August 2012
22 posts
CODING.FM →
The Sounds of Coding.
(via The Verge)
Cyrano de Bergerac Theatre Scene →
“Oh, yes, a poet. So, while we fight, I’ll improvise a ballade for you, and as I end the refrain, thrust home.”
Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS →
Today we released a new version of Facebook for iOS that’s faster, more reliable, and easier to use than ever before. The development of this new app signals a shift in how Facebook is building mobile products, with a focus on digging deep into individual platforms. To understand how we approached this shift, let’s take a look at how Facebook has evolved on mobile.
iOS developers...
ETE 2012 - Nathan Marz on Storm →
“Storm makes it easy to write and scale complex realtime computations on a cluster of computers, doing for realtime processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. Storm guarantees that every message will be processed. And it’s fast – you can process millions of messages per second with a small cluster. Best of all, you can write Storm topologies using any programming language. Storm was...
Amazon Glacier →
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per...
The Future is not Real-Time →
unwieldy:
Many technology pundits have insisted that the future is in real-time communication. You will know about everything going on in the world, instantly—bzzt, you have a new push notification.
On a daily basis, we’re exposed to hundreds of articles, tweets, emails and advertisements. We are, as…
A VC: More Good Advice for Mobile App Devs →
I think it increasingly means you have to be on both iOS and Android as soon as you can. I have advocated for building for Android first and iOS second. I think that strategy will start making more and more sense for apps that aren’t looking to be paid.
Step 1) Take VC money;
Step 2) Burn through that money making a free Android app;
Step 3) Get acquired (“acqui-hired”)...
Network Theory Breakthrough Reveals The Origin Of... →
Researchers solve the seemingly impossible problem of using only a few measurements to find the first victim of a disease.
Using this to find the source of a piece of information on the internet or a subset such as a social network might be interesting - and perhaps a lot easier taking into account “linking” and the highly structured and mapped nature of a social net.
Hopefully...
Social Network Shame →
Michael Arrington on the latest release of Path:
But the part that I really like as both a user and an investor: When you look at your friends list it names and shames users who haven’t logged in recently.
and
There’s just enough stick here to maybe shame users into logging in more often, eventually creating a habit and becoming a more obsessive user.
“Last...
Paul Graham: Why Arc Isn't Especially... →
A PG classic:
Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from doing too much damage. The price is that the resulting code...
A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet... →
Why do cats (usually) land on their feet? In the six-minute video below, missile engineer and last-name-avoider Destin explains…and includes some real stunt-cat dropping photographed with a high-speed camera. He also has archival footage of Air Force researchers dropping cats on parabolic flights, which helps explain the physics behind the phenomenon. As far as I can tell, no cats were harmed...
Samsung Calls BS On Apple's Charges Of Copying →
From Conan O’Brien’s show.
(via Daring Fireball)
Apple Support Allowed Hacker Access to Reporter's... →
After convincing Apple support that they were Mat Honan, the hacker had Apple Support change Honan’s iCloud password which gave them full access. From there, they were able to perform the remote wipes on Honan’s devices using Apple’s Find My iPhone service which offers remote wipe as a security feature for lost devices.
Huge security fail for Apple Support. I wonder if in...
“When events like this happen they just reaffirm that these aren’t investors,...”
– Patrick Healy, Wave of Volatile Trading Unsettles U.S. Markets - NYTimes.com
“I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.”
– Winston Churchill (attributed)
Access 4 million hotel rooms with an Arduino →
in short: At the base of every Onity lock is a small barrel-type DC power socket (just like on your old-school Nokia phone). This socket is used to charge up the lock’s battery, and to program the lock with a the hotel’s “sitecode” — a 32-bit key that identifies the hotel. By plugging an Arduino microcontroller into the DC socket, Brocious found that he could simply read this 32-bit key out of...
Ep. 29: "Eventually My Scabs Healed" - Roderick on... →
Everyone should listen to this episode. The description doesn’t do it justice but here it is:
> The Problems: hippies vs. stoners; lost in Wikipedia; thumbing a ride to Kilimanjaro; the Petty Thieves of Avignon; John’s raving on a Spanish beach; when good battles nice; 24-track tape you could read through; the persistence of zombies; living with shaka brah hand; great monks versus...
