- BitCoin Watch — news and market analysis for this artificial currency. (If you’re outside the BitCoin world wondering wtf the fuss is all about try We Use Coins for a gentle primer and then Is BitCoin a Good Idea? for the case against) (via Andy Baio)
- Time Capsule — send your Flickr photos from a year ago. I love that technology helps us connect not just with other people right now, but with ourselves in the future. Compare TwitShift and Foursquare and Seven Years Ago. (via Really Interesting Group)
- HTTP Archive Mobile — mobile performance data. The top 100 web pages average out at 271kb vs 401kb for their desktop incarnations, which still seems unjustifiably high to me.
- Skype at Conferences — The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference which stuttered into a dalekian half life without really quite making the breakthrough into comprehensibility. After various attempts to rewire, reconfigure and reboot, we gave up and had what turned into a good conversation among the dozen people round the table in London. Conference organizers, take note: Skype at conferences is a recipe for fail.
"events" entries
Why Facebook isn't the best home for your public events
Facebook may not be great for event listings, but it could be a useful conduit.
Organizations should strive to own and control their
online identities (and associated data) to the extent they can.
Four short links: 20 May 2011
Digital Forex, Blasts from the Past, Mobile Web Performance, Skype at Conferences
Four short links: 9 May 2011
iPhone Anonymity, Fabbed Souvenirs, Perl+Go=Campher, and Javascript Slides
- UDID DeAnonymization — a developer exposed an API that connected UDID to other information such as Facebook ID. The API has been closed, but it remains true that your iPhone has a primary key and darn near every app developer has a database linking your UDID to other details about you. Apple requires this to not be public, but every private database is a bad architecture choice or security slipup away from being a public database.
- Be Your Own Souvenir — Kinect + 3D printer = print a tiny figurine of yourself. Kinect has solved a very real part of the input problem that 3D fabbing had. (via BoingBoing)
- Campher — Perl embedded in Go, by Brad Fitzpatrick.
- Slides from JS Conf 2011 — more than thirty talks, from greats like David Flanagan, Thomas Fuchs, and Tom Hughes-Croucher. (via Isaac Z Schlueter)
Four short links: 21 January 2011
Sensor Trojan, node.js IDE, Quantified Conference, and P2P Streaming
- Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers — Soundminer sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed […] the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number. Very clever use of sensors for evil! (via Slashdot)
- Cloud9 IDE — open source IDE for node.js. I’m using it as I learn node.js, and it’s sweet as, bro.
- The Quantified Self Conference — May 28-29 in Mountain View. (via Pete Warden)
- Bram Cohen Demos P2P Streaming — the creator of BitTorrent is winding up to release a streaming protocol that is also P2P. (via Hacker News)
Four short links: 6 December 2010
.bas Scripts, Net Neutrality, Open Harrassment, and iOS Blog
- Apple I Basic as Mac OS X Scripting Language — great hack. The “apple1basic” executable is a statically recompiled version of the original binary. All code is running natively. It plugs right into UNIX stdin and stdout. You can pass it the filename of a BASIC program to run. You can run BASIC programs like shell scripts. (via Hacker News)
- How to Discredit Net Neutrality — the Level3-Comcast dispute isn’t as straightforward as you might think (or as I implied). Increasingly, advocates of net neutrality have pegged their case to a larger and more powerful role for FCC regulation in the internet industry. And thus the net neutrality debate, instead of focusing on developing new institutional arrangements to preserve internet freedom on BOTH the demand and supply side, descends into a replay of the early 1980s, Reagan-era punch and judy show between democrats and republicans, with one arguing for “more government” and the other for “less government.” Neither talking much sense about what the government should actually do. There’s a missing discussion here about competition preventing carrier abuses, competition that the US lacks.
- The Dark Side of Open Source Conferences (Val Aurora) — A good first step is for conferences and communities to adopt and enforce explicit policies or codes of conduct that spell out what kind of behavior won’t be tolerated and what response it will get. Much in the way that people don’t stop speeding unless they get speeding tickets, or that murder is totally unacceptable to most people but laws against it still exist, harassment at conferences may seem obviously wrong, but stopping it will require written rules and enforceable penalties.
- iDev Blog-a-Day — love the layout and the content’s good too.
Four short links: 2 June 2010
WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO
- Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) — Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to (“exit node”) and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first: YouTube turning a blind eye to copyright infringement, Facebook games and spam, etc.
- VC Investments in Education — Cleantech investors are chasing a 3x larger market than Education and yet are putting 50-60x the money to work chasing those returns.
- Cells: A Massively Multi-Agent Python Programming Game — a sweet-looking update on the old Core War game.
- Google IO 2010 Session Videos Online — I’m keen to learn more about BigData and Prediction APIs, which seem to me an eminently sensible move by Google to play to their strengths.
Four short links: 3 May 2010
Science Data Hacking, Obstructive Interfaces, 3G to Wifi, and Australian Gov 2.0
- Science Hack Day — Saturday, June 19th and Sunday, June 20th, 2010, in the Guardian offices in London. A meeting place for the designer/coder class and scientists, with datasets as the common language. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Facebook’s Evil Interface (EFF) — Facebook’s new M.O. is to say “to better help you, we took away your privacy. If you are stupid and wish to attempt to retain your privacy, don’t not avoid to fail to click here. Now click here. Now click here … ha, moved it! Moved it again! Gotcha!”. Attempting to use Facebook to talk to friends without having your friendships and interests pimped to the data mining Johns is as hard as canceling an AOL subscription.
- Make Your Own 3G Router — an easter-egg inside the new Chumby model (which O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures invested in).
- Australian Government’s Response to the Web 2.0 Taskforce — it’s all positive: all but one recommendation accepted. Another very positive step from the Aussies.
Four short links: 15 April 2010
Obscurely Secure Data, Bio Data Torrents, Open Knowledge Conference, Library of Twitter
- Is Making Public Data Available a Threatening Act? (Pete Warden) — Imagine a thought experiment where I downloaded the income, charitable donations, pets and military service information for all 89,000 Boulder residents listed in InfoUSA’s marketing database, and put that information up in a public web page. That’s obviously pretty freaky, but absolutely anyone with $7,000 to spare can grab exactly the same information! That intuitive reaction is very hard to model. Is it because at the moment someone has to make more of an effort to get that information? Do we actually prefer that our information is for sale, rather than free? Or are we just comfortable with a ‘privacy through obscurity’ regime?
- BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data — described in a PLoSone article. BitTorrent for bio datasets. (via Fabiana Kubke)
- The Open Knowledge Conference — Saturday 24th April 2010 in London. Check out the programme, killer topics and people.
- Library of Congress to Archive All Tweets — Twitter is handing the archive of all public tweets to the Library of Congress, with a search interface. I like this new slant on national libraries’ roles as repositories of nationally and historically important digital text.
Four short links: 13 April 2010
Find the Pretty, Win the Prize, Manage the Data, and Model the Temple
- 0to255 — simple cute colour-generator. (via Hacker News)
- ProPublica Wins Pulitzer Prize (NYTimes) — important landmark in the rise of online journalism. The award is a landmark for ProPublica, founded in 2007, and the other digital news outlets that have sprouted around the country. Over the last few years, the Pulitzer Prize board has relaxed the eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online; this year there were many such submissions.
- Big Data Workshop — unconference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (via jchris on Twitter
- 3D Machu Picchu, Created With LIDAR — viewable in Google Earth, took over 1,200 hours of work. (via skry on Twitter)
Four short links: 17 March 2010
MySQL, MySociety, NoSQL DB, and NoSQL Conference Notes
- Common MySQL Queries — a useful reference.
- MySociety’s Next 12 Months — two new projects, FixMyTransport and “Project Fosbury”. The latter is a more general tool to help people organise their own campaigns for change.
- riak — scalable key-value store with JSON interface. (via joshua on Delicious)
- Notes from NoSQL Live Boston — full of juicy nuggets of info from the NoSQL conference.