- Optimizing MongoDB — shorter field names, barely hundreds of ops/s when not in RAM, updates hold a lock while they fetch the original from disk … it’s a pretty grim story. (via Artur Bergman)
- Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? — focus is absolutely necessary if we are to gain knowledge. We will be ignoramuses indeed, if we merely flow along with the digital current and do not take the time to read extended, difficult texts. (via Sacha Judd)
- Trend Data for Teens (Pew Internet and American Life Project) — one in six American teens have used the Internet to look for information online about a health topic that’s hard to talk about, like drug use, sexual health, or depression.
- The Guts of Android (Linux Weekly News) — technical but high-level explanation of the components of an Android system and how they compare to those of a typical Linux system.
ENTRIES TAGGED "Internet"
Four short links: 9 June 2011
MongoDB Subpessimalization, Anti-Intellectualism, Teen Internet Use, Android Internals
Four short links: 6 June 2011
Paper App, Retro Net Simulation, Games Creator, Beginning Large-Scale Machine Learning
- Turning Receipts into Paper Apps (BERG London) — I love the idea of the modern web app sensibility bleeding back into the world, the same way classic offline design has informed online.
- Telehack — an amazing interactive reconstruction of the early net, part nostalgia part game part simulation. Check out the README for more details. (via Andy Baio)
- Stencyl — free Flash games creation tool. Brilliant because they’re creating and owning a corresponding market for in-game assets (icons, sounds, etc.). (via Andy Baio)
- Introductory Machine Learning Resources (Quora) — collection of pointers for beginners. (via Joshua Schachter)
Four short links: 30 May 2011
Tables to Charts, Crowdsourcing Incentives, Domain Boondoggles, and Conquering Complexity
- Chartify — jQuery plugin to create Google charts from HTML tables. (via Rasmus Sellberg)
- Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers (Crowdflower) — In a tough turn for the sociologists and psychologists, none of the purely social/psychological treatments had any significant effects at all.
- The gTLD Boondoggle — ICANN promised back in 1998 that they would bring the world lots of new domains. So far they haven’t, the world has not come to an end, and the Internet has not collapsed. The absence of demand for new TLDs from actual users (as opposed to domain promoters and the occasional astroturf) is deafening. What we do see is a lot of concern that there will be more mistakes like .XXX, and pressure from governments both via the GAC and directly to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s a bugger when you go hunting for a new product’s domain name and realize “all the good ones are taken”, but that’s an argument against domain squatters/speculators not an argument for opening up new top-level-domain vistas.
- Atul Gawande’s Medical School Commencement Address (New Yorker) — every lesson in here about healthcare is just as applicable to software development. Read it. (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 26 May 2011
Fibre Horse, Forced Gold Farming, Google Correlate, Internet GDP
- Draft Horses Bring Fibre to Remote Locations — I love the conjunction of old and new, as draft horses prove the best way to lay fibre in remote Vermont. (via David Isenberg)
- Chinese Political Prisoners Gold-Farming (Guardian) — “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”
- Correlate — Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends. You upload your time series or geographic data, they find search terms that correlate. Very cool!
- McKinsey Internet Matters Report (PDF, free registration required) — Internet responsible for 3.4% of GDP in the countries they studied, 21% of GDP growth in last 5 years in mature countries, 2.6 jobs created for every one lost, and 75% of the Internet’s impact arises from traditional industries. Lots more like this in here. The United States captures more than 30 percent of global internet revenues and more than 40 percent of net income.
Four short links: 19 May 2011
Internet Access Rights, Statistical Peace, Vintage Jobs, and Errata Etymology
- Right to Access the Internet — a survey of different countries’ rights to access to access the Internet.
- Peace Through Statistics — three ex-Yugoslavian statisticians nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. In war-torn and impoverished countries, statistics provides a welcome arena in which science runs independent of ethnicity and religion. With so few resources, many countries are graduating few, if any, PhDs in statistical sciences. These statisticians collaboratively began a campaign to collect together the basics underlying statistics and statistics education, with the hope of increasing access to statistical ideas, knowledge and training around the world.
- Vintage Steve Jobs (YouTube) — he’s launching the “Think Different” campaign, but it’s a great reminder of what a powerful speaker he is and a look at how he thinks about marketing.
- Anatomy of a Fake Quotation (The Atlantic) — deconstructing how the words of a 24 year old English teacher in Japan sped around the world, attributed to Martin Luther King.
Four short links: 2 May 2011
Internet Cafe Culture, Image Processing, Library Mining, and MediaWiki Parsing
- Chinese Internet Cafes (Bryce Roberts) — a good quick read. My note: people valued the same things in Internet cafes that they value in public libraries, and the uses are very similar. They pose a similar threat to the already-successful, which is why public libraries are threatened in many Western countries.
- SIFT — the Scale Invariant Feature Transform library, built on OpenCV, is a method to detect distinctive, invariant image feature points, which easily can be matched between images to perform tasks such as object detection and recognition, or to compute geometrical transformations between images. The licensing seems dodgy–MIT code but lots of “this isn’t a license to use the patent!” warnings in the LICENSE file. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Secret Life of Libraries (Guardian) — I like the idea of the most-stolen-books revealing something about a region; it’s an aspect of data revealing truth. For a while, Terry Pratchett was the most-shoplifted author in England but newspapers rarely carried articles about him or mentioned his books (because they were genre fiction not “real” literature). (via Brian Flaherty)
- Sweble — MediaWiki parser library. Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined. There was no grammar, no defined processing rules, and no defined output like a DOM tree based on a well defined document object model. This is to say, the content of Wikipedia is stored in a format that is not an open standard. The format is defined by 5000 lines of php code (the parse function of MediaWiki). That code may be open source, but it is incomprehensible to most. That’s why there are 30+ failed attempts at writing alternative parsers. (via Dirk Riehle)
Let's imagine Steve Jobs is President of the United States
How can our experiences with the Internet and consumer tech apply to government transformation?
Sooner or later, writes Francis J. Pedraza, the same forces that have touched all of our lives through consumer markets and the Internet will give us Government 2.0.
For election info, the Internet reaches a new high-water mark
Pew finds more than 50% of US adults used the Internet for political purposes during the 2010 elections.
New research from the Pew Internet and Life Project on the 2010 midterm elections shows that a majority of U.S. citizens are now turning to the web for news and information about politics.
Developer Week in Review
iPhone gets cracked, Twitter gets picky, and Internet connectivity gets disrupted.
In the latest Developer Week in Review: the iPhone fell to attackers, Twitter shunned their developers, and the Internet proved not to be as robust as one might hope.
Four short links: 24 February 2011
Network Snooping, Traffic Growth, Data Munging, and Open Interop
- Charles — a debugging proxy that lets a developer view all HTTP and SSL traffic between their machine and the Internet. (via Andy Baio’s excellent “How I Indexed The Daily)
- The Rise and Rise of Mobile Broadband — the Blackberry is now the standard measure of traffic, apparently. The outcome is simple – Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic grew 159% last year and will grow another 131% this year. They contend traffic will increase 26 times versus 2010 levels, a 92% cumulative annual growth rate. I hope the network engineers are ready.
- Pattern — BSD-licensed Python tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks). (via Hacker News)
- ODF Plugfest — when you have open standards, you need interop events like this to ensure that theoretically compatible programs are actually compatible. (via Jono Bacon on Twitter)
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