Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-31

• A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - ACM Queue

  Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001) redefined our vocabulary and all but promised an end to the waterfall model and big software companies, thanks to the new grass-roots open source software development movement. I found the book thought provoking, but it did not convince me. On the other hand, being deeply involved in open source, I couldn't help but think that it would be nice if he was right.

  The book I brought to the beach house this summer is also thought provoking, much more so than Raymond's (which it even mentions rather positively): Frederick P. Brooks's The Design of Design (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010). As much as I find myself nodding in agreement and as much as I enjoy Brooks's command of language and subject matter, the book also makes me sad and disappointed.

• Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

  After I wrote about doing personal analytics with data I’ve collected about myself, many people asked how they could do similar things themselves.

  Now of course most people haven’t been doing the kind of data collecting that I’ve been doing for the past couple of decades. But these days a lot of people do have a rich source of data about themselves: their Facebook histories.

  And today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data. Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains; now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics. And this is just the beginning; over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-29

• OmniTI ~ Javascript Tips for Non-Specialists

  Javascript coding is a rather unique skill in the web development world—if you are not experienced with writing Javascript for the browser (especially if you are a coder who works primarily with other languages such as Perl or PHP), it may seem that the language has a mind of its own, refusing to behave in the way a language should. This, combined with the myriad Javascript tutorials on the web which teach sub-par coding practices, makes improving your Javascript skills a daunting task. It’s also something that developers usually don’t have much time for if they only write Javascript occasionally. All this makes the language appear as an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, nestled inside a sesame seed bun of mystery.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-27

• Silicon Valley’s Hardware Renaissance - NYTimes.com

  THE shift away from the Valley’s obsession with dot-com services and Web-based social networks is a return to the region’s roots. The Valley began as a center for electronics hardware design in the late 1930s, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard built an audio oscillator that Walt Disney used in the production of the movie “Fantasia.” At the start of the 1970s, the label Silicon Valley was coined because of the proliferation of semiconductor companies. In the mid-1970s, a group of computer hardware hobbyists started the Homebrew Computer Club here, which gave rise to several dozen start-ups, including Apple Computer.

  Today some of the most successful hardware start-ups in Silicon Valley have been formed from the diaspora of former Apple employees who want to try their hand at companies that pair hardware and software — which is an integral part of Apple’s DNA.

• Greyhole - Redundant Storage Pooling using Samba

  Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they're connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.

• Saudi Oil Producer’s Computers Restored After Cyberattack - NYTimes.com

  Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil producer, has resumed operating its main internal computer networks after a virus infected about 30,000 of its workstations earlier this month, the company said Sunday.

• Oracle Broadens Support for Open-source R Analytics | PCWorld

  Oracle is expanding its support for R, the open-source language for statistical analysis, the company announced Friday.

  New features include R ports for the Solaris and AIX OSes, adding to existing support for Linux and Windows environments, Oracle said. Oracle has also extended R support to its TimesTen in-memory database.

• Three kinds of big data - O'Reilly Radar

  So where will big data go to grow up?

  Once we get over ourselves and start rolling up our sleeves, I think big data will fall into three major buckets: Enterprise BI, Civil Engineering, and Customer Relationship Optimization. This is where we’ll see most IT spending, most government oversight, and most early adoption in the next few years.

• Computational social science: Making the links : Nature News & Comment

  The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them.

• rOpenSci - open source tools for open science

  At rOpenSci we are creating packages that allow access to data repositories through the R statistical programming environment that is already a familiar part of the workflow of many scientists. We hope that our tools will not only facilitate drawing data into an environment where it can readily be manipulated, but also one in which those analyses and methods can be easily shared, replicated, and extended by other researchers. While all the pieces for connecting researchers with these data sources exist as disparate entities, our efforts will provide a unified framework that will be quickly connect researchers to open data.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-24

• Computer viruses: A thing of threads and patches | The Economist

  A paper presented to a conference in Bellevue, Washington, earlier this month describes—for the enlightenment of the white hats in this arms race—an innovation that may make viruses still sneakier. Its authors, Vishwath Mohan and Kevin Hamlen of the University of Texas, call their program “Frankenstein”, after the fictional scientist who (at least, in film versions of the story) stitched together his monster out of body parts scavenged from graveyards and slaughterhouses.

  The digital version of Frankenstein works by scanning innocuous programs—word processors, say, or the calculator that is part of Microsoft’s Windows operating system—for small chunks of code dubbed “gadgets”. Such snippets encode handfuls of the most basic operations that computers perform: loading a number into memory, for instance, and then adding two numbers together. Harvest enough of these, and arrange them in the right order, and it is possible to knock together a piece of software that can perform any task you like.

• Start-Ups Emerge as Tech Vendors of Choice - WSJ.com

  Businesses are getting more comfortable buying technology from start-ups and other small outfits, a shift that could usher in a period of slower growth for tech giants such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp.

  There is no precise data that shows the tech-buying shift. In a recent study by the CIO Executive Council, a peer group for IT executives, corporate tech buyers gave their top vendors a score of only 3.23 out of 10 across 20 categories, such as providing honest communication and demonstrating an ability to innovate.

  Meanwhile, a 2012 survey of U.S. CIOs by recruiting firm Harvey Nash Group PLC found 73% said they needed to embrace new technology or risk losing market share.

  The dollars at stake are huge. Gartner Inc. projected in July that world-wide corporate IT spending is on pace to hit $3.6 trillion this year, up 3% from last year.

• Book Review: Ballpoint - WSJ.com

  Common objects often have uncommon stories. The zipper, the pencil and the paper clip were devised by inventors who long struggled to produce things we now take for granted. Unearthing the histories of these humble objects may reveal much about the hidden underpinnings of our everyday world. That is the case with "Ballpoint," Hungarian author György Moldova's chronicle of the vicissitudes of the ballpoint pen's invention and commercial development.

  Mr. Moldova, the author of more than 50 books of nonfiction and fiction, is much honored in his native land, where he is renowned for his vivid portraits of subjects that would seem to resist enlivening, such as coal mining and the railway and textile industries. He presents "Ballpoint" (translated by David Robert Evans) as "both a historical manuscript and a novel." He also quotes the words of the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Lobachevsky: "The real problem with books about geniuses is that they are not written by geniuses."

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-21

• Researcher creates proof-of-concept malware that infects BIOS, network cards

  Rakshasa, named after a demon from the Hindu mythology, is not the first malware to target the BIOS -- the low-level motherboard firmware that initializes other hardware components. However, it differentiates itself from similar threats by using new tricks to achieve persistency and evade detection.

  Rakshasa replaces the motherboard BIOS, but can also infect the PCI firmware of other peripheral devices like network cards or CD-ROMs, in order to achieve a high degree of redundancy.

  Rakshasa was built with open source software. It replaces the vendor-supplied BIOS with a combination of Coreboot and SeaBIOS, alternatives that work on a variety of motherboards from different manufacturers, and also writes an open source network boot firmware called iPXE to the computer's network card.

• littleblackbox - Database of private SSL/SSH keys for embedded devices - Google Project Hosting

  LittleBlackBox is a collection of thousands of private SSL and SSH keys extracted from various embedded devices. These private keys are stored in a database where they are correlated with their public certificates as well as the hardware/firmware that are known to use those private keys.

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