- Bruce Sterling on Disruption — If more computation, and more networking, was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not. Obviously we’re living in a Depression. Slow first 25% but then it takes fire and burns with the heat of a thousand Sun Microsystems flaming out. You must read this now.
- The Matasano Crypto Challenges (Maciej Ceglowski) — To my delight, though, I was able to get through the entire sequence. It took diligence, coffee, and a lot of graph paper, but the problems were tractable. And having completed them, I’ve become convinced that anyone whose job it is to run a production website should try them, particularly if you have no experience with application security. Since the challenges aren’t really documented anywhere, I wanted to describe what they’re like in the hopes of persuading busy people to take the plunge.
- Tachyon — a fault tolerant distributed file system enabling reliable file sharing at memory-speed across cluster frameworks, such as Spark and MapReduce. Berkeley-licensed open source.
- Jammit (GitHub) — an industrial strength asset packaging library for Rails, providing both the CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression that you’d expect, as well as YUI Compressor, Closure Compiler, and UglifyJS compatibility, ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in JavaScript template support, and optional Data-URI / MHTML image and font embedding. (via Joseph Misiti)
ENTRIES TAGGED "database"
Four short links: 19 April 2013
Sterling on Disruption, Coding Crypto Fun, Distributed File System, and Asset Packaging
Four short links: 23 November 2012
Island Traps, Apolitical Technology, 3D Printing Patent Suits, and Disk-Based Graph Tool
- Trap Island — island on most maps doesn’t exist.
- Why I Work on Non-Partisan Tech (MySociety) — excellent essay. Obama won using big technology, but imagine if that effort, money, and technique were used to make things that were useful to the country. Political technology is not gov2.0.
- 3D Printing Patent Suits (MSNBC) — notable not just for incumbents keeping out low-cost competitors with patents, but also (as BoingBoing observed) Many of the key patents in 3D printing start expiring in 2013, and will continue to lapse through ’14 and ’15. Expect a big bang of 3D printer innovation, and massive price-drops, in the years to come. (via BoingBoing)
- GraphChi — can run very large graph computations on just a single machine, by using a novel algorithm for processing the graph from disk (SSD or hard drive). Programs for GraphChi are written in the vertex-centric model, proposed by GraphLab and Google’s Pregel. GraphChi runs vertex-centric programs asynchronously (i.e changes written to edges are immediately visible to subsequent computation), and in parallel. GraphChi also supports streaming graph updates and removal of edges from the graph.
Four short links: 12 September 2012
Time-Series Database, Multi-Device TV, C# to Javascript, and Tiny Research
- Seriesly — time-series database written in go.
- Tablets and TV (Luke Wroblewski) — In August 2012, 77% of TV viewers used another device at the same time in a typical day. 81% used a smartphone and TV at the same time. 66% used a laptop and TV at the same time.
- Saltarelle — open source (Apache2) C# to Javascript compiler. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Tiny Transactions on Computer Science — computer science research in 140 characters or fewer.
Heavy data and architectural convergence
Data is getting heavier relative to the networks that carry it around the data center.
Imagine a future where large clusters of like machines dynamically adapt between programming paradigms depending on a combination of the resident data and the required processing.
Four short links: 15 March 2012
Javascript STM, HTML5 Game Mashup, BerkeleyDB Architecture, and API Ontologies
- atomize.js — a distributed Software Transactional Memory implementation in Javascript.
- mari0 — not only a great demonstration of what’s possible in web games, but also a clever mashup of Mario and Portal.
- Lessons From BerkeleyDB — chapter on BerkeleyDB’s design, architecture, and development philosophy from Architecture of Open Source Applications. (via Pete Warden)
- An API Ontology — I currently see most real-world deployed APIs fit into a few different categories. All have their pros and cons, and it’s important to see how they relate to one other.
Top stories: February 6-10, 2012
The NoSQL movement, a victory for the web, and it's time to end DRM and embrace a unified ebook format.
This week on O'Reilly: Mike Loukides surveyed the NoSQL database landscape, the open web scored an important victory in court, and Joe Wikert said it's time to embrace a unified ebook format and abandon DRM.
Helping educators find the right stuff
The Learning Registry looks to crack the education resource discovery problem.
There are countless repositories of high-quality content available to teachers, but it is still nearly impossible to find content to use with a particular lesson plan for a particular grade aligned to particular standards. That's where the Department of Education's new Learning Registry comes in.
Oracle's NoSQL
Oracle's NoSQL Database is more than a product. It's also an acknowledgement.
Oracle's announcement of a NoSQL product isn't just a validation of key-value stores, but of the entire discussion of database architecture.
What CouchDB can do for HTML5, web apps and mobile
The utility of CouchApps and how CouchDB could shape mobile.
OSCON speaker Bradley Holt talks about what CouchDB offers web developers, how the database works with HTML5, and why CouchApps could catch on.
Four short links: 14 March 2011
Future Retrospective, Political Entrepreneurs, Library DRM, and In-Database Analytics
- A History of the Future in 100 Objects (Kickstarter) — blog+podcast+video+book project, to have future historians tell the story of our century in 100 objects. The BBC show that inspired it was brilliant, and I rather suspect this will be too. It’s a clever way to tell a story of the future (his hardest problem will be creating a single coherent narrative for the 21st century). What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? ‘Smart drugs’ that change the way we think? A fragment from suitcase nuke detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world’s most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid? (via RIG London weekly notes)
- Entrepreneurs Who Create Value vs Entrepreneurs Who Lock Up Value (Andy Kessler) — distinguishes between “political entrepreneurs” who leverage their political power to own something and then overcharge or tax the crap out of the rest of us to use it vs “market entrepreneurs” who recognize the price-to-value gap and jump in. Ignoring legislation, they innovate, disintermediate, compete, stay up all night coding, and offer something better and cheaper until the market starts to shift. My attention was particularly caught by for every stroke of the pen, for every piece of legislation, for every paid-off congressman, there now exists a price umbrella that overvalues what he or any political entrepreneur is doing. (via Bryce Roberts)
- Harper-Collins Caps eBook Loans — The publisher wants to sell libraries DRMed ebooks that will self-destruct after 26 loans. Public libraries have always served and continue to serve those people who can’t access information on the purchase market. Jackass moves like these prevent libraries from serving those people in the future that we hope will come soon: the future where digital is default and print is premium. That premium may well be “the tentacles of soulless bottom-dwelling coprocephalic publishers can’t digitally destroy your purchase”. It’s worth noting that O’Reilly offers DRM-free PDFs of the books they publish, including mine. Own what you buy lest it own you. (via BoingBoing and many astonished library sources)
- MAD Lib — BSD-licensed open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Ted Leung)
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