links
Recently-encountered interesting links.
This is the link-blog part of my usual website, tecznotes.
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Jan 5, 2009
Deep Throat Meets Data Mining
found: 07:54pm
January 5, 2009
"Let's call it data mining in the public interest." How code and data can help journalists.
Soviet Military Maps of Britain
found: 12:21am
January 5, 2009
"I have been researching the history of the Soviet global mapping project and, in particular, the large scale plans of British and Irish towns and cities produced from 1950s to 1990. These are of astonishing accuracy and contain an amazing level of detail, especially considering they were compiled under great secrecy during the Cold War."
Jan 4, 2009
Octocat
found: 10:47pm
January 4, 2009
Charming, but still deeply odd.
Jan 2, 2009
Birdo Studio: Black Thin King
found: 09:39pm
January 2, 2009
= Presstube + Betty Boop
In Praise of Simple Competence
found: 05:26pm
January 2, 2009
"Much of what distinguishes a good bureaucracy from a bad one is how it accomplishes the the trivia of day to day relations with clients and day-to-day problems in maintaining and operating its technology. Accomplishing these trivia may involve considerable planning, complex coordination, and central direction, but is more commonly linked to the effectiveness of large numbers of people doing minor things competently.
...
This appears to be true of armies, factories, postal services, hotels, and universities."
now, more than ever
found: 04:16pm
January 2, 2009
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."
A global map of Accessibility
found: 04:00pm
January 2, 2009
"Wilderness? Only 10% of the land area is remote - more than 48 hours from a large city.
The world is shrinking. Cheap flights, large scale commercial shipping and expanding road networks all mean that we are better connected to everywhere else than ever before. But global travel and international trade and just two of the forces that have reshaped our world. A new map of Travel Time to Major Cities - developed by the European Commission and the World Bank - captures this connectivity and the concentration of economic activity and also highlights that there is little wilderness left."
Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse
found: 11:22am
January 2, 2009
"A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it.
AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down.
...
It's an eviction; a mass eviction that happened under our noses and we let it happen.
...
When we evict people from their webpages, fuck all is required.
...
What, you're paying for something? Check this recent event out, paying subscriber: you have shit. Because of a cascade of EULA and Best Practices, and most importantly, a complete disregard for the importance of this data, we're going to let it happen again. And again. And again."
Jan 1, 2009
New S3 "Requester Pays"
found: 01:43pm
January 1, 2009
"You can now configure an Amazon S3 bucket to bill the requester, rather than you (the bucket owner), for both request and bandwidth fees associated with access to the bucket. Requests against such buckets must be authenticated and bear a header that signifies consent to be billed for the request. Bandwidth between EC2 and S3 within a region remains free of charge when this option is enabled."
I'm leaving Tumblr.
found: 01:41pm
January 1, 2009
"Tumblr doesn't solve that problem. Reblogging is boring. We don't need more curators, we need more creators, and we need ways to aggregate what we do in the real world and connect it with people we care about. There needs to be a hub, flexible enough for new sites and content types to be added and removed as the tides ebb and flow. For the time being, that'll be a personal site for me. We'll see what happens."
Leah Evans
found: 12:30pm
January 1, 2009
"My quilted wall hangings consist of layers of the following techniques: applique, reverse applique, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches. There is an overall balance between hand and machine work.
My current work combines aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery. I also find myself drawn to the more minute systems of the microbial world.
...
It is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests me most of all."
Dec 31, 2008
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits
found: 11:27am
December 31, 2008
"An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data."
Shaka, When The Walls Fell
found: 02:36am
December 31, 2008
The Power of (Right Wing) Myth:
"In 'Darmok' (originally aired 1991) the crew of the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, a people with an incomprehensible language. 'We come in peace,' say the Enterprise crew. 'Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra,' reply the Tamarians. 'Temba, his arms wide.' The Next Generationers are baffled.
...
When I saw this episode I wondered how a people who speak only in metaphors could develop technology. ... But let's worry about that some other time. The point I want to make here is that when righties talk about history, they are not talking about what actually happened in the past. Instead, they are evoking historical persons and events as archetype and allegory."
SpatiaLite
found: 12:30am
December 31, 2008
"...enables SQLite to support spatial data too [aka GEOMETRY], in a way conformant to OpenGis specifications.
Supports standard WKT and WKB formats.
Implements SQL spatial functions such as AsText(), GeomFromText(), Area(), PointN() and alike.
The complete set of OpenGis functions is supported via GEOS, this comprehending sophisticated spatial analysis functions such as Overlaps(), Touches(), Contains() and so on."
Dec 30, 2008
A cartography boom offers new ways to see the world
found: 03:04pm
December 30, 2008
"Maps have increasingly become vehicles not just for telling us how the world looks, but for organizing and representing all sorts of information.
The past year saw an explosion of such maps, portraying everything from earthquake devastation to voting patterns to international reading habits - often made on the fly, by citizens, in response to events."
Dec 29, 2008
Sakurako Shimizu: Waveform Jewelry
found: 10:14pm
December 29, 2008
"Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell."
The earrings are inspired, the bracelet is beautiful.
Dec 26, 2008
Act Like An Architect
found: 09:43pm
December 26, 2008
"At every stage of the economic chain, from investment to implementation, the creation of value is an act of design. Design thinking is spread all along the sequence, but it is most condensed at the end, when the confluence of money, will, culture and stuff must coalesce into some sort of interaction, or object, or structure, or space. If there is no thing, no construct at the end of all these transactions, then the whole set of deals collapses as nothing more than a ponzi scheme.
... no matter what you do in 2009, act like an architect."
Dijkstra on Radical Novelty
found: 01:56pm
December 26, 2008
Talk notes from 1988:
"The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us. Earlier scientific examples are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; later technological examples are the atom bomb and the pill."
The radical novelty of the automatic computer can be found in large numbers and digital (as opposed to analog) implementation: small changes, potentially big effects. Towards the final third this amazing talk becomes a bit uptight.
Communing Through Search
found: 12:14am
December 26, 2008
"In 2006 i tried shrooms for the first time. Me and my webmaster set up up a play room and off we went. While rolling a joint proved to be a task quite beyond our means, typing into google was not. I had heard some rumours about this interesting AOL search database that had gotten out, and we quickly located the mother lode. As we started digging into it through laughter and confusion, reading what was often these people's stories, their most intimate fears and the challenges they faced, we experienced a profound communion with them. We were in their minds, typing through their fingers, understanding their humanity perhaps better than at any other time, having removed the filters in our head and also the filters on these people's thoughts. It was a remarkable experience and one that i will always treasure."
Dec 25, 2008
Climate Man
found: 01:08am
December 25, 2008
"...defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading 'no new coal'. He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence.
...
This is a different league to protesters chaining themselves to equipment. It's someone treating a power station as an adventure playground."
A brief history of moral panics
found: 12:57am
December 25, 2008
"To recap, our brief history of moral panics sees a pattern emerging which is not to do with general social standards changing, but to do with the same panic happening at different dates around different media. If we use moral panics as a way to measure how hot a medium is, we get something like this: Books: hot in 1959ish. Pop Music: "bigger than Jesus" in 1965 (vinyl, pop) and 1985ish (CD, rap). Film-in-cinema: peak in power 1976ish. Film-on-VHS: peaks 1984ish. Internet: considered at its most dangerous circa 1996. Computer games: hot and dangerous now, baby!
Ambitious young media turks take note -- don't waste your time dabbling with Daddy's toxins. No moral panic, no credibility. Not inappropriate? Not appropriate."
PyEphem
found: 12:35am
December 25, 2008
"PyEphem provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language. Given a date and location on the Earth's surface, it can compute the positions of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and their moons, and of any asteroids, comets, or earth satellites whose orbital elements the user can provide. Additional functions are provided to compute the angular separation between two objects in the sky, to determine the constellation in which an object lies, and to find the times at which an object rises, transits, and sets on a particular day."
Dec 24, 2008
INAV: Interactive Network Active-traffic Visualization
found: 02:04pm
December 24, 2008
Graphical view of live network traffic made with Prefuse Toolkit and accompanied by piano.
Should we worry that Google is watching?
found: 11:52am
December 24, 2008
Ethan Zuckerman on Hal Roberts on surveillance:
"Hal uses the term to explain systems like Google because it allows him access to a set of insights from Foucault and others regarding the alienation individuals feel confronted by systems that watch them, control them and aren't entirely understandable. I find that the term 'surveillance' brings me directly to ideas about direct physical control - the ruling party's police watching you vote and taking you out for a beating if you vote the wrong way. A term that includes everything from tapping the lines of human rights activists to arrest them for treason through watching whether I click result two or three when searching for 'sumo' seems like a badly overloaded term.
Harry Lewis has a helpful response to this complaint - he posits a form of watching that would be surveillance if governments did it."
Small-scale PageRank
found: 11:06am
December 24, 2008
Using your laptop to compute PageRank for millions of webpages: smallish vector multiplication code for big corpuses in small memory footprints.
Inner City Boundaries
found: 12:49am
December 24, 2008
"It came as something of a surprise to me to learn that the Bay Area was once racially segregated.
...
East Oakland is today a ghetto in the sense of 'a bad place to live,' but it's helpful to remember that it was once a ghetto in the original sense of the term, i.e., 'minorities must live within these quarters.' San Leandro in particular was very aggressive in using restrictive covenants to make sure no black East Oaklanders spilled over into its borders.
...
The situation began to change in the 70's, but by then the die had been cast. It's hard to believe that social policies from 30+ years ago would leave such a lasting imprint, but the evidence is right in front of our eyes."
Dec 23, 2008
Decide, Then Convince
found: 01:37pm
December 23, 2008
Bob Sutton:
"1) Decide To Do Something That Will Probably Fail,
2) Then Convince Yourself And Everyone Else That Success is Certain.
...there is a true ethical dilemma in the world of innovation. If you are on top of portfolio, being optimistic and funding optimists, increases your hit rate, but as March says, for the typical person, project, or company in the portfolio, the effect is to 'entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism).'
...
The same optimism that increases the odds of success also can lead to escalating commitment to a failing course of action."
My sense is that step two is the hard & interesting bit.
DeepEarth
found: 01:28pm
December 23, 2008
"DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience." OpenStreetMap London used as front & center example on this page.
Behind the Results
found: 11:28am
December 23, 2008
I missed this back in November. USA Today does a really nice thing here with a "squeegee" interface to county-by-county demographics and presidential election results.
Household Wants Indicator
found: 01:19am
December 23, 2008
"The owner of this household wants indicator would have flipped the tag next to a particular foodstuff that had run out to remind her to purchase some more when she next went shopping. Some of the products listed are no longer commonly used such as a bathbrick. This was made at Bridgwater from earth containing lime and used for cleaning polished metal. Isinglass is a whitish, semi-transparent and very pure form of gelatin which comes from the bladders of some freshwater fish. It was used for making jellies."
Dec 21, 2008
Concert Visuals '08
found: 11:50pm
December 21, 2008
Ten most innovative concert visuals from the past year, from XL, Exyzt, UVA, Moment Factory, Universal Everything, Cornelius, Steve DiPaola, Spiral Eyes, and Pixel Addicts.
5 Second Spots
found: 12:24am
December 21, 2008
Possible future of advertising in absurdly-brief moving pictures. These UHU examples in particular are begging for a rapid-fire, breakbeat-noise soundtrack. Paging Madame Chao...
OpenZoom Description Format
found: 12:19am
December 21, 2008
Daniel Gasienica describes an XML format for describing image pyramid resources:
"When we look at multi-scale or multi-resolution imaging in 2008,1 we're mostly looking at a pile of image files (called tiles) that make up an image pyramid. Typically, image file formats, e.g. JPEG and PNG, have stored their properties such as width and height inside the file. These formats acted not only as carrier of image data but also as container for the metadata associated with it. This is a manifestation of the The Truth Is in the File paradigm."
Dec 17, 2008
Along The Way
found: 09:26am
December 17, 2008
BART construction film from 1968.
"Over the hills and all along the way, we're building a train for tomorrow, we're building a dream for tomorrow ... where trains that cross the hills and land go through the town by night and day, sunshine touches every hand in parks where children play."
Dec 16, 2008
BART added commas
found: 06:17pm
December 16, 2008
Small UI intervention that makes the riding experience a bit better... would appreciate more informative time/schedule messaging less noisy community/fundraising messaging.
"Riders waiting on BART platforms have noticed something new in the past couple of weeks about the electronic signs overhead displaying the number of minutes until the next train arrives. Now the signs are displaying how long until the next TWO trains arrive on a particular line."
The State of Transit Routing
found: 12:44pm
December 16, 2008
O'Reilly Radar looks at routing applications for transit, with lengthy comments from Ian White and Stefan Knecht that are especially interesting. How open is open, and where does data come from?
Web Ops Visualizations Group on Flickr
found: 12:35pm
December 16, 2008
"This group is for sharing visualizations of web operations metrics. For the most part, this means graphs of systems and application metrics, from software like ganglia, cacti, hyperic, etc."
Project Management Lingo
found: 11:57am
December 16, 2008
Excellent collection of PM jargon:
"Come to Beavis meeting"
"Consistify"
"Enterprise phase"
"Gantt flotsam"
"I’m going to have to push back on that"
"Permalancing"
"Ready fire aim"
"Then a miracle occurs"
Not quite what I had in mind
found: 12:25am
December 16, 2008
George Oates, on a nonsensical exit:
"I watched as my access to various parts of the guts of Flickr fell away. I noticed how naturally I searched for any and all bits I could think of, just in the hope that it still existed. But no. I was shut out entirely within about 14 hours of the phone call."
Dec 15, 2008
An Imperial Palimpsest on Poland's Electoral Map
found: 06:46pm
December 15, 2008
"The divide between the (more free-market) PO and the (more populist) PiS almost exactly follows the old border between Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia, as it ran through Poland! How about that for a long-lasting cultural heritage?!?"
Dec 14, 2008
On Packaging
found: 10:46am
December 14, 2008
James Bennett explains various conflicting philosophies on package management and dependency handling in Python.
Dec 13, 2008
Soft Sites: Masonville Cove
found: 09:00pm
December 13, 2008
Fred Scharmen uncovers the past and future of one small piece of Baltimore's coast.
"Erosion is constantly filling the harbor and the bay. For centuries, dredging has been the invisible accompaniment of transport and logistics. More and more things need to be moved, ships get bigger, channels get deeper, and spoils from dredge are used to build new land and new terminals for larger vessels, which then create even more turbulent churn. Shipping, development, erosion, wakes, and dredging are then caught in a feedback loop, each link in the circle generating more of the next.
If the Head is growing with increased erosion and shipping, this is the local effect of a global cycle that also began here."
Dec 12, 2008
Where is East Oakland?
found: 01:15pm
December 12, 2008
V Smoothe muses on the identification of neighborhoods, with links to various historical & current surveys on East Bay self-identification, psychogeography, etc.
The Bourne Infrastructure
found: 09:29am
December 12, 2008
"Rather than Bond's private infrastructure expensive of cars and toys, Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower.
A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities."
Dec 11, 2008
Fabric
found: 05:46pm
December 11, 2008
"Fabric is a simple pythonic remote deployment tool.
It is designed to upload files to, and run shell commands on, a number of servers in parallel or serially. These commands are grouped in tasks (regular python functions) and specified in a 'fabfile.'
It is a bit like a dumbed down Capistrano, except it's in Python, doesn't expect you to be deploying Rails applications, and the 'put' command works."
Working at Google, Working at Meetup
found: 09:32am
December 11, 2008
Posting this old compare/contrast because it's all about the difference between a separate environment vs. an integrated one, suburban vs. urban. Google has a chef, Meetup has NYC's 18,000+ restaurants. We work in the Mission District, same reason.
Dec 10, 2008
Map Shanty
found: 11:17pm
December 10, 2008
"As public geospatial consciousness expands, we have an opportunity to affect the way the world is seen and represented. The Radical Map Shanty seeks to develop geographic literacy and expand perceptions of the physical and mental spaces we occupy. We think the rooftop of a frozen lake is the perfect place for it."
Outlier, Safety and Motion
found: 04:11pm
December 10, 2008
Abe Burmeister:
"What I set out to design, and what Tyler [Clemens] was working on before we linked up, is clothing that gives the complete freedom to move through the city on a bike. But by moving we don't just in the traditional physical sense, but instead we deal with three very different vectors of motion: physical or mechanical motion, liquid motion and social motion.
The physical is where traditional cycling clothing actually works well....
Ultimately though we really are focused on social mobility. People need to feel comfortable where ever they show up, and that means wearing clothing that matches the setting."
Citroen CX
found: 01:09pm
December 10, 2008
French commercial, Jean Paul Goude starring Grace Jones.
Dec 9, 2008
GenDisasters
found: 11:53pm
December 9, 2008
"Find Over 9800 Disaster Articles Added, Browse by type of
Disaster, State or Year. New - Canada Disasters.
Add Articles to the Disaster Database! Add Comments or More information to the existing disaster articles!"
Google's User Data Empire
found: 11:22pm
December 9, 2008
"Even ignoring Google's less than benevolent intentions, can anyone imagine a data breach? No company is truly secure. 4 years ago the entire member database of the largest porn network on the planet was available(including passwords) for 1 grand. over 500,000 records. There have been data breaches at pharmaceutical companies, leaking millions customer records, down to the pill they took and when the prescription was up. Government servers get compromised, credit bureaus get compromised. So why would Google be any different?"
The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers
found: 09:16am
December 9, 2008
Clay Shirky on seeing the impending collapse of newspapers in 1995: "So I'm calling bullshit on the Rosenbaum thesis, because no one has been 'caught up in this great upheaval.' Caught up? That makes it sound like a tornado. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move."
"45o 46' 48. 94'' N 8o 02' 26. 11'' W"
found: 08:24am
December 9, 2008
Artwork by Carlo Ferris. I'm uncomfortable just looking at it.
Dec 8, 2008
The 25-Line ActionScript Contest
found: 02:25pm
December 8, 2008
November/December Finalists. #34 and #59 are especially cool.
OpenStreetMap + Paris + MapServer
found: 11:54am
December 8, 2008
Handsome street map of Paris generated with MapServer, from OSM data.
Dec 7, 2008
Eduard Imhof
found: 06:53pm
December 7, 2008
Eduard Imhof (25 January 1895 - 27 April 1986) was a professor of cartography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, from 1925 - 1965. His fame, which extends far beyond the Institute of Technology, stems from his relief shading work on school maps and atlases. Between 1922 and 1973 Imhof worked on many school maps. He drew and shaded maps of Switzerland as well her various cantons and the Austrian province of Vorarlberg.
Toy Chest
found: 05:31pm
December 7, 2008
"Toy Chest collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects.
...
Also on this page are 'paradigms'--books, essays, digital projects, etc.--that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create."
Interactive Data Visualization at CIID
found: 11:44am
December 7, 2008
"Today marked the beginning of two weeks with Shawn Allen of Stamen Design who will be teaching us Interactive Data Visualization. From the course syllabus..."
Dec 6, 2008
Let's talk about Python 3.0
found: 02:01am
December 6, 2008
"After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English, and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the banana, their answer would almost certainly be: 'Well, I don’t really know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.'"
Transbay Blog: The Price Is Right
found: 01:42am
December 6, 2008
"Implementing congestion pricing to remove automobiles off of San Francisco streets would shorten travel times and make Muni more reliable. But what's even better is that depending on the plan that is ultimately selected, congestion pricing in San Francisco could generate some $35-$65 million each year. That money could be applied to many worthy causes, including (i) increasing frequency of transit service; (ii) enhancing streetscapes by providing pedestrian and bicycle facilities, and calming traffic; and (iii) implementing bus rapid transit on Geary and Van Ness. Which is basically the point."
Dec 5, 2008
Stamen in Contagious and Esquire
found: 11:08pm
December 5, 2008
We get a meaty, multi-page article loaded with quotes and illustrations in Contagious.
Dec 4, 2008
Noncontiguous Area Cartograms
found: 09:52am
December 4, 2008
"Fully contiguous cartograms have stretched and distorted borders but perfectly maintained topologies. Like the Gastner-Newman diffusion-based cartograms we see all over the place. Though all sorts of cartogram designs have been produced, those with perfect topology preservation (fully contiguous cartograms) receive the majority of academic and popular press attention.
Some notable exceptions are the well done animated ones by Mapping Worlds and a recent NY Times example showing electors per voter that I’ll return to later. These fully noncontiguous cartograms preserve the shapes of enumeration units perfectly, but don’t even attempt to preserve any borders or adjacencies from the original map."
Dec 3, 2008
Garden Of Eden
found: 01:52pm
December 3, 2008
"Garden of Eden, 2007 by Wollle shows eight pedestals, each of which is covered with an airtight Plexiglas box. Via the internet, the latest air pollution levels in the capitals of the G8-countries are obtained. The system reproduces these levels artificially inside these boxes, each of which contains a lettuce that serves an indicator of the quality of the air inside the capsules."
Minimuni
found: 09:04am
December 3, 2008
Paul Hammond's SF Muni iPhone app: "If you live exactly 6 minutes from Sunset Tunnel East Portal, 8 minutes from Duboce and Church, and 10 minutes from Church Station you may find it useful too."
John F. Burns, Martial Law in Poland
found: 12:42am
December 3, 2008
"The first official Soviet comment on events in Poland said today that they were 'an internal matter.' It described any 'different interpretation' implying Soviet manipulation as an attempt in itself to interfere in Polish affairs.
The statement, issued by the Government's press agency Tass, indicated that the Kremlin, was eager to counter charges in the West that Soviet pressure had forced the Polish authorities to impose martial law and suspend the operations of the Solidarity trade union, and the statement did not explicitly endorse the crackdown."
Dec 2, 2008
United Maps
found: 01:53pm
December 2, 2008
"We don't drive vans to produce maps.
United Maps licences professional vector map data from many sources and deploys smart algorithms to conflate vectorized base maps, and actively collects and validates relevant content from a vast spectrum of additional content sources.
United Maps generates a new generation of maps:
richly detailled,
intelligently layered,
interlinked and fully routable."
The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing
found: 01:23pm
December 2, 2008
"It's been possible since Version 6 of Mathematica to embed images directly into lines of code, allowing such stupid code tricks as expanding a polynomial of plots.
But is this really good for anything?
As with many extremely nifty technologies, this feature of Mathematica had to wait a while before the killer app for it was discovered. And that killer app is image processing."
Dec 1, 2008
Hadoop On Ubuntu
found: 06:44pm
December 1, 2008
"In this tutorial, I will describe the required steps for setting up a multi-node Hadoop cluster using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) on Ubuntu Linux." One of these days.
Nov 30, 2008
Fight Mr. Untestable
found: 02:27pm
November 30, 2008
More Misko Hevery on testable code, this time on avoiding global state. See also: "insanity: repeating the same thing and expecting a different result."
OPEN Lecture: Shawn Allen at CIID
found: 11:53am
November 30, 2008
Shawn in Copenhagen on Wednesday.
Homecamp: Demand Shifting
found: 10:44am
November 30, 2008
Interesting: it's possible to measure total demand on the electrical grid from AC frequency skew at any regular socket, and act accordingly.
Nov 29, 2008
Software Craftsmanship 2009
found: 01:22am
November 29, 2008
"This is a conference about the 'hard skills' that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software.
From writing effective unit tests to managing dependencies, and from writing reliable multi-threaded code to building robust and dependable service-oriented architectures."
Nov 28, 2008
What's in a Schedule?
found: 09:51pm
November 28, 2008
"Even for a perfectly reliable system, where exactly is that threshold between using the schedule and using expectations?
How does this threshold change as a function of normal or excessive variability in operations?
What is the best way to integrate real-time data (of varying predicative quality) with realistic expectations for trip planning on-the-go?"
World Capitals in OpenStreetMap and Google Maps
found: 11:47am
November 28, 2008
Next, next, next, next ... very interesting to see the places where OpenStreetMap's coverage beats Google's.
Figment Engine: OpenStreetMap
found: 11:26am
November 28, 2008
Getting OSM data into Silverlight, building a renderer, etc.
Subject To Change
found: 11:13am
November 28, 2008
Page 93:
"You have to recognize that a system will degrade, and make it such that such entropy doesn't shatter the entire experience. the true success of experience design isn't how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong. ... Ultimately instead of providing seamless environment, you want to provide meaningful, beautiful seams into which people can insert themselves, customizing their experience to suit their needs."
Valencia Street Makeover
found: 01:01am
November 28, 2008
"Design schemes for the $6 million makeover of four blocks running between 15th and 19th streets are expected to be complete by the end of December and work to widen sidewalks, plant trees, add bike racks and pedestrian-level street lighting could be done by summer 2010."
Nov 27, 2008
A Year Of Parking Tickets
found: 03:45pm
November 27, 2008
New York Times interactive graphic:
Map of New York City Parking Tickets in 2008.
I.D. - Stamen
found: 12:07am
November 27, 2008
I.D. magazine has a nice little blurb about us.
Nov 25, 2008
Green Guru Gone Wrong
found: 05:55pm
November 25, 2008
On Cradle To Cradle author William McDonough:
"McDonough desperately needs to break the logjam that has stalled him. Just as the global fixation on sustainability is exploding, McDonough's design revolution is paralyzed -- and he is the paralyzing agent, unable to capitalize on his brilliant, crucial idea, but unwilling to set it free.
...
Critics argue that McDonough's work is not transparent or consensus based, and that because he sometimes consults for companies whose products he's also certifying, the whole endeavor is conflicted, if not unethical.
...
McDonough continues to scare off the very forces that could bring his idea to life."
Metal Heart
found: 04:49pm
November 25, 2008
Sped-up, tilt-shift monster truck action. They'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge.
Nov 24, 2008
Maps That Matter
found: 12:58am
November 24, 2008
"We put together a simple slide show of Maps that Matter that was displayed on foyer screen at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in August 2008. The presentation show our initial selection of sixteen influential and iconic images in geography."
Nov 23, 2008
If Gamers Ran The World
found: 04:08pm
November 23, 2008
Tom Armitage: "Well, if they can handle complexity, and they've stocked up all the magic item chests ready for when scarcity hits, and they've failed enough times at the low-stakes games that they know they can make it at the high-stakes ones, and if our environment is one carefully planned out for effective growth rather than rammed together for efficiency, and if they understand how to handle the ever-more complex forms of communications necessary to deal with the large, distributed teams of people necessary to understand complexity - and if they can create a world that supplies and consumes the data necessary to make smart, informed, decisions - then they might just make it awesome."
Nov 22, 2008
Digg Attack
found: 05:28pm
November 22, 2008
"The goal was to create a small game where the action is based on an external data source. It turns out that the Digg API fits that bill fine as it provides both varied data and a steady stream of it, and thus the product, in its current state, is an unusual 2D shooter where the flow of enemies is based on stories that are 'dugg'."
All that is solid melts into lair
found: 03:39pm
November 22, 2008
"But a problem remains for the film-maker: how to show us multiplicity, power and scale (Mr White in Quantum of Solace: 'we are everywhere') - and how to do it with Adamian grandeur and spectacle - in a world whose secret mountain redoubts and dark-side moon bases have been somewhat disappointingly replaced by the physical objects of ubiquitous computing and the ubiquitous metaphoric objects of power..."
Nov 21, 2008
First Image from Mariner 4
found: 11:18pm
November 21, 2008
"A 'real-time data translator' machine converted Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper. Too anxious to wait for the official processed image, employees from the Voyager Telecommunications Section attached these strips side by side to a display panel and hand colored the numbers like a paint-by-numbers picture. The completed image was framed and presented to JPL director, William Pickering. Mariner 4 was launched on November 28, 1964 and journeyed for 228 days to the Red Planet, providing the first close-range images of Mars."
Development Seed Geodata and Mapping
found: 07:32am
November 21, 2008
"We build tools with Drupal and Mapnik that make embracing clear communication techniques and simple yet powerful displays easier to implement. We've developed the technical modules that allow a tool like Drupal to integrate with maps like the one below. We also deploy the infrastructure to power serious mapping servers so your maps and your website stay accessible."
Nov 20, 2008
Death Metal Branding
found: 07:08pm
November 20, 2008
"I am 37 years old, I come from Belgium but I live in Exeter, Devon, in the UK. In the last 20 years I have drawn more than 7,000 logos, mostly for black- and death-metal bands from all over the world, including Emperor, Moonspell, Nachtmystium, and Enthroned.
...
Besides drawing logos, I am a forestry engineer and I have a regular job as a customer-service assistant in retail. I need a job to support my artistic activity." (Christophe Szpajdel)
An Approximate Measure of Technical Debt
found: 12:27pm
November 20, 2008
"Part of the problem is that technical debt is, well, technical, so only programmers can see it. Managers and stakeholders can see the effects of the debt (the aforementioned wailing and gnashing of teeth), but they can't see the cause. So when programmers complain about the quality of the code, they often ignore them. "We're behind schedule already!" they cry, brandishing their whips. "Row faster!" And the poor programmers work as hard they can, taking more shortcuts, incurring more debt, and making things even worse."
Nov 19, 2008
Living Data
found: 11:45am
November 19, 2008
"Data is missing at least five things, all of which be-come both necessary and possible in a world of globally distributed computing:
1) Ownership,
2) Error bars,
3) Sensitivity,
4) Dependency,
5) Semantics.
...
Unfortunately, a lot of the major data movers benefit from not knowing how meaningful their numbers are. A credit bureau just reports the numbers it got from somewhere else; if it were easy to find out how those numbers were collected, then demands for quality control would increase."
Nov 18, 2008
San Francisco Bay Area 24K DEM
found: 12:34am
November 18, 2008
Elevation data for complete SF Bay Area.
Nov 16, 2008
Critique of Data Art
found: 06:53pm
November 16, 2008
"The paper develops the questions that I posted here a while ago, focusing on how artists construct a notion of data while they use it as a creative material. It especially considers the distinction between data and information, arguing that data art often works to defer, abstract or undermine information - in the sense of a formed or contextualised message - and instead offers us a more open or underdetermined experience of the data as abstract pattern and relation. The problem here is that we can't have unmediated access to the abstract data - it's always mapped to something, structured in ways extraneous to the dataset. And data itself is always extracted, made or constructed, not some kind of autonomous digital object." (Mitchell Whitelaw)
Ditching the Semantic Web?
found: 12:23pm
November 16, 2008
"But there was no use of it. I wasn't using any of the technologies for anything, except for things related to the technology itself. The Semantic Web is utterly inbred in that respect. The problem is in the model, that we create this metaformat, RDF, and then the use cases will come. But they haven't, and they won't. Even the genealogy use case turned out to be based on a fallacy."
Obama's Office Of Urban Policy
found: 11:52am
November 16, 2008
"Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."
Code Tactics
found: 11:05am
November 16, 2008
"And just like the chess player solving a tactical puzzle, arm yourself! In chess, there are names for all of the common tactical patterns. Fork, pin, skewer. Discovered check, driving off, piling on. The list goes on a bit, but it's finite. In the same way, there is a jargon for describing code quality in much more concrete terms than the all-too-common (and uselessly vague) "bad smell". There are the basics: use meaningful names, keep it simple stupid (KISS), don't repeat yourself (DRY), be consistent, and so on. Then there are more complex quality issues like cohesion, coupling, information hiding, referential integrity and separation of concerns. Challenge yourself to use the correct terminology, both in describing problems and in suggesting improvements." (David Lowe)
On the loss of history
found: 10:11am
November 16, 2008
"Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian's comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can't imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends - the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages - but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now....
in part a simple reluctance to believe that history is about other people."
Nov 15, 2008
Baumol's cost disease
found: 10:37am
November 15, 2008
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are always closely tied to labor productivity changes.
Information Radiator
found: 12:24am
November 15, 2008
"An Information radiator is a display posted in a place where people can see it as they work or walk by. It shows readers information they care about without having to ask anyone a question. This means more communication with fewer interruptions.
A good information radiator
Is large and easily visible to the casual, interested observer,
Is understood at a glance,
changes periodically, so that it is worth visiting,
is easily kept up to date."
Agile Development Practices
found: 12:06am
November 15, 2008
"So the story of the manifesto is over, really. The time for marketing is past. Now what teams have to do is execute. Here, the news is not so good. A lot of teams execute poorly. Helping you avoid their fate is what this talk's about.
...
Humans + running code are smarter than humans + time.
...
Values: courage, ease, reactivity, naivete, visibility, joy." (Brian Marick)
Nov 14, 2008
End of Wall Street's Boom
found: 06:05pm
November 14, 2008
"Heh heh heh, c'mon. We'd never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade."