- 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)
"css" entries
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
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)
Four short links: 29 March 2011
Mobile Money, Materials Magic, Minimising Multiples, and Making Motion
- Serve — American Express mobile payments play. Money on mobiles is a huge potential, look for others to bang around here before the right answer is found. (via Mike Olson)
- Move Mayonnaise and Ketchup (YouTube) — I don’t know why you’d want to move mayonnaise and ketchup intact, but this is the machine for it. (via Russell Brown)
- Duplicates Detection with ElasticSearch (Andre Zmievski) — duplicate detection (or de-duping) is one of the most unappreciated problems that the developers of certain types of applications face sooner or later. The applications I’m talking about share two main characteristics: item collection and some sort of social aspect.
- Ceaser — tool for making CSS easing animations. (via Josh Clark)
Four short links: 12 January 2011
Zork Pen, Clever Web Design, iPhone Library, and Text Layout
- Zork and Tic-Tac-Toe on a LiveScribe Pen (YouTube) — this guy totally ported the Z-Machine so he can play Zork on his pen. My favourite bit is the comment from Infocom founder Scott Cutler: As the implementer who wrote the first Z-machine for the TRS-80 some 30 years ago and one of the founders of Infocom, I was thrilled and impressed to see what you did. I can guarantee you that we never imagined it would be played with a pen! (via Joe Johnston and Jason Scott)
- Ben the Bodyguard — brilliant web site design. (via Aza Raskin)
- three20 — open source iPhone library based on the Facebook app, providing things like photo viewer, message composer, etc. (via The Mission Lab)
- Scale and Rhythm — beautiful web site that lets you experiment with the variables in text layout.
Four short links: 28 December 2010
Amazon Records, Social Bookmarking, Female Founders, and CSS Framework
- Amazon Sold 158 Items/Second on Cyber Monday (TechCrunch) — I remember when 20 hits/s on a Sun web server was considered pretty friggin’ amazing. Just pause a moment and ponder the infrastructure Amazon has marshaled to be able to do this: data centers, replication, load balancers, payment processing, fulfillment, elastic cloud computing, storage servers, cheap power, bandwidth beyond comprehension.
- Quick Thoughts on Pinboard (Matt Haughey) — thoughtful comments, and an immediate and just as thoughtful response. (I am a happy pinboard user who is also looking forward to the social networking features to come)
- Female Founders — impressively long list of female startup founders. (via Hacker News)
- Less Framework — cross-device css grid system based on using inline media queries. (via Pinboard)