- The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things — a Bruce Sterling Kindle single, a powerfully-written challenge to the presumed-benevolent technology-pervaded universe that we label “the Internet of Things”. The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It’s an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.
- mbeddr — a set of integrated and extensible languages for embedded software engineering, plus an IDE. It supports implementation, testing, verification and process aspects. It integrates with command-line build tools and integration servers, as well as file-based version control systems. Nice to see something beyond webdev getting tools love.
- Replace wget With axel — download accelerator, aka a parallel wget for situations where the fetched file has multiple servers.
- Photos From When Cables Crowded The Skies (io9) — the communication age’s equivalent of the industrial revolution’s smog.
"history" entries
Four short links: 16 September 2014
IoT Struggle, Embedded Tools, Download Accelerator, and Comms Smog
Four short links: 1 September 2014
Sibyl, Bitrot, Estimation, and ssh
- Sibyl: Google’s System for Large Scale Machine Learning (YouTube) — keynote at DSN2014 acting as an intro to Sibyl. (via KD Nuggets)
- Bitrot from 1997 — That’s 205 failures, an actual link rot figure of 91%, not 57%. That leaves only 21 URLs as 200 OK and containing effectively the same content.
- What We Do And Don’t Know About Software Effort Estimation — nice rundown of research in the field.
- fabric — simple yet powerful ssh library for Python.
Four short links: 21 August 2014
Open Data Glue, Smithsonian Crowdsourcing, MIT Family Creativity, and Hardware Owie
- Dat — an open source project that provides a streaming interface between every file format and data storage backend. See the Wired piece on it.
- Smithsonian Crowdsourcing Transcription (Smithsonian) — 49 volunteers transcribed 200 pages of correspondence between the Monuments Men in a week. Soon it’ll be mathematics test questions: “if 49 people transcribe 200 pages in 7 days, how many weeks will it take …”
- MIT Guide to Family CompSci Sessions — This guide is for educators, community center staff, and volunteers interested in engaging their young people and their families to become designers and inventors in their community.
- What to Do When You Screw up 2,000 Orders (SparkFun) — even hardware companies need to do retrospectives.
Four short links: 20 August 2014
Plant Properties, MQ Comparisons, 1915 Vis, and Mobile Web Weaknesses
- Machine Learning for Plant Properties — startup building database of plant genomics, properties, research, etc. for mining. The more familiar you are with your data and its meaning, the better your machine learning will be at suggesting fruitful lines of query … and the more valuable your startup will be.
- Dissecting Message Queues — throughput, latency, and qualitative comparison of different message queues. MQs are to modern distributed architectures what function calls were to historic unibox architectures.
- 1915 Data Visualization Rules — a reminder that data visualization is not new, but research into effectiveness of alternative presentation styles is.
- The Broken Promise of the Mobile Web — it’s not just about the UI – it’s also about integration with the mobile device.
Four short links: 28 July 2014
Secure Server, Angular Style, Recursion History (see Recursion History), Aerospike Open Source
- streisand — sets up a new server running L2TP/IPsec, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge. It also generates custom configuration instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, and fellow activists.
- Angular.js Style Guide — my opinionated styleguide for syntax, building and structuring Angular applications.
- How Recursion Got into Programming — Committee member F.L. Bauer registered his protest by characterizing the addition of recursion to the language as an “Amsterdam plot”.
- aerospike — open source database server and client, with bold claims of performance.
Visualization of the Week: Avengers Assemble
Jer Thorp visualizes the history of "The Avengers."
In this week's visualization, The New York Times' data artist Jer Thorp visualizes the appearances of "The Avengers" in the comic book series.
Visualization of the Week: Anachronistic language in “Downton Abbey”
A look at the historical accuracy of "Downton Abbey's" language.
Ben Schmidt ran the script of the "Downton Abbey" season two finale through Google Ngrams to see how the show's language matches up with history.
Lessons of the Victorian data revolution
Transaction costs, crowdsourcing, and the persuasiveness of data were all in play long ago.
Examples from the Victorian era show that if we're going to improve the world with data, it's absolutely essential we stay grounded in reality.
Linked data creates a new lens for examining the U.S. Civil War
Data projects are marking the Civil War's 150th anniversary.
The 150th anniversary (the "sesquicentennial") of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War is occurring this month. Two organizers behind the Civil War Data 150 project discuss how linked data is marking the occasion and improving our knowledge.
Strata Week: Political lessons from data land
Yelp's MRJob goes open source, CODATA catalogues historical data, one more telecom lawsuit, and Expedia cleans up their UI
In the latest Strata Week: Yelp makes MRJob open source; CODATA wants to inventory "threatened data"; a visualization untangles a telecom lawsuit; and analytics and a simple fix nets $12 million for Expedia.