O'Reilly Radar

The crypto-currency ecosystem

June 27, 2013 - 7:37pm

Just like the IP protocol, bitcoin is the culmination of several important advancements, all combining to form a paradigm-changing innovation. The Internet Protocol was not just an arrangement of headers and payload. It also represented the triumph of packet-switching, layered protocols and distributed routing algorithms — four or five critical innovations, combined in a single implementation that changed the world. Bitcoin is a combination of several innovations, arranged in a novel way: a peer-to-peer network, a proof-of-work algorithm, a distributed timestamped accounting ledger and an elliptic-curve cryptography and key infrastructure. Each of these parts is novel on its own, but the combination and specific arrangement was revolutionary for its time and is beginning to show up in more innovations outside bitcoin itself.

Take a look around bitcoin and you will quickly notice that these four parts are being mashed up in even more novel ways. There’s an ecosystem of innovation boiling around the bitcoin proof-of-concept implementation, in the form of alt-coins, meta-coins and blockchain-riders.

An alt-coin is the term used to describe a crypto-currency that shares the core building blocks of bitcoin, but differs in some of the particulars. Probably the best example of such an alt-coin is Litecoin, which is described as “silver to bitcoin’s gold.” Litecoin uses the same basic construct: blockchain, p2p network, proof-of-work algorithm and crypto, with a few important differences. Instead of a computationally-intensive proof-of-work algorithm like bitcoin’s SHA256, Litecoin uses a memory-or-computation algorithm, called scrypt. This makes it less appealing to ASIC optimization than bitcoin and therefore easier to “mine” with consumer computers. Litecoin also tweaks several of the design parameters of bitcoin, speeding up transaction processing and increasing the maximum currency-issuance ceiling from 21 million coins to 84 million. As the name suggests, Litecoin is a lighter version of bitcoin.

Litecoin is only one of dozens or perhaps hundreds of alt-coins. Each addresses a slightly different audience, solves a different “problem” or simply tries to improve on the basic bitcoin algorithm and design. All these alt-coins take the basic building blocks and re-combine them in slightly different arrangements, then compete in the small early-adopter marketplace for attention. What’s really exciting is that this ecosystem is a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Best yet, the ecosystem is subject to evolution-like fitness function resulting in splintering, re-convergence, and birth and death of currencies at a frantic pace.

It is difficult to define a clear taxonomy of crypto-currencies, but in the family of the distributed blockchain, we find three broad sub-categories: alt-coins, meta-coins and para-chains.

Alt-coins are currency implementations that are forked from bitcoin and differ in the implementation fundamentals. They use their own blockchain ledger, their own P2P network. Some also use a different mining algorithm to secure the network. Examples include Litecoin, Terracoin, Devcoin and PPcoin.

Meta-coins are currency implementations that use the bitcoin blockchain itself but encode their own metadata within novel transaction semantics. The prime example of a meta-coin is Zerocoin, which implements strong transactional anonymity, unlike bitcoin’s weak pseudonymity. Another is Bitnotar, a distributed notary that encodes “proof of document existence” in the blockchain with special transactions.

Para-chains are implementations of the distributed blockchain but which encode non-currency, non-payment data. These may exist as completely separate chains or be mined together with bitcoin using merged-mining via a Merkle-Tree Root included in bitcoin’s blocks. Examples include Bitmessage (anonymous encrypted messages), Namecoin (distributed name registry) and Chronobit (distributed merged-mining notary and attestation).

We’ve seen this evolutionary process before in the technology of peer-to-peer networks. The first “generation” of P2P was centralized and clunky. The “fitness function” was sharing large files, and Napster quickly grew to fill that ecological niche successfully. Once smashed by incumbents, Napster’s demise led to a change in the fitness function: distributed and survivable P2P networks started emerging. As each one was attacked and destroyed, the successors adapted and optimized to become more evasive, less easy to squash, more efficient and more distributed. It’s arguable that today’s P2P networks have evolved to the point of becoming more or less unstoppable and have dominated dozens of niche network ecologies.

The alt-coins in the bitcoin ecosystem are currently exploiting niches where bitcoin is not a perfect fit. Some are more “transactional,” some reward developers, others offer demurrage instead of deflation. If bitcoin stumbles or is directly attacked, the ecosystem will change its fitness function to fill the gap. If bitcoin’s weaknesses are shown to be in the exchanges, in detection and monitoring, in centralization, then those will be the fitness function to solve. The alt-coins will surge in to fill the new ecological niche left open by bitcoin’s retreat, becoming more stealthy, more distributed, more untraceable and more efficient in response. Bitcoin is an expression of a viral networking pattern that will survive bitcoin.

Where bitcoin pioneered four new technologies, proving that a distributed currency could work at scale, it has now spawned a growing ecosystem of rapid innovation that is re-combining these core inventions. The distributed blockchain, consensus through proof-of-work/stake, and P2P networking will continue to evolve and astound us long after crypto-currencies become accepted and mainstream.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 27 June 2013

June 27, 2013 - 12:32am

1. nitrous.io — IDE “in the cloud”, as “the kids” say.
2. smartHeadlight — headlight that tracks raindrops and doesn’t send out light to reflect off them back into your eyes causing you to clutch your head and veer off the road into the parking lot of a Hooters to which your wife will NOT enjoy being called to tow your VERY SORRY HONEY ass home. Thank heavens science can save us from this awful hypothetical scenario. (via Greg Linden)
3. Knight Funds outline.io — it’s a public policy simulator that helps people visualize the impact that public policies like health care reform and school budget changes might have on local economies and communities. Simulators are hugely underused way to get public to understand policy debate. (via Julie Starr)
4. ZXX Font — designed to be hard to OCR, though a common trick makes it pervious to OCR. Secrecy is not an option on your font menu. (via Beta Knowledge)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Podcast: what makes a scientist?

June 26, 2013 - 8:01am

At Sci Foo Camp last weekend, we enjoyed sitting down with several thoughtful scientists and thinkers-about-science to record a few podcast episodes. Here we speak with Tom Daniel, a professor of biology, computer science, and neurobiology at the University of Washington, and Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider and a Stanford-trained physicist. First topic: what brings people to science, and how we compare to our icons. Along the way, we mention Hans Bethe, Isaac Newton’s epitaph, and John McPhee’s trip across Interstate 80.

We’ll post the rest of the series over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can find more episodes of our podcast and subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

$20,000 and a trip to Shenzhen

June 26, 2013 - 7:58am

Manufacturing is rapidly becoming more accessible to people whose expertise lies elsewhere. The change is most apparent at the small scale, where it’s become easy to order prototypes made on high-quality 3D printers and electronics in small batches from domestic factories. High-volume Chinese manufacturing has been tougher to get into.

A new incubator launching today, and led by our former O’Reilly colleague Brady Forrest, is aimed at lowering the barriers to getting physical goods manufactured fast and in high volumes. Highway1 will prepare nascent hardware companies to enter the accelerator pipeline of the Sino-Irish supply-chain giant PCH International. It offers portfolio companies up to $20,000 and a hardware crash-course that includes a trip to the factories of Shenzhen. Forrest says his curriculum will eventually be made public (minus the China junket, of course).

The successful companies that progress to PCH’s accelerator will have PCH as both an investor and supply-chain manager, essentially drawing from the same network that supplies some of Silicon Valley’s bestsellers.

Forrest put it to me this way: “There is no Amazon Web Services for hardware, but we’re the closest thing to it.”

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 26 June 2013

June 26, 2013 - 12:49am

1. Memory Allocation in Brains (PDF) — The results reviewed here suggest that there are competitive mechanisms that affect memory allocation. For example, new dentate gyrus neurons, amygdala cells with higher excitability, and synapses near previously potentiated synapses seem to have the competitive edge over other cells and synapses and thus affect memory allocation with time scales of weeks, hours, and minutes. Are all memory allocation mechanisms competitive, or are there mechanisms of memory allocation that do not involve competition? Even though it is difficult to resolve this question at the current time, it is important to note that most mechanisms of memory allocation in computers do not involve competition. Does the dissector use a slab allocator? Tip your waiter, try the veal.
2. Living Foundries (DARPA) — one motivating, widespread and currently intractable problem is that of corrosion/materials degradation. The DoD must operate in all environments, including some of the most corrosively aggressive on Earth, and do so with increasingly complex heterogeneous materials systems. This multifaceted and ubiquitous problem costs the DoD approximately $23 Billion per year. The ability to truly program and engineer biology, would enable the capability to design and engineer systems to rapidly and dynamically prevent, seek out, identify and repair corrosion/materials degradation. (via Motley Fool)
3. Innovate Salone — finalists from a Sierra Leone maker/innovation contest. Part of David Sengeh‘s excellent work.
4. Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks — ebook series, conferences, talks, on network analysis in the humanities. Everything from Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary, to the repertory of 16th century polyphony, to a data-driven update to Alfred Barr’s diagram of cubism and abstract art (original here).

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 25 June 2013

June 24, 2013 - 10:22pm

1. Cliodynamics: History as Science — a systematic application of the scientific method to history: verbal theories should be translated into mathematical models, precise predictions derived, and then rigorously tested on empirical material. In short, history needs to become an analytical, predictive science.
2. Cricket — indoor location system from MIT. In a nutshell, Cricket uses a combination of RF and ultrasound technologies to provide location information to attached host devices. Wall- and ceiling-mounted beacons placed through a building publish information on an RF channel. [...] The listener runs algorithms that correlate RF and ultrasound samples (the latter are simple pulses with no data encoded on them) and to pick the best correlation. Even in the presence of several competing beacon transmissions, Cricket achieves good precision and accuracy quickly.
3. The World at Night — an international effort to present stunning nightscape photos and time-lapse videos of the world’s landmarks against celestial attractions.
4. Paul Steinhardt on Impossible Crystals (YouTube) — quasi-crystals with five-fold symmetry previously believed impossible. And then he found one, and led an expedition in 2011 to Chukotka in Far Eastern Russia to find new information about its origin and search for more samples. As you do when you’re the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton, a job title that comes with no pressure at all to bring home the impossible.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 24 June 2013

June 23, 2013 - 9:54pm

1. Reading Runes in Animal Movement (YouTube) — accessible TEDxRiverTawe 2013 talk by Professor Rory Wilson, on his work tracking movements of animals in time and space. The value comes from high-resolution time series data: many samples/second, very granular.
2. Best Science Writing Online 2012 (Amazon) — edited collection of the best blog posts on science from 2012. Some very good science writing happening online.
3. Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education (PDF) — Derek Muller’s PhD thesis, summarised as “mythbusting beats lectures, hands down”. See also his TED@Sydney talk.
4. Melomics — royalty-free computer-generated music, all genres, for sale (genius business model). Academic spinoff from Dr. Francisco J. Vico’s work at UMA in Spain.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Why We Started the Velocity Conference

June 18, 2013 - 2:59pm

Back in 2006, Debra Chrapaty, then VP of Operations for Windows Live (later CIO at Zynga, and now CEO of Nirvanix) made a prescient comment to me: “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.” As it often turns out, things don’t work out quite as planned. A few months later, Amazon announced EC2, and it was Amazon, not Microsoft, that became the platform whose infrastructure startups chose to host their applications on. But Debra certainly nailed the big idea!

I wrote a blog post about that conversation, entitled Operations: The New Secret Sauce, which included the statement “Operations used to be thought of as boring. It’s now ground zero in the computing wars.” Jesse Robbins, then “Master of Disaster” at Amazon and later co-founder and CEO of Opscode, told me that everyone in operations at Amazon printed out that blog post and posted it in their cubicles.  Operations had been a relatively low-status job. Jesse told me that was the first time anyone had made a strong public statement about how important it was becoming.

As a result of that post, Jesse, Steve Souders, and a group of others came to me the following year and said “We need a gathering place for our tribe.”  That gathering place became the Velocity Conference, now in its sixth year.  We chose to include not just web operations, but also web performance and the emerging field of “DevOps” – the development model for applications hosted in the cloud.

This seems to be part of the secret sauce of some of our most successful events:  the recognition that it’s not just about technology but the people who put it into practice. At the heart of conferences like Velocity and Strata are new job descriptions, new skills, and new opportunities to grow careers and companies. That’s also why we increasingly think of these events not as conferences but as gathering places for communities.  Technology matters. The people who put it into practice matter more.

The Velocity Conference starts tomorrow in Santa Clara.  There is still time to attend.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 21 June 2013

June 17, 2013 - 7:02am

1. Ant-Sized Computers (MIT TR) — The KL02 chip, made by Freescale, is shorter on each side than most ants are long and crams in memory, RAM, a processor, and more.
2. Some Thoughts on Digital Manufacturing (Nick Pinkston) — Whenever I see someone make a “new” 3D printer that’s just a derivative of the RepRap or MakerBot – I could care less. Only new processes, great interfaces or super-low price points get my attention anymore. FormLabs being a great example of all three – which is why they were a massive hit. If you’re looking for problems: make a cheap laser cutter, CNC mill, or pick-n-place machine. See the Othermill.
3. The Dictatorship of Data (MIT TR) — Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers. (via Wolfgang Blau)
4. A Field Test of Mobile Phone Shielding Devices (PDF) — masters thesis comparing various high-tech fabric-type shielding devices. Alas, tin-foil helmets weren’t investigated. (via Udhay Shankar)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 20 June 2013

June 17, 2013 - 6:40am

1. Wormhole — Facebook’s pub/sub system. Wormhole propagates changes issued in one system to all systems that need to reflect those changes – within and across data centers.
2. Nanocubes — Fast Visualization of Large Spatiotemporal Datasets.
3. Sean Gourley on Relevance (YouTube) — Is Silicon Valley really doing what it should be doing? he asks, 3m30 in. Good to see him pondering stuff that matters, back in 2011.
4. Shortcat — a keyboard tool for Mac OS X that lets you “click” buttons and control your apps with a few keystrokes. Think of it as Spotlight for the user interface.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 19 June 2013

June 17, 2013 - 6:34am

1. Multithreading is Hard — The compiler and the processor both conspire to defeat your threads by moving your code around! Be warned and wary! You will have to do battle with both. Sample code and explanation of WTF the eieio barrier is (hint: nothing to do with Old McDonald’s server farm). (via Erik Michaels-Ober)
2. Improving Photo Search (Google Research) — volume of training images, number of CPU cores, and Freebase entities. (via Alex Dong)
3. Is Google Dumping Open Standards for Open Wallets? (Matt Asay) — it’s easier to ship than standardise, to innovate than integrate, but the ux of a citizen in the real world is pants. Like blog posts? Log into Facebook to read your friends! (or Google+) Chat is great, but you’d better have one client per corporation your friends hang out on. Nobody woke up this morning asking for features to make web pages only work on one browser. The user experience of isolationism is ugly.
4. GitHub Renders GeoJSON — Under the hood we use Leaflet.js to render the geoJSON data, and overlay it on a custom version of MapBox’s street view baselayer — simplified so that your data can really shine. Best of all, the base map uses OpenStreetMap data, so if you find an area to improve, edit away.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 18 June 2013

June 17, 2013 - 3:15am

1. Our Backbone Stack (Pamela Fox) — fascinating glimpse into the tech used and why.
2. Automating Card Games Using OpenCV and Python — My vision for an automated version of the game was simple. Players sit across a table on which the cards are laid out. My program would take a picture of the cards and recognize them. It would then generate valid expression that yielded 24, and then project the answer on to the table.
3. Ray Ozzie on PRISM — posted on Hacker News (!). In particular, in this world where “SaaS” and “software eats everything” and “cloud computing” and “big data” are inevitable and already pervasive, it pains me to see how 3rd Party Doctrine may now already be being leveraged to effectively gut the intent of U.S. citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Don’t we need a common-sense refresh to the wording of our laws and potentially our constitution as it pertains to how we now rely upon 3rd parties? It makes zero sense in a “services age” where granting third parties limited rights to our private information is so basic and fundamental to how we think, work, conduct and enjoy life. (via Alex Dong)
4. Larry Brilliant’s Commencement Speech (HufPo) — speaking to med grads, he’s full of purpose and vision and meaning for their lives. His story is amazing. I wish more CS grads were inspired to work on stuff that matters, and cautioned about adding their great minds to the legion trying to solve the problem of connecting you with brands you love.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 17 June 2013

June 17, 2013 - 3:09am

1. Weekend Reads on Deep Learning (Alex Dong) — an article and two videos unpacking “deep learning” such as multilayer neural networks.
2. The Internet of Actual Things — “I have 10 reliable activations remaining,” your bulb will report via some ridiculous light-bulbs app on your phone. “Now just nine. Remember me when I’m gone.” (via Andy Baio)
3. Announcing the Mozilla Science Lab (Kaitlin Thaney) — We also want to find ways of supporting and innovating with the research community – building bridges between projects, running experiments of our own, and building community. We have an initial idea of where to start, but want to start an open dialogue to figure out together how to best do that, and where we can be of most value..
4. NAND to Tetris — The site contains all the software tools and project materials necessary to build a general-purpose computer system from the ground up. We also provide a set of lectures designed to support a typical course on the subject. (via Hacker News)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Networked Things?

June 14, 2013 - 11:46am

Well over a decade ago, Bill Joy was mocked for talking about a future that included network-enabled refrigerators. That was both unfair and unproductive, and since then, I’ve been interested in a related game: take the most unlikely household product you can and figure out what you could do if it were network-enabled. That might have been a futuristic exercise in 1998, but the future is here. Now. And there are few reasons we couldn’t have had that future back then, if we’d have the vision.

So, what are some of the devices that could be Internet-enabled, and what would that mean? We’re already familiar with the Nest; who would have thought even five years ago that we’d have Internet-enabled thermostats?

From the thermostat, it’s an easy jump to the furnace. A furnace may be the dullest appliance in the house. Except when it breaks. The first November after we bought our house, the furnace broke down. The furnace guy came and fixed it. And fixed it again a few days later. And fixed it again a few days later … seven times during the month of November, until he finally said, “I have a bad feeling about this,” and replaced the part he had replaced on the first service call, which turned out to be defective in exactly the same way as the original.

Fortunately, we had a service contract and got most of a new furnace out of the deal. But what impressed me was that I didn’t really appreciate waking up at 2 a.m. wondering why it was cold, noticing that the furnace wasn’t running, calling the answering service, and waiting for the guy to get here. And I wondered why the furnace couldn’t have a little Internet-connected controller that would notice it wasn’t working and send the repair service a message saying “fix me” — bonus points for sending diagnostic information so the technician could make sure he had the right part. Then the tech could call me and say, “We’ll be at your house in 15 minutes; just unlock the door and go back to bed.” That’s a good reason for the phone to ring at 2 a.m.

So that’s one. My next Internet-enabled device fantasy is our water system. Like many residents of formerly rural suburbs, I have a private well. And one of the things I dread is groundwater pollution: every few years, you read about an area where the well water goes bad because someone dumped pollutants (dry cleaning fluid, used motor oil, you name it) that eventually made it to the water table. The polluter has frequently gone out of business, so there’s nothing you can do but try to persuade the water company to extend service to your area. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile if the state were flooded with water sensors (one on every well) that would allow you to trace these events and predict their spread? Wouldn’t it be great if the water company could start running the pipes before your tap water started smelling like tetrachloroethylene? That’s easily within modern sensor network technology. A daily update to a central database from each of a few hundred thousand homes isn’t a big deal. I bet the sensors themselves would be quite simple, and I’m sure the local water companies already have sensors (and networks) on their wells.

Let’s move downstream from the well to more familiar appliances. What about dishwashers? At Foo camp last year, Jason Huggins (@hugs), founder of Sauce Labs and BitBeam, said, “Robotics is always in the future. Every once in a while, a piece of it breaks off and becomes part of the present. Then we get used to having it around, and it stops being robotics. But someone who lived in the 40s would be amazed by a modern dishwasher.” So, how smart could a dishwasher really be? Loading and unloading sounds like a hard problem. But for those occasions when you’ve just left home and realized that you’ve forgotten to start the dishwasher, being able to start it remotely would be useful. Being able to sense what was in it and adjust the cycle accordingly would also be useful. An Internet-enabled dishwasher could also access a rate API from the utility company and run itself at times when power is least expensive.

Bread makers: what if a bread maker or ice cream maker could download recipes from the web? (There is an XML-based microformat for recipes.) Then making bread would be as simple as loading up the machine with ingredients; it would take care of everything else by itself, based on a recipe you’ve selected from an online library. For that matter, what about your stove and oven? Why get up to turn off the oven when the timer goes off — why can’t it know what you’re cooking and turn itself off at the right time? There’s also a recipe standard for beer (BeerML); I can imagine fully automated brewing. I’ve seen a fully automated Internet-enabled still (at a properly licensed distillery).

What makes these ideas interesting isn’t the intelligence, it’s the connectivity. Furnaces newer than mine have microprocessor-based controllers that probably display error codes. I’m sure that modern dishwashers have microprocessors to regulate temperature and water usage; and while bread makers went out of fashion a while ago, my rather elderly microwave has a “sensor” mode that will automatically turn itself off when it thinks the food is cooked. I suspect it would be hard to find any modern device that doesn’t have at least one microprocessor. The magic starts when you add the ability to communicate over a network. Given that these devices already have processors, adding a simple network connection is trivial.

None of these examples are staggeringly inventive. A dishwasher that can be turned on from remote locations and optimize energy consumption is almost dull. So is the Nest thermostat, if you think about what it does rather than what it means. A thermostat is supposed to be dull, and the smarter a thermostat is, the more you can ignore it. The Nest is most certainly a part of the future that has broken off and now belongs to the present. So, here’s the challenge: rather than think about what can’t be done or how silly it would be to have a networked refrigerator, let’s take what we already have and think about what we might be able to do if our things were part of an Internet of Things. What “Things” would you Internet-enable?

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Radar podcast: the Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

June 14, 2013 - 9:49am

On this week’s podcast, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas and I talk about things that have been on our minds lately: the NSA’s surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn’t doing what you think he’s doing with hydroponics.

The odd ad in The Economist that caught Jon’s attention, from Dassault Systemes. Does this suggest that contractors, contemplating years of American and European austerity, are looking for ways to market defense technologies to the civilian world?

Because we’re friendly Web stewards, we provide links to the more obscure things that we talk about in our podcasts. Here they are.

• As the Vietnam War wound down, Boeing dabbled in both futuristic and not-so-futuristic public transit systems.
• In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower anticipated the rise of a military-industrial complex–a permanent, infrastructural presence for military contractors. In his “Chance for Peace” address, also very moving, Eisenhower enumerated the costs of military preparedness: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
• The Guardian interviewed Edward Snowden on video in Hong Kong, where he has fled to avoid prosecution for leaking the NSA PowerPoint deck that has caused a firestorm.
• A programmer has linked Arduinos with hydroponics to optimize growth patterns.
• For an overview of how software and industry might come together, take a look at my research report on the industrial internet, including a bit of background on Sight Machine, which makes quality control software for factories. (Full disclosure: O’Reilly’s sister firm, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, has become an investor in Sight Machine since I wrote the report.)

If you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, on SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast RSS feed.

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Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 14 June 2014

June 14, 2013 - 7:02am

1. How Geeks Opened up the UK Government (Guardian) — excellent video introduction to how the UK is transforming its civil service to digital delivery. Most powerful moment for me was scrolling through various depts’ web sites and seeing consistent visual design.
2. Tools for Working Remotely — Braid’s set of tools (Trello, Hackpad, Slingshot, etc.) for remote software teams.
3. Git Push to Deploy on Google App Engine — Enabling this feature will create a remote Git repository for your application’s source code. Pushing your application’s source code to this repository will simultaneously archive the latest the version of the code and deploy it to the App Engine platform.
4. Amazon’s 3D Printer Store — printers and supplies. Deeply underwhelming moment of it arriving on the mainstream.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 13 June 2013

June 13, 2013 - 1:12am

1. The Unengageables (Dan Meyer) — They signed their “didactic contract” years and years ago. They signed it. Their math teachers signed it. The agreement says that the teacher comes into class, tells them what they’re going to learn, and shows them three examples of it. In return, the students take what their teacher showed them and reproduce it twenty times before leaving class. Then they go home with an assignment to reproduce it twenty more times. Then here you come, Ms. I-Just-Got-Back-From-A-Workshop, and you want to change the agreement? Yeah, you’ll hear from their attorney. Applies to management as much as to teaching.
2. Fixing Signin — The general principle can be stated simply, in two parts: first, give users a trust-worthy way to identify themselves. Second, do so with as little information as possible, because users don’t want to (and simply can’t) remember things like passwords in a secure way. (via Tim Bray)
3. Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi (Adafruit) — finally, a clear incentive for kids to work through the frustration of setting up their own Linux box.
4. Mieko Haire — Apple’s fictious demo lady. Or is she fictitious? This is a new aesthetic-esque glitch, but while most glitches are glitches because you see something that doesn’t exist, this is glitchy because the fictions are actual people. Ok, maybe I need to lay off the peyote.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 12 June 2013

June 12, 2013 - 3:16am

1. geogit — opengeo project exploring the use of distributed management of spatial data. [...] adapts [git's] core concepts to handle versioning of geospatial data. Shapefiles, PostGIS or SpatiaLite data stored in a change-tracking repository, with all the fun gut features for branching history, merging, remote/local repos, etc. BSD-licensed. First sound attempt at open source data management.
2. Introducing Loupe — Etsy’s monitoring stack. It consists of two parts: Skyline and Oculus. We first use Skyline to detect anomalous metrics. Then, we search for that metric in Oculus, to see if any other metrics look similar. At that point, we can make an informed diagnosis and hopefully fix the problem.
3. Bluetooth-Controlled Robotic Cockroach (Kickstarter) — ’nuff said. (via BoingBoing)
4. Nature Sounds of New Zealand — if all the surveillance roboroach anomaly detection drone printing stories get to you, put this on headphones and recharge. (caution: contains nature)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 11 June 2013

June 11, 2013 - 8:05am

1. For Example — amazing discussion of 3D visualization techniques, full of examples using the D3.js library and bl.ocks.org example gist system. Gorgeous and informative.
2. Anti-Gravity 3D Printer — uses strands to sculpt on any surface. (via Slashdot)
3. How 3D Printing Will Rebuild Reality (BoingBoing) — But even though home 3D-printing has received substantial publicity of late, it is in the industrial sector where the technology will probably make its most significant near-term impact on the world both by manufacturing improved commercial products and by stimulating industry to develop next-generation fab methods and machines that could one day truly bring 3D-printing home to users in a real way.
4. The Emotional Side of Big Data — Personal Democracy Forum 2013 talk by Sara Critchfield, on reframing emotion as data for decision-making. (via Quartz)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 10 June 2013

June 10, 2013 - 9:03pm

1. Anatomy of Two Memes — comparing the spread of Gangnam Style to Harlem Shake. Memes are like currencies: you need to balance accessibility (or ‘money supply’) and inflation. Gangnam Style became globally accessible through top-down mainstream sources (High Popularity), but this gave it high social inflation so it wasn’t valuable to share (Low Shareability). However, scale sustained its long term growth. Harlem Shake was not as easily accessible because it was driven more by small communities (Low Popularity), but for the same reason, being less easily accessible, it remained highly valuable (High Shareability). Lack of scale was what made Harlem Shake growth short-term and eventually killed it prematurely. Caution: contains fauxconomics.
2. Handedness (Github) — determine left or right handedness from pinch gesture.
3. Innovation Cartography — video of a talk by Richard Jefferson of Cambia’s lens, on the imperative to innovate held at the Skoll World Forum on Social Enterprise. His story of maritime cartography (starts around 5m50s) is awesome.
4. Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go — or “crack for Nat” as I like to translate that title.

Categories: Tech: General Technology