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 January 20th through January 23rd:

• Data.gov – Featured Datasets: Open Government Directive Agency – Datasets required under the Open Government Directive through the end of the day, January 22, 2010. Freedom of Information Act request logs, Treasury TARP and derivative activity logs, crime, income, agriculture datasets.
• All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love – The bot’s name? Jason Thorton. He’s been humming along for months now, sending out over 1250 tweets to some 174 followers. His tweets, while not particularly creative, manage to be both believable and timely. And he’s powered by a single word: Love.

  Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own.

• Building a Twitter Bot – "Meet Jason Thorton. To people who know Jason, he is a successful entrepreneur in San Francisco who tweets 4-5 times a day. But Jason has a secret, he’s not really a human, he’s the product of my simple algorithm in PHP

  Jason tweets A LOT about the word “love” – that’s because Jason actually steals tweets from the public timeline that contain the word “love” and posts them as his own

  Jason also @replies to people who use the word “love” in their tweets, and asks them random questions or says something arbitrary

  It took me about 3 hours to code Jason, imagine what a real engineer could do with real AI algorithms? Now realize that it’s already a reality. Sites like Twitter are full of side projects, company initiatives, spambots and AI robots. When the free flow of information becomes open, the amount of disinformation increases. Theres a real need for someone to vet the people we ‘meet’ on social sites – will be interesting to see how this market grows in the next year

• Website monitoring status – Public API Status – Health monitor for 26 APIs from popular Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others
• 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.

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

• Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users | Social Media Stuff | Justin Parks – Ideas for queries on Google to find Twitter users / content.
• David Ziegler’s Blog – A Python Script to Automatically Extract Excerpts From Articles – Some notes on cleaning up web page content to extract a text excerpt of the intended content.
• Papers on PageRank you should read | Science for SEO – A list of interesting PageRank and search relevance ranking papers. June 2009.
• aicoder: TunkRank Scoring Improvement – On influence ranking models for Twitter.
• datawrangling’s trendingtopics at master – GitHub – This repository contains the full source code for Trendingtopics.org, built by Data Wrangling to demonstrate how Hadoop & EC2 can power a data driven website. The trend statistics and time series data that run the site are updated periodically by launching a temporary EC2 cluster running the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution. Our initial seed data consists of the raw wikipedia database content dump along with hourly traffic logs for all articles collected from the wikipedia squid proxy (curated by Domas Mituzas). We made the first 7 months of this hourly data for all articles available as an Amazon Public Dataset. The current trend calculations are run with Hadoop Streaming and Hive. The output produced by these Hadoop jobs is loaded into MySQL and indexed to power the live site.

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 22nd from 06:31 to 07:14:

• Javascript Malware Analysis: A Case Study – "This particular beast was found in the wild in May 2009 on a site phishing for Facebook user credentials, and is a particularly-nasty bugger. Note the number of strangely-named variables created up front, many of which are not even referenced in the code blocks that follow. Additionally notice the odd ternary statements which have no impact on the operation of the code, and presumably must exist to trip up scanners (unless there is a fancy form of string replacement on the body of some functions, in which case the functions could be mutated before execution – and that would be scary. A cipher based on the body of the function has also been seen.)"
• MySQL: Forked beyond repair? | Developer World – InfoWorld – Now that MySQL is part of Oracle, will the forks take over? "if MySQL's approval ratings are slumping, all the more reason for Oracle to move decisively. Oracle must work to regain the trust and support of the MySQL community or risk losing mindshare to a fork, such as Drizzle or MariaDB. To do that, it has to avoid making the mistakes that Sun made when it acquired MySQL. In a sense, to succeed with MySQL, Oracle will have to stop acting like Oracle."
• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Less Virtual, More Machine – Windows 7 and the magic of Boot to VHD – Notes on using Windows virtual hard drives to manage instances of multiple version of Windows in parallel, e.g. Windows 7 beta, WinXP, etc.
• How Opera’s business model works – Communication Breakdown – David Meyer’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community – Around 40M users, "Most of our revenue — 75-80 percent — comes from mobile devices, fom a free browser. We provide the browser for free, like Opera desktop and Mini, and then we generate revenue through our content partners. We provide the search in the right corner and things like that, and that generates revenues in the free distributions. Then you get paid by OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] for distribution — companies like Nokia and Motorola. Most of the mobile OEMs and a fair amount of the other OEMs. We signed up Ford recently and we're now in Ford trucks."
• Digicorp » Blog Archive » Prevention of Sql Injection with PHP – Notes on good coding hygiene for avoiding SQL injection attacks while processing web form input such as passwords and other text fields.

These are my links for May 20th from 19:50 to 22:03:

• PicFog Displays the Strength of Real-Time Image Search – More real time social search prototypes, this one for images shared on twitter. Fun to play with.
• bits done properly – 7 TwitPic alternatives – A list of alternative photo sharing sites suitable for use with Twitter.
• Twitter Data – A simple, open proposal for embedding data in Twitter messages – Home – "Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured data representation format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time to enable powerful new kinds of applications to be built on the Twitter platform."
• Announcing TweetMotif for summarizing twitter topics with a dash of NLP – Brendan O’Connor’s Blog – TweetMotif is an experiment in using natural language processing to identify trending topics.
• OneRiot Announces API & Real-Time Search Partnerships – "Real-time social search outfit OneRiot today announced their API and partnership program for adding real-time search capabilities to browser add-ons, desktop applications, social websites and other services" Screenshots from initial app TwitterBar (browser extension)
• Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Jetpack, Call for Participation – API for Firefox extension development

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 14th through May 15th:

• Congratulations, Google staff: $210k in profit per head in 2008 | Royal Pingdom – Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft ($194K), Apple ($151K), Intel ($64K) and IBM ($30K).
• Statistical Data Mining Tutorials – A nice collection of presentations reviewing topics in data mining and machine learning. e.g. "HillClimbing, Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. Some very useful algorithms, to be used only in case of emergency." These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. They include regression algorithms such as multivariate polynomial regression, MARS, Locally Weighted Regression, GMDH and neural nets. And they include other data mining operations such as clustering (mixture models, k-means and hierarchical), Bayesian networks and Reinforcement Learning.
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies feature – Looking at the infrastructure overhead required for Twitter's attempted change to @reply behavior.
• Scratch Helps Kids Get With the Program – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – On my candidate list for 7th grade introductory programming and analysis. "Scratch, an M.I.T.-developed computer-programming language for children, is the focus of worldwide show-and-tell sessions this Saturday. "
• jLinq – Javascript Query Language – For manipulating data sets in Javascript, sort of like jQuery

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 May 4th through May 5th:

• Influential Nodes in a Diffusion Model for Social Networks (icalp05-inf.pdf) – Kempe, Kleinberg, Tardos. Algorithm for greedy approximation of most influential nodes in social network (63% of optimal) under various conditions.
• Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network (kdd03-inf.pdf) – Kempe, Kleinberg, Tardos. Maximizing propagation by selecting most influential nodes is NP-hard, but a greedy approximation can work well (63% of optimal) under various conditions.
• Notification Strategies for Social Networks – Discussion on approaches to maximizing use of a limited number of notifications within social networks e.g. Facebook
• James Smith • loopj.com » Blog Archive » jQuery Plugin: Tokenizing Autocomplete Text Entry – Looks handy – "This is a jQuery plugin to allow users to select multiple items from a predefined list, using autocompletion as they type to find each item. You may have seen a similar type of text entry when filling in the recipients field sending messages on facebook."
• Google Code FAQ – Using cURL to interact with Google data services – Step by step tutorial on using curl with Google data APIs.
• Behind The Business Plan Of Pirates Inc. : NPR – It takes around $250K to fund a Somali pirate operation. About 20 percent goes to pay off officials who look the other way. About 50 percent is for expenses and payroll. The leader of an attack makes $10,000 to $20,000 (the average Somali family lives on $500 a year). The initial investor — who put in $250,000 of seed capital — gets 30 percent, sometimes up to $500,000.

These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:

• FusionCharts Free – Animated Flash Charts and Graphs for ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, RoR and other web applications – Flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that can be used with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations to deliver interactive and powerful flash charts. You do NOT need to know anything about Flash to use FusionCharts. All you need to know is the language you're programming in.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
• A Really Gentle Introduction to Data Mining | Regular Geek – List of data mining blogs and related resources.
• BlackBerry SSH Tutorial: Connect to Unix Server using MidpSSH for Mobile Devices – Notes on using MidpSSH on Blackberry for remote access to servers. Seems to work, although big network lag on my BlackBerry Bold / AT&T.
• Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 – U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
• DIY: How To Find Authoritative Twitter Users Plus 100 To Get You Started | Ignite Social Media – Some comments on recommendation metrics for Twitter, trying to use "favorites" mark as an indicator.
• 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."

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.