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"databases" entries
USB in Cars, Capture Presentations, Amazon Redshift, and Polytweeting
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Hyundia Replacing Cigarette Lighters with USB Ports (Quartz) — sign of the times. (via Julie Starr)
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Freeseer — free, open source, cross-platform application that captures or streams your desktop—designed for capturing presentations. Would you like freedom with your screencast?
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Amazon Redshift: What You Need to Know — good write-up of experience using Amazon’s column database.
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GroupTweet — Allow any number of contributors to Tweet from a group account safely and securely. (via Jenny Magiera)
Amen Break, MySQL Scale, Spooky Source, and Graph Analytics Engine
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The Amen Break (YouTube) — fascinating 20m history of the amen break, a handful of bars of drum solo from a forgotten 1969 song which became the origin of a huge amount of popular music from rap to jungle and commercials, and the contested materials at the heart of sample-based music. Remix it and weep. (via Beta Knowledge)
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The MySQL Ecosystem at Scale (PDF) — nice summary of how MySQL is used on massive users, and where the sweet spots have been found.
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Lab41 (Github) — open sourced code from a spook hacklab in Silicon Valley.
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Fanulus — open sourced Hadoop-based graph analytics engine for analyzing graphs represented across a multi-machine compute cluster. A breadth-first version of the graph traversal language Gremlin operates on graphs stored in the distributed graph database Titan, in any Rexster-fronted graph database, or in HDFS via various text and binary formats.
Insecure Hardware, Doc Database, Kids Programming, and Ad-Blocking AP
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Researchers Can Slip an Undetectable Trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs (Ars Technica) — The exploit works by severely reducing the amount of entropy the RNG normally uses, from 128 bits to 32 bits. The hack is similar to stacking a deck of cards during a game of Bridge. Keys generated with an altered chip would be so predictable an adversary could guess them with little time or effort required. The severely weakened RNG isn’t detected by any of the “Built-In Self-Tests” required for the P800-90 and FIPS 140-2 compliance certifications mandated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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rethinkdb — open-source distributed JSON document database with a pleasant and powerful query language.
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Teach Kids Programming — a collection of resources. I start on Scratch much sooner, and 12+ definitely need the Arduino, but generally I agree with the things I recognise, and have a few to research …
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Raspberry Pi as Ad-Blocking Access Point (AdaFruit) — functionality sadly lacking from my off-the-shelf AP.
No Managers, Bezos Pearls, Visualising History, and Scalable Key-Value Store
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No Managers — If we could find a way to replace the function of the managers and focus everyone on actually producing for our Students (customers) then it would actually be possible to be a #NoManager company. In my future posts I’ll explain how we’re doing this at Treehouse.
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The 20 Smartest Things Jeff Bezos Has Ever Said (Motley Fool) — I feel like the 219th smartest thing Jeff Bezos has ever said is still smarter than the smartest thing most business commentators will ever say. (He says, self-referentially) “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.”
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Putting Time in Perspective — nifty representations of relative timescales and history. (via BoingBoing)
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Sophia — BSD-licensed small C library implementing an embeddable key-value database “for a high-load environment”.
Constant KV Store, Google Me, Learned Bias, and DRM-Stripping Lego Robot
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Sparkey — Spotify’s open-sourced simple constant key/value storage library, for read-heavy systems with infrequent large bulk inserts.
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The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling (Ted Chiang) — story about what happens when lifelogs become searchable. Now with Remem, finding the exact moment has become easy, and lifelogs that previously lay all but ignored are now being scrutinized as if they were crime scenes, thickly strewn with evidence for use in domestic squabbles. (via BoingBoing)
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Algorithms Magnifying Misbehaviour (The Guardian) — when the training set embodies biases, the machine will exhibit biases too.
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Lego Robot That Strips DRM Off Ebooks (BoingBoing) — so. damn. cool. If it had been controlled by a C64, Cory would have hit every one of my geek erogenous zones with this find.
Flexible Layouts, Web Components, Distributed SQL Database, and Reverse-Engineering Dropbox Client
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intention.js — manipulates the DOM via HTML attributes. The methods for manipulation are placed with the elements themselves, so flexible layouts don’t seem so abstract and messy.
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Introducing Brick: Minimal-markup Web Components for Faster App Development (Mozilla) — a cross-browser library that provides new custom HTML tags to abstract away common user interface patterns into easy-to-use, flexible, and semantic Web Components. Built on Mozilla’s x-tags library, Brick allows you to plug simple HTML tags into your markup to implement widgets like sliders or datepickers, speeding up development by saving you from having to initially think about the under-the-hood HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
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F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales — a distributed relational database system built at Google to support the AdWords business. F1 is a hybrid database that combines high availability, the scalability of NoSQL systems like Bigtable, and the consistency and usability of traditional SQL databases. F1 is built on Spanner, which provides synchronous cross-datacenter replication and strong consistency. Synchronous replication implies higher commit latency, but we mitigate that latency by using a hierarchical schema model with structured data types and through smart application design. F1 also includes a fully functional distributed SQL query engine and automatic change tracking and publishing.
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Looking Inside The (Drop)Box (PDF) — This paper presents new and generic techniques, to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world. We describe a method to bypass Dropbox’s two factor authentication and hijack Dropbox accounts. Additionally, generic techniques to intercept SSL data using code injection techniques and monkey patching are presented. (via Tech Republic)
Approximate Queries, Spreadsheet as Database, China Robot Plans, and Open Source Google App Engine
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blinkdb — The current version of BlinkDB supports a slightly constrained set of SQL-style declarative queries and provides approximate results for standard SQL aggregate queries, specifically queries involving COUNT, AVG, SUM and PERCENTILE and is being extended to support any User-Defined Functions (UDFs). Queries involving these operations can be annotated with either an error bound, or a time constraint, based on which the system selects an appropriate sample to operate on.
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sheetsee.js (github) — Javascript library that makes it easy to use a Google Spreadsheet as the database feeding the tables, charts and maps on a website. Once set up, any changes to the spreadsheet will auto-saved by Google and be live on your site when a visitor refreshes the page. (via Tom Armitage)
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China Plans to Become a Leader in Robotics (Quartz) — The ODCCC too funds high risk research initiatives through the Thousand Talent Project (TTP), a three-year term project with possible extension. The goal of the TTP is to recruit thousands of foreign researchers with strong expertise in hardware and software to help develop innovation in China. There are already more than 100 foreign researchers working in China since 2008, the year TTP started.
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AppScale (GitHub) — open source implementation of Google App Engine.
Model-Driven Configuration, 1,000 RSS Readers Bloom, JSON Query Language, and Doug Engelbart's Vision
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ansible — Model-driven configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration, and remote task execution system. Uses SSH by default, so no special software has to be installed on the nodes you manage. Ansible can be extended in any language.
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The Golden Age of RSS — One of the things I expected least to see in 2013 was that this year would mark the greatest flourishing of RSS reader applications in the decade since it first came to prominence on the web.
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JSONiq: the JSON Query Language — expressive and highly optimizable language to query and update NoSQL stores. It enables developers to leverage the same productive high-level language across a variety of NoSQL products. Implemented in Zorba, an Apache-licensed virtual machine for JSONiq and XQuery queries.
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Bret Victor on Doug Engelbart — If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems. Poetic, articulate, and bang on the money.
Paperclip Computing, Packet Capture, Offline Wikipedia, and Sensor Databases
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How to Build a Working Digital Computer Out of Paperclips (Evil Mad Scientist) — from a 1967 popular science book showing how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).
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Moloch (Github) — an open source, large scale IPv4 packet capturing (PCAP), indexing and database system with a simple web GUI.
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Offline Wikipedia Reader (Amazon) — genius, because what Wikipedia needed to be successful was to be read-only. (via BoingBoing)
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Storing and Publishing Sensor Data — rundown of apps and sites for sensor data. (via Pete Warden)
Processing for Illustrator, Archiving Tools, Sweet Retro Art, and More Database Tools
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Drawscript — Processing for Illustrator. (via BERG London)
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Archive Team Warrior — a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive. (via Ed Vielmetti)
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Retro Vectors — royalty-free and free of charge.
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TokutekDB Goes Open Source — a high-performance, transactional storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB. See the announcement.