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Virtual Images Part 1: Snapshots

By Gene McCullagh
September 6, 2010

Some images only require a few adjustments and you're done. Yes. You're that good! Other images just ask to be taken down different paths. As artists we often try to find the best expression of the moment we captured. But we don't always know the steps from capture to masterpiece. We try different settings. Apply a preset or two. Dive into the adjustment brush. and so on. And, even though Lightroom preserves an endless stream of history on an image we don't always remember at which step we saw one of those "looks" we liked. So what do we do? Before Lightroom we might have saved multiple copies of an image. One for each different look. Now I know that storage is cheaper these days but how many times do you want to multiply a 25Mb file? Enter the snapshot!

The Watering Hole - Implementation Details

By James Turner
September 4, 2010

Admit it, when you watched the movie, you starting thinking about function calls memory management too.

Are You Intimidated By Breakfast Cereal?

By Caitlyn Martin
September 4, 2010

An article by Graham Morrison for Tech Radar UK this past week struck a bit of a raw nerve for me. It was one of a type we see periodically in the tech press and the title pretty much tells the story:  The trouble with Linux: there's too much choice. To Mr. Morrison and all the others who have written articles like this one I say: Hogwash!

Build HTML documentation for your C# code with Sandcastle in under 5 minutes

By Andrew Stellman
September 3, 2010

If you've ever used a library that has accurate MSDN-style API documentation, you know how useful it can be. There are lots of ways to create HTML documentation. But the easiest way that I've found is to use Sandcastle. It's an open source documentation generator from Microsoft that reads your assemblies (DLL or EXE files) and their XML Comments and automatically generates HTML documentation. Sandcastle is a very flexible tool, which means it's also a very complex tool. Luckily, there's a companion tool, Sandcastle Help File Builder, that makes it really easy to get up and running with Sandcastle in minutes.

Four short links: 3 Sep 2010

By Nat Torkington
September 3, 2010

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Controlling the Viewport in Mobile Web Applications

By Andrew Trice
September 2, 2010

In this post, we'll cover a simple addition that you can add to your HTML 4/5 mobile web applications to have them respond more like applications, and less like "web pages" in webkit-based browsers.

FCC.gov poised for an overdue overhaul

By Alex Howard
September 2, 2010

The Federal Communications Commission is prepping a significant reboot of its website. In this interview, FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel explains how citizen participation and open government are shaping the new FCC.gov.

Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places

By Tyler Bell
September 2, 2010

The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience. It works, for now, but it won't be the long-term solution for customer/business relationships and physical point of presence. So what will replace it? Here's a look at the local sector's near-term future.

Data Week: Becoming a data scientist

By Edd Dumbill
September 2, 2010

Data Week is a new series that brings together notable stories and developments from the data world. Links in this edition include: the connection between visualizations and art, advice on becoming a data scientist, BigCouch goes open source, and more.

Four short links: 2 Sep 2010

By Nat Torkington
September 2, 2010

Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic. v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability. Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter...

Pragmatic Design Patterns: Composition Over Inheritance

By Amy Blankenship
September 2, 2010

Many developers have the idea that design patterns are "nice to haves," something that you can add after the fact, if you have time to waste making your code academically appealing for no added benefit. At some level, I...

Fun Project Honeynet Log Challenge: Log Mysteries

By Anton Chuvakin
September 1, 2010

Project Honeynet just released its latest Forensic Challenge 5 - Log Mysteries. It is based on logs from a compromised virtual server and requires quite a bit of digging through messy log data.

TOC's Wednesday Devices, and Gadgets and EReaders Update #2

By Kevin Shockey
September 1, 2010

The IFA traditionally offers an early indication of what gadgets will sell well through Christmas. It's no wonder so much attention is focused on the show with order volume stemming from last year's show reaching nearly $3.8 billion.

Mobile Tools and Tricks with jQuery

By Matthew David
September 1, 2010

jQuery plugins you can use to build web sites specifically for mobile devices

jQuery Boston Conference coming Oct 16-17

By Matthew David
September 1, 2010

Annual jQuery Conference coming to Boston October 16-17

WP7 UX Introduction: Part 1

By Jesse Freeman
September 1, 2010

In this series we will explore the phone, it's UX and some early experiments I have done on the phone.

What we can learn from data, 3-D and a giant globe

By Mac Slocum
September 1, 2010

IBM researcher and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Julia Grace spends her days digging into data. Her tools are a little unusual, though. Instead of spreadsheets and bar graphs, she uses visualizations and a seven-foot-tall, three-dimensional globe. Grace discusses life with a giant globe and explores her recent findings in this Q&A.

Four short links: 1 September 2010

By Nat Torkington
September 1, 2010

R Library for Chernoff Faces -- faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data) Piwik -- GPLed web analytics package. Pomegranate -- a data...

Amazon's cloud platform still the largest, but others are closing the gap

By Ben Lorica
August 31, 2010

Tim's recent tweet on the growing demand for Google App Engine skills inspired me to measure the popularity of the major cloud computing platforms. Elance is one of many job boards in our data warehouse of U.S. job postings1 , and I wanted to measure demand across many more job sites. Measured in terms of (U.S.) job postings, Amazon's Cloud...

Your App is a Theme Park Part 1

By Antonio Holguin
August 31, 2010

Marty Sklar, former Vice Chairman and Principal Creative Executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, has many times presented a list of rules that are now know as "Mickey's 10 Commandments." We'll take a look at these rules and see how they apply to creating, designing and developing our own applications.

Radar is getting a redesign

By Mac Slocum
August 31, 2010

Radar will get refreshed later this week with a new look and more functionality. This brief overview offers a preview of the design and explains our rationale for the change.

Points of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map

By Tim O'Reilly
August 31, 2010

In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followup Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of "the Great Game" played out between England and Russia in the late Victorian era for control of access to India through what is now Afghanistan. In our planning for this year's Web 2.0...

Hacking online advertising

By Mac Slocum
August 31, 2010

Grand and bold declarations about the demise of online advertising -- and the web itself -- get all the attention. But two recent ads serve as countermeasures to the gloom: hackers are calibrating online advertising to serve their own specific needs.

Four short links: 31 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 31, 2010

Rules for Revolutionaries -- Carl Malamud's talk to the WWW2010 Conference. Video, slides, and text available. Self-Improving Bayesian Sentiment Analysis for Twitter -- a how-I-did-it for a homegrown project to do sentiment analysis on Twitter. LUXR -- the Lean User Experience Residency program. LUXr brings user experience and design services to early stage teams in a lower cost, more...

Why project managers should care about development

By Andrew Stellman
August 31, 2010

In a recent post on Building Better Software, I wrote about why developers should care about project management. But I think it's worth making the opposite case: why project managers should care about development.

The network neutrality debate: It all depends on what you fear

By Andy Oram
August 30, 2010

Network neutrality confuses a lot of laypeople because of all the different levels on which it's being argued and the opposing ways language is used by different participants. Andy Oram takes a look at the loaded words in the net neutrality debate.

Adding Rich Animation to your iPhone and Android Web Sites

By Matthew David
August 30, 2010

Both the iPhone and Android Web browsers are built using the same technology, WebKit. With this in mind, you can create Web sites optimized for WebKit that will run on both phones. The focus of this article is animation for the mobile phone. We will cover CSS3, SVG and CANVAS techniques you can use today.

The VC-free startup

By Dale Dougherty
August 30, 2010

The big-bet venture capital model works on occasion in Silicon Valley, but it seldom works elsewhere. Dale Daugherty mulls the trajectory of non-VC startups: the small firms that don't need an exit strategy because the business creates its own type of fulfillment.

Four short links: 30 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 30, 2010

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

The Watering Hole - A Point to Ponder

By James Turner
August 29, 2010

Berkeley Breathed had his dandelion patch, we have Mount Conflicted...

Vale Java? Scala Vala palava - and Go too

By Rick Jelliffe
August 28, 2010

Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that...

The Watering Hole - I've Got a Secret... Or Not...

By James Turner
August 28, 2010

Remember the good old days, when you needed to use things like sex and blackmail to get good secrets?

Bug Scrub Day

By Tom Barker
August 28, 2010

As a way of addressing our burgeoning bug list my manager instituted something that we call Bug Scrub Day. One day a month we drop everything that we are doing and focus only on addressing bugs. The need for such...

View From the Trenches: Surviving Change

By Kassia Krozser
August 27, 2010

I am a veteran of the format wars. I started as an innocent civilian, caught on the side of Beta while the DVD army pushed the front closer and closer to my home. Later, I joined the motion picture special forces, dutifully accounting for units of Laser Discs, Beta tapes, and endless VHS videocassettes. I don't think a truce was...

View from the Trenches: Surviving Change

By Kassia Krozser
August 27, 2010

I am a veteran of the format wars. I started as an innocent civilian, caught on the side of Beta while the DVD army pushed the front closer and closer...

Is Your Survey Data Lying to You?

By Jeevan Padiyar
August 27, 2010

Statistical nuggets are great because in isolation they give us a glimpse into why people do what they do, and how we can adjust our business to match market needs. But how often do we blindly accept data because it comes with pretty graphs and sound bites that seem to make sense? Probably more often than we'd like to admit. The best way to ensure that we are not led astray, is to look at what biases have been introduced into a study before using its data to make a decision.

A New Take on the Coffee Table Book

By Kat Meyer
August 27, 2010

In one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, Kramer comes up with the brilliant idea for a coffee table book with fold-down legs that makes it into a little coffee table--a coffee table book COFFEE TABLE book. Hilarious. Today I receive a press release from the folks over at Sideways announcing, "Sideways Takes the Coffee Table-Style Book to the iPad." Huh,...

Gnash 0.8.8: A Huge Improvement Over Previous Versions

By Caitlyn Martin
August 27, 2010

Early this week Gnash 0.8.8 was released. Despite the small increment in version number, which would make this seem like a minor maintenance release, the difference between version 0.8.8 and the earlier 0.8.7 is like night and day.

Applying the lessons of Enterprise 2.0 to Gov 2.0

By Alex Howard
August 27, 2010

In this podcast, MIT professor Andrew McAfee applies the insights from his research into the use of social software in the enterprise to understanding how and where technology will change government.

Early Flex 4.5 SDK released on Adobe Open Source

By RJ Owen
August 27, 2010

Adobe has posted a build of the Flex 4.5 SDK, code named "Hero", on their open-source site. This build does not contain features that rely on future versions of the Flash Player or AIR runtime, which is to say there's no AIR for Android goodness in here. Still, the new build adds the much-anticipated Spark DataGrid, a few other Spark components, and a number of bug fixes.

Four short links: 27 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 27, 2010

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...

Is Your Survey Data Lying to You?

By Jeevan Padiyar
August 27, 2010

As the book industry continues to change, we are inundated with statistics about user behavior: ·         49% of e-book readers are bought as gifts [Bowker] ·         28% of US adults...

A New Take on the Coffee Table Book

By Kat Meyer
August 27, 2010

In one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, Kramer comes up with the brilliant idea for a coffee table book with fold-down legs that makes it into a little coffee table--a...

Want a Free Pass to 360|Flex WADC?

By RJ Owen
August 26, 2010

John Wilker has started a contest over on the 360|Flex blog. The requirements are simple and the stakes are high - tell John why you want to go to 360|Flex in the comments and John will pick someone to win a free pass to 360|Flex in Washington D.C., September 19-22. Entrants will be judged on "zest for life and creativity", and the winner will be chosen by midnight on 8/30 (that's soon.) What are you waiting for - go leave a comment on the 360|Flex blog!

My Favorite Slogan Explained

By Matt Frye
August 26, 2010

Someone asked me recently about mattfrye-isms. If you've ever worked for or with me, you've heard them, and I have a favorite. They asked me why I say it. Is it cool? Is it funny? Well, it can be...

Great Twitter Accounts to keep up to date on jQuery news

By Matthew David
August 26, 2010

Twitter is a great way to get news instantly. I particularly like getting updates as text messages to my phone. There are some great jQuery accounts you should be subscribing to. They are: @jquery - the official word from THE...

Welcome Matthew David as a new jQuery Blogger

By Matthew David
August 26, 2010

Welcome message from Matthew David as a new jQuery Blogger!

Tracking the signal of emerging technologies

By Alex Howard
August 26, 2010

The first NASA IT Summit featured deep views into the future, including an interplanetary Internet, the evolution of computational computing and Gartner's top emerging technologies.

Earthquakes are HUGE on Data.gov

By Andrew Odewahn
August 26, 2010

After launching just over a year ago with only 47 data sets, the Data.gov catalog now has 2,326 entries that have been collectively downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times. Of course, even these sizable download counts understate the actual impact of this data, which is being embedded in a variety of sites and apps, like those being developed...

Four short links: 26 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 26, 2010

Germany's Industrial Expansion Fueled by Absence of Copyright Law? (Der Spiegel) -- fascinating article about the extraordinary publishing output in 1800s Germany vs other nations, all with no effective and enforceable copyright laws. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his...

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