O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

I'm not sure what this says about the relationship between mailing list activity and delivered software;-)

With several hundred applications now available in the iTunes App store, I decided to consider alternate ways of gauging interest in the platform. Using MarkMail, one can quickly scan thousands of mailing lists and restrict the results to those related to software development. Based on the number of posts to (MarkMail) mailing lists, Linux-based alternatives generate considerably more email chatter than the iPhone:"

Getting Stupid, take two

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

[See terse, prior comment on haystack]

Carr is not the only one who finds that they appear to be loosing some memory etc. as a result of using Google as a memory substitute. They also find that they are reading less. That is not my experience, but life would not be life if we all had the same experience.
However, I think they have a pretty narrow set of concerns.

Google is not the issue. [There are plenty of reasons to worry about Google, but spreading illiteracy is not one of them.] The issue is the net, the web and expanding modes of human communication.

1. Carr and his friends may be reading less, but others are reading much more. Others? A pretty diverse group Here are two examples: I read more because its easier to find things that interest me, things I find valuable because I have more powerful search tools than a coffee shop and a library card index. Others, in rural Peru, for example, read more because while their village did not have books in the past, now, thanks to OLPC and the net, the village has on line libraries, access to news papers, blogs, etc.
2. Reading is only one, and not the best, form of human communication. Music and images have much more to offer and both are undergoing an explosion of production and use. Carr may find You Tube too low brow. Fine. All the educated people thought Dante was too low-brow too.
3. A bit of perspective is useful. The written word devalued traditional skills -- especially oral memorization. Those skills gave special rights to a small number of people with the unusual innate ability to handle the rhyme and volume as well as access to the holders of the tales. And yes it may be true that Carr is reading less. [Perhaps even writing less;-) ]But I can find Lynne d Johnson and Salt-n-Pepa.

Thanks to the web and technology like Google's more people can produce more content in more formats than ever before. And, more people can find it.

I'm so sorry that this does not work out for the editors of Atlantic, but I'll get over it.

Different Approaches to the Semantic Web - O'Reilly Radar

Interesting, but why ignore semantics inferred through machine learning?

I've been thinking a bit more about why I'm more excited about Metaweb's freebase than I have been about previous Semantic Web projects that I've been exposed to.

I think that part of it is the difference in how they capture data about relationships. A good example is Semantic MediaWiki, which Stefano Mazzocchi pointed me to. They capture relations in a very explicit way, in this case, using structured wikitext. For example, as the wikipedia page on Semantic MediaWiki explains, an entry about Berlin might include the wikitext:"

An ESB for the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging 'enterprise people' to think more like 'web people.' Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the 'generative enterprise,' and that sort of thing.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip."

Less than Lord of the Rings

Asked by Google to estimate the size of the world's publicly available economic statistics, Rosling came up with an estimate of 1.5 terabytes-- less than one episode of Lord of the Rings.
"...Democracy is taking a new phase in modern times..."
-- Hans Rosling at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul

Some of what Rosling is jarring for me. What does he mean that the Philippines has the same economic status as the U.S. in 1971? He had just been talking about infant mortality. Whatever, his basic thesis that web 2.0 level technology, including the long tail, allow a revolution in human understanding of what is happening on the planet is sound.

Rosling points out that the gamers have the technology to present statistics in a meaningful manner. His son produced an amazing site on world income distribution. Check it out. If you think this is esoteric stuff, google "world income distribution". His son has not one day of computer science education. His son: "Education too often hampers learning."[ Full disclosure: I can't claim such fine credentials, but I did drop out of CS at Berkeley after two years, sort of, -- plus I skipped the entire calculus sequence and dove into statistics w/o guidance from Jerzy Neyman.]

"I can walkup to the door of the New York Stock Exchange on tax financed sidewalks..."





Thanks to Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics:: Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly radar

Building and City Transformations

An amazing view of relationships between shapes, buildings, design ideas and their transformations.


Pascal Mueller, along with collaboratoters Peter Wonka, Simon Haegler, Andreas Ulmer and Luc Van Gool, is responsible.

Checkout their Procedural Pompeii Reconstruction

Current TV :: Viewer Created Content

Current TV's web site has a section on producer training. Cool.

• Production Tips
• Storytelling :: help from Ira Glass, Xeni Jardin, Sarah Vowell, Orville Schell, Robert Redford and more
• Journalism :: help from Sean Penn
• Broadband
• Gear Selection
• Shooting
• Editing

Its not enough to have an interesting life.
You have to have interesting things to say.
--Sarah Vowell

My advice? Start with Sean Penn. Its Penn's focus is more on people who want to break a story on pesticides in Mexico than people who want to produce next generation kayaking videos, but he captures the zeitgeist. I stumbled into this after seeing the Ira Glass's presentation on story telling. Anyone who needs to communicate can benefit from this material on storytelling. Don't miss Sarah Vowell (see above) who nails the importance of editing, not the technique, but the value, the need for obsession.

Dive Deeper
Links are provided to a number of resources I did not even know I was looking for.

Directions for the net :: first pass -- end user experience

In the rush of new tools, services, etc. for building and distributing content on the net (cellular, wifi, Internet, etc), its easy to miss some broad trends.
The end user is not an end user -- computing and communications resources get embedded everywhere. Ubiquitous computing. Concrete walls get smart.
A web page is not a web page -- browsers become tools for distributing loosely coupled apps which play the role of minimalist operating systems as well as providing end user functionality.
A computer is not a computer -- the computer really is the network.
The network is not a network -- it may be better to forget all about computers/networks and think about human communication. The net becomes a way to augment human communication and perseption. Its easy to see how it is augmenting vision, hearing, and speech, but surface computing is moving in a tactile direction (think iPhone) and body language is even finding enhancement (think Wii). Some are experimenting with olfactory communication as well.

Outsourcing Collaborative Tools

A group at UC Berkeley is working to align campus wide approaches to technical infrastructure to support education and research. They have published a report summarizing their findings in the "...areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally." They focused on offerings from Google and Microsoft, but mention other companies.

They did not investigate a variety of other collaborative tools, but mentioned them. (See below). This is slightly surprising, since wikis, for example have been in use in many universities for around 10 years and are undoubtedly used by the majority of under-graduates.

• Collaborative Authoring (e.g., Google Docs, 37signals Writeboard)
• Discussion forums
• Instant messaging
• Knowledge bases
• "Live" collaboration tools (e.g., electronic whiteboards, screen sharing tools such as
• TeamSpot)
• News Aggregators/Feed Readers
• Personal Portals (e.g., UPortal/NetVibes)
• Photo Sharing (e.g., Flickr)
• Podcasting (e.g., iTunesU)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us)
• Social Networking (e.g., FaceBook, MySpace)
• Surveys/Quizzes/Polls (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang)
• Video Sharing (e.g., YouTube)
• Web/video conferencing (e.g., WebEx)
• Weblogging ("blogging") tools
• Wikis

the media reloaded

If:book has interesting coveerage of changes in the nature of 'the media' as all kinds of new players begin directing traffic, filtering, etc.

Qemu, VMware, & Emulation

Doug Schaefer at QNX has an interesting post on Qemu
"... an open source processor emulator that can emulate a number of different processors and peripheral devices, to run a Debian Linux ARM installation."

Qemu can sometimes run faster than the ARM it is emulating! Not magic at all when you think about it a bit, but cool for sure.

More typically my goals are the opposite: I like VMwar's ability to run a configured os + software unchanged. Slow is just fine. Even if scaling after development making development smooth and hiccup free is wonderful. Really it is a requirement. Coding by convention (ala Ruby on Rails (RoR)) solves many problems. But its not appropriate for all contexts and when it is not, VMware is one approach that may help.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)

Got it!

If you are not familiar with the offering, check this out.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Who needs it?

Lets say you are developing a custom content management system for a photo editor. Raw images from today's cameras run about 5 - 15 megs. Lets plan ahead and assume 25 megs so we get an even 40 per gig. It would be easy to shoot 400 gigs of photos in a year or two & the required disk drive would cost $250 & then you would need reduncancy and backup & all of a sudden $1,000 in fixed costs plus co-hosting fee. It adds up. Finally you could be sure that your bargan basement ISP would not be able to restore your backups when you really needed them any way.

Enter the cloud

400 gigs of storage will cost $40 per month.
Working with 10 images per hour, 10 hours a day would require about 2.5 gigs of traffic at $ .20 each. Fifty cents. $15/month.

Plus: No IT department

USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions

USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions: "The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved it's true: The brain's wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making.

A brain-imaging study reported in the current Science examines 'framing,' a hot topic among psychologists, economists and political hucksters.

Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London."

...
The brain images revealed the amygdala, a neural region that processes strong negative emotions such as fear, fired up vigorously in response to each two-second (on average) gambling decision. Where people resisted the framing effect, a brain region connected to positive emotions such as empathy, and another that activates whenever people face choices, lit up as well, seeming to duke it out over the decision.

Dance Machine

The dude with the pink shirt reminds me I need some new shoes.

How I Became a Basketball Fan

Northwest Florida Daily News: NBA star Yao Ming swears off shark's fin soup in wildlife protection campaign: "BEIJING (AP) - NBA star Yao Ming pledged Wednesday to give up eating shark's fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, as he joined a campaign to promote wildlife protection.

'Endangered species are our friends,' Yao said at a news conference organized by the London-based conservation group WildAid.

The group said China is the world's biggest importer of shark's fins, which conservationists say are cut from sharks that are thrown back into the ocean to die.

'As the human population increases, many wildlife species are decreasing, and the primary reason is that humans fail to treat animals as friends,' said Yao, who played for the Shanghai Sharks basketball team before moving to the Houston Rockets."

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact: "So far, we've been able to harvest only a tiny fraction of geothermal energy resources, taking advantage of places where local geology brings hot water and steam near the surface, such as in Iceland or California, where such phenomena have long been used to produce electricity. But new oil-field stimulation technology, developed for extracting oil from sources such as shale, makes it possible to harvest much more of this energy by allowing engineers to create artificial geothermal reservoirs many kilometers underground."

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box: "Continuous Integration, Source Control, a Wiki and a Bug-Tracker are all cornerstones of a functioning Agile development project. But if you've not configured them all before, it can be a bit tricky - and you might miss some of the tight integration that makes them really useful."

Another example that thought works.

Writely

I tried this 10 months ago & did not find it useful, but it was promsing.
Looks pretty cool now.

paul graham railsconf 2006

the power of the marginal
california has an advantage with its climate because there is more marginal space
the only business woz and jobs had was building blue boxes --- a business with the rare characteristics of being both illegal and unprofitable
evaluating a field :: what are its tests like? how hard are they to hack?
look for overlap between leaders and practitioners
how much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders
where the insiders are corrupt, don't worry
if it is corrupt enough, the test is an anti-test

"even a dumb man is considered wise if he remains silent" old testament
may have worked for bronze age goat herders in palestine

if you want to score big, focus on the margin of the margin

Martin Fowler at RailsConf 2006

opinionated :: focus on limited problem space

drive toward simplicity :: facilitated by focus

conversational approach :: move developers from closet to customer

• often focus can be accelerated by shooting, then aiming. show the customer something -- is this what you want?
• observational approach to requirements -- see what the customer actually does
  

ruby :: not the same level of uniformity as lisp and smalltalk, but provides a better foundation for dealing with computing resources as they lay

post modern computing :: just as buildings composed of modules don't live, software built from a uniform paradigm don't live

• ruby says: dive in a deal with the mess in the world -- be the glue
• ron jefferies pointed out that becasuse it deals with more messy realities of the real world, a payrole system is more complex than an operating system