- Compiling Android from Source (Jethro Carr) — not as easy as you might think. The documentation is minimal, and each device has its own binary blobs of not-open-source crap necessary to make them work. Open source is supposed to let users continue to do good things with the device, even if the vendor disapproves (cf Stallman’s Printer). Jethro’s experience is that with Android, not so much. Even the Google AOSP supported phones can’t run a pure open source stack, proprietary downloads are supplied by Google for specific hardware components for each model and for a specific OS release. Should Google decide to stop supporting a device with future Android versions (as has happened with earlier devices) you won’t easily be able to support the hardware. (via Don Christie)
- Javascript Objects, Functions, Scope, Prototypes, and Closures — an extremely readable yet concise guide to these topics in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
- CSS3 Progress Bars (GitHub) — gorgeous and useful. (via Juha Saarinen)
- To Know But Not Understand (David Weinberger) — excellent excerpt from his new book on big data and computational science. We can climb the ladder of complexity [...] to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved. Preordered his book! (via Alexis Madrigal)
ENTRIES TAGGED "css"
Four short links: 4 January 2012
Android Source, Javascript Language, CSS3 Progress Bars, and Computational Science
Four short links: 2 January 2012
Finland Schools, Open Source Prezi, Debit Cards for Hackers, and Sensor Startups
- What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (The Atlantic) — Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen)
- impress.js (github) — MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I’ve never been happy with the Prezi because I fear data lock-in. This might be a way forward. (via Hacker News)
- Facebook Offers Debit Cards to White Hat Hackers (CNet) — paying vulnerability bounties without handing out cash. I figure it’s the start of a loyalty program. Will Facebook learn what the hackers spent the money on? Interesting possibilities opened up here.
- Green Goose — interesting startup selling consumer sensor hardware. My intuition is that we’re platforming too soon: that we need a few individual great applications of the sensors to take off, then we can worry about rationalising hardware in our house. The biggest problem seems to me that we’re talking about “sticking sensors on milk cartons” rather than solving an actual problem someone has. (“There are no sensors on my milk cartons” is not an oft-heard lament)
Four short links: 17 October 2011
From Reddit to Movie, Google Audited, Web Delays, and Sugared CSS
- Story Written in Reddit — historical scifi based on the question “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?” Movie rights were just acquired by Warners. (via BoingBoing)
- Auditing Google — the comically complex games played to move profits to jurisdictions beyond taxation is under scrutiny, at last. While you dodge taxes like this, you have no high moral ground for “do no evil”.
- Frontend SPOF Survey (Steve Souders) — a “frontend SPOF” is any crap whose mere presence can delay the display of your web page. We’ve been bitten by this on Radar: “ooh, let’s try this widget—wait, now it takes 12s to load a page, wtf?”
- Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets — an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’;s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.
PhoneGap basics: What it is and what it can do for mobile developers
Joe Bowser on using PhoneGap to develop across mobile platforms.
Joe Bowser, the developer of the Android version of PhoneGap, on the pros and cons of developing with the PhoneGap cross-platform application framework.
Four short links: 9 September 2011
Pay for News?, Outages Compendium, CSS Sudoku Solver, and Open Source in the Military
- A Simple Test For Whether People Will Pay For News — an excellent thought experiment, one which sends shivers down the spines of editors.
- Outages.org — This is as complete a list as possible of links to carrier and other provider network status pages as well as links to network diagnostic tools; user contributions are strongly encouraged. (via Jesse Vincent)
- Sudoku Solver Just in CSS — boggle. (via Paul Irish)
- MIL-OSS Conference Writeup — Alex S. Voultepsis explained how the intelligence community has built up an internal infrastructure with the tools that people want to use; in a vast number of cases, they use OSS to do this. For example, Intellipedia is implemented using MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia. (via John Scott)
Four short links: 13 July 2011
Freebase in Node, Form Styling, Implicit Friendships, and Dyslexic Font
- Freebase in Node.js (github) — handy library for interacting with Freebase from node code. (via Rob McKinnon)
- Formalize — CSS library to provide a standard style for form elements. (via Emma Jane Hogbin)
- Suggesting More Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (PDF) — Google paper on the algorithm behind Friend Suggest. Related: Katango. (via Big Data)
- Dyslexia — a typeface for dyslexics. (via Richard Soderberg)
Four short links: 16 June 2011
Solar Wireless Sensors, CSS Lint, Options Explained, and Web Hacks
- Solar Powered Wireless Sensor Network — Chris is building wireless sensor networks using open source software and hardware that could be used in a variety of applications like air quality or home energy monitoring. It looks like he was inspired by Tweetawatt and is using xBee and ASUS wifi for communication in conjunction with Pachube for data display. (via MindKits)
- CSS Lint — validate and quality check your CSS. (via Jacine Luisi)
- An Introduction to Stock Options for the Tech Entrepreneur or Startup Employee (Scribd) — nice introduction to board, stock, options, finance, dilution, and more.
- Interesting Web Hacks (Quora) — You can quickly run HTML in the browser without creating a HTML file: Enter this in the address bar: data:text/html,<h1>Hello, world!<h1> (via Alex Gibson)
Four short links: 14 June 2011
ASCII Diagrams, Bayesian Textbook, Telehacks Interview, and Table Resizing in CSS
- ASCII Flow — create ASCII diagrams. Awesome. (via Hacker News)
- Principles of Uncertainty — probability and statistics textbook, for maths students to build up to understanding Bayesian reasoning.
- Playable Archaeology: An Interview with the Telehacks Anonymous Creator (Andy Baio) — The inspiration was my son. I had shown him the old movies Hackers, Wargames, and Colossus: The Forbin Project and he really liked them. After seeing Hackers and Wargames, he really wanted to start hacking stuff on his own. I’d taught him some programming, but I didn’t want him doing any actual hacking, so I decided to make a simulation so he could telnet to hosts, hack them, and get the feel of it, but safely. (Andy was the interviewer, not the creator)
- Responsive Data Tables — CSS ways to reformat data tables if the screen width is inadequate for the default table layout. (via Keith Bolland)
Four short links: 10 June 2011
CS Courses, Crowdsourced Sound Map, CSS Game, and Shared Social Intentions
- Advanced Computer Science Courses — collection of online course notes/lectures for classes in advanced CS topics. (via Hacker News)
- UK SoundMap — very cool crowdsourced audio landscape of the UK. (via British Library)
- CSS Panic — game with no HTML, no Javascript, it’s all CSS. Only works in Safari and Chrome. (via Dale Harvey)
- Sharing Intentions Talk — interesting talk by Jyri Engestrom on building social mobile apps to share intentions as social objects. Gotta love these folks who can read and use Bruno Latour instead of merely reaching for the Advil as I do.
Four short links: 7 June 2011
Shadowy CSS, Bitcoin Mining, Graphics API, Date Design
- OMG Text — a plugin for CSS framework Compass for directional text shadows. (via David Kaneda)
- Build a Cheap Bitcoin Mine — some day it will be revealed that the act of generating a bitcoin token is helping the Russian mafia to crack nuclear missile launch codes and Afghan druglords built the Bitcoin system to destabilize the US dollar.
- Polycode — a free, open-source, cross-platform framework for creative code. You can use it as a C++ API or as a standalone scripting language to get easy and simple access to accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, hardware shaders, sound and network programming, physics engines and more. The core Polycode API is written in C++ and can be used to create portable native applications. Lua interfaces. (via Joshua Schachter)
- Flickr Date Design — interesting thoughts on Flickr’s date design. The date your photos was taken is stored in a MySQL datetime technically giving you the ability to label your photo as being taken solidly 800+ years before anything most of us would describe as the invention of photography. Which is a little silly.[...]Fundamentally this split between system activity time, and human editable creation date models a world where the people who use your software do something other then use your software. You have to decide how you feel about admitting that possibility. (via Nelson Minar)
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