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 17th through January 20th:

• PG&E Electrical System Outage Map – This map shows the current outages in our 70,000-square-mile service area. To see more details about an outage, including the cause and estimated time of restoration, click on the color-coded icon associated with that outage.
• Twitter.com vs The Twitter Ecosystem – Fred Wilson comments on some data from John Borthwick indicating Twitter ecosystem use = 3-5x Twitter.com directly.

  "John's chart estimates that Twitter.com is about 20mm uvs a month in the US (comScore has it at 60mm uvs worldwide) and the Twitter ecosystem at about 60mm uvs in the US.

  That says that across all web services, not just AVC, the Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com. And on this blog, whose audience is certainly power users, that ratio is 5x."

• Chris Walshaw :: Research :: Partition Archive – Welcome to the University of Greenwich Graph Partitioning Archive. The archive consists of the best partitions found to date for a range of graphs and its aim is to provide a benchmark, against which partitioning algorithms can be tested, and a resource for experimentation.

  The partition archive has been in operation since the year 2000 and includes results from most of the major graph partitioning software packages. Researchers developing experimental partitioning algorithms regularly submit new partitions for possible inclusion.

  Most of the test graphs arise from typical partitioning applications, although the archive also includes results computed for a graph-colouring test suite [Wal04] contained in a separate annex.

  The archive was originally set up as part of a research project into very high quality partitions and authors wishing to refer to the partitioning archive should cite the paper [SWC04].

• Twitter’s Crawl « The Product Guy – "A list of incidents that affected the Page Load Time of the Twitter product, distinguishing between total downtime, and partial downtime and information inaccessibility, based upon the public posts on Twitters blog.

  http://status.twitter.com/archive

  I did my best to not double count any problems, but it was difficult since many of the problems occur so frequently, and it is often difficult to distinguish, from these status blog posts alone, between a persisting problem being experienced or fixed, from that of a new emergence of a similar or same problem. Furthermore, I also excluded the impact on Page Load Time arising from scheduled maintenance/downtime – periods of time over which the user expectation would be most aligned with the product’s promise of Page Load Time. "

• Soundboard.com – Soundboard.com is the web's largest catalog of free sounds and soundboards – in over 20 categories, for mobile or PC. 252,858 free sounds on 17,171 soundboards from movies to sports, sound effects, television, celebrities, history and travel. Or build, customize, embed and manage your own

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 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 3rd through May 4th:

• Dilbert comic strip for 05/04/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. – Secretary to Pointy Haired Boss: "I live in a rented trailer and all of my money is in my checking account. Your investments are worthless and your mortgage is underwater. My net worth is higher than yours now. I guess promiscuity and a G.E.D. was a pretty good strategy after all." Reminded me of a thought I had earlier this year, that much of Western Civilization is built on valuing delayed gratification, which hasn't worked out so well recently as opposed to immediate consumption in many cases.
• Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) – StatSheet.com ChangeLog – Owner of StatTweets post regarding his network of sports-related Twitter handles being banned. They had several hundred accounts, one for stats for each team. This makes sense for users, given the way Twitter works, but they don't like mass account creation. Interested to see how this sorts out, there seem to be at least a few similar Twitter networks with team/region/topic-specific handles.
• Dooley Online: What URL Shortener Should I Use? – Comparison of features and some usage data for URL shorteners such as tinyurl and bit.ly used on twitter and other services.
• Obesity and Overweight: Trends: U.S. Obesity Trends 1985-2007 | DNPAO | CDC – During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. This slide set illustrates this trend by mapping the increased prevalence of obesity across each of the states. In 2007, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; three of these states (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%. The animated map below shows the United States obesity prevalence from 1985 through 2007.
• Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – A look back to the beginnings of SMS in 1985 – Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said. For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters. Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

These are my links for April 30th from 05:57 to 07:10:

• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – 100 remedies for the fatal flaws exhibited by famous evil overlords of the past. Also some business executives, I think.
• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early | Wired Science – Google’s search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico. And there the team found a pre-media bump in telltale flu-related search terms (you know, “influenza + phlegm + coughing”) that was inconsistent with standard, seasonal flu trends.
• What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees (SCREENSHOTS) – Some screen shots of current admin tools at Twitter for managing user accounts, blocks, whitelisting, suspensions, and user stats such as # follow attempts, # updates, #directs, etc
• Twitter Aggregator Sawhorse Media Raises Seed Round, Launches Pets, Celeb Sites | paidContent.org – "Channelized" feeds from curated lists of twitter sources.

These are my links for April 11th through April 12th:

• Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
• The dark side of Dubai – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent – "Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging."
• Topless Robot – Hot Girls Have Lightsaber Strip-Fight for Your Viewing Pleasure – Star Wars CGI meets fake body spray ad
• Poll Result: Best VPN to leap China’s Great Firewall? – Thomas Crampton – - Witopia – Undisputed winner. Quality of service, speed of surfing, though it is said to be relatively expensive at US$50 to US$60 per year. Hotspot Shield – Bandwidth limits can be painful. Force you to wait until the next month if you use it too much. – Ultrasurf – StrongVPN
• InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph – In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008 (November 2008), Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.
• The Running Man, Revisited § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors.

These are my links for April 9th from 08:07 to 17:53:

• IP address geolocation SQL database – IP address geolocation with MySQL by Marc-Andre Caron. He's done all the necessary legwork to solve this problem, putting together a free, monthly-updated MySQL dataset that will allow you to derive country, region, city, zip, latitude, and longitude from an IP address.
• Del.icio.us Finally Gets Some Respect from Yahoo – Probably Too Late – ReadWriteWeb –
• In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson by Michael Rottman – The Morning News – "7. Do you feel protons decaying? Grand Unification may be occurring near your vital organs. "
• FT.com / Companies / UK companies – Dotcom veterans in Twitter ‘brains trust’ – "Mr Read has brought together a “brains trust” of advisers to Twitter Partners, including Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, founders of Lastminute.com; Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, the London venture capitalists; and Toby Coppel, the former European vice-president at Yahoo."
• byteonic.com » What you cannot do using Java in Google App Engine – List of some restrictions on Java code running on GAE

These are my links for March 16th through April 2nd:

• Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News – Photo and more comments on the Google data center server configuration, 12vdc only, local battery, shown at yesterday's data center power conference.
• Google’s Custom Web Server, Revealed « Data Center Knowledge – 1:30 video of current server configuration, from Google Data Center Energy Summit, April 1, 2009. Open shelf, power supply with built in battery (per-unit UPS) rather than centralized UPS.
• HerHotSpot Uses Facebook Connect to Block Boys Out – Relies on Facebook profile data to limit boys access to site targeting girls only. Uses FBConnect as the exclusive login method.
• SandHill.com | Opinion : Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – Collection of pointers to maps of the cloud computing ecosystem, and a merged map, as of March 2009
• Penny Arcade! – Le Twittre –

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Google Friend Connect APIs – Google Code –
• Geek And Poke – Mostly twitter and cloud computing themed cartoons.
• Official Google Blog: Here comes Google Voice – GrandCentral makes a comeback, after disappearing into Google a while back. Now with voice transcription, SMS folders, and integration with GMail address book.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances – AWS introduces pricing structure for longer term, reserved capacity. Upfront payment, plus a (lower) incremental hourly charge, net savings for continuous 24×7 clients, and guaranteed availability of instances for backup or surge capacity.
• How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent « abovethecrowd.com – Bill Gurley on the case for virtual goods and casual gaming as revenue vehicles on US-based social networking sites, in a look at China-based QQ / TenCent.
• Too Big Has Failed – Thomas Hoenig, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, March 6, 2009 (PDF) – Hoenig argues that too-big-to-fail institutions have failed, US banks will require some form of nationalization eventually.

These are my links for March 6th through March 8th:

• Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming! –
• Wolfram Alpha is Coming — and It Could be as Important as Google | Twine –
• Wolfram Alpha — it’s like plugging into an electronic brain » VentureBeat –
• If browsers were women – Sharenator.org – "[Chrome] Extremely skinny, but very cool and friendly. However, when it comes to the bedroom, she is very inexperienced and has little to offer. [IE] For most, she's the first woman they tried. She's really easy but can get you infected." etc etc
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The coming of the megacomputer – Nick Carr commentary on Rick Rashid's statement that 20% of servers were going to major cloud data centers. Also some interesting discussion in comments.
• FT.com | Tech Blog | How many computers does the world need? – According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
• The New Hot Cuisine: Korean – WSJ.com – Korean food is slowly making its way into mainstream awareness, both high end (French Laundry, Le Bernardin) and everyday (CPK, Kogi BBQ).
• WriteOnIt – Fake pictures – Build fake magazine covers, newspapers, and photos.

These are my links for March 4th through March 6th:

• Welcome to VIPERdb – Scripps – VIPERdb is a database for icosahedral virus capsid structures . The emphasis of the resource is on providing data from structural and computational analyses on these systems, as well as high quality renderings for visual exploration.
• Virus images at VIPERdb – If you have ever wanted to make beautiful images of viruses, in colors of your choice, then go to VIPERdb, the virus particle explorer.
• Reverse HTTP – IETF draft-lentczner-rhttp-00.txt – Formal description of the reverse HTTP proposal for initiating connections through firewalls then reversing server and client roles.
• Reverse HTTP – Second Life Wiki – Experimental protocol which takes advantage of the HTTP/1.1 Upgrade: header to turn one HTTP socket around. When a client makes a request to a server with the Upgrade: PTTH/0.9 header, the server may respond with an Upgrade: PTTH/1.0 header, after which point the server starts using the socket as a client, and the client starts using the socket as a server.
• WTFs/m – The only valid measurement of code quality, WTFs/min

These are my links for March 1st from 22:05 to 22:33:

• Typical Programmer – Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming –
• The Evolution of a Programmer –
• The evolution of a Ruby programmer at Will.Whim –
• The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer –
• The Evolution of a Python Programmer. – TDWTF Forums –
• State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 — The Languages – O’Reilly Radar – O'Reilly update and heatmap visualization on market size and share trends among programming languages. Objective-C got a notable boost from iPhone interest.
• 8 Little Things We Still Can’t Stand About the iPhone – Opportunities for improvement in the iPhone.

These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:

• Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates: FOWA/Miami (Feb 2009) – Aarrrrr! Some practical notes for web startups.
• Experience with the Skype for Asterisk Beta – Skype for Asterisk is working and includes access to presence data. Open beta apparently coming soon.
• Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street – Felix Salmon writes about David Li, the Gaussian copula function, and its widespread (mis)use in pricing derivatives based on correlation only, leading to parts of today's financial crisis.
• Cloud Personality Types… — Dave Graham’s Weblog – What sort of cloud computing personality are you? A growing list of categories and descriptions.
• Xming – PC X Server – A free X server for Windows platforms.

These are my links for February 21st from 13:59 to 21:55:

• Non Sequitur — Gocomics.com – "Hi. My name is Bob, and I'm a Twitter addict…"
• A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition – Christopher J.C. Burges (PDF) – Appeared in: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2, 121-167, 1998. The tutorial starts with an overview of the concepts of VC dimension and structural risk
  minimization. We then describe linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for separable and non-separable
  data, working through a non-trivial example in detail. We describe a mechanical analogy, and discuss
  when SVM solutions are unique and when they are global. We describe how support vector training can
  be practically implemented, and discuss in detail the kernel mapping technique which is used to construct
  SVM solutions which are nonlinear in the data. We show how Support Vector machines can have very large
  (even infinite) VC dimension by computing the VC dimension for homogeneous polynomial and Gaussian
  radial basis function kernels. While very high VC dimension would normally bode ill for generalization
  performance, there are several arguments which support the observed high accuracy of SVMs,
  which we review.
• Data Mining Research – dataminingblog.com: Data Miners on Twitter – A list of data mining people on twitter.
• YouTube – The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Part 1 – Nice animated video attempting to present a simplified explanation of the credit crisis and the relationship between home mortgage lending, bank leverage, and risk.
• “10 Obstacles to Cloud Computing” by UC Berkeley & How GoGrid Hurdles Them | GoGrid Blog – Another commentary on the recent UCB cloud computing overview paper

These are my links for February 20th through February 21st:

• xkcd – A Webcomic – Online Communities – A map of online communities (circa 2007?)
• State of OpenSocial – weekend Apps Feb 20 2009 – Google Docs – Kevin Marks overview of OpenSocial as of February 2009.
• Massive Scrape of Twitter’s Friend Graph « blog.infochimps.org – Sample dataset for research on social graphs. "The infochimps have gathered a massive scrape of the Twitter friend graph. Right now it weighs in at about 2.7M users, 10M tweets, 58M edges."
• getting theinfo: data sets (theinfo) – Another list of publicly accessible data collections online
• Some Datasets Available on the Web » Data Wrangling Blog – List of many research datasets and resources related to data analysis available online, last updated February 2009.
• ICWSM 2009 – International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California. This interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical papers from areas such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies.

These are my links for February 16th through February 17th:

• Top 100 Network Security Tools – Many many security testing and hacking tools.
• FRONTLINE: inside the meltdown: watch the full program – "On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. "There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left," says Sen. Christopher Dodd"
• The Dark Matter of a Startup – "Every successful startup that I have seen has someone within their ranks that just kinda “does stuff.” No one really knows specifically what they do, but its vital to the success of the startup."
• Why I Hate Frameworks – "A hammer?" he asks. "Nobody really buys hammers anymore. They're kind of old fashioned…we started selling schematic diagrams for hammer factories, enabling our clients to build their own hammer factories, custom engineered to manufacture only the kinds of hammers that they would actually need."
• Mining The Thought Stream – Lots of comments around what is Twitter good for and how will it make money, revolving around real/near-time search, analytics, marketing, etc.
• Understanding Web Operations Culture – the Graph & Data Obsession … – Comparison of traffic at Flickr, Google, Twitter, last.fm during the Obama inauguration. "One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate."

A fine depiction of field positions in a typical youth soccer match, from Rhymes With Orange.

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