- How to Manage Employees When They Make Mistakes — sound advice on how to deal with employees who failed to meet expectations. Yet again, good parenting can make you a good adult. It’s strange to me that in the technology sector we have such a reputation for yellers. Maybe it’s business in general and not just tech. […] People stay at companies with leaders who rule like Mussolini because they want to be part of something super successful. But it does tend to breed organizations of people who walk around like beaten dogs with their heads down waiting to be kicked. It produces sycophants and group think. And if your company ever “slips” people head STRAIGHT for the door as they did at Siebel. I’d love to see a new generation of tech companies that don’t rule through fear. (via Hacker News)
- Information Wants to be Paid (Pete Warden) — I want to know where I stand relative to the business model of any company I depend on. If API access and the third-party ecosystem makes them money, then I feel a lot more comfortable that I’ll retain access over the long term. So true. It’s not that platform companies are evil, it’s just that they’re a business too. They’re interested in their survival first and yours second. To expect anything else is to be naive and to set yourself up for failure. As Pete says, it makes sense to have them financially invested in continuing to provide for you. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a damn sight better than “build on this so we can gain traction and some idea of a business model”. Yet again, Warden reads my mind and saves me the trouble of finding the right words to write.
- 0Boxer — Chrome and Safari extensions to turn gmail into a game. (via waxy)
- Twitter’s New Search Architecture (Twitter Engineering Blog) — notable for two things: they’re contributing patches back to the open source text search library Lucene, and they name the individual engineers who worked on the project. Very classy, human, and canny. (via straup on Delicious)
"APIs" entries
Four short links: 7 October 2010
Managing Mistakes, Paying for APIs, Gaming Gmail, and Classy Twitter Engineering
Four short links: 9 September 2010
Thumb Drives and the Cloud, FCC APIs, Mining on GFS, Check Your Prose with Scribe
- CloudUSB — a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter)
- FCC APIs — for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband tests, census block search, and more. (via rjweeks70 on Twitter)
- Sibyl: A system for large scale machine learning (PDF) — paper from Google researchers on how to build machine learning on top of a system designed for batch processing. (via Greg Linden)
- The Surprisingness of What We Say About Ourselves (BERG London) — I made a chart of word-by-word surprisingness: given the statement so far, could Scribe predict what would come next?
Four short links: 3 June 2010
Passionate Users, Mail APIs, Phone Hacking, and Patent Data Online
- How to Get Customers Who Love You Even When You Screw Up — a fantastic reminder of the power of Kathy Sierra’s “I Rock” moments. In that moment I understood Tom’s motivation: Tom was a hero. (via Hacker News)
- Yahoo! Mail is Open for Development — you can write apps that sit in Yahoo! Mail, using and extending the UI as well as taking advantage of APIs that access and alter the email.
- Canon Hack Development Kit — hack a PowerShot to be controlled by scripts. (via Jon Udell)
- 10TB of US PTO Data (Google Books) — the PTO has entered into a two year deal with Google to distribute patent and trademark data for free. At the moment it’s 10TB of images and full text of grants, applications, classifications, and more, but it will grow over time: in the future we will be making more data available including file histories and related data. (via Google Public Policy blog post)
Four short links: 30 March 2010
ACTA, Google Books, and APIs vs Data
- PublicACTA — New Zealand is hosting the final round of ACTA negotiations, and InternetNZ and other concerned technology-aware citizens will also host a PublicACTA conference. The goal is to produce a statement from the citizens, one which can be given to the negotiators ahead of the final round. If you can’t make it to NZ for April 10, the site has an interesting blog and the conference itself will be live streamed.
- Submission on Copying in the Digital Environment — ahead of the ACTA round, New Zealand negotiators invited submissions around certain questions. This fantastic response from an artist and author reminds me why the fight is so important. 2. The idea that all copying must be authorised (or else be illegal) makes no sense in the digital environment. The internet works through copying – that’s how the technology of it functions, and it’s also how its power to promote and market ideas and art is unleashed. For example, when my work “goes viral” – i.e. is copied from website to blog to aggregation site to tweet to email (and so on) – I benefit enormously from that exposure. This is not something I can engineer or control, and when it has happened it has always come as a pleasant surprise. I have benefited from these frenzies of “unauthorised” copying in a number of ways, from international commissions to increased sales. I have learned that such copying is in my interests; in fact, it is essential to my success in the digital environment. (via starrjulie on Twitter)
- Jon Orwant of Google Books — Jon’s an O’Reilly alum, and engineering manager for Google Books. David Weinberger liveblogged a talk Jon gave to Harvard librarians. Google Books want to scan all books. Has done 12M out of the 120 works (which have 174 manifestations — different versions and editions, etc.). About 4B pages, 40+ libraries, 400 languages (“Three in Klingon”). Google Books is in the first stage: Scanning. Second: Scaling. Third: What do we do with all this? 20% are public domain.
- We Have an API — Nat Friedman asks for a “download all the data” link instead of an API that dribbles out data like a pensioner with a prostate problem (my words, not his). I loved Francis Irving’s observation, buried in the comments, that A “download data” item is just an API call that can return all the data..
Four short links: 7 January 2010
London Data, SEO Deathspiral, Subversion Search, Entity Extraction APIs
- London Datastore to Launch — the Mayor of London will launch a site full of London data. (via Ed Dumbill)
- Google Destroyed the Web — It’s hard to disagree with the basic contention that SEO aimed at Google’s rankings has fucked the web. It’s a vicious circle, too: the more fake content sites are created to game Google, the harder it will be for any new web search startup to filter that effluent and deliver meaningful results in competition to Google. This is a grim feedback loop.
- ReposSearch — search Subversion repositories.
- Survey of Entity Extraction APIs — he describes the qualititative differences in the APIs and their responses, finding that Evri and OpenAlchemy had the best for his needs.
Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs
Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are “A platform beats an application every time” and “All the smart people don’t work for you.” Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal’s director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.
Four short links: 26 October 2009
Data Exploration, Evidence-Based Coding, API to the English Language, Dual Licensing
- Toiling in the Data Mines — Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls “material exploration”. Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that’s a shame. Material explorations are something I’ve really only done since I’ve joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar – in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that’s appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.
- Bits of Evidence — Slides for a talk, “What we actually know about software development and why we believe it is true”. (via Simon Willison)
- Wordnik API — definitions, frequencies, examples APIs. See the announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit.
- The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing — Brian Aker eloquently describes why he feels that dual licensing is anti-open source. Brian obviously has considerable experience informing this opinion–his years as Director of Technology for MySQL.
Four short links: 2 October 2009
Social Media Parasites, Open Government Data, Prime Numbers, Amazon Image Abuse
- I’m Tired of Your Analogue Attitude — hilarious animated clip about social media gurus, made using xtranormal. (via trib on twitter)
- Three Laws of Open Government Data — 1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist; 2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage; 3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower. (also see slide deck)
- Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers — paper about some of the fun mathematics around prime numbers. (via Hacker News)
- Abusing Amazon Images — decoding and doing fun things with the Amazon images API. The cool thing (if you want to generate unlikely Amazon images) is that you’re not limited to one use of any of these commands. You can have multiple discounts, multiple shadows, multiple bullets, generating images that Amazon would never have on its site. However, every additional command you add generates another 10% to the image dimensions, adding white space around the image. And that 10% compounds; add a lot of bullets, and you’ll find that you have a small image in a large blank space. (You can use the CR command to cut away the excess, however.) Note also that the commands are interpreted in order, which can have an impact on what overlaps what.
Four short links: 8 September 2009
Mobile jQuery, API to Google Book Search, Open Learning, Popularity Algorithms
- jQTouch — jQuery library for mobile web app development. (via brian on Delicious)
- GData API to Google Book Search — search full text, get back metadata, modify “my library” collections, etc.
- Open and Free Courses at the CMU Open Learning Initiative — rather than just a lecture and handout dump, it has interactive exercises and questions to help you practice and figure out whether you’ve learned the subject. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You Can Be Proud Of — description and brief analysis for the popularity algorithms in Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Linkibol. A basic collective intelligence technique that’s not obvious. (via Simon Willison)
Four short links: 2 September 2009
Happy Programmers, Usability Tool, Geo API, Zombie Math
- The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) — you’ll be surprised. Age before beauty!
- Judge It Now — fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster.
- BlockChalk API — These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services. Also see the explanatory blog post. (via joshua on Delicious)
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The Mathematics of Zombie Attacks (PDF) — Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually
portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently,
we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie
movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and
their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the
model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but
not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the
effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular,
impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which
eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the
doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. (via Doug McKenna)