"books" entries

Four short links: 29 January 2015

Four short links: 29 January 2015

Security Videos, Network Simulation, UX Book, and Profit in Perspective

  1. ShmooCon 2015 Videos — videos to security talks from ShmooCon 2015.
  2. Comcast (Github) — Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets. On BSD-derived systems such as OSX, we use tools like ipfw and pfctl to inject failure. On Linux, we use iptables and tc. Comcast is merely a thin wrapper around these controls.
  3. The UX ReaderThis ebook is a collection of the most popular articles from our [MailChimp] UX Newsletter, along with some exclusive content.
  4. Bad AssumptionsApple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter.
Four short links: 23 October 2014

Four short links: 23 October 2014

Hard Javascript, Responsive Progress, Software Experiments, and Facebook Emotions

  1. You Don’t Know JSa series of [CC-licensed] books [to be published by O’Reilly] diving deep into the core mechanisms of the JavaScript language.
  2. progressbar.js — responsive progress bar.
  3. Microsoft Garage — Microsoft software experiments, in public. This is awesome.
  4. Creating Empathy on Facebook (NY Times) — On Facebook, teenagers are presented with more options than just “it’s embarrassing” when they want to remove a post. They are asked what’s happening in the post, how they feel about it and how sad they are. In addition, they are given a text box with a polite pre-written response that can be sent to the friend who hurt their feelings. (In early versions of this feature, only 20 percent of teenagers filled out the form. When Facebook added more descriptive language like “feelings” and “sadness,” the figure grew to 80 percent.)
Four short links: 28 August 2014

Four short links: 28 August 2014

Visual Python, Scraping and Screenshotting, Un-free Speech, IP Law Textbook

  1. PlotDeviceA Python-based graphics language for designers, developers, and tinkerers. More in the easy-to-get-started + visual realm, like Processing. (via Andy Baio)
  2. Scumblr and Sketchy Search — Netflix open sourcing some scraping, screenshot, and workflow tools their security team uses to monitor discussion of themselves.
  3. Should Twitter, Facebook and Google Executives be the Arbiters of What We See and Read? (Glenn Greenwald) — In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further. Whatever else is true, the implications of having those companies make lists of permitted and prohibited ideas are far more significant than when ordinary private companies do the same thing.
  4. Intellectual Property: Law and the Information Society; Cases and Materials (PDF) — James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins’ open law textbook on IP (which even explores the question of whether that’s a valid and meaningful term). (via James Boyle)
Four short links: 24 July 2014

Four short links: 24 July 2014

Neglected ML, Crowdfunded Recognition, Debating Watson, and Versioned p2p File System

  1. Neglected Machine Learning IdeasPerhaps my list is a “send me review articles and book suggestions” cry for help, but perhaps it is useful to others as an overview of neat things.
  2. First Crowdfunded Book on Booker Shortlist — Booker excludes self-published works, but “The Wake” was through Unbound, a Threadless-style “if we hit this limit, the book is printed and you have bought a copy” site.
  3. Watson Can Debate Its Opponents (io9) — Speaking in nearly perfect English, Watson/The Debater replied: “Scanned approximately 4 million Wikipedia articles, returning ten most relevant articles. Scanned all 3,000 sentences in top ten articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech with top claim predictions. Ready to deliver.”
  4. ipfsa global, versioned, peer-to-peer file system. It combines good ideas from Git, BitTorrent, Kademlia, and SFS. You can think of it like a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging Git objects, making up the web. IPFS provides an interface much simpler than HTTP, but has permanence built in.. (via Sourcegraph)
Four short links: 13 May 2014

Four short links: 13 May 2014

Reverse Engineering, Incident Response, 3D Museum, and Social Prediction

  1. Reverse Engineering for Beginners (GitHub) — from assembly language through stack overflows, dongles, and more.
  2. Incident Response at Heroku — the difference between good and bad shops is that good shops have a routine for exceptions.
  3. 3D Petrie MuseumThe Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology has one of the largest ancient Egyptian and Sudanese collections in the world and they’ve put 3D models of their goods online. Not (yet) available for download, only viewing which seem a bug.
  4. Sandy Pentland on Wearables (The Verge) — Pentland was also Nathan Eagle’s graduate advisor, and behind the Reality Mining work at MIT. Check out his sociometer: One study revealed that the sociometer helps discern when someone is bluffing at poker roughly 70 percent of the time; another found that a wearer can determine who will win a negotiation within the first five minutes with 87 percent accuracy; yet another concluded that one can accurately predict the success of a speed date before the participants do.
Four short links: 29 April 2014

Four short links: 29 April 2014

Robot Legs, CS in Classrooms, Go Robotics, and Game Programming

  1. Bionic Legs Let Patients Walk AgainThe Ekso costs about $100,000 and was purchased with a grant from Baptist Health Foundation. Chara Rodriguez, a physical therapist and neurologic clinical specialist at University Health System, called the machine “the Maserati of the rehab world.” (via Robot Economics)
  2. Roundup of CS in Education Systems (Economist) — Above all, the new subject will require teachers who know what they are doing. Only a few places take this seriously: Israel has about 1,000 trained computer-science teachers, and Bavaria more than 700. Mathematics and computer-science graduates generally choose more lucrative trades; the humanities and social-science graduates who will find themselves teaching coding will need plenty of support.
  3. gobot — Go framework for hardware and robotics comms, with Arduino, Sphero, (and more) backends.
  4. Game Programming Patterns — free online book with programming patterns for game developers.
Four short links: 16 April 2014

Four short links: 16 April 2014

Time Series, CT Scanner, Reading List, and Origami Microscope

  1. morris.jspretty time-series line graphs.
  2. Open Source CT Scanner — all the awesome.
  3. Alan Kay’s Reading List — in case you’re wondering what to add to the pile beside your bed. (via Alex Dong)
  4. Foldscope — origami optical microscope, 2000x magnification for under $1.
Four short links: 26 March 2014

Four short links: 26 March 2014

Better Fonts, Speaking Javascript, Arduinos & Phones, and Averaging Streams in Go

  1. brick — uncompressed versions of popular web fonts. The difference between compressed and uncompressed is noticeable.
  2. Speaking Javascript — free online version of the new O’Reilly book by Axel Rauschmayer.
  3. micio.js — clever hack to communicate between Arduino and mobile phones via the microphone jack.
  4. Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages for Go — Go implementation of algorithm useful for dealing with streams of data.
Four short links: 13 March 2014

Four short links: 13 March 2014

Parallel Programming, Malignant Computation, Politicised GDS, and Data Stream Toolkit

  1. Is Parallel Programming Hard? And, If So, What Can You Do About It? — book by Paul E. McKenney, on single-machine multi-CPU parallel programming.
  2. Malignant ComputationThe bitcoin mining network would work just as well if it had far less computation devoted to it. Bitcoins would be mined at exactly the same rate if 1/2 or 1/4 of the computational resources were devoted. This means that bitcoin has incentivized a tremendous amount of computational busy work.
  3. GDS Becomes Political (Computer Weekly) — She [Opposition MP] said that digital should not be about imposing a way of working on the public sector – Labour is not fond of the “digital by default” mantra – but about supporting public service delivery. […] “When this government decided upon the digitalisation of this [online job search] service they apparently did not take into account those with poor literacy skills, mental health issues or learning difficulties – who, as most people would have predicted, make up a higher-than-average proportion of the unemployed.”
  4. streamtools (Github) — a graphical toolkit for dealing with streams of data. Streamtools makes it easy to explore, analyse, modify and learn from streams of data. (via OpenNews)
Four short links: 31 January 2014

Four short links: 31 January 2014

Mobile Libraries, Python Idioms, Graphics Book, and Declining Returns on Aging Link Bait

  1. Bolts — Facebook’s library of small, low-level utility classes in iOS and Android.
  2. Python Idioms (PDF) — useful cheatsheet.
  3. Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book — Markdown source in github. Notable for elegance and instructive for those learning to optimise. Coder soul food.
  4. About Link Bait (Anil Dash) — excellent consideration of Upworthy’s distinctive click-provoking headlines, but my eye was caught by we often don’t sound like 2012 Upworthy anymore. Because those tricks are starting to dilute click rates. from Upworthy’s editor-at-large. Attention is a scarce resource, and our brains are very good at filtering.