"Node.js" entries

Four short links: 22 February 2011

Four short links: 22 February 2011

Node.JS Cluster, Experience Culture, Robots in Education, and Homebrew Printer

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 22, 2011
  1. Cluster (github) — Node.JS multi-core server manager with plugins support. Hot restarts, and other goodness. (via The Change Log via Javascript Weekly)
  2. Nokia Culture Will Out (Adam Greenfield) — Except that, as realized by Nokia, this is precisely what failed to happen. I experienced, in fact, neither a frisson of elegant futurism nor a blasé presentiment of everyday life at midcentury. I was given an NFC phone, and told to tap it against the item I wanted from the vending machine. This is what happened next: the vending machine teeped, and the phone teeped, and six or seven seconds later a notification popped up on its screen. It was an incoming text message, which had been sent by the vending machine at the moment I tapped my phone against it. I had to respond “Y” to this text to complete the transaction. The experience was clumsy and joyless and not in any conceivable way an improvement over pumping coins into the soda machine just the way I did quarters into Defender at the age of twelve.
  3. NextGen Education and Research Robotics — virtual conference on robotics in education.
  4. Homemade Arduino Printer (Instructables) — made with an Arduino, two dead CD/DVD drives and a marker pen. Clever hack! (via MindKits on Twitter)
Four short links: 25 January 2011

Four short links: 25 January 2011

Scalable Scraping, iPad Tactility, Emotional Failbots, and Asking Good Questions

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 25, 2011
  1. node.io — distributed node.js-based scraper system.
  2. Joystick-It — adhesive joystick for the iPad. Compare the Fling analogue joystick. Tactile accessories for the iPad—hot new product category or futile attempt to make a stripped-down demi-computer into an aftermarked pimped-out hackomatic? (via Aza Raskin on Twitter)
  3. Programmed for Love (Chronicle of Higher Education) — Sherry Turkle sees the danger in social hardware emulating emotion. Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, “transgressive,” and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It’s not that she’s against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She’s concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver. (via BoingBoing)
  4. Asking the Right Questions (Expert Labs) — Andy Baio compiled a list of how Q&A sites like StackOverflow, Quora, Yahoo! Answers, etc. steer people towards asking questions whose answers will improve the site (and away from flamage, chitchat, etc.). The secret sauce to social software is the invisible walls that steer people towards productive behaviour.
Four short links: 21 January 2011

Four short links: 21 January 2011

Sensor Trojan, node.js IDE, Quantified Conference, and P2P Streaming

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 21, 2011
  1. Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers — Soundminer sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed […] the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number. Very clever use of sensors for evil! (via Slashdot)
  2. Cloud9 IDE — open source IDE for node.js. I’m using it as I learn node.js, and it’s sweet as, bro.
  3. The Quantified Self Conference — May 28-29 in Mountain View. (via Pete Warden)
  4. Bram Cohen Demos P2P Streaming — the creator of BitTorrent is winding up to release a streaming protocol that is also P2P. (via Hacker News)
Four short links: 5 October 2010

Four short links: 5 October 2010

Better Mouse Trap, Node.js Tutorial, Eternal Computing Truths, and Tax Receipts Exposed

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 5, 2010
  1. Nooski Mouse Trap — I have one, it is fantastic. This man built a better mouse trap. Now please beat a path to his door.
  2. Introduction to Node.js (video) — Two weeks ago, Yahoo! hosted a BayJax meetup dedicated to NodeJS (since the meetup coincided with Cinco de Mayo, we named it ‘Cinco de Node’). Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS, gave a talk on the project and was very kind to let us record his presentation for YUI Theater. (via anselm on Twitter)
  3. Living With a Computer (Atlantic Monthly) — a 1979 blast from the past about what it was like to get your first computer. So much of this article remains as true today as it was then: upgrade fever, impatience, more dependencies, etc. Yet another hazard is that recommending the right computer is a little like recommending the “right”‘ religion. People tend to like the system they’ve ended up with. The most important point about computers, more so than about religions, is that the difference between a good one and a bad one is tiny compared with the difference between having one and not. (via pomeranian99 on Twitter)
  4. Why You Can’t Have a Receipt for Your Taxes (Clay Johnson) — In the end, this is because our dollars are not packets.
Four short links: 29 July 2010

Four short links: 29 July 2010

Non-Profits, UK Legislation, Mobile Web Variation, and Scaling

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 29, 2010
  1. How to Raise Funds for Non-Profits (Joi Ichi) — One organization sent a message to all of their donors during the Haiti crisis asking them to give to an NGO that they had vetted. They didn’t ask for any money for themselves. This had a hugely positive effect and the donors trust in the group increased. Wallets aren’t zero sum.
  2. legislation.gov.uk — very elegant legislation system for the UK. Check out the annual analysis, for example. (via rchards on Twitter)
  3. The Great WebKit Comparison Table — So far I’ve tested 14 different mobile WebKits, and they are all slightly different. You can find the details below. (via Andrew Savikas)
  4. Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large (al3x) — In a system of no significant scale, basically anything works. The power of today’s hardware is such that, for example, you can build a web application that supports thousands of users using one of the slowest available programming languages, brutally inefficient datastore access and storage patterns, zero caching, no sensible distribution of work, no attention to locality, etc. etc. Basically, you can apply every available anti-pattern and still come out the other end with a workable system, simply because the hardware can move faster than your bad decision-making.
Four short links: 26 May 2010

Four short links: 26 May 2010

Reading Outlook in Open Source, Android Tablets, Websocket Editing, Jabber for Node.js

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 26, 2010
  1. PSTSDK — Apache-licensed code from Microsoft to read Outlook files. Covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise not to assert related patents against users of this library.
  2. Cheap Android Tablet — not multitouch, but only $136. Good for hacking with in the meantime. (via Hacker News)
  3. Real-Time Collaborative Editing with Websockets, node.js, and Redis — uses Chrome’s websockets alternative to Comet and other long-polling web connections.
  4. XMPP Library for Node.js — I’m intrigued to see how quickly Node.js, the Javascript server environment, has taken off.