- Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) — twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?
- CC Searching within Google Image Search — what it seems. (via waxy)
- YQL INSERT INTO — insert into {table} (status,username,password) values ("new tweet from YQL", "twitterusernamehere","twitterpasswordhere"). That’s too cool. (via Simon Willison)
- CleanWell — very low-cost recyclable enviro-friendly antimicrobials to battle third-world disease. Met the founder at Sci Foo. He said women wash hands more than men, because women enter bathrooms in pairs. Single easiest way to increase handwashing compliance is to put sinks and basins outside the room, in public view.
"software" entries
Four short links: 14 July 2009
Twenty Questions, CC Pix, INSERT INTO WEB, and Wash Your Hands!
Four short links: 7 May 2009
iPhone Rocketry, Copywrongs, Econopocalypse, and Empire
- How To Use An iPhone To Fly RC Airplanes and Helicopters — So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and was already buily by someone else). The pilot program interprets what the iphone is doing, and outputs data to one of the ethernet ports of which there are conveniently 4. Rudder, Ailerons, Throttle, Elevator.
- Economist Debates: Copyrights and Wrongs — The Economist live debate about copyright, with the moot “This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good.” Public comments, voting, and new informed opinions each day.
- How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street (NYMag) — story of the software developer behind a lot of the mortgage repackaging software. Many good lines, e.g., But even then, I was wondering why I was making more than anyone in my family, maybe as much as all my siblings combined. Hey, I had higher SAT scores. I could do all the arithmetic in my head. I was very good at programming a computer. And that computer, with my software, touched billions of dollars of the firm’s money. Every week. That justified it. When you’re close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don’t they?
- Yow — words of wisdom from John Battelle on Google as the new Microsoft: If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it’s that no company – or two companies – can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies’ motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.
You ain't gonna need what?
One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses–but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and…
Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books
Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the…
Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App
Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app): How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I…
iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes
We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year…
Challenges for the New Genomics
New guest blogger Matt Wood heads up the Production Software team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he builds tools and processes to manage tens of terabytes of data per day in support of genomic research. Matt will be exploring the intersection of data, computer technology, and science on Radar. The original Human Genome Project was completed in 2003,…
Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers
Ebooks as iPhone applications started as a novelty/workaround, but the technique is now being used by Houghton Mifflin for a full-fledged digital rollout. From Wired's Epicenter blog: The publisher recently partnered with a design and development company called ScrollMotion to launch a series of bestselling in-copyright e-books for the iPhone where each title is its own app and a…
Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
Hugh McGuire is loving Stanza, the free ereader app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. From the Book Oven Blog: 40,000 ebook dowloads-a-day. I've got 35 of them sitting on my iPod. If you are a publisher, think long and hard about that number. The reason I have 35 books downloaded onto my Stanza is: a) it is easy, b) it…
Mobile First, PC Second
Over on Radar, Tim O'Reilly says the mobile tipping point is upon us: I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then…