"culture" entries

Four short links: 9 December 2014

Four short links: 9 December 2014

Tab Tool, Ad Manifesto, Cultural Heritage, and Software Sustainability

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 9, 2014
  1. tab — command-line tool for doing heavy lifting with tab-separated files.
  2. Acceptable Ads — manifesto from the makers of AdBlock Plus. (via Monday Note)
  3. Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Matt Webb) — Matt points to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and comments: When the aliens land and set up shop and they’re like, “Guys, so what have you got?” And we’re all… “Uh, lasers? We’ll trade you lasers for a starship drive.” And the aliens will be: “Nope, what else?” Then we’ll say: “Tsiattista poetic duelling. Turkish coffee. Jazz.” Bingo. Kudos to UNESCO for prepping our inventory ahead of time.
  4. Apache (and Other Foundations) Considered Useful (Chris Aniszczyk) — have over a decade of experience being built for the sole purpose of allowing independent open source communities to flourish with fair governance models […] This is important because the incentives between individuals small companies, large companies, heavily funded companies and even academics are different and need to be accounted for in a fair open source governance structure. Sustainability of software commons is an unsolved problem, but foundations make it tractable.
Four short links: 8 December 2014

Four short links: 8 December 2014

Systemic Improvement, Chinese Trends, Deep Learning, and Technical Debt

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 8, 2014
  1. Reith Lectures — this year’s lectures are by Atul Gawande, talking about preventable failure and systemic improvement — topics of particular relevance to devops cultural devotees. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Chinese Mobile App UI Trends — interesting differences between US and China. Phone number authentication interested me: You key in your number and receive a confirmation code via SMS. Here, all apps offer this type of phone number registration/login (if not prefer it). This also applies to websites, even those without apps. (via Matt Webb)
  3. Large Scale Deep Learning (PDF) — Jeff Dean from Google. Starts easy! Starts.
  4. Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (PDF) — Google research paper on the ways in which machine learning can create problems rather than solve them.
Four short links: 3 December 2014

Four short links: 3 December 2014

VIsual NoSQL, QA MindSet, Future Programming, and Interactive Cities

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 3, 2014
  1. Visual Guide to NoSQL Systems — not quite accurate in the “pick any two,” but still a useful frame for understanding the landscape.
  2. The QA Mindset (Michael Lopp) — Humans do strange shit to software that we could never predict in the controlled setting of our carefully constructed software development environments. This x1000.
  3. Future Programming 2014 Videos — a collection of talks on boundary-pushing ideas around IDEs, code control, distributed objects, GPUs, etc.
  4. Some of These Things are Not Like the Others (Tom Armitage) — writeup on sensor-rich interactive cityscapes designed for residents to thrive rather than for merchants to transact. Lovely.
Four short links: 28 November 2014

Four short links: 28 November 2014

Material Design Inspiration, Event Processing, Launch Infrastructure, Remote Work

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 28, 2014
  1. Material Up — material design inspiration. MD is a physics engine for UI.
  2. Flafka (Cloudera) — Flume plus Kafka, offers sub-second-latency event processing without the need for dedicated infrastructure. (via Abishek Tiwari)
  3. terraform.io — open source package providing a common configuration to launch infrastructure, from physical and virtual servers to email and DNS providers.
  4. Remote Work: An Engineering Leader’s Perspective — Even proponents of remote work seem to think that you should either have a distributed team from the get go, or stick to a traditional on-site team. Our experience shows that this is incorrect…
Four short links: 24 November 2014

Four short links: 24 November 2014

Magic Leap, Constant Improvement, Philanthropofallacies, and Chinese Manufacturing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 24, 2014
  1. How Magic Leap is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality (Gizmodo) — amazing piece of investigative tech journalism.
  2. Better All The Time (New Yorker) — What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. […] Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good.
  3. Stop Trying to Save the World (New Republic) — What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket. (note: some pottymouth language in this article, and some analysis I wholeheartedly agree with.)
  4. Christmas in Yiwu — We travelled by container ship across the East China Sea before following the electronics supply chain around China, visiting factories, distributors, wholesalers and refineries. Fascinating! 22km of corridors in the mall that dollar store buyers visit to fill their shelves. I had never seen so many variations of the same product. Dozens of Christmas stockings bearing slightly different Santas and snowmen. Small tweaks on each theme. An in-house designer creates these designs. It feels like a brute force approach to design, creating every single possibility and then letting the market decide which it wants to buy. If none of the existing designs appeal to a buyer they can get their own designs manufactured instead. When a custom design is successful, with the customer placing a large order, it is copied by the factory and offered in their range to future buyers. The factory sales agent indicated that designs weren’t protected and could be copied freely, as long as trademarks were removed. Parallels with web design left as exercise to the reader. (via the ever-discerning Mr Webb)
Four short links: 21 November 2014

Four short links: 21 November 2014

Power Assist, Changing Minds, Inside Index, and Poop History

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 21, 2014
  1. Wearable Power Assist Device Goes on Sale in Japan (WSJ, Paywall) — The Muscle Suit, which weighs 5.5 kilograms (12 pounds), can be worn knapsack-style and uses a mouthpiece as its control. Unlike other similar suits that rely on motors, it uses specially designed rubber tubes and compressed air as the source of its power. The Muscle Suit can help users pick up everyday loads with about a third of the usual effort. […] will sell for about ¥600,000 ($5,190), and is also available for rent at about ¥30,000 to ¥50,000 per month. Prof. Kobayashi said he expected the venture would ship 5,000 of them in 2015. (via Robot Economics)
  2. Debunking Handbook — techniques for helping people to change their beliefs (hint: showing them data rarely does it). (via Tom Stafford)
  3. Building a Complete Tweet Index (Twitter) — engineering behind the massive searchable Tweet collection: indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms.
  4. History of the Poop Emoji (Fast Company) — In Japanese, emoji are more like characters than random animated emoticons.
Four short links: 14 November 2014

Four short links: 14 November 2014

Completing Maps, ChatOps, Career Design, and Data Privacy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 14, 2014
  1. Missing Maps Fill In the Blanks (New Scientist) — OpenStreetMap project to crowdmap slums around the world.
  2. Chatops — devops deployment chatter with Hubot.
  3. Alternatives to Tech Career Ladders — Spotify trying to figure out how to keep engineers challenged as they become more senior.
  4. Mozilla’s Data Privacy Principles — well-articulated and useful: without pre-defined principles, it’s so easy to accidentally collect or poorly protect data.
Four short links: 13 November 2014

Four short links: 13 November 2014

Material Design, GitHub Communication, Priority Queues, and DevOps Learnings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 13, 2014
  1. Materialize — another web implementation of Material Design.
  2. Communicating at Github — interesting take on making visible and optimising for the conversations and decisions that form culture but are otherwise invisible.
  3. MultiQueues — an approach for parallel access to priority queues.
  4. Devops Learnings — We view DevOps as the missing components of agile – the enabler for getting it out of the door and closing the loop between software engineer and customer.
Four short links: 23 October 2014

Four short links: 23 October 2014

Hard Javascript, Responsive Progress, Software Experiments, and Facebook Emotions

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 23, 2014
  1. You Don’t Know JS — a series of [CC-licensed] books [to be published by O’Reilly] diving deep into the core mechanisms of the JavaScript language.
  2. progressbar.js — responsive progress bar.
  3. Microsoft Garage — Microsoft software experiments, in public. This is awesome.
  4. Creating Empathy on Facebook (NY Times) — On Facebook, teenagers are presented with more options than just “it’s embarrassing” when they want to remove a post. They are asked what’s happening in the post, how they feel about it and how sad they are. In addition, they are given a text box with a polite pre-written response that can be sent to the friend who hurt their feelings. (In early versions of this feature, only 20 percent of teenagers filled out the form. When Facebook added more descriptive language like “feelings” and “sadness,” the figure grew to 80 percent.)
Four short links: 16 October 2014

Four short links: 16 October 2014

Eye Catcher, Exoskeleton, Homebrew Cray, and Information Architecture

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 16, 2014
  1. Eye Catcher (We Make Money Not Art) — the most banal-looking wooden frame takes thus a life of its own as soon as you come near it. It quickly positions itself in front of you, spots your eyes and starts expressing ’emotions’ based on your own. Eye Catcher uses the arm of an industrial robot, high power magnets, a hidden pinhole camera, ferrofluid and emotion recognition algorithms to explore novel interactive interfaces based on the mimicry and exchange of expressions.
  2. FORTIS Exoskeleton (Lockheed Martin) — transfers loads through the exoskeleton to the ground in standing or kneeling positions and allows operators to use heavy tools as if they were weightless. (via CNN)
  3. Homebrew Cray-1A – fascinating architecture, but also lovely hobby project to build the homebrew. The lack of Cray software archives horrifies the amateur historian in me, though. When I started building this, I thought “Oh, I’ll just swing by the ol’ Internet and find some groovy 70′s-era software to run on it.” It turns out I was wrong. One of the sad things about pre-internet machines (especially ones that were primarily purchased by 3-letter Government agencies) is that practically no software exists for them. After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90′s.
  4. How Do Committees Invent? — 1968 paper that gave us organizations which design systems […] produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. That was the 1968 version of the modern “your website’s sitemap is your org chart”.