- Gun Part on Thingiverse — we’re used to thinking of the legal problems caused by cheap and decentralized copies of digital works. Now the problems we had with pipe bombs (designs are free on the net, the parts are cheap) are just as applicable to every type of restricted object (in this case, a gun). The difference between regulating speech (design of an object) and regulating possession of objects is blurring and it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. (via Jesse Robbins)
- Mobile Data (Luke Wrobewski) — Mobile data traffic is now outpacing fixed broadband traffic. Last year, it grew 4.2 times as fast. The entire list of interesting numbers repays reading.
- ERPnext — open source (Python/Javascript) ERP system. Yet another example of open source climbing up the business stack.
- Technology Time Out (Slideshare) — my presentation to employees embarking on a hackathon, about future trends, the role of software developers, and the need to work on meaningful stuff.
"software" entries
Moneyball for software engineering
How metrics-driven decisions can build better software teams.
Don't dismiss "Moneyball" just because it began in the sports world. Many of the system's metrics-based techniques can also apply to software teams.
Developer Week in Review: webSOS
HP bails, Oracle fails, and the UK teaches coding (including Wales).
WebOS is going to the great operating system repository in the sky, Oracle finds yet another way to peeve developers, and the UK tries to create a new generation of programmers.
Four short links: 21 September 2011
Unregulated Printing, Mobile Data, Open Source ERP, and Future Technology
FOSS isn't always the answer
Proprietary software has its place.
James Turner says the notion that proprietary software is somehow dirty or a corruption of principles ignores the realities of competition, economics, and context.
Four short links: 3 June 2011
Distributed Drug Money, Science Game, Beautiful Machine Learning, and Stream Event Processing
- Silk Road (Gawker) — Tor-delivered “web” site that is like an eBay for drugs, currency is Bitcoins. Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users. “Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb,” he says. The site is viewable here, and here’s a discussion of delivering hidden web sites with Tor. (via Nelson Minar)
- Dr Waller — a big game using DC Comics characters where players end up crowdsourcing science on GalaxyZoo. A nice variant on the captcha/ESP-style game that Luis von Ahn is known for. (via BoingBoing)
- Machine Learning Demos — hypnotically beautiful. Code for download.
- Esper — stream event processing engine, GPLv2-licensed Java. (via Stream Event Processing with Esper and Edd Dumbill)
Process kills developer passion
Best practices sound good in isolation, but they can suck the life out of developers.
The software industry is now full of "best practices," and many of them make sense when considered in isolation. But when you lump them all on the backs of developers, you end up with dispirited bureaucrats/bean counters.
Software patents, prior art, and revelations of the Peer to Patent review
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. Problems with prior art disproportionately affect
software.
Four short links: 22 March 2010
Trading Software, Learning Programming Languages, Web Security Scanner, Learning as Game
- Marketcetera — open source trading platform.
- Google Code University: Programming Languages — video-based classes on C++, Python, Java, and Go.
- Skipfish — open sourced web application security scanner, from Google.
- Professor Swaps Grades for XP — divided class into guilds, awarded XP for achieving various solo, guild, and pickup quests. (via johnny723 on Twitter)
Four short links: 14 January 2010
Google for Good, Flash in JS, Pop Software, and Scientific Publishing
- Four Possible Explanations for Google’s Big China Move (Ethan Zuckerman) — I’m staying out of the public commentary on this one, but Ethan’s fourth point was wonderfully thought provoking: a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. It’s deliciously provocative to ask what the world’s strongest tech company could do if it wanted to be actively good, rather than merely “not evil”.
- Gordon — An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript. (via Hacker News)
- Pop Software — great blog post about this new category of software. The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that – they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. […] Apps are not Applications – they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Pop software has amazing scale, is hit-driven, is a very hard business for developers, and isn’t going away. (via timo on Delicious)
- Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted? — an analysis of the scientific publishing world: what roles it serves, how some of those roles can be better served by new technology, and which roles are still mired in traditions and performance plans anchored to the old models. As is often the case, people won’t move to the new system when the amount they’re paid is determined by the old system. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around
If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!
An interview with Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative
director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the
casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the
challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being
frustrating.