- Bioweathermap — crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter)
- We Are All African Now — a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray)
- Standing Out In The Crowd — OSCON keynote by Kirrily Robert on women in open source. Excellent.
- Energy Harvesting Powers Printed LED — an interesting combination of two emerging technologies. Like an RFID, the circuit has a current induced by the presence of a changing RF field. The EL display and the RFID circuit are printed in organic compounds, whereas the power control is built with traditional circuit fabrication techniques. (via Freaklabs)
"OSCON" entries
VistA scenarios, and other controversies at the Open Source health care track
The history and accomplishments attributed to VistA, the Veterans
Administration's core administrative software, mark it as one of the
most impressive software projects in history. Still, lots of smart
people in the health care field deprecate VistA and cast doubt that it
could ever be widely adopted.
What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention
The health care technology track at the Open Source convention
touches on core areas for improvement: patient-centered care, the use of
mobile devices, administrative efficiencies, and the collection,
processing, and display of statistics to improve health care
Announcing The Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON
As new problems in computing arise, new languages are being created to help tackle those problems. We want to bring together programming language creators, researchers, and enthusiasts to share goals, experiences, and challenges. We are holding the first-ever Emerging Languages Camp Wednesday, July 21st and Thursday, July 22nd at OSCON. This is a free event. Both days will be a series of talks from the language creators.
Nominations Open For O’Reilly Open Source Awards 2010
Recognizing community contribution and leadership
The O’Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted this July at OSCON 2010 in Portland, OR. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2009 include Brian Aker, Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Bruce Momjian, Chris Messina, David Recordon, and Andrew Tridgell.
Nominations Open For O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2010
Recognizing community contribution and leadership
The O’Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted this July at OSCON 2010 in Portland, OR. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2009 include Brian Aker, Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Bruce Momjian, Chris Messina, David Recordon, and Andrew Tridgell.
Why health care is coming to the Open Source convention
This year for the first time, O’Reilly’s Open Source convention
contains a track on health care IT. The call for
participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad
areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices,
and patient-centered care. IT specialists and programmers across the country who have lost their employment or are just seeking new challenges will naturally be wondering what health care IT is and how they can get into it. A health care track at OSCon is, to start with, a natural way to serve our core audience.
Four short links: 29 July 2009
Four short links: 27 July 2009
- Ignite OSCON — 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They’re all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
- gheat — a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
- CaDNAno — open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church’s projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- CommentPress — an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I’m taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing “edit this page”. (via gov2.net.au’s issues paper)
OSCON: Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth
Two of my favorite presenters, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, did an OSCON session on “Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth.” Brian and Ben talked about how programmers’ insecurities cause all manner of troubles in programming projects, and then presented a number of tips for how to avoid these problems. They also asserted that there are very few genius “lone ranger”programmers in the real world — most highly successful and productive programmers work smart and collaborate well.
OSCON: The saga of MySQL
At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are…