- The Undue Weight of Truth (Chronicle of Higher Education) — Wikipedia has become fossilized fiction because the mechanism of self-improvement is broken.
- Playfic — Andy Baio’s new site that lets you write text adventures in the browser. Great introduction to programming for language-loving kids and adults.
- Review of Alone Together (Chris McDowall) — I loved this review, its sentiments, and its presentation. Work on stuff that matters.
- Why ESRI As-Is Can’t Be Part of the Open Government Movement — data formats without broad support in open source tools are an unnecessary barrier to entry. You’re effectively letting the vendor charge for your data, which is just stupid.
"mapping" entries
Four short links: 16 February 2012
Wikipedia Fail, DIY Text Adventures, Antisocial Software, and Formats Matter
Visualization of the Week: AntiMap
A mobile mapping app lets users capture and visualize their movements.
The DIY mapping tool AntiMap lets users capture their movements via their mobile devices, then visualize and analyze their movements.
Global Adaptation Index enables better data-driven decisions
The Global Adaptation Index combines development indicators from 161 countries.
Speed, accessibility and open data have come together in the Global Adaptation Index, a new data browser that rates a given country's vulnerability to environmental shifts.
Four short links: 1 September 2011
Android Charting, Illusion of Insight, Mapping API, and Science Storytelling
- A Chart Engine — Android charting engine.
- The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight — we are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.
- Urban Mapping API — add rich geographic data to web and non-web applications.
- Tell Us A Story, Victoria — a university science story-telling contest.
Four short links: 31 August 2011
Maps on Android, Security Laws, Trough of Potential, and Enterprise Gamification
- OSMdroid — The OpenStreetMapView is a (almost) full/free replacement for Android’s MapView class. Also see this tutorial. (via Simon Gianoutsos)
- 10 Immutable Laws of Security (Microsoft) — an oldie but a goodie. Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
- What’s in The Trough? (BERG London) — as a predictor or similar tool for action, the Gartner Hype Cycle is comically useless. As a tool for brainstorming, as BERG point out, it’s fantastic.
- JP Rangaswami’s Enterprise Gamification (Livestream) — video of JP’s “Enterprise Gamification” talk. As Kevin Slavin points out, the introduction is cheesily bad but the talk is pantswettingly good.
Four short links: 1 July 2011
Vector Graphics, Processing Maps, Augemented Senses, and Graph Analysis
- paper.js — The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting. MIT-licensed Javascript library that gives great demo.
- TileMill for Processing — gorgeous custom maps in Processing. (via FlowingData)
- Research Assistant Wanted — working with one of the authors of Mind Hacks on augmenting our existing senses with a form of “remote touch” generated by using artificial distance sensors, such as ultrasound, to stimulate tactile stimulators (vibrating pads) placed against the surface of the head.. (via Vaughn Bell)
- GoldenORB — a cloud-based open source project for massive-scale graph analysis, built upon best-of-breed software from the Apache Hadoop project modeled after Google’s Pregel architecture. (via BigData)
Four short links: 8 April 2011
Varnish Guide, Fields Revealed, Dev Leaderboard, and Map Documentary
- A Practical Guide to Varnish — Varnish is the http accelerator used by the discerning devops.
- Ferrofluid Sculptures (New Scientist) — hypnotic video of an iron-based fluid that is moulded by magnetic fields, which I include for no good reason than it is pretty pretty science. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Twisted Highscores List — clever leaderboard for tickets, reviews, commits, and fixes. A fun retro presentation of the information, rather than a determined effort to jolly up the grim task of software development by spraying on a thin coat of gamejuice. (via Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
- Beauty of Maps (YouTube) — BBC’s “Beauty of Maps” tv show is available in full on YouTube. Aspects of visualization and design here, as well as practical cartography. (via Flowing Data)
Four short links: 5 April 2011
Big Maps, ssh VPN, Line Maps, and HTML5 Multiplayer Pacman
- The Big Map Blog — awesome old maps, for the afficionado. (via Sacha Judd)
- sshuttle — poor man’s VPN built over ssh. (via Hacker News)
- Remembering LineDrive — I, too, am bummed that LineDrive never became standard. And Maneesh, one of its cocreators. Check out his publications list!
- Websockets Pacman — multiplayer Pacman, where players take the role of ghosts. All implemented with WebSockets in HTML5. (via Pete Warden)
Four short links: 7 March 2011
Heritage Games, Unpredictable Publishing, Timezones, and Map Tiles
- DigitalKoot — Playing games in Digitalkoot fixes mistakes in our index of old Finnish newspapers. This greatly increases the accuracy of text-based searches of the newspaper archives. (via Springwise and Imran Ali on Twitter)
- Some Things That Need To Be Said (Amanda Hocking) — A.H. is selling a lot of copies of her ebooks, and she cautions against thinking hers is an easily reproduced model. First, I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. Middlemen give you time in exchange for money. Second, By all accounts, he has done the same things I did, even writing in the same genre and pricing the books low. And he’s even a better writer than I am. So why am I selling more books than he is? I don’t know. I’m reminded of Duncan Watts’s work MusicLab which showed that “hits” aren’t predictable. It’s entirely possible to duplicate Amanda’s efforts and not replicate her success.
- A Literary Appreciation of the Olson Timezone Database — timezones are fickle political creations, and this is a wonderful tribute to the one database which ruled them all for 25 years.
- TileMill — a tool for cartographers to quickly and easily design maps for the web using custom data. Open source, built on Mapnik.
Four short links: 3 March 2011
Chinese Maps, Ops Standards, Android Malware, and Free Fonts
- Guangzhou City Map — Chinese city maps: they use orthographic projection (think SimCity) and not satellite images. A nice compromise for usability, information content, and invisible censorship. (via Hacker News)
- Broken Windows, Broken Code, Broken Systems — So, given that most of us live in the real world where some things are just left undone, where do we draw the line? What do we consider a bit of acceptable street litter, and what do we consider a broken window? When is it ok to just reboot the system, and when do you really need to figure out exactly what went wrong?
- Android Malware — black hat copied apps, added trojans, uploaded to Android Marketplace. Google were slow to respond to original developer’s claims of copying, quick to react to security guy’s report of malware. AppStores are not magic moneypumps in software form, no more than tagging, communities, or portals were. User contributions need editorial oversight.
- The League of Movable Type — a collection of open source fonts, ready for embedding in your web pages.