"Stack Exchange" entries

Four short links: 16 January 2012

Four short links: 16 January 2012

Computational Science, Bad Patents, Fasterscript, and Secure Social Software

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 16, 2012
  1. Computational Science Stack Exchange — q+a site for data-intensive computation-heavy science. (via Gael Varoquaux)
  2. An Open Letter to our Customers, Past and Future (Luma Labs) — a reminder that poor patent examination hurts innovative startups working in physical goods, just as much as with digital goods.
  3. Javascript Performance (Steve Souders) — JavaScript is typically the #1 place to look for making a website faster. Numbers and examples to show this, plus an interesting look at execution order of asynchronously loaded pages: Preserving execution order of async scripts makes the page slower. If the first async script takes a long time to download, all the other async scripts are blocked from executing, even if they download sooner.
  4. Retroshare (Sourceforge) — GPL and LGPLed cross-platform, private and secure decentralised communication platform. It lets you to securely chat and share files with your friends and family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels. I haven’t tried it, but it’s an interesting premise.
Four short links: 12 May 2011

Four short links: 12 May 2011

One-Click Zeroed Down Under, Piracy, One Site To Rule Them All, and English Language

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 12, 2011

  1. Telsta Scores Patent Win over Amazon (ZDNet) — The delegate of the Commissioner of Patents, Ed Knock, found this week that Amazon’s 1-click buy facility “lacks novelty [and] an inventive step”, making Amazon’s claim unpatentable.
  2. The Final Answer for What To Do To Prevent Piracy (Jeff Vogel) — His advice is to do the minimum to encourage people to pay, as Anything beyond that will inconvenience your paying customers and do little to nothing to prevent piracy.
  3. alpha.gov.uk — an experimental prototype of a single interface to all government services. Governments have been trying these for years. This one’s different–it’s not built by the highest bidder, it’s the result of a lean team headed by the stellar Tom Loosemore (ex-BBC). It’s prototyping the idea of using lightweight reusable syndication-friendly components (decision trees, calculators, guides, etc.) to build such a site. My suspicion, though, is that government websites are a people problem not a technology problem.
  4. A StackExchange for the English Language — what’s the collective noun for pedants?