- Influx DB — open-source, distributed, time series, events, and metrics database with no external dependencies.
- Omega (PDF) — flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters. From Google Research.
- GraspJS — Search and replace your JavaScript code based on its structure rather than its text.
- Amazon Mines Its Data Trove To Bet on TV’s Next Hit (WSJ) — Amazon produced about 20 pages of data detailing, among other things, how much a pilot was viewed, how many users gave it a 5-star rating and how many shared it with friends.
"scale" entries
Four short links: 5 November 2013
Time Series Database, Cluster Schedulers, Structural Search-and-Replace, and TV Data
Four short links: 27 September 2013
Amen Break, MySQL Scale, Spooky Source, and Graph Analytics Engine
- The Amen Break (YouTube) — fascinating 20m history of the amen break, a handful of bars of drum solo from a forgotten 1969 song which became the origin of a huge amount of popular music from rap to jungle and commercials, and the contested materials at the heart of sample-based music. Remix it and weep. (via Beta Knowledge)
- The MySQL Ecosystem at Scale (PDF) — nice summary of how MySQL is used on massive users, and where the sweet spots have been found.
- Lab41 (Github) — open sourced code from a spook hacklab in Silicon Valley.
- Fanulus — open sourced Hadoop-based graph analytics engine for analyzing graphs represented across a multi-machine compute cluster. A breadth-first version of the graph traversal language Gremlin operates on graphs stored in the distributed graph database Titan, in any Rexster-fronted graph database, or in HDFS via various text and binary formats.
Four short links: 15 August 2013
Audio Visualization, 3D Printed Toys, Data Center Computing, and Downloding Not Yet Beaten
- github realtime activity — audio triggered by github activity, built with choir.io.
- Makies Hit Shelves at Selfridges — 3d printing business gaining mainstream distribution. Win!
- The Datacenter as Computer — we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today’s WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today’s WSCs on a single board. (via Mike Loukides)
- Illegal Downloads Not Erased By Simultaneous Release — Data gathered by TorrentFreak throughout the day reveals that most early downloaders, a massive 16.1%, come from Australia. Down Under the show aired on the pay TV network Foxtel, but it appears that many Aussies prefer to download a copy instead. The same is true for the United States and Canada, with 16% and 9.6% of the total downloads respectively, despite the legal offerings. Unclear whether this represents greater or less downloading than would have happened without simultaneous release.
Four short links: 9 August 2013
DEFCON Doco, Global-Scale Networks, Media Goblin, and TCP/IP Legos
- DEFCON Documentary — free download, I’m looking forward to watching it on the flight back to NZ.
- Global-Scale Systems — botnets as example of the scale of networks and systems we’ll have to build but don’t have experience in.
- MediaGoblin — GNU project to build a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.
- Teaching TCP/IP Headers with Legos — genius. (via BoingBoing)
Strata Week: The data behind Yahoo's front page
A new look at Yahoo's traffic, the challenge of scaling Tumblr, and a host of visualization guidelines.
In this week's data news: Yahoo visualizes its front page traffic and demographics, why Tumblr is tougher to scale than Twitter, and a look at what you need to consider as you build visualizations.
Four short links: 9 March 2011
R IDE, Audience Participation, Machine Learning, Surviving Success
- R Studio — AGPLv3-licensed IDE for R. It brings your R console, source code, plots, help, history, and workspace browser into one cohesive package. We’ve added some neat productivity features like a searchable endless command history, function/symbol completion, data import dialog with preview, one-click Sweave compile, and more. Source on github. Built as a web-app on Google AppEngine, from Joe Cheng who did Windows Live Writer at Microsoft. (via DeWitt Clinton)
- Adventures in Participatory Audience — Nina Simon helped thirteen students produce three projects to encourage participation in museum audiences: Xavier, Stringing Connections, and Dirty Laundry. My favourite was Dirty Laundry, where people shared secrets connected to works of art. Nina’s description of what she learned has some nuggets: friendly faces welcoming people in gets better response than a card with instructions, and I am still flummoxed as to what would make someone admit to an affair or bad parenting in a sterile art gallery, or the devastating one that read, “I avoid the important, difficult conversations with those I love the most.” Audience participation in the real world has lessons on what works for those who would build social software.
- Why Generic Machine Learning Fails — Returns for increasing data size come from two sources: (1) the importance of tails and (2) the cost of model innovation. When tails are important, or when model innovation is difficult relative to cost of data capture, then more data is the answer. […] Machine learning is not undifferentiated heavy lifting, it’s not commoditizable like EC2, and closer to design than coding. The Netflix prize is a good example: the last 10% reduction in RMSE wasn’t due to more powerful generic algorithms, but rather due to some very clever thinking about the structure of the problem; observations like “people who rate a whole slew of movies at one time tend to be rating movies they saw a long time ago” from BellKor.
- Anatomy of a Crushing — Maciej Ceglowski describes how pinboard.in survived the flood of Delicious émigrées. It took several rounds of rewrites to get the simple tag cloud script right, and this made me very skittish about touching any other parts of the code over the next few days, even when the fixes were easy and obvious. The part of my brain that knew what to do no longer seemed to be connected directly to my hands.
Four short links: 18 February 2011
Data Sets, Data-driven Policy, Task Queues, and 8-Bit Browser
- DSPL: DataSet Publishing Language (Google Code) — a representation language for the data and metadata of datasets. Datasets described in this format can be processed by Google and visualized in the Google Public Data Explorer. XML metadata on CSV, geo-enabled, with linkable data. (via Michal Migurski on Delicious)
- Why is Evidence So Hard for Politicians — Ben Goldacre nails how politicians go about “evidence-based policy making”: So the Minister has cherry picked only the good findings, from only one report, while ignoring the peer-reviewed literature. Most crucially, he cherry-picks findings he likes whilst explicitly claiming that he is fairly citing the totality of the evidence from a thorough analysis. I can produce good evidence that I have a magical two-headed coin, if I simply disregard all the throws where it comes out tails.
- Celery: Distributed Task Queue — asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well. MIT-style licensed, written in Python, RabbitMQ is the recommended message broker. (via Joshua Schachter on Delicious)
- pixelfari — Safari hacked to look like it’s running on an 8-bit computer. This sense of playfulness with the medium is something I love about the best coders. They think “ha, wouldn’t it be funny if …” and then can make it happen.
Four short links: 22 September 2010
Amazon as Vendor, Distributed Tasks, Evolutionary Photofitting, and Basic Physics
- The Rise of Amazon Web Services — Stephen O’Grady points out that Amazon has become an enterprise sales company but we don’t treat it as such because we think of it as a retail company that’s dabbling in technology. I think of Amazon as an automation company: they automate and optimize everything, and a data center is just a warehouse for MIPS. (via Matt Asay)
- Celery Project — a distributed task queue. (via joshua on Delicious)
- Memory Upgrade (The Economist) — a photofit system that uses evolutionary algorithms to generate the suspects’ faces, and does clever things like animated distortions to call out features the witness might recall. Technology going beyond automated sketch artists.
- The Particle Adventure: The Fundamental of Matter and Force — basic physics in easy-to-understand language with illustrations, all in bite-size pieces (and 1998-era web design). I’m pondering what one of these would be like for computers, and whether “how do these actually work?” has the same romance as “how does the world really work?”.
Four short links: 9 September 2010
Thumb Drives and the Cloud, FCC APIs, Mining on GFS, Check Your Prose with Scribe
- CloudUSB — a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter)
- FCC APIs — for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband tests, census block search, and more. (via rjweeks70 on Twitter)
- Sibyl: A system for large scale machine learning (PDF) — paper from Google researchers on how to build machine learning on top of a system designed for batch processing. (via Greg Linden)
- The Surprisingness of What We Say About Ourselves (BERG London) — I made a chart of word-by-word surprisingness: given the statement so far, could Scribe predict what would come next?
Four short links: 29 July 2010
Non-Profits, UK Legislation, Mobile Web Variation, and Scaling
- 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.
- legislation.gov.uk — very elegant legislation system for the UK. Check out the annual analysis, for example. (via rchards on Twitter)
- 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)
- 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.