- Stop Whining About Facebook’s Redesign (Slate) — How can I be so sure that you’ll learn to like the redesign? Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. The conclusion is that sites don’t say why they’re redesigning, and that causes the resistance.
- C# and CLI under the Community Promise (Miguel de Icaza) — Microsoft have announced they won’t pursue patents relating to C# or the .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI): It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications. Good news for Mono and other .NET-compatible projects.
- app-engine-patch — a patch that lets most of Django work on Google App Engine. (via caseywest on Twitter)
- Scope — talk by Matt Webb, given to Reboot 2009. Every ten slides I sigh happily as new mental connections slide into place, as only Matt can make them. Worth it just for finding this Stewart Brand quote, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” That one sentence could direct a lifetime of action.
"opensource" entries
Four short links: 8 July 2009
Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise
Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond Says There's Plenty of it Around, if You Look
There’s a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that they fear it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That’s certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it’s Jeffrey Hammond’s job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren’t accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He’ll be speaking at OSCON, O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what’s going on in the enterprise at the moment.
Four short links: 24 June 2009
Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins
- The Digital Open — The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
- Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian’s Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment — Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. “Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect,” Willison said. “It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around.” (via migurski on delicious)
- 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr — John Allspaw and Paul Hammond’s talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world “10 deploys/day” and you’ll be met with disbelief.
- Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 — bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)
Nominations For Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2009
The 5th annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted at OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Gerv Markham, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Doc Searls, and Andrew Tridgell. The…
Four short links: 2 Mar 2009
You open the letterbox. Inside are four interesting links covering politics, mobile business, Javascript, and MySQL:
- The Minimal Compact (Adam Greenfield) — a manifesto on “open source constitutions for post-national entities”. Sample: “Of interest are alternatives that are designed from the beginning to: Ensure the greatest freedom for the greatest number, without simultaneously abridging the freedoms of others; Permit individuals with common goals and beliefs to act in their own interest at the global level and with all the privileges afforded nation states, even when those individuals are separated by distance; Provide robust resistance to attempts to concentrate power, and other abuses of same.”
- Wireless carrier financial results (Matt Gross) — Matt extracted the data from GigaOm’s article on wireless carrier finances and presented them in simple tables for comparison.
- jQuery Sparklines — elegant micro-charting library.
- How Friendfeed Uses MySQL to Store Schemaless Data — another entry in the post-normalized database stakes. “We like MySQL for storage, just not RDBMS usage patterns.”
Four short links: 16 Feb 2009
A lot of Python and databases today, with some hardware and Twitter pranking/security worries to taste:
- Free Telephony Project, Open Telephony Hardware — professionally-designed mass-manufactured hardware for telephony projects. E.g., IP04 runs Asterisk and has four phone jacks and removable Flash storage. Software, schematics, and PCB files released under GPL v2 or later.
- Don’t Click Prank Explained — inside the Javascript prank going around Twitter. Transparent overlays would appear to be dangerous.
- Tokyo Cabinet: A Modern Implementation of DBM — ok, so there’s definitely something going on with these alternative databases. Here’s the 1979 BTree library reinvented for the modern age, then extended with PyTyrant, a database server for Tokyo Cabinet that offers HTTP REST, memcached, and a simple binary protocol. Cabinet is staggeringly fast, as this article makes clear. And if that wasn’t enough wow for one day, Tokyo Dystopia is the full-text search engine. The Tyrant tutorial shows you how to get the server up and running. And what would technology be without a Slideshare presentation? (via Stinky)
- Whoosh — a pure Python fulltext search library.
World Plone Day
November 7th is World Plone Day, when the Plone community will run outreach events around the world to "promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, ngos, and in business". Look for your local community in their list of planned events. I see there's even going to be activities in Auckland, Wellington,…