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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