"processing" entries

Four short links: 1 Apr 2009

Four short links: 1 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 1, 2009

No April Fools jokes because I’m a Grinch. Instead you get architecture, research, visualization, and pain:

  1. Stacks, Readers, Staff–Building the British Library is an overview of what a momentous accomplishment the British Library was. And a reminder that no matter how gorgeous, loved, and inevitable the final product seems, there’s always a pitched battle to get it made. Architect Sir Colin St. John ‘Sandy’ Wilson used to refer to the project that took up the bulk of his professional career as ‘the thirty years war’. There was no overall budget, and so from year to year, the architects never knew how much was going to be available for construction. That meant a constant process of re-design and re-assesment of priorities, as the eventual shape and size of the building always seemed to be in flux.
  2. Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (Paul Graham) — transcript of a talk Hamming gave at Bell Labs in 1986, talking about how to do great research. Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody’s has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be?
  3. CS171 – Harvard course on visualization, with links to video, slides, etc.
  4. Carpal Tunnel Exercises That Really Work (BoingBoing) — no idea whether they do or not, but I know enough people who are looking for something that does that I’m posting this. If you recommend a book or program that’s worked for your Carpal Tunnel, please post in the comments.
Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 9, 2009

Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:

  1. Art and Code — conference on programming environments for “artists, young people, and the rest of us”. Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I’ve written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
  2. TripIt API — clever, they’re building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you’ve bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
  3. Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O’Brien) — good point from Danny that I’ve been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn’t necessarily comprised of people you’d choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I’m not convinced. I’d say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you’re doing things wrong, but it’s how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
  4. Promoting Open Government (Economist) — state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).