"blogging" entries

Four short links: 26 September 2014

Four short links: 26 September 2014

Good Communities, AI Games, Design Process, and Web Server Library

  1. 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging (Anil Dash) — If your comments are full of assholes, it’s your fault. Good communities don’t just happen by accident.
  2. Replicating DeepMind — open source attempt to build deep learning network that can play Atari games. (via RoboHub)
  3. ToyTalk — fantastic iterative design process for the product (see the heading “A Bit of Trickery”)
  4. h2oan optimized HTTP server implementation that can be used either as a standalone server or a library.
Four short links: 7 April 2014

Four short links: 7 April 2014

Auto Ethics, Baio on Medium, Internet of Insecure Things, New Unlicensed Spectrum

  1. Can We Design Systems to Automate Ethics — code in self-driving cars will implement a solution to the trolley problem. But which solution?
  2. My First Post on Medium (Andy Baio) — one or two glitches but otherwise fine demonstration of what’s possible with Medium.
  3. SCADA Vulnerability: 7600 Plants at Risk (BBC) — the vulnerabilities are in unpatched Centum CS 3000 software. The real business for IoT is secure remote updates and monitoring. (via Slashdot)
  4. New Unlicensed SpectrumThe unanimous vote frees up 100 MHz of airwaves in the lower part of 5 GHz spectrum band. Previously, the FCC reserved those airwaves for exclusive use by a satellite phone company. The FCC vote opens those unlicensed airwaves so they can be used by consumer electronics equipment, including Wi-Fi routers. With the new airwaves, Wi-Fi equipment can handle more traffic at higher speeds.
Four short link: 27 November 2012

Four short link: 27 November 2012

Faking with Stats, Praising Coworkers, Medium Explained, and SIGGraph Trailer

  1. Statistical Misdirection Master Class — examples from Fox News. The further through the list you go, the more horrifying^Wedifying they are. Some are clearly classics from the literature, but some are (as far as I can tell) newly developed graphical “persuasion” techniques.
  2. Wall of Awesome — give your coworkers some love.
  3. Dave Winer on Medium — Dave hits some interesting points: Users can create new buckets or collections and call them anything they want. A bucket is analogous to a blog post. Then other people can post to it. That’s like a comment. But it doesn’t look like a comment. It’s got a place for a big image at the top. It looks much prettier than a comment, and much bigger. Looks are important here.
  4. SIGGraph Asia Trailer (YouTube) — resuiting Sims and rotating city blocks, at the end, were my favourite. (via Andy Baio)

A venture into self-publishing

Scott Berkun on his experiences from both sides of the publishing fence.

Scott Berkun turned to self-publishing with his latest book, "Mindfire." In this TOC podcast, Berkun discusses the experience and says the biggest surprise was the required PR effort. He also says traditional and self-publishing don't need to be polarized options, for authors or for publishers and editors.

Publishing News: Blogging and the law

How to blog and not get sued, magazine apps miss the mark, and a publisher gets aggressive with marketing.

In the latest Publishing News: Bloggers get tips on avoiding lawsuits, magazine publishers are building clunky apps, and Open Road outlines its aggressive marketing techniques.

Four short links: 15 November 2010

Four short links: 15 November 2010

Prison Blogging, 3D Hacks, Budget Simulation, and Enterprise Sales

  1. Between the Bars — snail-mail-to-blogs transcription service for prisoners, to make visible stories that would otherwise be missed. there is a religous program here called Kairo’s in the program inmates are given letters and drawings made by small children not one in that program did not cry, after reading the words of incouragement from those kids. An unmissable reminder of the complexity of human stories, suffering, and situations, the posts range from the banal to the riveting. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
  2. Kinect Opensource News — a roundup of open source Kinect hacks. I like memo’s gestural interface the best. Impressive stuff for just a few days’ access to the open source drivers. (via Andy Baio)
  3. You Fix The Budget (NY Times) — a simpler version of Budget Hero, which lets you choose policies and see their effect on the deficit. Unlike Budget Hero, the NYT app doesn’t discuss non-deficit consequences of the actions (social consequences, ripple-on economic effects). Like Budget Hero, you can’t add your own policies: you’re forced to choose from the ones presented. Real life is more complex than this simulation, but even something this simple is powerful: by interacting with this, you understand the magnitude of (say) education vs healthcare, and you realize how much of the current debate is froth.
  4. Meet the New Enterprise Customer, a Lot like the Old Enterprise Customer — Ben Horowitz nails the difficulty of selling to the enterprise, and drives a stake through the “they’ll buy our service with their credit cards, like consumers do” myth. xcellent enterprise sales reps will guide a company through their own purchasing processes. Without an enterprise sales rep, many companies literally do not know how to buy new technology products. (via Mike Olson on Twitter)

Why blogging still matters

Anil Dash on the enduring power of blogs.

During an interview at Web 2.0 Expo NY, Anil Dash's response to an offhand question hit at the heart of blogging's continued importance.

Four short links: 31 March 2010

Four short links: 31 March 2010

Messaging, Predicting, Visualising, and Patenting

  1. ZeroMQ — bold claim of “Fastest. Messaging. Ever.” LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
  2. Prediction Market News (David Pennock) — HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. Interestingly, another company called Veriana Networks is close to launching a competing Hollywood derivatives market called the Trend Exchange.
  3. A Pivot Visualization of my WordPress Blog (Jon Udell) — using pro-am data exploration tools from Microsoft (Pivot) to work with information from his blog. Contains the scripts he used to do it.
  4. Select Committee Report on Patents Bill (PDF) — New Zealand Government select committee recommends no software patents in NZ. We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented. We received many submissions concerning the patentability of computer programs. Under the Patents Act 1953 computer programs can be patented in New Zealand provided they produce a commercially useful effect [footnote: Under the Patents Act 1953 mathematical algorithms as such are not patentable. They may be patented under the Patents Act when used in a computer, so long as they produce a commercially useful effect.] Open source, or free, software has grown in popularity since the 1980s Protecting software by patenting it is inconsistent with the open source model, and its proponents oppose it. A number of submitters argued that there is no “inventive step” in software development, as “new” software invariably builds on existing software. They felt that computer software should be excluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques. In general we accept this position.
Four short links: 29 March 2010

Four short links: 29 March 2010

Distributed Comments, Graph Exploration, Body as UI, and Genomic Advertising

  1. Salmon Protocol — protocol to unite comments and annotations with original web pages. A distributed solution to the problem that Disqus tackles in a centralised fashion. Important because we’ll all be historians of our earlier lives and dissipated prolific micro-content is a historian’s nightmare.
  2. Gephi — open source (GPLv3) interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. I believe tools for data exploration, versus static infographics, are the only way to develop a new sense for data. (via mattb on Delicious)
  3. Skinput — a bio-acoustic sensor lets you use your skin to write, tap, drag, etc. See also BBC article. (via Mike Loukides)
  4. First Synthetic Genome Secret Messages Decoded (Wired) — the first synthetic genome contained advertisements (“VENTNERINSTITVTE”, “CRAIGVENTNER”). I can’t figure out whether it’s a cheeky easter egg in the finest geek tradition, or whether it’s as if the Apollo 11 had “BUY COKE” on the side or Magellan’s yachts had sails emblazoned with “VENETIAN GLASS: BEST IN THE WORLD!”. (via christianbok on Twitter)
Four short links: 23 March 2010

Four short links: 23 March 2010

PM Plugs Tech, Science Bloggers, History Repeats, Beautiful Math

  1. British Prime Minister’s Speech — a huge amount of the speech is given to digital issues, including the funding and founding of an “Institute for Web Science” headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. (via Rchards on Twitter)
  2. Periodic Table of Science Bloggers — a great way to explore the universe of science blogging. (via sciblogs)
  3. For All The Tea in China — a tale of industrial espionage from the 1800s. The man behind the theft was Robert Fortune, a Scottish-born botanist who donned mandarin garb, shaved the top of his head and attached a long braid as part of a disguise that allowed him to pass as Chinese so he could go to areas of the country that were off-limits to foreigners. He forged a token and stole IP, in some ways it’s like the reverse of the Google-China breakin. (via danjite on Twitter)
  4. Nature by Numbers — relating numbers, geometry, and nature. Beautiful and educational. (via BoingBoing)