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site admin | April 23rd, 2009 | Comments are closed
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.
site admin | April 19th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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.
site admin | April 15th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 13th through April 15th:
site admin | April 12th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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.
site admin | April 10th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 9th through April 10th:
site admin | April 9th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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
site admin | April 7th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 3rd through April 7th:
- Agile Testing: Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 – Practical guidance on using cloud computing at EC2. Expect failures, automate deployment, more.
- joshua’s blog: on url shorteners – Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us) summary on the state of URL shorteners (tinyurl, bit.ly, etc), and issues with 3rd party redirects, link sharing through twitter, etc.
- Control Yourself » status.net coming soon – On status.net, plans for hosting laconi.ca sites, and federating microblogging status networks
- There must be some way out of here (Scripting News) – Comments on the rise of celebrity accounts on Twitter, increasing spam/noise, and alternative models for laconi.ca and status.net
- Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites – Tad Hogg, Kristina Lerman 31 Mar 2009 Abstract: We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of individual users. This approach provides a tractable method to understand user activity on the web site and how this activity depends on web site design choices, especially the choice of what information about other users' behaviors is shown to each user. We illustrate this modeling approach in the context of user-created content on the news rating site Digg.
site admin | March 8th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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.
site admin | March 6th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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
site admin | March 3rd, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for March 3rd from 05:48 to 12:10:
site admin | March 2nd, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for March 1st from 22:05 to 22:33:
site admin | February 27th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 26th through February 27th:
site admin | February 26th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 26th from 10:39 to 20:05:
site admin | February 26th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 25th through February 26th:
site admin | February 25th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 24th through February 25th:
- The C10K problem – On techniques for scaling to large number of network clients (e.g. >10000).
- Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Hello, (twitter) world – List of official Yahoo twitter handles for various activities including research, geo, search, and yui.
- New AWS Public Data Sets – Economics, DBpedia, Freebase, and Wikipedia – AWS adds Freebase, DBPedia, Wikipedia extract, and US Transportation data sets.
- eigenclass – Related document discovery, without algebra – Another approach to simple related document discovery, based on tags, should work ok for small data sets.
- SVD Recommendation System in Ruby – igvita.com – A 50 line SVD recommendation / collaborative filtering system for a Rails app. with the help of some simple linear algebra.
site admin | February 24th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:
site admin | February 17th, 2009 | Comments are closed
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."
site admin | February 16th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 15th through February 16th:
- Berkeley cloud report gets mixed reviews | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – James Urqhardt commentary on UCB paper, "The paper begins by setting a definition of Cloud Computing that will be considered controversial by many, as it is firmly in the "there is no cloud computing inside enterprise data centers" camp."
- Above the Clouds: Above the Clouds Released – UC Berkeley RAD Lab starts a new blog and publishes their take on the state of cloud computing.
- Forget Dunbar’s Number, Our Future Is in Scoble’s Number « I’m Not Actually a Geek – A look at changing interaction styles enabled by growing use of online social networks and applications. "If Dunbar’s Number is defined at 150 connections, perhaps we can term the looser connection of thousands as Scoble’s Number. "
- What really happened at Ma.gnolia and lessons learned – Video podcast with Larry Halff describing how Ma.gnolia was implemented (Ruby on Rails), its ongoing operation leading up to the failure of the (1/2 TB) MySQL database a few weeks ago.
- Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites « random($foo) – An overview of packages, services, and approaches for building web systems, circa January 2009. With assorted comments.
- Online Mind Mapping – MindMeister – Web-based, embeddable mind mapping software, sort of like MindJet, wiki-style collaborative editing.
- Jean-Lou Dupont’s WEBlog: Cloud Computing Mind Map – A mind map of companies and projects in the cloud computing space.
site admin | February 15th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 14th through February 15th:
Ho John Lee | November 3rd, 2005 | 1 comment
I came across a cryptic link to mturk.com on supr.c.ilio.us, asking “Isn’t that how the Matrix came to be?”
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial, artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.
All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo code below illustrates how simple this can be.
read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}
Given the source of the link, I was a little skeptical at first read, but it appears to be a legitimate beta project that just launched yesterday at Amazon. At least, the documentation links point back into Amazon Web Services, and at least one person seems to know someone there.
This is an interesting idea that should find some useful applications. Spammers have supposedly been doing something like this to defeat the image-based Turing tests used to screen comment posting systems, offering access to porn in exchange for solving the puzzles, and there are other anecdotes of using low cost offshore labor for similar tasks. Having a simpler web service interface for finding a human key operator somewhere will probably allow smaller and more experimental applications to emerge.
Update 11-04-2005 08:09 PST – Slashdot, TechDirt, Google Blogoscoped on Mechanical Turk, pointer to BoingBoing on porn puzzles and spam, captcha.net
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