- pathod — A pathological HTTP daemon for testing and torturing client software. (via Hacker News)
- A Walk Through Twitter’s Walled Garden (The Realtime Report) — nice breakdown of Twitter’s business model choice and consequences. Twitter wants you to be able to see the pictures and read the articles shared in your its Tweets, without leaving the garden. Costolo told the Los Angeles Times that “Twitter is heading in a direction where its 140-character messages are not so much the main attraction but rather the caption to other forms of content.” (You know all the traffic that Twitter’s been driving to web sites? Don’t count on it being there next year.) (via Jim Stogdill)
- My Computing Environment (Jesse Vincent) — already have a set of those gloves on order.
- How Speedo Created a Record-Breaking Swimsuit (Scientific American) — A new 3-D printer at Aqualab fabricated prototypes of the cap and goggles for testing within hours, rather than sending drawings to a manufacturer and waiting weeks or months. “In the past we couldn’t do many changes to the original design,” Santry says. “With this process, we completely revolutionized the goggle from scratch.” (via Eric Ries)
"Twitter" entries
Four short links: 30 July 2012
Torturing HTTP, Twitter Business, Mobile Setup, and 3D Printing Olympic Gold
Four short links: 27 July 2012
Weibo cf Twitter, Rendering Fonts, Clothing Manufacturing, and Profiling Python
- Social Media in China (Fast Company) — fascinating interview with Tricia Wang. We often don’t think we have a lot to learn from tech companies outside of the U.S., but Twitter should look to Weibo for inspiration for what can be done. It’s like a mashup of Tumblr, Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s very picture-based, whereas Twitter is still very text-based. In Weibo, the pictures are right under each post, so you don’t have to make an extra click to view them. And people are using this in subversive ways. Whether you’re using algorithms to search text or actual people–and China has the largest cyber police force in the world—it’s much easier to censor text than images. So people are very subversive in hiding messages in pictures. These pictures are sometimes very different than what people are texting, or will often say a lot more than the actual text itself. (via Tricia Wang)
- A Treatise on Font Rasterisation With an Emphasis on Free Software (Freddie Witherden) — far more than you ever thought you wanted to know about how fonts are rendered. (via Thomas Fuchs)
- Softwear Automation — robots to make clothes, something which is surprisingly rare. (via Andrew McAfee)
- A Guide to Analyzing Python Performance — finding speed and memory problems in your Python code. With pretty pictures! (via Ian Kallen)
You still need your own website
Brett Slatkin on the federated social web and why a website still matters.
Brett Slatkin's hope for a federated social web hasn't worked out as expected, so he's shifting perspective from infrastructure to user behavior. Here he explains why you shouldn't abandon your website for third-party platforms.
Four short links: 30 May 2012
CC-Licensed Museum, Bye Bye API, Socket Server, and Free Taxpayer-Funded Research NOW!
- Wide Open Future of the Art Museum (TED) — text of an interview with curator at the Walters Art Museum about CC-licensing content: reasons for it, value to society, value to the institution. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. (via Carl Malamud)
- Twitter Resiles From API-Driven Site (Twitter) — performance was the reason to return to server-assembled pages, vs their previous “client makes API calls and assembles the page itself”.
- Stripe Einhorn — language-independent shared socket manager. Einhorn makes it easy to have multiple instances of an application server listen on the same port. You can also seamlessly restart your workers without dropping any requests. Einhorn requires minimal application-level support, making it easy to use with an existing project.
- Petition the Whitehouse For Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research (Whitehouse) — We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. Sign this and spread the word: it’s time to end the insanity of hiding away research to protect a handful of publishers’ eighteenth century business models.
Four short links: 26 April 2012
Historic Software, Flickr Javascript, Twitter Commandline, and Math Mental Habits
- Apollo Software — amazing collection of source code to the software behind the Apollo mission. And memos, and quick references, and operations plans, and …. Just another reminder that the software itself is generally dwarfed by its operation.
- flickrapi.js (Github) — Aaron Straup Cope’s Javascript library for Flickr.
- t (Github) — command-line power-tool for Twitter.
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Habits of Mind (PDF) — Much more important than specific mathematical results are the habits
of mind used by the people who create those results,and we envision a curriculum
that elevates the methods by which mathematics is created,the techniques used
by researchers,to a status equal to that enjoyed by the results of that research. Loved it: talks about the habits and mindsets of mathematicians, rather than the set of algorithms and postulates students must be able to recall. (via Dan Meyer)
Commerce Weekly: PayPal’s Here service takes on Square
PayPal launches a card reader, AmEx teams with Twitter, and the smartphone tipping point is mere months away.
PayPal introduces its own credit card reader, AmEx asks you to tweet it out, and Asymco visualizes the smartphone market. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Commerce Weekly: PayPal's Here service takes on Square
PayPal launches a card reader, AmEx teams with Twitter, and the smartphone tipping point is mere months away.
PayPal introduces its own credit card reader, AmEx asks you to tweet it out, and Asymco visualizes the smartphone market. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Strata Week: Datasift lets you mine two years of Twitter data
Datasift offers more access to the Twitter archive, and a proposal for a data school.
In this week's data news, Datasift will offer deeper access to old tweets, P2PU and the Open Knowledge Foundation announce a School of Data.
HIMSS asks: Who is Biz Stone and what is Twitter?
Explaining cutting edge social media to the last industry to computerize.
As patients and practitioners gather on Twitter, the service has evolved into a peer-to-peer healthcare marketplace. That's why Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's keynote at HIMSS is so fitting.
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.