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"future of manufacturing" entries
iPhone Anonymity, Fabbed Souvenirs, Perl+Go=Campher, and Javascript Slides
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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.
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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)
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Campher — Perl embedded in Go, by Brad Fitzpatrick.
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Slides from JS Conf 2011 — more than thirty talks, from greats like David Flanagan, Thomas Fuchs, and Tom Hughes-Croucher. (via Isaac Z Schlueter)
In-Line Computing, What Price All The Books?, Android SIM Toolkit, and Small Manufacturing Grows
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Raspberry Pi — the creator of the game Elite has made an inline computer the size of a thumb drive–it plugs into an HDMI cable on one end and USB on the other. 700MHz CPU, OpenGL, 1080p-capable, running Ubuntu. Pricetag: $25. The mission is to supply them to schools.
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A Budget for Babel (Tim Carmody) — What would you pony up for instant access to every book? Interesting insight into the value and utility of such a service.
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Android’s Achilles Heel: The Sim Toolkit — Now if you live in the States, you might not even know what the STK is, so a bit of explaining is in order. Put simply, the STK allows carriers to load a simple set of menus and ‘applications’ on your SIM card. Again, on your fancy iPhone, you may question the need or purpose for such a thing, but that’s because you are still years behind and using a credit card. Here, where credit cards are virtually unknown, the present and future of payments is Mobile Money, which is almost always delivered via.. you guessed it, the STK.
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Democratizing Design — AutoDesk partner with Ponoko and Techshop to allow anyone to design 3-D models, and then turn them into real-life products. Great to see this kind of small-run custom manufacturing heading toward the mainstream.
Javascript Master Class, Stats for Pythonistas, CAM Floor, and HTML Extraction
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Javascript Trie Performance Analysis (John Resig) — if you program in Javascript and you’re not up to John’s skill level (*cough*) then you should read this and follow along. It’s a ride-along in the brain of a master.
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Think Stats — an introduction to statistics for Python programmers. (via Edd Dumbill)
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Bolefloor — they build curvy wooden floors. Instead of straightening naturally curvy wood (which is wasteful), they use CV and CAD/CAM to figure the smallest cuts to slot strips of wood together. It’s gorgeous, green, and geeky. (via BoingBoing)
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Extracting Article Text from HTML Documents — everyone’s doing it, now you know how. It’s the theory behind the lovingly hand-crafted magic of readability. (via Hacker News)
Printed Toys, Magazines in JS, git push web, Clean Beats More
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UK Internet Entrepreneurs (Guardian) — two things stood out for me. (1) A startup focused on 3d printing better dolls for boys and girls. (2) it seems easier to the government to start something new and impose its own vision than it is to understand and integrate with what already exists.
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TreeSaver.js — MIT/GPLv2-licensed JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts using standards-compliant HTML and CSS.
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Using git to Manage a Web Site — This page describes how I set things up so that I can make changes live by running just “git push web”.
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Strata Data Conference Recap — Clean data > More Data > Fancy Math — this is the order which makes data easier and better to work with. Clean data will be easier to work with and provide best results. If your data isn’t clean, it is better to have more data than having to resort to fancy math. Using higher order statistical processing, while workable as a last resort, will require longer to develop, difficult algorithms and harder to maintain. So best place to focus is to start with clean data.
Engineering Management, Open Source Escrow, Media Immunity, and Small-run Production
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Five Google Engineering Management Mistakes — interesting to see informed criticism, because Google’s style is often presented as a winning model. TLs [Tech Leads] were still evaluated as individual contributors. Leads to poor management practices: Grabbing all the sexy work for themselves; Providing negative evaluations for team members so they look good in comparison; Not paying attention to team member needs or requests; Confrontational relationships between team members and TLs (in some dysfunctional cases).
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Community Escrow (Simon Phipps in Computerworld) — interesting take on open source as a way of protecting against the interests of a vendor changing to no longer be aligned with those of the customer. The kicker: If the product was “open core” – with the key commercial features kept proprietary – it will be very hard for anyone to provide continuity. This is especially true if you are using the software as a service, because the critical know-how to make the software reliably run in the cloud is unlikely to be included in the open source project. Hear, hear. Cloud and open core are new enough that we still blow kisses every time we meet, but that honeymoon will pass and before long it’ll be hostile cold stares and long contemplative silences spent gazing out the window, musing on their shortcomings.
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Data Story Telling (Pete Warden) — Pete nails something I’ve been chewing on: in this model, a new form of media is like an infection hitting a previously unexposed population. Some people figure out how it can be used to breach the weak spots in the audience’s mental ‘immune system’, how to persuade people to believe lies that serve the propagator’s purpose. Eventually the deviation from reality becomes too obvious, people wise up to the manipulation and a certain level of immunity is propagated throughout the culture. The same is true for advertising: we’re in an arms race, novelty against neuroplasticity.
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Whimsy (and Clothes) For Sale (NY Times) — “We could never afford to make product in volume, so we adopted kind of like a Beanie Baby approach: we’d create small collections that supremely rabid buyers would end up buying,” Mr. Lindland said, noting that some customers own more than 20 pairs of his signature pants. “They’re a collectors’ item, oddly enough.” Small-run manufacturing embraced as a differentiating advantage, rather than as a competitive disadvantage.
Data Center Sizes, Behaviour Change, Android Sensors, and HP's 3D Printers
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Google’s Insane Number of Servers Visualized (Gizmodo) — sometimes you do just have to see it to comprehend it.
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Spreading Critical Behaviours “Virally” (HBR) — form small groups of peers and get them to exchange best practices. Repeat and watch quality rise. (via Kevin Marks)
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Android: Monitoring Sensors in the Background — tips on how to have programs continuously monitoring the sensors.
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HP Designjet 3D Printers — everyone’s hoping HP can do to 3D printer prices what they did to 2D printer prices. (WIthout doing to 3D printer materials what they did to 2D printer ink) (via fabbaloo)