Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for February 4th through February 11th:

• Schneier on Security: Interview with a Nigerian Internet Scammer – "We had something called the recovery approach. A few months after the original scam, we would approach the victim again, this time pretending to be from the FBI, or the Nigerian Authorities. The email would tell the victim that we had caught a scammer and had found all of the details of the original scam, and that the money could be recovered. Of course there would be fees involved as well. Victims would often pay up again to try and get their money back."
• xkcd – Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games – n = Google hits for "strip <game name>" / Google hits for "<game name>"
• PeteSearch: How to split up the US – Visualization of social network clusters in the US. "information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there's a line between them.

  Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South."

• Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile | Linux Magazine – Sort of like memcache. "Calling redis a key/value store doesn’t quite due it justice. It’s better thought of as a “data structures” server that supports several native data types and operations on them. That’s pretty much how creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (known as antirez) describes it in the documentation. Let’s dig in and see how it works."
• Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

These are my links for January 30th through February 4th:

• Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume Explains Why He’s The Renaissance Man For the Job – Davinci – Gizmodo – At one time in history, even da Vinci himself had to pen a resume to explain why he was a qualified applicant. Here's a translation of his letter to the Duke of Milan, delineating his many talents and abilities. "Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below..The document, written when da Vinci was 30, is actually more of a cover letter than a resume; he leaves out many of his artistic achievements and instead focuses on what he can provide for the Duke in technologies of war.
• jsMath: jsMath Home Page – The jsMath package provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of unix. It overcomes a number of the shortcomings of the traditional method of using images to represent mathematics: jsMath uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at the full resolution of your printer, and you don't have to wait for dozens of images to be downloaded in order to see the mathematics in a web page. There are also advantages for web-page authors, as there is no need to preprocess your web pages to generate any images, and the mathematics is entered in TeX form, so it is easy to create and maintain your web pages. Although it works best with the TeX fonts installed, jsMath will fall back on a collection of image-based fonts (which can still be scaled or printed at high resolution) or unicode fonts when the TeX fonts are not available.
• Josh on the Web » Blog Archive » Abusing the Cache: Tracking Users without Cookies – To track a user I make use of three URLs: the container, which can be any website; a shim file, which contains a unique code; and a tracking page, which stores (and in this case displays) requests. The trick lies in making the browser cache the shim file indefinitely. When the file is requested for the first – and only – time a unique identifier is embedded in the page. The shim embeds the tracking page, passing it the unique ID every time it is loaded. See the source code.

  One neat thing about this method is that JavaScript is not strictly required. It is only used to pass the message and referrer to the tracker. It would probably be possible to replace the iframes with CSS and images to gain JS-free HTTP referrer logging but would lose the ability to store messages so easily.

• Panopticlick – Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 342,943 tested so far.

  Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.39 bits of identifying information.

  The measurements we used to obtain this result are listed below. You can read more about the methodology here, and about some defenses against fingerprinting here

These are my links for December 31st through January 17th:

• Khan Academy – The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

  We have 1000+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan.

• StarCraft AI Competition | Expressive Intelligence Studio – AI bot warfare competition using a hacked API to run StarCraft, will be held at AIIDE2010 in October 2010.
  The competition will use StarCraft Brood War 1.16.1. Bots for StarCraft can be developed using the Broodwar API, which provides hooks into StarCraft and enables the development of custom AI for StarCraft. A C++ interface enables developers to query the current state of the game and issue orders to units. An introduction to the Broodwar API is available here. Instructions for building a bot that communicates with a remote process are available here. There is also a Forum. We encourage submission of bots that make use of advanced AI techniques. Some ideas are:
  * Planning
  * Data Mining
  * Machine Learning
  * Case-Based Reasoning
• Measuring Measures: Learning About Statistical Learning – A "quick start guide" for statistical and machine learning systems, good collection of references.
• Berkowitz et al : The use of formal methods to map, analyze and interpret hawala and terrorist-related alternative remittance systems (2006) – Berkowitz, Steven D., Woodward, Lloyd H., & Woodward, Caitlin. (2006). Use of formal methods to map, analyze and interpret hawala and terrorist-related alternative remittance systems. Originally intended for publication in updating the 1988 volume, eds., Wellman and Berkowitz, Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge University Press). Steve died in November, 2003. See Barry Wellman’s “Steve Berkowitz: A Network Pioneer has passed away,” in Connections 25(2), 2003. It has not been possible to add the updating of references or of the quality of graphics that might have been possible if Berkowitz were alive. An early version of the article appeared in the Proceedings of the Session on Combating Terrorist Networks: Current Research in Social Network Analysis for the New War Fighting Environment. 8th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium. National Defense University, Washington, D.C June 17-19, 2003
• SSH Tunneling through web filters | s-anand.net – Step by step tutorial on using Putty and an EC2 instance to set up a private web proxy on demand.
• PyDroid GUI automation toolkit – GitHub – What is Pydroid?

  Pydroid is a simple toolkit for automating and scripting repetitive tasks, especially those involving a GUI, with Python. It includes functions for controlling the mouse and keyboard, finding colors and bitmaps on-screen, as well as displaying cross-platform alerts.
  Why use Pydroid?

  * Testing a GUI application for bugs and edge cases
  o You might think your app is stable, but what happens if you press that button 5000 times?
  * Automating games
  o Writing a script to beat that crappy flash game can be so much more gratifying than spending hours playing it yourself.
  * Freaking out friends and family
  o Well maybe this isn't really a practical use, but…

• Time Series Data Library – More data sets – "This is a collection of about 800 time series drawn from many different fields.Agriculture Chemistry Crime Demography Ecology Finance Health Hydrology Industry Labour Market Macro-Economics Meteorology Micro-Economics Miscellaneous Physics Production Sales Simulated series Sport Transport & Tourism Tree-rings Utilities"
• How informative is Twitter? » SemanticHacker Blog – "We undertook a small study to characterize the different types of messages that can be found on Twitter. We downloaded a sample of tweets over a two-week period using the Twitter streaming API. This resulted in a corpus of 8.9 million messages (”tweets”) posted by 2.6 million unique users. About 2.7 million of these tweets, or 31%, were replies to a tweet posted by another user, while half a million (6%) were retweets. Almost 2 million (22%) of the messages contained a URL."
• Gremlin – a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language – GitHub – Gremlin is a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language developed in Java 1.6+ for key/value-pair multi-relational graphs known as property graphs. Gremlin makes extensive use of the XPath 1.0 language to support complex graph traversals. This language has applications in the areas of graph query, analysis, and manipulation. Connectors exist for the following data management systems:

  * TinkerGraph in-memory graph
  * Neo4j graph database
  * Sesame 2.0 compliant RDF stores
  * MongoDB document database

  The documentation for Gremlin can be found at this location. Finally, please visit TinkerPop for other software products.

• The C Programming Language: 4.10 – by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft – void Rlyeh
  (int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) {
  int Ia, fhtagn;
  if (wgah>=nagl) return;
  swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2);
  fhtagn = wgah;
  for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia<=nagl; Ia++)
  if (mene[Ia]<mene[wgah])
  swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia);
  swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn);
  Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1);
  Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl);

  } // PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU!

• How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation – This is so Meta – "Save your email list as a CSV file (just comma separate those email addresses). Upload this file to your facebook account as if you wanted to add them as friends. Voila, facebook will give you all the profiles of all those users (in my test, about 80% of my email lists have facebook profiles). Now, click through each profile, and because of the new default facebook settings, which makes all information public, about 95% of the user info is available for you to harvest."
• Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL): Tools Repository – A collection of previously internal-only security tools from Microsoft, including anti-xss, fuzz test, fxcop, threat modeling, binscope, now available for free download.
• Analytics X Prize – Home – Forecast the murder rate in Philadelphia – The Analytics X Prize is an ongoing contest to apply analytics, modeling, and statistics to solve the social problems that affect our cities. It combines the fields of statistics, mathematics, and social science to understand the root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Understanding these relationships and discovering the most highly correlated variables allows us to deploy our limited resources more effectively and target the variables that will have the greatest positive impact on improvement.
• PeteSearch: How to find user information from an email address – FindByEmail code released as open-source. You pass it an email address, and it queries 11 different public APIs to discover what information those services have on the user with that email address.
• Measuring Measures: Beyond PageRank: Learning with Content and Networks – Conclusion: learning based on content and network data is the current state of the art There is a great paper and talk about personalization in Google News they use content for this purpose, and then user click streams to provide personalization, i.e. recommend specific articles within each topical cluster. The issue is content filtering is typically (as we say in research) "way harder." Suppose you have a social graph, a bunch of documents, and you know that some users in the social graph like some documents, and you want to recommend other documents that you think they will like. Using approaches based on Networks, you might consider clustering users based on co-visitaion (they have co-liked some of the documents). This scales great, and it internationalizes great. If you start extracting features from the documents themselves, then what you build for English may not work as well for the Chinese market. In addition, there is far more data in the text than there is in the social graph
• mikemaccana’s python-docx at master – GitHub – MIT-licensed Python library to read/write Microsoft Word docx format files. "The docx module reads and writes Microsoft Office Word 2007 docx files. These are referred to as 'WordML', 'Office Open XML' and 'Open XML' by Microsoft. They can be opened in Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Mac Office 2008, OpenOffice.org 2.2, and Apple iWork 08. The module was created when I was looking for a Python support for MS Word .doc files, but could only find various hacks involving COM automation, calling .net or Java, or automating OpenOffice or MS Office."

These are my links for June 3rd through June 4th:

• MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes – marcua’s blog – Fall 2008 course notes on database systems, spanning history of databases and data structures up through mapreduce style systems.
• Ray Ozzie’s cloud hangs over the Valley | Beyond Binary – CNET News – Notes from Ray Ozzie talk on Microsoft and the cloud at Churchill Club, June 2009. Would be interesting to hear more of his thoughts on Google Wave, given his past work on Notes and Groove.
• Matasano Chargen » Blog Archive » Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! – An epic discussion of shortcomings in various common encryption implementations for web applications, presented in the form of a somewhat random screenplay.
• Is Twitter A Substitute For Set Top Box Data? – The post describes a little experiment Simulmedia did to analyze TV channel surfers using only Twitter posts as their data source. Simulmedia explains why they turned to Twitter data for this work:
• NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream | Linux Magazine – A log structured (as opposed to journaling) file system with some advantages for write performance and shorter crash recovery times. Good for large working file systems?

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• jqPlot – Pure Javascript Plotting – jqPlot is a plotting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. jqPlot produces beautiful line and bar charts with many features including: Numerous chart style options. Date axes with customizable formatting. Rotated axis text. Automatic trend line computation. Tooltips and data point highlighting. Sensible defaults for ease of use.
• New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org – "Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%."
• Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality – 2003 article on popularity / traffic on blogs, which was then the latest emerging social media format. "Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes. "
• well-formed.eigenfactor.org : Visualizing information flow in science – Some nice visualization ideas using hierarchical clustering to explore patterns in citation networks.
• Bing API, Version 2.0 – Updated API documentation for Microsoft Bing (formerly Live Search) web services.

These are my links for May 29th from 05:17 to 12:45:

• Some stats from Twitter conference compared to… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed – Anecdotal data from 140tc this week. 200 tweets/second at peak. Didn't see an estimate of current user account population though, I keep seeing site unique visitor estimates, which aren't useful.
• Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters | Zoho Blogs – "The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? It comes down to one word: karma."
• makerfaire.com: Maker Faire – This weekend at San Mateo Expo Center
• Google Wave Federation Protocol‎ –
• Google Wave API Overview – Google Wave API – Google Code – APIs for Google Wave email / bbs / wiki / chat / collaboration / communications mashup platform introduced yesterday.
• What Emacs Commands Do You Use Most and Find Most Useful? : programming – Reddit thread discussing favorite emacs commands

These are my links for May 24th through May 27th:

• Formulas and game mechanics – WoWWiki – Your guide to the World of Warcraft – Formulas and game mechanics rules and guidelines for developing role playing games
• Manchester United’s Park Has the Endurance to Persevere – NYTimes.com – Korean soccer player Park Ji-Sung – On Wednesday night in Rome, Park is expected to become the first Asian player to participate in the European Champions League final when Manchester United faces Barcelona.
• mloss.org – Machine Learning Open Source Software – Big collection of open source packages for machine learning, data mining, statistical analysis
• The Datacenter as Computer – Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle 2009 (PDF) – 120 pages on large scale computing lessons from Google. "These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base."
• Geeking with Greg: The datacenter is the new mainframe – Pointer to a paper by Googlers Luiz Andre Barroso and Urs Holzle on the evolution of warehouse scale computing and the management and use of computing resources in a contemporary datacenter.

These are my links for May 21st from 06:07 to 22:34:

• Data.gov Launches to Mixed Reviews | Wired Science | Wired.com – Commentary and initial reactions to data.gov. Good news – government is taking steps to improve access to public data. Bad news – limited catalog of datasets to start (47). But it's going in the right direction.
• IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize – Robert M. Bell, Jim Bennett, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. A look at collaborative filtering and other predictive clustering systems used by one team competing for the Netflix prize, in which the goal is a 10% improvement over the original Cinematch recommendation system.
• bb: 21may2009 – (opinion) Graphic of the gap between how people (and companies) succeed, and how people think they succeed.
• Seventeen things that people are actually saying when they retweet others – meish dot org: life, unfolding – A look at various reasons why messages are retweeted on Twitter.
• Expanding the Cloud: Moving large data sets into Amazon S3 with AWS Import/Export. – All Things Distributed – More on shipping data to S3 via hard drive from Werner Vogels
• Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! – Tanenbaum-style bulk transfer for AWS/S3! "Customers with AWS storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level often ask us if they can sidestep the internet and simply send us a disk drive, or even a 747 full of such drives. "

These are my links for May 19th from 08:04 to 19:24:

• List of Really Useful Free Tools For JavaScript Developers | W3Avenue –
• When Korean Culture Flourished – WSJ.com – In the geography of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gallery devoted to Korea acts as a sort of land bridge between China and South Asia that all too often serves as passage rather than destination. The first in a series of shows to be held over the next 10 to 15 years, "Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600" may change this. With only 47 objects(!), the exhibition explores a fertile 200-year period in Korea's cultural history, revealing as much through its choice of works as it does through the order in which it displays them. The show's modest size makes the point that, sadly, little has survived from this period, when the Joseon — or Fresh Dawn — dynasty (1392-1910) united the Korean peninsula militarily, established Confucianism as the national ideology and introduced a phonetic alphabet.
• Axiis : Data Visualization Framework – Axiis provides both pre-built visualization components as well as abstract layout patterns and rendering classes that allow you to create your own unique visualizations. Axiis is built upon the Degrafa graphics framework and Adobe Flex 3.
• Report: Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users – ReadWriteWeb – A lot of people would be interested in that dataset. Tricky to balance data exposure with consumer privacy.
• Lendingclub.com: A De-anonymization Walkthrough « 33 Bits of Entropy – Step by step look at de-anonymizing a consumer data set. Given alternate sources, you can fill in a lot of gaps.

These are my links for May 12th from 10:52 to 21:56:

• An unthinking programmer’s guide to the new C++ • The Register – Must be better for templating or something. Double ampersands and empty curly braces? int&& r2 = foo(); // foo() returns an int ; int i = {}; // i = 0;
• Announcing the Map/Reduce Toolkit – Open Blog – NYTimes.com – Package for making it easier to use mapreduce for batch processing, from NYTimes.
• jQuery-gestures- Image gallery – Demonstration of using jQuery to build a gesture-based user interface (in this case a photo gallery application)
• Dolores Labs Blog » The Programming Language with the Happiest Users – Interesting sentiment analysis based on Twitter messages. Cobol = least happy, Perl = most happy. Some judgement calls here, sentiment was done using 3 people on Mechanical Turk.
• U.S. starting lineup if top American jocks played soccer – Greg Lalas – SI.com – Trying to get my head wrapped around Kobe and Lebron with a ball at their feet.
• Dept. of Science: Don’t!: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – The ability to wait (delayed gratification) is difficult, but learnable. Stanford study of pre-school kids at Bing Nursery School waiting for 1 marshmallow now or 2 later, the kids who were able to wait often ended up more successful in school then career. But some impatient kids learned to wait, now some proposals to teach self control in school.

These are my links for May 8th through May 12th:

• 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends – List of trend tracking sites, plus more in the comments.
• ToorCamp 2009, A Hacker Conference Inside An Abandoned Titan-1 Missile Silo – This looks like fun!
• neo4j open source graph database – Sounds interesting for social media graph hacking. "Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development."
• One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – A sample – "1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix."
• EJW.COM || SETTING THE EXAMPLE – Thoughts on URL shorteners from Eric James Woodward (tr.im / Nambu). tinyurl.com, bit.ly, tr.im etc know what everyone is shortening right now; is 15 minutes of lead time useful? Click throughs depend on audience size and can be gamed, etc.

These are my links for May 6th through May 7th:

• Content Syndication with Case-Hardened JavaScript – kentbrewster.com – Handy code for building Javascript widgets with content from various sources such as Twitter, Digg, Yahoo Pipes, etc.
• Mathematical Atlas: A gateway to Mathematics – "The Mathematical Atlas is a collection of articles about aspects of mathematics at and above the university level, but (usually) not at the level of current research. The goal of this collection is to introduce the subject areas of modern mathematics, to describe a few of the milestone results and topics, and to give pointers to some of the key resources where further information is to be found. Like any good atlas, we try to present several ways to look at each area and to show its relationship with neighboring areas and sub-areas. "
• Three Reasons Why Twitter Will NOT Index the Links You Share – ReadWriteWeb – Argues that Twitter will rely on bit.ly through partnership or acquisition to handle sentiment and semantic analysis of twitter search and link contents.
• Tough Love For Microsoft Search – December 2008 post from Danny Sullivan on Microsoft and the search landscape.
• Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – Malcolm Gladwell, with a reporter at large on Vivek Ranadivé and his NJB girls basketball team, employing asymmetric strategies to overcome conventionally stronger teams, and a broader look at the history of insurgent strategies from David and Goliath, T.E. Lawrence, George Washington, etc.

These are my links for May 5th through May 6th:

• Coding Horror: I Just Logged In As You: How It Happened – On good password management, why forums should mostly not be storing user passwords in general, and how re-use of passwords on multiple sites can lead to vulnerability on other sites.
• Arc Forum | Arc – Arc is a version of Lisp. Among other things it is used to implement Hacker News.
• John Graham-Cumming: Can you trust Paul Graham with your password? – On best practices for storing password hashes to avoid attacks on compromised password files and the use of rainbow files, in a look at Hacker News implementation of passwords
• Deliberate Ambiguity: How *not* to rate a search engine – Search engines have very simple user interfaces, but are used in many different contexts, most of which don't resemble the way people often try out a new search engine.
• The Slow Erosion of Google Search – Bokardo – On changes in internet user behaviors over time, more social media (ask your Twitter friends) vs directed search (send a keyword query) etc.
• Brynn Marie Evans » Why social search won’t topple Google (anytime soon) – On differences between searching through social media such as Twitter, Facebook etc, vs Google etc.
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Stock picking with real-time news – Looking at real time social media trends for trading ideas.
• Lisp’s reputation is so bad that many people don’t even take a look at Lisp | International Lisp Conference 2009 – I haven't touched Lisp in years, except maybe for configuring emacs. A list of possible reasons why Lisp is not more widely used, e.g. "Lisp is old and moldy. It must be primitive by today's standards.", "The exciting languages to learn now are Python, Ruby, Groovy, etc."
• Peering into North Korea – The Big Picture – Boston.com – A collection of recent photos of scenes from North Korea.

These are my links for April 28th through April 29th:

• With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Use Yahoo to query and assemble data from around the internet, manipulate resulting XML recordsets with server side Javascript.
• Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool – Articles – MIX Online – "Makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers."
• Inside Facebook Reports: Why Hasn’t Facebook Grown More in China? – A look at Chinese consumer internet and social media usage, QQ, 51, Xiaonei, Kaixin, and some reasons why there are only around 300,000 Facebook users in China today.
• Facebook maps the swine flu hysteria | The Web Services Report – CNET News – Visualizing interest in swine flu by mapping percentages of mentions on Facebook wall pages, using data from Lexicon.
• Develop Twitter API application in django and deploy on Google App Engine — The Uswaretech Blog – Django Web Development – Walkthrough of a sample Twitter application on Google App Engine, using Django/Python.

These are my links for April 28th from 05:35 to 14:24:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data – Interesting. Wonder if the underlying public data sets will eventually become available on Google App Engine as well, sort of like the public data sets available for use with Amazon EC2 applications.
• MySQL And Search At Craigslist – Jeremy Zawodny's slides on MySQL, Sphinx, and free text search implementation at Craigslist, from last week's MySQL conference.
• Skew, The Frontend Engineer’s Misery @ Irrational Exuberance – For mashups and the like, the distinction between a FE engineer and web dev is rather small in terms of technical skills; they are both using the same skillset, they are both interacting with APIs, and so on. However, there are important distinctions between the two: 1. web developers tend to move in small groups or as individuals, whereas fe engineers work in larger groups, 2. web developers tend to design a product on top of an existing backend service (api, etc), while fe engineers are usually working in parallel with the backend being developed.
• Study: Twitter Audience Does Not Have A Return Policy – Over 60 percent of people who sign up to use the popular (and tremendously discussed) micro-blogging platform do not return to using it the following month, according to new data released by Nielsen Online. In other words, Twitter currently has just a 40 percent retention rate, up from just 30 percent in previous months–indicating an “I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.
• Hey Americans, Appreciate Your Freedom Of Speech : NPR – Firoozeh Dumas on the underappreciated freedoms of speech and expression we have in the US vs journalists and bloggers in Iran.

These are my links for April 24th through April 27th:

• Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps – tech – 27 April 2009 – New Scientist – Building map visualizations using geotagged photos from Flickr.
• Does Hewlett-Packard Need a Dose of Anarchy? – NYTimes.com – When your organization is built on lean, predictable operating excellence (cost cutting, procurement, scale), where do speculative, high risk, growth opportunities come from?
• JavaScript for hackers – Opera Developer Community – On Javascript parser and some eval examples that lead to XSS vulnerabilities
• Processing.js – Javascript port of Processing graphics library, requires Canvas.
• Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition – Face recognition technology startup from CMU, with a demo of tagging faces in video of all episodes of Star Trek (the original series).

These are my links for April 20th through April 23rd:

• What I’ve Learned from Hacker News – Paul Graham on social dynamics and managing Hacker News, user submitted comments and ranking (voting up/down) , editorial intervention and moderators, project goals.
• SEOmoz | Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed! – Looking at variations on algorithms for ranking items on social news aggregators
• NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome – Walkthrough on setting up cached PHP web server on nginx with apc.
• Particletree » PHP Quick Profiler – Lightweight tool for profiling PHP code.
• MySQL’s Full-Text Formulas – Database Journal –
• http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html – Online text-to-speech demo, with various male and female speakers, plus a few translations.
• Dealing with Duplicate Person Data – Proud to Use Perl – Classifying likely duplicate entries in name/address contact data using Levenshtein distance and tables of nickname synonym and assigned distance weights.
• Web Security Horror Stories: The Director’s Cut at <head> – Presentation slides from a talk by Simon Willison on cross site scripting, SQL injection, referer forgery, and clickjacking attacks on web applications.

These are my links for April 18th through April 19th:

• Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design – Stefano’s Linotype – A practical approach to CSS for non-designers (programmers).
• The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions – Presentation slides on improving application user experience by making them more game like (points, levels, scarcity), social interaction, and other ideas.
• Stephen Marsland – Python code from "Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective", assorted clustering and estimation algorithms.
• Firediff – In Case of Stairs – Firediff implements a change monitor that records all of the changes made by firebug and the application itself to CSS and the DOM. This
  provides insight into the functionality of the application as well as provide a record of the changes that were required to debug and tweak the page’s display.
• Crowdsourcing the semantic web | lexanderA – "Currently, all attempts at providing semantic metadata require server-side changes which means that we need to rely on page authors to implement them. This, of course, is a major obstacle. But what if we could change that? What if we could bypass page authors and have the crowd add semantic metadata to existing pages?"
• Just How Important is the Valley? Let’s Look at some Data. – Tony Wright dot com – Is the silicon valley entrepreneurship model specific to SV? List of acquisitions in 2007 and 2008.

These are my links for April 12th through April 13th:

• Google App Engine Blog: Many languages, and in the runtime bind them – Now that AppEngine has a Java environment, there are a lot of possibilities for running other languages on top of the JVM, this is an all-singing, all-dancing shell interpreter demo providing a switchable command line interface to Beanshell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme.
• High Performance Web Sites :: don’t use @import – Summary – use LINK instead of @import for stylesheet references. "Using @import within a stylesheet adds one more roundtrip to the overall download time of the page. Using @import in IE causes the download order to be altered. This may cause stylesheets to take longer to download, which hinders progress rendering making the page feel slower."
• Learn Korean Language :The Official Korea Tourism Guide Site – Flash-based Korean language lessons, from KBS World Radio.
• Korea rate of obesity ranks lowest among OECD nations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily – Korea has lowest obesity rate among 30 OECD countries, at 3.5%, vs the US (#30) at 34.3%.
• FT.com / Weekend / Reportage – Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing? – “High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing,” Patrick O’Shea, the president of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. “If you have an IQ of 160 or higher,” O’Shea explained, “you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.”

These are my links for April 12th from 17:02 to 19:13:

• Dubai bashing and ‘what-aboutery’ – Joi Ito’s Web – Joi Ito comments on various recent negative articles on Dubai.
• A VR Geek Blog » Diva – Exploring your database in 3D – Visualization tool for looking at relational database structure in 3D, with optional data glove VR interface. Wonder if they ship with the cool techno music that's playing in the demo videos.
• Polar Rose | Naming is sharing! – Face recognition service, currently scans Flickr photo collections for tagging to Facebook names.
• iSerenity – A collection of background / ambient noise, including ocean, rainforest, city street, library, etc
• A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together | High Scalability – Notes on approaches to data caching in web applications.