- PC Emulator in Javascript — days later and it’s mindboggling.
- US Home Prices as Opera (Flowing Data) — reminded me of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” which has software that turns your company’s performance numbers into music. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from “Saul”, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.
- s3cmd Parallel — command-line tool with parallel uploads to s3. (via Nelson Minar)
- Eight of China’s Top Nine Government Officials are Scientists (Singularity Hub) — the article’s idiotic reduction to performance on standardised tests misses America’s primary strength against China, namely creative and flexible workforce. China will get there, but it’s not there yet.
"china" entries
Four short links: 23 May 2011
PC in JS, Musical Visualization, S3 Parallel, and Tech-led Ed
Four short links: 2 May 2011
Internet Cafe Culture, Image Processing, Library Mining, and MediaWiki Parsing
- Chinese Internet Cafes (Bryce Roberts) — a good quick read. My note: people valued the same things in Internet cafes that they value in public libraries, and the uses are very similar. They pose a similar threat to the already-successful, which is why public libraries are threatened in many Western countries.
- SIFT — the Scale Invariant Feature Transform library, built on OpenCV, is a method to detect distinctive, invariant image feature points, which easily can be matched between images to perform tasks such as object detection and recognition, or to compute geometrical transformations between images. The licensing seems dodgy–MIT code but lots of “this isn’t a license to use the patent!” warnings in the LICENSE file. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Secret Life of Libraries (Guardian) — I like the idea of the most-stolen-books revealing something about a region; it’s an aspect of data revealing truth. For a while, Terry Pratchett was the most-shoplifted author in England but newspapers rarely carried articles about him or mentioned his books (because they were genre fiction not “real” literature). (via Brian Flaherty)
- Sweble — MediaWiki parser library. Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined. There was no grammar, no defined processing rules, and no defined output like a DOM tree based on a well defined document object model. This is to say, the content of Wikipedia is stored in a format that is not an open standard. The format is defined by 5000 lines of php code (the parse function of MediaWiki). That code may be open source, but it is incomprehensible to most. That’s why there are 30+ failed attempts at writing alternative parsers. (via Dirk Riehle)
Four short links: 26 April 2011
Android Nook, Market Failure, Social Spread Analysis, and Chinese eBooks
- Barnes and Noble Nook Color Gets Android Upgrade (Wired) — was an e-reader, but now Barnes and Noble are offering an upgrade to turn it into a fully-fledged Android tablet. The only thing you won’t be able to do is download apps from the Google marketplace. The Nook retails for $250. (via Glyn Moody)
- Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure (Ars Technica) — “In almost all cases, piracy is not an issue of legality,” says Kun Gao, CEO of the anime streaming site Crunchyroll. It’s often a market issue—and Crunchyroll turns a profit by offering anime lovers what they want: legal access to anime shows right after new episodes have aired in Japan. […] Kun claims that piracy drops “60 to 70 percent” for shows carried by Crunchyroll. (via Glyn Moody)
- Project Cascade — New York Times project analyzing tweets, retweets, bit.ly uses, and other events in the online lifecycle of stories. Built using Processing and MongoDB. (via Flowing Data)
- Survey Indicates e-book Boom in China (Xinhua) — estimates of 613M ebooks read, 23% on mobile phones. Contains the sobering the acceptable price to download an e-book from the Internet is 1.33 yuan (0.2 U.S. dollars), and nearly 54 percent of digital readers say they would pay an average of 3.45 yuan to download e-books. (via Tim O’Reilly)
ePayments Week: Android's predicted ascendance
Android could soon own half the market, NFC Simm cards in China, and Quova challenges developers
Gartner says Android can take half the smartphone market by the end of 2012. Also, China's mobile customers can slip NFC SIMM cards into their handsets, and geolocation company Quova challenges developers.
Hints of iPhone envy in China
An informal poll finds 43% of Chinese phone owners who don't have an iPhone wish they had one.
A survey of Chinese phone owners conducted through the Sina micro-blog service finds that iPhones are a prized possession, while Android interest is tepid and things aren't looking good for Nokia.
Four short links: 6 April 2011
Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking
- Timeline Setter — ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma)
- Return to Shenzhen Part 1 — Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk cell phones. That’s right, you could buy a pile of cell phones. […] This market was truly amazing. It was one of most dense I’ve been to, shoulder to shoulder with very little standing room. Every device imaginable was available (checkout the pile of iPads) and people were literally negotiating a spot price minute by minute. The raw phones were sold for cash and then taken to other parts of the market for parts, resale, or recycling.
- Suwappu Toys in Media (BERG London) — a concept video for a toy project. This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds.
- Predator Eye-Tracking Video (YouTube) — neat technology. The source was released, retracted, reposted to GitHub by a third party, then retracted but rumours are it will be properly released soon.
Four short links: 3 March 2011
Chinese Maps, Ops Standards, Android Malware, and Free Fonts
- Guangzhou City Map — Chinese city maps: they use orthographic projection (think SimCity) and not satellite images. A nice compromise for usability, information content, and invisible censorship. (via Hacker News)
- Broken Windows, Broken Code, Broken Systems — So, given that most of us live in the real world where some things are just left undone, where do we draw the line? What do we consider a bit of acceptable street litter, and what do we consider a broken window? When is it ok to just reboot the system, and when do you really need to figure out exactly what went wrong?
- Android Malware — black hat copied apps, added trojans, uploaded to Android Marketplace. Google were slow to respond to original developer’s claims of copying, quick to react to security guy’s report of malware. AppStores are not magic moneypumps in software form, no more than tagging, communities, or portals were. User contributions need editorial oversight.
- The League of Movable Type — a collection of open source fonts, ready for embedding in your web pages.
Four short links: 17 February 2011
Kindle Economics, Real-World Typography, Private Social Networks, and Cultural Capitalism
- The True Cost of Publishing on the Kindle — an article, apparently by a horrified negotiator with Amazon, revealing that magazine and newspaper publishers pay the WhisperNet delivery costs of their editions. That’s not Amazon overhead, it comes out of the publisher’s royalty slice. (via Hacker News)
- Fonts in Use — examples of sweet typography and the fonts that were used.
- Ffffound — social network for graphic designers (invite only) with a “people who liked also liked” type of recommendation system. Very clever. So as you research “I want to build a cheesy 70s logo”, you thumbs up the images you like and soon the system is suggesting designs with elements of cheesy 70s logos to you. I love that it is invitation-only: you’re trusting the judgement of the other people, so you had better only let in people whose judgement you trust.
- China’s Second Wives and Gift Culture — second wives, status, and brand. But any city that has a middle class is going to have Second Wives. […] Even Jiang Zemin, the former President, had a very high profile mistress – a singer called Song Zuying who appears on the Chinese New Year programme every year. And it’s not a scandal. A reminder that if you think you can export your crappy business built on American status symbols, you’re leaping into the Sea of Fail. (via Sciblogs)
Four short links: 24 January 2011
National Facebook Relations, Personality Design, Lessons Learned, and Khan Academy
- The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks (The Atlantic) — After more than ten days of intensive investigation and study, Facebook’s security team realized something very, very bad was going on. The country’s Internet service providers were running a malicious piece of code that was recording users’ login information when they went to sites like Facebook. By January 5, it was clear that an entire country’s worth of passwords were in the process of being stolen right in the midst of the greatest political upheaval in two decades. Sullivan and his team decided they needed a country-level solution — and fast. […] Sullivan’s team decided to take an apolitical approach to the problem. This was simply a hack that required a technical response. “At its core, from our standpoint, it’s a security issue around passwords and making sure that we protect the integrity of passwords and accounts,” he said. “It was very much a black and white security issue and less of a political issue.” cf Google and China. National politics of snoopiness vs corporate ethic of not being evil aren’t directly compatible, and the solution here only works because (let’s face it) Tunisia is not a rising economic force. If you’re selling ads in China, you don’t get to pretend that the Great Firewall of China is a security issue.
- Emoticomp — what happens if you subtly imbue objects with personalities? Obviously it could be incredibly annoying (cue Douglas Adams’s Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) but there’s potential here to add depth to devices. We are, after all, customized over hundreds of thousands of years to read and interact with the emotional objects known as people. (via Matt Jones)
- My Mistakes (Slideshare) — Perry Evans (Mapquest, Jabber, Local Matters, Closely) gave a presentation on what he’s learned from his failures. I bought into the strategy of growth via acquisition. In most cases, this is an excuse for not fixing your current business.
- The Autodidact and the Khan Academy (Chris Lehmann) — […] it seems to me to be one more moment when people who should know better are, essentially, saying, “See! We don’t need teachers anymore!” As if every student could learn from a pre-packaged delivery model of content. It doesn’t work that way. I like the Khan Academy but, as Chris says, it’s not a replacement for education for most kids.
Four short links: 17 January 2011
De-DRMing eBooks, Chinese Data, eBook Pricing, and Universal Translation (soon)
- Remove DRM from EBooks — it’s been done, and the tools are getting easier to use. The Kindle DRM-remover uses gdb to hook into the Kindle for Mac application, watch when a book’s decoded and snaffle the key. (via BoingBoing)
- AliBaba’s Data Possibilities (The Economist) — Alibaba has a huge and barely exploited asset: the data it has gathered on the spending habits of China’s emerging middle class. The firm is cagey about what, exactly, it will do with these data, and insists that it will not violate anyone’s privacy. Nonetheless, there are ways in which Alibaba could profit from what it knows. One idea might be to use customer data to identify trends and so help companies to anticipate what consumers want. Given the paucity of accurate data in China, this would be extremely valuable.
- Agency Pricing — Under agency pricing, the publisher controls the price and the retailer is not allowed to discount […] under Agency Pricing and with a reduced sales price of $9.99, the agency publishers are making the same amount of money as its hardcover revenue. (via Hacker News)
- Google Translate for Conversations — Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. As Douglas Adams said, by allowing everyone to understand each other, the babel fish has caused more wars than anything else in the universe.