- Matt Jones: Practical Design Fiction (Vimeo) — the log scale of experience! Fantastic hour-long recap of the BERG thinking that he’s continued at the Google Creative Lab in NYC. (via Matt Jones)
- 3dPL — public license for 3d objects. (via BoingBoing)
- Google Contributor — when the web’s biggest advertiser tries alternative ways to fund web content, I’m interested.
- Templar — an HTTP proxy that provides advanced features to help you make better use of and tame HTTP APIs. Timeouts, caching, metrics, request collapsing, …
"web" entries
Four short links: 6 March 2015
Design Fiction, 3D License, Web Funding, and API Magic
Four short links: 5 March 2015
Web Grain, Cognition and Computation, New Smart Watch, and Assessing Accuracy
- The Web’s Grain (Frank Chimero) — What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?
- Bruce Sterling on Convergence of Humans and Machines — I like to use the terms “cognition” and “computation”. Cognition is something that happens in brains, physical, biological brains. Computation is a thing that happens with software strings on electronic tracks that are inscribed out of silicon and put on fibre board. They are not the same thing, and saying that makes the same mistake as in earlier times, when people said that human thought was like a steam engine.
- Smart Pocket Watch — I love to see people trying different design experiences. This is beautiful. And built on Firefox OS!
- Knowledge-Based Trust (PDF) — Google research paper on how to assess factual accuracy of web page content. It was bad enough when Google incentivised people to make content-free pages. Next there’ll be a reward for scamming bogus facts into Google’s facts database.
Four short links: 13 February 2015
Web Post-Mortem, Data Flow, Hospital Robots, and Robust Complex Networks
- What Happened to Web Intents (Paul Kinlan) — I love post-mortems, and this is a thoughtful one.
- Apache NiFi — incubated open source project for data flow.
- Tug Hospital Robot (Wired) — It may have an adult voice, but Tug has a childlike air, even though in this hospital you’re supposed to treat it like a wheelchair-bound old lady. It’s just so innocent, so earnest, and at times, a bit helpless. If there’s enough stuff blocking its way in a corridor, for instance, it can’t reroute around the obstruction. This happened to the Tug we were trailing in pediatrics. “Oh, something’s in its way!” a woman in scrubs says with an expression like she herself had ruined the robot’s day. She tries moving the wheeled contraption but it won’t budge. “Uh, oh!” She shoves on it some more and finally gets it to move. “Go, Tug, go!” she exclaims as the robot, true to its programming, continues down the hall.
- Improving the Robustness of Complex Networks with Preserving Community Structure (PLoSone) — To improve robustness while minimizing the above three costly changes, we first seek to verify that the community structure of networks actually do identify the robustness and vulnerability of networks to some extent. Then, we propose an effective 3-step strategy for robustness improvement, which retains the degree distribution of a network, as well as preserves its community structure.
Four short links: 4 February, 2015
CLR Open Source, Cluster Management, Workplace Bias, and So Much Chrome
- CoreCLR Open Sourced (MSDN) — garbage collection, compilation to machine code, and other bits of the CLR.
- Kafka Manager — Yahoo open sources a cluster management tool.
- Unconscious Bias at Work — useful talk on workplace biases.
- All the Chrome (Quirksmode) — Google Chrome is not the default browser on Android 4.3+. There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers, and they are all subtly, though not wildly, different. The number of Chromium family members has recently risen from nine to eleven with the addition of HTC and LG Chromium, default browsers for modern HTC and LG high-end devices.
Power of the platforms
Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.
After decades of work on programming, we finally got a development environment with massive reach and tremendous power. Somehow, though, the web isn’t centered on a comprehensive programming environment. The web succeeded with a (severely) lowest-common denominator, specification-driven approach that let it grow with time, technology, and multiple communities, across multiple platforms.
Almost two decades ago, I was all excited about Java. Write applets once, run anywhere, with libraries to make sure it all came out the same wherever anywhere might be. Java is still a powerhouse, but it all worked out differently than I expected. Even in Java’s early years, before the Java news was filled with security bulletins, applets felt like a strange mix with their surrounding web pages. Creating an applet demanded programmers to build every detail. Even with Java’s ever-improving libraries, creating a Java applet that did much was an intense experience focused on programming.
Java wasn’t the only comprehensive way to build web apps, of course. Flash demanded programming, but its values always incorporated design, action, and well, flash, in ways that meshed well with the way people built sites. Flash kept growing and growing before its ecosystem took a fatal hit from the iPhone as HTML5 offered replacements for some of its key strengths. I mostly notice Flash these days because it asks me to update it regularly and because pages tell me when it’s crashed.
Compared to either of those rich environments, web technology is a tangled mess. The early web was functional but unstyled, with no behavior beyond navigating among pages. That? That would dominate client-side computing? Read more…
Four short links: 23 January 2015
Investment Themes, Python Web Mining, Code Review, and Sexist Brilliance
- 16 Andreessen-Horowitz Investment Areas — I’m struck by how they’re connected: there’s a cluster around cloud development, there are two maybe three on sensors …
- Pattern — a web mining module for the Python programming language. It has tools for data mining (Google, Twitter and Wikipedia API, a web crawler, a HTML DOM parser), natural language processing (part-of-speech taggers, n-gram search, sentiment analysis, WordNet), machine learning (vector space model, clustering, SVM), network analysis and <canvas> visualization.
- Code Review — FogCreek’s code review checklist.
- Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions Across Academic Disciplines (Science) — Surveys revealed that some fields are believed to require attributes such as brilliance and genius, whereas other fields are believed to require more empathy or hard work. In fields where people thought that raw talent was required, academic departments had lower percentages of women. (via WaPo)
Four short links: 29 December 2014
Open Source Submersible, Web Language, Cheap Robot Arm, and Visualisation Trends
- OpenROV — open source submersible, funded in 1 day on Kickstarter, now available for purchase.
- Ur/Web — web application language that’s functional, pure, statically typed, and strict. (via IT World)
- MeArm (Thingiverse) — a low cost robot arm. The meArm is designed to be light weight and inexpensive – to be the perfect introduction to robotics. Design on Thingiverse, kickstarting the controller.
- Eric Rodenbeck on Running a Studio (Flowing Data) — Stamen’s founder on the challenges of staying current. I hadn’t realised quite how quickly the visualisation field is changing.
Four short links: 17 December 2014
Security Stick, Spyware Toy, Bezos Time, and Popular JavaScript
- USB Armory — another Linux-on-a-stick, but this one has some nifty dimensions and security applications in mind.
- Who’s the Boss? — The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Excellent deconstruction of ludic malware. (via Washington Post)
- Bezos on Time (Business Insider) — Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. We all have a limited amount of time, and where you spend it and how you spend it is just an incredibly levered way to think about the world. This (he says at 9 p.m. in the office, in a different city from his family!).
- libscore — popularity of JavaScript scripts and libraries in the top million sites. But remember, just because all the cool kids do it doesn’t make right for you. (via Medium)
Four short links: 16 December 2014
Memory Management, Stream Processing, Robot's Google, and Emotive Words
- Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale — how they gathered data, how Javascript memory management works, and what they did to nail down leaks.
- tigon — an open-source, real-time, low-latency, high-throughput stream processing framework.
- Robo Brain — machine knowledge of the real world for robots. (via MIT Technology Review)
- The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum — convincing argument for teaching intro to programming with Scheme, but not using the classic text SICP.
Update: the original fourth link to Depeche Mood led only to a README on GitHub; we’ve replaced it with a new link.
Four short links: 11 December 2014
Crowdsourcing Framework, Data Team Culture, Everybody Scrolls, and Honeypot Data
- Hive — open source crowdsourcing framework from NYT Labs.
- Prezi Data Team Culture — good docs on logging, metrics, etc. The vision is a great place to start.
- Scroll Behaviour Across the Web (Chartbeat) — nobody reads above the fold, they immediately scroll.
- threat_research (github) — shared raw data and stats from honeypots.