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Four short links: 12 November 2009
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 12, 2009
Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets) Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I...
Four short links: 30 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 30, 2009
Smart Materials in Architecture -- Using thermal bimetals can allow architects to experiment with shape-changing buildings, Ritter said. Thermal bimetals include a combination of materials with different expansion coefficients that can cause a change in. Under changing temperatures this can lead one side of a compound to bend more than the other side, potentially creating an entirely different shape,...
Four short links: 29 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 29, 2009
Bletchley Park May Have a Future -- the UK birthplace of modern computing, where Alan Turing worked during WW II breaking German codes, is dilapidated and in need of major repair. They appear to have a supporter in the UK National Lottery, who have given them a grant to begin work and prepare for further grants. It should be...
Chapter-by-chapter coverage of Masterminds of Programming
By Andy OramSeptember 24, 2009
Programmer Taran Rampersad planned all along to write a review of Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages--but his reading impressed him so much he ended up writing a review for each chapter.
Four short links: 23 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 22, 2009
Projections (YouTube) -- the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room. Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (NYTimes) -- a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with...
Four short links: 21 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 20, 2009
TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published;...
Four short links: 13 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 12, 2009
Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android -- regular readers know I'm a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They've got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming...
Four short links: 10 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 10, 2009
The Propaganda Newspapers -- London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well. Time for Computer Science to Grow Up -- publish in journals so conferences can be...
Four short links: 5 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 6, 2009
Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer...
Four short links: 29 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 29, 2009
Bioweathermap -- crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter) We Are All African Now -- a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray) Standing Out In The Crowd -- OSCON keynote...
Four short links: 13 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 9, 2009
IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit -- methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download. Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave -- [M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s...
Four short links: 10 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 9, 2009
Ceph -- open source distributed filesystem from UCSC. Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write...
Four short links: 26 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 26, 2009
Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious) Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through...
Up Close with an Enigma
By Ben LoricaMay 8, 2009
At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take...
Four short links: 15 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 15, 2009
Computer archaeology, Unix, mad science, and data mining: NASA Images Saved By Volunteers -- Pictures from the mid-1960s Lunar Orbiter program lay forgotten for decades. But one woman was determined to see them restored. One woman and some keen hardware hackers who built Frankenstein's tape reader to recover the images. Not just a reminder of how ephemeral our media, but...
The Women of XML
By Kurt CagleMarch 24, 2009
I've long been a fan of Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. She was not only one of Charles Babbage's biggest patrons, but she also was one of the first to suggest the use of "Jacquard Loom" type cards as a way of programming the Analytical Engine as well providing what may have been the first software programs. Lovelace, the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron, was also herself a "free spirit", albeit one with an astonishingly brilliant intellect behind it.
Four short links: 16 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 16, 2009
Toys, telegraphs, transparency, and travel in today's roundup of short interesting links. New Law Could Wipe Out Handcrafted Toy Makers - CNN story on a new consumer safety law that mandates expensive quality tests for components of toys, even those handmade in the US by micro-businesses. It's not clear what a solution looks like: mass-produced in China or micro-produced in...
Cakewalk Turns 20, Glimpses the Future
By David BattinoJuly 19, 2008
Late 1980s, deep in the basement of the Oberlin Conservatory: Strolling past the broken-down harp cases, a surprise visitor enters my electronic music class.
Baby's 60th Birthday
By Imran AliJune 20, 2008
Radar's predictive sense is drawn from the 'wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst' as we seek to collectively surface the emerging trends of the technology sector. However, from time to time, it's appropriate to look back at the milestones that have shaped the digital industries which we all inhabit. One of these milestones falls tommorow in the Northern...
Macintosh History 101
By Jochen WoltersJanuary 14, 2008
Chances are that, by the time you are reading this, Steve Jobs has already finished his keynote at MWSF2008, announcing shiny new Apple products. As a little counterweight to the springflood of news messages this will most definitely cause, I thought you might enjoy a little walk down memory lane to rediscover how it all began, and which milestones it took Apple and the Macintosh to get to where they are today.
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