- Mobile Money (The Economist) — Many people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.
- Akka — Apache-licensed Java high-performance concurrency library built around the concept of “actors“. (via Hacker News)
- Pykka — actors in Python. (via Hacker News)
- Loom.io Project — help crowdfund a collaborative decision-making tool. They’re using it as they build the tool, and it’s the implementation of a process they use in real life. I know many organisations who need a free open-source web application that helps groups make better decisions together. You should probably read more about the interesting company Enspiral which is behind loom.io.
ENTRIES TAGGED "collaboration"
Rethinking games
Pandemic, a collaborative board game, casts a different light on competition and gaming.
At a recent board games night hosted by Greg Brown (@practicingruby), we played a game called “Pandemic” that made me rethink the meaning of games. I won’t bother you with a detailed description; it’s enough to say that there are four or five players who take turns, and the goal is to defeat outbreaks of disease.
What…
Smart notebooks for linking virtual teams across the net
Kickstarter project promotes open-source, standards-based collaboration tool
Who has the gumption to jump into the crowded market for collaboration tools and call for a comprehensive open source implementation? Perhaps just Miles Fidelman, a networking expert whose experience spans time with Bolt, Beranek and Newman, work on military command and control systems, a community networking non-profit called the Center for Civic Networking, and building a small…
A lever is always better than a lone coder
Team Geek authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman on coding myths and collaboration.
If we accept that software development is a team activity (it is), the importance of collaboration and communication becomes clear. Team Geek authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman discuss the nuances of modern programming in this interview.
Four short links: 15 May 2012
Mobile Money, Actors in java, Actors in python, and a Decision-Making Tool
Four short links: 8 March 2012
Compete on Convenience, Minimal Viable Operating System, Awesome Font, Collaboration Integration
- Add Torrent Links to IMDB (Userscripts) — a glimpse at what the Internet could look like: from the site you research movies on, with one click you could then launch the download. If only the company that ran the movie research site had rights to the OneClick patent and the ability to offer movies for download. Oh wait, those aren’t the barriers. If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!
- JeOS — I hadn’t heard this term before: Just Enough Operating System. Take a standard distro, and strip it down to the bare essentials that you actually need.
- Font Awesome — a font with a zillion pictograms and icons. “An iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap”.
- Collabograte — a collection of integration recipes for collaboration tools so you aren’t broken on the “how do I get this thing set up with LDAP auth?” wheel which others have reinvented with their nose to the mixed metaphor grindstone. (via Kartik Subbarao)
Four short links: 2 November 2011
Deployment, Image Distribution, Open Source Sharing, and Soulless Programming
- Thoughts on Web Application Deployment (OmniTI) — if your web site is your business, this stuff is critical and it’s under-taught. Everyone learns it on the job, and there’s not a lot of standardization between gigs.
- Github Enterprise — GitHub Enterprise is delivered in the industry-standard OVF format, which means you’ll be able to run it on virtualization layers like VMware, VirtualBox, and Oracle VM. An increasingly common way to sell web apps, but it’ll trigger GPL-style distribution terms in software licenses.
- SparkleShare — open source sharing tool that markets itself as “like Dropbox”. Uses git as a backend, so you can share via github.
- Whatever Happened to Programming? — When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. [...] Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic? Any time you are in the “someone else’s code is almost right, make the changes to improve it” situation, you’re doing unsatisfying programming. It’s factory assembly of software, not craftsmanship. Welcome to the future: you have been replaced by a machine, and the machine is you.
Four short links: 10 January 2011
Online Collaboration, Reputable Twitterers, Old Computers, and Web Experiments
- Tools and Practices for Working Virtually — a detailed explanation of how the RedMonk team works virtually.
- Twitter Accounts for All Stack Overflow Users by Reputation (Brian Bondy) — superawesome list of clueful people.
- The Wonderful World of Early Computing — from bones to the ENIAC, some surprising and interesting historical computation devices. (via John D. Cook)
- Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure (PDF) — they can’t run just one test at a time, so they have infrastructure to comprehensively test all features against all features and in real time pull out statistical conclusions from the resulting data. (via Greg Linden)
An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform
This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress.
Four short links: 11 May 2010
Computational Design, Instructive Games, Collaboration, and Good Bad Code
- ToxicLibs — an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing. (via joshua on Delicious)
- RibbonHero — a game for learning the new Microsoft Office. (via azaaza on Twitter)
- Teambox — open source project collaboration tool.
- Google Web Security Tutorials — the classes given to new recruits, including Jarlsberg, a bug-ridden very vulnerable demo app for would-be security gurus to fix. I like the idea of releasing antitheses, bad code that can be just as instructive as good code.
Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online
Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel)….
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 