- Historical Images Remapped — Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your data.
- Future Internet Scenarios — results of scenario planning by the Internet Society, some possible futures from open and competitive to anticompetitive centralised walled-gardens.
- OpenLibrary Bookreader — the Internet Archive’s book reader is (naturally) open source for you to reuse and improve. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
- OpenStack Austin Release — code to compute controller and object storage released. Competition and interoperability require exactly this kind of open cloud environment.
"cloud" entries
Cloud computing's fear factor: Acknowledge, reduce, move on
If cloud computing has so much potential, why are many organizations afraid of it?
A combination of negative messages and concerns about readiness have made cloud computing the most feared of the big technology innovations. There are legitimate reasons to approach the cloud with care, but we should not be consumed by irrational fear.
Four short links: 22 October 2010
Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing
Four short links: 22 September 2010
Amazon as Vendor, Distributed Tasks, Evolutionary Photofitting, and Basic Physics
- The Rise of Amazon Web Services — Stephen O’Grady points out that Amazon has become an enterprise sales company but we don’t treat it as such because we think of it as a retail company that’s dabbling in technology. I think of Amazon as an automation company: they automate and optimize everything, and a data center is just a warehouse for MIPS. (via Matt Asay)
- Celery Project — a distributed task queue. (via joshua on Delicious)
- Memory Upgrade (The Economist) — a photofit system that uses evolutionary algorithms to generate the suspects’ faces, and does clever things like animated distortions to call out features the witness might recall. Technology going beyond automated sketch artists.
- The Particle Adventure: The Fundamental of Matter and Force — basic physics in easy-to-understand language with illustrations, all in bite-size pieces (and 1998-era web design). I’m pondering what one of these would be like for computers, and whether “how do these actually work?” has the same romance as “how does the world really work?”.
Four short links: 16 September 2010
Javascript Terminal, Visual Query Explainer, New Google Courses, and Cloudtop Apps
- jsTerm — ANSI-capable telnet terminal built in HTML5 with Javascript, Websocket, and Node.js. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
- MySQL EXPLAINer — visualize the output of the MySQL EXPLAIN command. (via eonarts on Twitter)
- Google Code University — updated with new classes, including C++ and Android app development.
- Cloudtop Applications (Anil Dash) — Anil calling “trend” on multiplatform native apps with cloud storage. Another layer in the Web 2.0 story Tim’s been telling for years, with some interesting observations from Anil, such as: Cloudtop apps seem to use completely proprietary APIs, and nobody seems overly troubled by the fact they have purpose-built interfaces.
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?
Amazon's cloud platform still the largest, but others are closing the gap
Measured in terms of (U.S.) job postings, Amazon's Cloud Computing platform is still larger than Google's App Engine. What's interesting is that the gap has closed over the past year.
Lessons learned building the elmcity service
Jon Udell's reflections on mashing up software cultures and calendar data.
What happens when you mix open source goals, styles, and attitudes with Microsoft tools, languages, and frameworks? You get a cultural mashup. That's what the elmcity
project is, and what this series will explore.
Four short links: 14 July 2010
Cloud Data Ingest, Microbiome, Patent Blindness, Russian Open Data
- Flume — Cloudera open source project to solve the problem of how to get data into cloud apps, from collection to processing to storage. Flume is a distributed service that makes it very easy to collect and aggregate your data into a persistent store such as HDFS. Flume can read data from almost any source – log files, Syslog packets, the standard output of any Unix process – and can deliver it to a batch processing system like Hadoop or a real-time data store like HBase. All this can be configured dynamically from a single, central location – no more tedious configuration file editing and process restarting. Flume will collect the data from wherever existing applications are storing it, and whisk it away for further analysis and processing. (via mikeolson on Twitter)
- How Microbes Defend and Define Us (NYTimes) — there’s been a lot of talk about the microbiome at Sci Foo in the last few years, now it’s bubbling out into the world. Turns out that “bacteria bad, megafauna good” is as simplistic and inaccurate as “Muslim bad, Christian good”. Fancy that. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Startup Model Patently Flawed (Nature) — “There is a lot of stuff that academics are realizing isn’t patentable but they can commercialize for themselves by starting a company,” says Scott Shane, an economist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and a co-author of the study. Because surveys of entrepreneurial activity — including government assessments — typically focus on patent activity, they may be significantly underestimating academics’ efforts, he notes. (via pkedrosky on Twitter)
- Open Data on Russian Government Spending (OKFN) — a group outside government is adding analytics to the data that departments are required to release.
Velocity Culture: Web Operations, DevOps, etc…
Velocity 2010 is happening on June 22-24 (right around the corner!). This year we’ve added third track, Velocity Culture, dedicated to exploring what we’ve learned about how great teams and organizations work together to succeed at scale.
Web Operations, or WebOps, is what many of us have been calling these ideas for years. Recently the term “DevOps” has become a kind of rallying cry that is resonating with many, along with variations on Agile Operations.
Four short links: 21 April 2010
8-Bit HTML5 Games, Cloud Morality, Global Data, Geo-tagged Notes
- Akihabara — toolkit for writing 8-bit style games in Javascript using HTML5. (via waxy)
- Google Government Requests Tool –moving services into the cloud loses you control and privacy (see my presentation on the subject), and one way is by making your mail/browser history/etc. easier for law enforcement to get their hands on. There’s new moral ground here for service providers in what services they build, how they design their systems, and how they let people make informed choices. Google is one of the few companies around that are taking actions based on an analysis of what’s right, and whether or not they fall short of your moral conclusions on the subject, you have to give them credit for responding to the moral challenge. Compare to Facebook whose moral response has been to reduce user control over the use of their data.
- World Bank Data — the World Bank has released a huge amount of data about countries and economies, under an Open Knowledge Definition-compliant license. (via Open Knowledge Foundation)
- Moes Notes — note-taking iPhone app that includes GPS reference, so you can associate a text/audio/photo/video note with time, date, or place. (via Rich Gibson)