"mapping" entries

Four short links: 10 September 2015

Four short links: 10 September 2015

Decentralised Software, Slow Chemistry, Spectrum Maps, and RF Interference

  1. Popcorn Time — interview with the creator. All the elements we used already existed and had done so for a long time. But nobody had put them together in an interface that talked to the user in a nice way, said Abad. Very Anonymous approach to software: Who are you going to sue? The first? The second? The third? I did the design. Was it illegal? I didn’t link the various parts together. There is no comprehensive overview of who did what. For we don’t have any business. We don’t have any headquarters or a general manager.
  2. Slow Chemistry (Nature) — “lazy man’s chemistry”: let a mix of solid reactants sit around undisturbed while they spontaneously transform themselves. More properly called slow chemistry, or even just ageing, the approach requires few, if any, hazardous solvents and uses minimal energy. If planned properly, it also consumes all the reagents in the mix, so that there is no waste and no need for chemical-intensive purification.
  3. Mapping the Spectrum in the Mission — SDR scanner to make a map of spectrum activity.
  4. Electronic Noise is Drowning Out the Internet of Things (IEEE Spectrum) — (paraphrasing) increases deployment costs, decreases battery life, creates interference, ruins policies of spectrum allocation, is expensive to trace, and almost impossible stop.
Four short links: 1 May 2015

Four short links: 1 May 2015

Go Examples, Penrose Map Hacks, Robotics Industry, and Archaeological Robotics

  1. Go By Example — a chance to replicate the experience of learning Perl or PHP, whereby you know nothing but copy and adapt other people’s code until it works and you’ve empirically acquired an intuition for what will trigger the compiler’s deathray and eventually someone points you to the docs that were opaque and suddenly a lightbulb goes off in your head and you shout “omigod I finally get it!” and the Real Engineer beside you rolls their eyes and gets back to genericising their containers for consensus or whatever it is that Real Engineers do now.
  2. Penrose Binning — entrancing visual hack for maps.
  3. Chinese Shopping for Robotic Ventures — Amazon has drones, Facebook has VR, Google and China are fighting it out for Robots. Meanwhile, Apple is curled up in a mountain filled with gold, their paws twitching and stroking their watches as they dream of battles to come.
  4. Robot Arm Brings Humanity Back to the Stone Age (IEEE) — Using robots to build a massive database of scrape/wear patterns for different stone-age tools. Currently, Iovita is experiencing some opposition from within his own profession. Some believe that manual experiments are closer to the past reality; others find that use-wear analysis in general does not advance archaeological theory. Iovita thinks this is mainly due to the fact that most archaeologists have a humanities background and are not familiar with the world of engineers. OH SNAP.
Four short links: 14 November 2014

Four short links: 14 November 2014

Completing Maps, ChatOps, Career Design, and Data Privacy

  1. Missing Maps Fill In the Blanks (New Scientist) — OpenStreetMap project to crowdmap slums around the world.
  2. Chatops — devops deployment chatter with Hubot.
  3. Alternatives to Tech Career Ladders — Spotify trying to figure out how to keep engineers challenged as they become more senior.
  4. Mozilla’s Data Privacy Principles — well-articulated and useful: without pre-defined principles, it’s so easy to accidentally collect or poorly protect data.
Four short links: 25 September 2014

Four short links: 25 September 2014

Elevation Data, Soft Robots, Clean Data, and Security Souk

  1. NGA Releases Hi-Res Elevation Data — 30-meter topographic data for the world.
  2. Soft Roboticsa collection of shared resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. From Harvard.
  3. OpenGovIn many domains, it’s not so much about “big data” yet as it is about “clean data.”
  4. Mitnick’s Zero-Day Exploit Shop — marketplace connecting “corporate and government” buyers and sellers of zero-day exploits. Claims to vet buyers. Another hidden economy becoming public.
Four short links: 10 March 2014

Four short links: 10 March 2014

Wolfram Language, Historic Innovation, SF Culture Wars, and Privacy's Death

  1. Wolfram Language — a broad attempt to integrate types, operations, and databases along with deployment, parallelism, and real-time I/O. The demo video is impressive, not just in execution but in ambition. Healthy skepticism still necessary.
  2. Maury, Innovation, and Change (Cory Ondrejka) — amazing historical story of open data, analysis, visualisation, and change. In the mid-1800’s, over the course of 15 years, a disabled Lieutenant changed the US Navy and the world. He did it by finding space to maneuver (as a trouble maker exiled to the Navy Depot), demonstrating value with his early publications, and creating a massive network effect by establishing the Naval Observatory as the clearing house for Navigational data. 150 years before Web 2.0, he built a valuable service around common APIs and aggregated data by distributing it freely to the people who needed it.
  3. Commuter Shuttle and 21-Hayes EB Bus Stop Observations (Vimeo) — timelapse of 6:15AM to 9:15AM at an SF bus stop Worth watching if you’re outside SF and wondering what they’re talking about when the locals rage against SF becoming a bedroom community for Valley workers.
  4. A Day of Speaking Truth to Power (Quinn Norton) — It was a room that had written off privacy as an archaic structure. I tried to push back, not only by pointing out this was the opening days of networked life, and so custom hadn’t caught up yet, but also by recommending danah boyd’s new book It’s Complicated repeatedly. To claim “people trade privacy for free email therefore privacy is dead” is like 1800s sweatshop owners claiming “people trade long hours in unpleasant conditions for miserable pay therefore human rights are dead”. Report of privacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.
Four short links: 16 January 2014

Four short links: 16 January 2014

OSM+State Dept, Web Principles, Simulations, and Code Pilot

  1. MapGive — State Dept launches OSM contributing tool “to help humanitarian efforts”.
  2. Principles for Making Things for The Web — excellent!
  3. Traffic Studies are Simulations (Computerworld) — simulations are an important software genre, oft ignored. (via Slashdot)
  4. CodePilotan Xcode plugin which lets you woosh through your code and save a lot of your time. See also the main site.
Four short links: 15 January 2014

Four short links: 15 January 2014

SCADA Security, Graph Clustering, Facebook Flipbook, and Projections Illustrated

  1. Hackers Gain ‘Full Control’ of Critical SCADA Systems (IT News) — The vulnerabilities were discovered by Russian researchers who over the last year probed popular and high-end ICS and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems used to control everything from home solar panel installations to critical national infrastructure. More on the Botnet of Things.
  2. mclMarkov Cluster Algorithm, a fast and scalable unsupervised cluster algorithm for graphs (also known as networks) based on simulation of (stochastic) flow in graphs.
  3. Facebook to Launch Flipboard-like Reader (Recode) — what I’d actually like to see is Facebook join the open web by producing and consuming RSS/Atom/anything feeds, but that’s a long shot. I fear it’ll either limit you to whatever circle-jerk-of-prosperity paywall-penetrating content-for-advertising-eyeballs trades the Facebook execs have made, or else it’ll be a leech on the scrotum of the open web by consuming RSS without producing it. I’m all out of respect for empire-builders who think you’re a fool if you value the open web. AOL might have died, but its vision of content kings running the network is alive and well in the hands of Facebook and Google. I’ll gladly post about the actual product launch if it is neither partnership eyeball-abuse nor parasitism.
  4. Map Projections Illustrated with a Face (Flowing Data) — really neat, wish I’d had these when I was getting my head around map projections.
Four short links: 24 December 2013

Four short links: 24 December 2013

Arduino Robot, LIDAR for Phones, Climbing Bots, and OS X Emulators

  1. Arduino Robot — for all your hacking needs.
  2. LIDAR for Smartphones (DIYdrones) — The device attaches to the back of a smartphone and combines a built-in laser range finder, 3D compass and Bluetooth chip with the phone’s camera and GPS.
  3. Bridge Inspection Robot Equipping Magnets — 7.8 inches/second, magnets, can scuttle up walls and along ceilings.
  4. OpenEmu — nice-looking emulator framework for OS X. Make your Christmas present a trip back in time.
Four short links: 20 November 2013

Four short links: 20 November 2013

Disruption, Telepresence, Drone Mapping, and TV Malware

  1. Innovation and the Coming Shape of Social Transformation (Techonomy) — great interview with Tim O’Reilly and Max Levchin. in electronics and in our devices, we’re getting more and more a sense of how to fix things, where they break. And yet as a culture, what we have chosen to do is to make those devices more disposable, not last forever. And why do you think it will be different with people? To me one of the real risks is, yes, we get this technology of life extension, and it’s reserved for a very few, very rich people, and everybody else becomes more disposable.
  2. Attending a Conference via a Telepresence Robot (IEEE) — interesting idea, and I look forward to giving it a try. The mark of success for the idea, alas, is two bots facing each other having a conversation.
  3. Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap — 100 acres of 4cm/pixel imagery, in less than an hour.
  4. LG Smart TV Phones Home with Shows and Played Files — welcome to the Internet of Manufacturer Malware.
Four short links: 22 October 2013

Four short links: 22 October 2013

Rich Text Editing, Structural Visualisation, DDoS Protection, Realtime DDoS Map

  1. Sir Trevor — nice rich-text editing. Interesting how Markdown has become the way to store formatted text without storing HTML (and thus exposing the CSRF-inducing HTML-escaping stuckfastrophe).
  2. Slate for Excel — visualising spreadsheet structure. I’d be surprised if it took MSFT or Goog 30 days to acquire them.
  3. Project Shield — Google project to protect against DDoSes.
  4. Digital Attack Map — DDoS attacks going on around the world. (via Jim Stogdill)