Items in Feb, 2010
Filters: Year: 2010 × Month: Feb × Sorted by date
Revisiting the click track. Paul Lamere uses the new Echo Nest API to access analysis data for music tracks and plot the beats per minute, making it easy to spot bands or drummers using a click track or drum machine to stay in tempo. # 15th February 2010, 9:35 am
Redis in Practice: Who’s Online? Using Redis to implement a “which of your friends are online now” feature, by maintaining a set of active user IDs for every minute, then intersecting the past five minutes of user IDs with a set containing the IDs of your friends. # 14th February 2010, 5:17 pm
A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback. Buzz is switching to the more obvious model: use existing Gmail behaviour to suggest a list of people to follow, rather than auto-following them. It feels pretty clear to me that this is how following recommendations should work. # 14th February 2010, 10:12 am
Around the World by Zeppelin. If you’re in the UK, you have four days left to catch this fantastic 90 minute documentary on iPlayer. It covers the first ever flight around the world, in the Graf Zeppelin in 1929, from the point of view of Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, a reporter for the Hearst media empire and the only woman on the voyage. The archive footage is incredible. # 12th February 2010, 10:37 pm
ElasticSearch: Your Data, Your Search. A neat example of how ElasticSearch’s schemaless indexes and native JSON support make it ridiculously easy to index different types of data and run queries across them. # 12th February 2010, 3:22 pm
Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub. Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations. # 12th February 2010, 1:17 pm
Google Image Charts: Mathematical (TeX) Formulas (via) I’m not sure when they added this, but you can now use the Google Charts Image API to render mathematical formulas, specified using TeX syntax. Wordpress.com and Wikipedia have both offered this feature for quite a while, but now you can use it anywhere on the Web. # 12th February 2010, 9:42 am
Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes). # 12th February 2010, 9:21 am
My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous) professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.
— Suw Charman-Anderson # 12th February 2010, 9:13 am
Elastic Search (via) Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported. # 11th February 2010, 6:33 pm
Kottke on Chatroulette. Jason Kottke: “In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.” # 11th February 2010, 5:52 pm
HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback. Everything you need to know about embedding HTML5 video on a page, complete with multiple codecs to cover the various supporting browsers and a fallback to Flash. # 11th February 2010, 5:49 pm
WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw. Interesting one this: by default, Buzz creates a public profile for you that lists the people you follow—but your default set of followers is derived from the people you contact most frequently using Gmail. This means users of Buzz may inadvertently reveal their most frequent contacts, which is an issue for people like journalists with anonymous sources, unhappy employees seeking new work or even people having e-mail based affairs. # 11th February 2010, 11:30 am
An Easy Way to Make a Treemap. The second in Flowing Data’s handy series of R tutorials. # 11th February 2010, 10:29 am
The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.
— Tim Bray # 10th February 2010, 5:40 pm
On walking into a disaster zone. Schuyler Erle: “The World Bank was looking for technical GIS professionals, ideally French-speaking, to go and advise the government [...] I can sort of speak French. Sure, why not?” # 10th February 2010, 3:45 pm
5 Questions for Simon Willison. I got interviewed about WildlifeNearYou for the Flickr code blog, in particular the way the site uses machine tags. # 10th February 2010, 2:31 pm
Plupload (via) Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing and drag-and-drop from the desktop. It achieves all of this by providing backends for Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 and Browserplus and picking the most capable available option. # 10th February 2010, 12:53 pm
Glitch is built in an entirely new and different way for a game. The back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we’ll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we’ll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.
— Glitch # 10th February 2010, 11:40 am
glitch zen. Glitch is the upcoming online game from Tiny Speck, many of whom are ex Flickr and indeed ex Game Never Ending before that. Glitch Zen is the first fan site. # 10th February 2010, 11:36 am
Presenting django-devserver, a better runserver. I really like this—it’s a Django management command (./manage.py rundevserver) which adds SQL logging and cache access summaries to the console output of Django’s local development server. It solves a similar set of problems to the debug toolbar, but requires slightly less setup and doesn’t inject additional HTML in to your pages. You can add your own custom modules to it as well. # 10th February 2010, 11:33 am
Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code. Fascinating overview of the virtual memory feature coming to Redis 2.0, which will remove the requirement that all Redis data fit in RAM. Keys still stay in RAM, but rarely accessed values will be swapped to disk. 16 GB of RAM will be enough to hold 100 million keys, each with a value as large as you like. # 9th February 2010, 3:59 pm
Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas. # 8th February 2010, 11:21 am
Integrate Tornado in Django. A handy ./manage.py runtornado management command for firing up a Tornado server that serves your Django application. # 8th February 2010, 11:12 am
Sketchpad—Online Paint/Drawing application (via) Impressive canvas based bitmap drawing tool with an extremely smooth UI. # 7th February 2010, 10:45 am
svg-edit. Click the “Try out SVG-edit 2.4” link—this is an impressive, full featured open source vector graphics editor that runs in the browser. # 7th February 2010, 10:30 am
As has been pointed out by the community, there is an existing crash bug that was reported by Matthew Dempsky in the Flash Player bugbase (JIRA FP-677) in September of 2008 that still exists in the release players. It is fixed in Flash Player 10.1 beta, and has been since we launched the beta in early November 2009. [...] So what happened here? We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch.
— Emmy Huang, PM for Flash Player # 7th February 2010, 10:21 am
Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.
— Kevin Lynch # 7th February 2010, 10:19 am
twitter-text-conformance (via) This is a neat idea: Twitter have released open source libraries for parsing standard tweet syntax in Ruby and Java, but they’ve also released a set of YAML unit tests aimed at anyone who wants to implement the same parsing logic in other languages. # 6th February 2010, 3:39 pm
What’s hot? Introducing Zeitgeist. Dan Catt’s first project at the Guardian. “When something appears on the Zeitgeist page, it’s because it performed better (got more attention) than the norm for that content type/section/day”. The application itself is written in Python and runs on Google App Engine. # 5th February 2010, 12:17 pm