- Wrong about the iPad (Tim Bray) — I am actively ignoring the iPad drivel, but this line caught my eye: Intelligence is a text-based application.
- Fertile Medium — online community consultancy, from the first and former Flickr community coordinator. One to watch: Heather and Derek really know their community. Again I say it: understanding of how open source and other collaborative communities can function is rare and valuable. (via waxy)
- pigz — parallel gzip implementation. Voom voom, so fast! (via kellan on Delicious
- Prefab: What If We Could Modify Any Interface? — screen-scraping for GUIs to bolt on new functionality to user interfaces. This is incredible. Watch the demo, it’s impressive!
"hacks" entries
Four short links: 5 April 2010
Intelligence, Community, Compression, and UI Hackery
Four short links: 26 February 2010
Gov App Building, Android FPS, Graph Mining, Keeping Fit
- Who Is Going To Build The New Public Services? — a thoughtful exploration of the possibilities and challenges of third parties building public software systems. There’s a lot of talk of “just put up the data and we’ll build the apps” but I think this is a more substantial consideration of which apps can be built by whom.
- Quake 3 for Android — kiss the weekend goodbye, NexusOne owners! My theory is that no platform has “made it” until a first person shooter has been ported to it. (via BoingBoing)
- Graph Mining — slides and reading list from seminar series at UCSB on different aspects of mining graphs. Relevant because, obviously, social networks are one such graph to be mined.
- Treadmill Desk — I want one. Staying fit while working at a sedentary job is important but not easy. I tried to type while using a stepper, but that’s just a recipe for incomprehensible typing fail. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 21 January 2010
Wireless Hacks, Real Time Web, 3D Christmas, Mac Sync
- DD-WRT — replacement firmware for cheap wireless router boxes that add new functionality like wireless bridging and quality-of-service controls (so Skype doesn’t break up while you’re web-browsing). Not a new thing, but worth remembering that it exists.
- Brain Dump of Real Time Web and WebSocket — long primer on the different technology for real-time web apps. Conclusion is that there’s no silver bullet yet, so more development work is needed. (via TomC on Delicious)
- Data Decs — 3d-printing Christmas decorations based on social network data. My favourite is the blackletter 404. (via foe on Delicious)
- ZSync — open source syncing application that makes it easy for app writers to connect desktop apps and iPhone apps. (via Dave Wiskus)
Four short links: 1 January 2010
Fonty Inkness, Machine Learning, Time-Series Indexes, and Graph Analysis
- Measuring Type — clever way to measure which font uses more ink.
- Vowpal Wabbit — fast learning software from Yahoo! Research and Hunch. Code available in git. (via zecharia on Delicious)
- Literature Review on Indexing Time-Series Data — a graduate student’s research work included this literature review of papers on indexing time-series data. (via jpatanooga on Delicious)
- igraph — programming library for manipulating graph data, with the usual algorithms (minimum spanning tree, network flow, cliques, etc.) available in R, Python, and C.
Four short links: 10 November 2009
DIY Diagnostic Chips, Genetics on $5k a Genome, Cellphones as Diagnostic Microscopes, AR-Equipped Mechanics Do It Heads-Up
- A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips — microfluidic chips (with tiny liquid-filled channels) can cost $100k and more. Michelle Khine used the Shrinky Dinks childrens’ toy to make her own. “I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for microfluidics,” she says. (via BoingBoing)
- Complete Genomics publishes in Science on low-cost sequencing of 3 human genomes (press release) — The consumables cost for these three genomes sequenced on the proof-of-principle genomic DNA nanoarrays ranged from $8,005 for 87x coverage to $1,726 for 45x coverage for the samples described in this report. Drive that cost down! There’s a gold rush in biological discovery at the moment as we pick the low-hanging fruit of gross correlations between genome and physiome, but the science to reveal the workings of cause and effect is still in its infancy. We’re in the position of the 18th century natural philosophers who were playing with static electricity, oxygen, anaesthetics, and so on but who lacked today’s deeper insights into physical and chemical structure that explain the effects they were able to obtain. More data at this stage means more low-hanging fruit can be plucked, but the real power comes when we understand “how” and not just “what”. (via BoingBoing)
- Far From a Lab? Turn a Cellphone into a Microscope (NY Times) — for some tests, you can use a camphone instead of a microscope. In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
- Augmented reality helps Marine mechanics carry out repair work (MIT TR) — A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic’s wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions. […] The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.
Four short links: 16 October 2009
Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes
- Wiimote Audio Geotagging — match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand)
- San Francisco: Open For Data — Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco’s huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions based on real-time city transport feeds; and EcoFinder, which points you to the nearest recycling site for a given item.
- Google Wave’s Best Use Cases (Lifehacker) — not cases where people are using Wave, but where they want to. Read this as “the Web has not provided all the tools to solve these problems”. Something will solve them, and Wave is trying to. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop — case study from the Cloudera blog. Performs alignment and genotyping on the 100GB of data you get when you sequence a human’s genome in about three hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon’s EC2. (via mndoci on Twitter)
Four short links: 12 October 2009
DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail
- Snowball — a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
- Insider Trades — a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
- Air New Zealand Slams IBM — central point of failure in the outsourced IT. “In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
- Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers’ Data — Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.
Four short links: 1 July 2009
Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality
- The Onyas — New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from “good on ya”, the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
- The Year of Business Metrics: Don’t make your users run away! — wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they’ve lost the user’s full attention and have to get it back. […] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Printcasting — very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
- Pachube Augmented Reality Hack — sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain’t bad. (via bruces on Twitter)
The Last HOPE
The Last HOPE conference in NYC was a great mix of hardware hacking, open source, phone phreaking, lock picking, sleeping on the floor, and good old fashioned paranoia mongering.
Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers
There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF. There has been some incredible discussion on…