Planet NZTech

Mike Riversdale: Happy 1st Birthday To Hashigo Zake - FREE Celebratory Drink

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:22:07 +0000

I am filled with admiration for Dominic and how he has, in a relatively short time, created Hashigo Zake, a wonderful bar filled with amazing beer, great staff and comfort. And he's successfully managed to tap (!) in to the now obvious demand for such a place here in Wellington.

So pop along on Thursday and/or Friday (9th/10th) to Hashigo Zake and help them celebrate their first birthday party! If you're on Twitter you can let everyone know you'll be there Thursday: http://twtvite.com/hashigozake1yr

This from their newsletter:

Our 1st Birthday

The astute among you might have noticed that we're up to Issue #51 of what is more or less a weekly dispatch. Which means we must be close to a year's worth.

Our birthday is next week, and at that time we will contemplate the significance of the milestone while expressing contempt for those who were skeptical a year ago. This week however is for shamelessly promoting the event itself.

So... next Thursday and Friday, with the assistance of a few of our favourite brewers, we will offer several hundred complimentary glasses of fine, locally made ale to thank you, our beloved customers for your patronage. We will also find a way to give away one or two of our most precious bottles of imported beer.

There will be no gilt-edged invitations and no-one is more or less welcome than anyone else. Just come on down and enter into the spirit of things.

Mike Riversdale: HA HA HA - tippexperience Is As Good As Old Spice

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:22:07 +0000

Old Spice started it and now we have the tippexerience.

So, you go to the site and watch the video ... all the way to the end.

And then, do as the hunter says and type in what you want and push your Enter key.

Yes, the obvious works so try it ... type in "fuck" and see what happens.

All save for work.

Andrew Butel: Managing Javascript & CSS source files

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:12:47 +0000

Early on in the development of Hive, we realised we needed a better way to manage javascript and CSS. As the javascript files got bigger we started having source code merges (shudder) and we occasionally would ship a version with debug code still in it. There are some really good systems out there for optimising [...]

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): Open Thread: How Do You Stream Internet Content to Your TV?

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:15:48 +0000

One of Apple's announcements yesterday was a completely redesigned Apple TV. It's competing in a crowded and still confusing field of products that stream video from the Internet to your TV. Boxee and Roku are two smaller companies trying to crack it; and Google TV was unveiled in May. The ultimate goal of all of these products is to make Web-to-TV very easy for consumers, but the market is still searching for the right formula.

We'd like to poll the ReadWriteWeb community on this topic. Let us know how you currently get online video (and other media content) onto your TV. Also, which of the emerging products do you think has the best chance to be the consumer offering of choice?

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The key points of the new Apple TV are: a much lower price (now $99, compared to $229 for the first generation product), streamlined form (80% smaller), streaming functionality, no more local storage, Netflix and YouTube access, and 99c TV show rentals.

Other ways to access Web content on your TV include: modern Internet-connected TVs; online gaming devices like Sony PlayStation 3 and X-Box 360; P2P software; Set-top boxes like TiVo (specifically, its Premiere offering released in March); streaming software for computers, such as playon; wireless USB display adapter sets; special cables to hook a computer up to a TV.

Of course, there's still the matter of accessing good content. All of the online TV players have been busy doing deals with TV and movie distributors, a process which is far from being worked through. Meanwhile, many consumers have used P2P services like BitTorrent to get such content for free.

The video below from the Google TV announcement shows the (potential) benefits of streaming Web content to your TV:

I myself use a combination of Sony Playstation 3 and the P2P client Vuze in order to stream the occasional TV show and movie to my TV. Although it converts online video to a PS3 compatible format, it's still not a completely satisfactory solution. Sometimes the sound doesn't work, or the video is choppy, and so on. So I'm looking forward to purchasing one of the upcoming devices from Apple, Boxee, Roku or Google.

Do you stream content from the Internet into your TV? If so, tell everyone how you do it in the comments below.

Discuss

Sue Tyler: Felt like Friday

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:55:28 +0000

An elegant mix of Felt favourites this week…

Got some favourites on Felt you’d like to share? Email your 6 links to feltlikefriday(at)craft2.org.

Jonathan Giles: UI Oddities #3 – Skype

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:01:50 +0000

Another quick post at a UI that annoyed me today, and today it is beta 2 of the Skype 5 client. Obviously, this is pre-release software, so perhaps it’ll be fixed by the final release. Anyway, the message I want to get across in this UI Oddities post is don’t make me scroll unnecessarily.

Refer to the image below. This is admittedly an image I found online of a slightly out-of-date client, but the point remains the same: the number of contacts on screen is considerable, given the size of the actual viewport. You can lessen the amount of scrolling even further by setting options inside Skype to hide contacts who are offline (which is my preference). Notice that, in this case, ‘Robert Miller’ is expanded as this contact has focus. That lets me see more details about that person, but in a normal workflow, this isn’t necessary and you’d have all contacts collapsed. Finally, note that the status messages that people sometimes use is to the right of the contacts name.

An older Skype client

I like this approach. My main requirement with Skype is to see which colleagues and friends are online, so that I can do my job. I have multiple monitors on my desk, and always have my Skype client visible on one of them. This makes it very easy to track who is online, and perform my job. In other words, the Skype 4 (and less) UI was great for me.

Compare the first screenshot to the second screenshot, which comes from my machine. In this case more emphasis is placed on the persons profile image, and therefore the amount of scrolling required is considerably more. In this case the status messages appear beneath the contacts name, rather than to the right, and space is reserved even if there is no status message. In the screenshot, there is only one status message (which is the dark red box). I’m sure this design is justified internally because the image is now bigger (even when the user doesn’t have an image defined), but in general I don’t like it because, as I said at the beginning, it requires me to scroll considerably more, and I can’t have my Skype window tall enough to see all online contacts at any one time.

The Skype 5 beta 2 client

As soon as I started up the new beta Skype client, I tried to dig through the options to try to change this. In my ideal situation, the image would be removed and the status message would return to it’s more logical location at the right of the contacts name. Alas, I failed to find anything in the options area, but I’m secretly hopeful that I just missed it, or that it’ll turn up in a future beta release.

For what it’s worth, my wish for an option to configure how the contacts looks isn’t without precedent. Windows Live Messenger has an options window, and one section of it contains the options shown in the screenshot below. In this case Windows Live Messenger lets me specify what both my favorites and my other contacts look like. Elsewhere in the options window I’ve set it that I don’t want to have favourite contacts. As shown in the screenshot below, all other contacts take the appearance of a small rectangle only (with the colour of the rectangle signifying the users status). This maximises the number of contacts I see onscreen, which is exactly what I need.

Windows Live Messenger contacts configuration options

I really hope to see a similar option in a future release of Skype 5, as the current approach is a huge nuisance for me. In general though, the message of this post is to other UI designers to consider your user, especially in cases where there is a potential for them to have a lot of data being presented, and where there may be some form of passive updating going on within the view. In these cases, there is considerably more value in presenting more data to the user at any one time over whitespace, which is unfortunately the direction Skype is currently going.

Andrew Chilton: 32 Commits Today

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:09:30 +0000

Yes, I know “commits” are about as informative as “Lines of Code” but it does sometimes help you see where you are in comparison to other days.

Thanks to the terrible Wellington weather I stayed home all day and hacked. It was awesome. It turns out I did 32 commits today to my current project. Correction, I have two projects on the go (one at home and one at the office). This is for the one I’m doing at home. After all that I am (1) tired, (2) chuffed I was so productive and (3) happy!

The most interesting of these of course is (2). I have found that since I quit my job and am doing my own thing, I am almost infinitely more productive. Firstly, I know the ins and outs of the system, secondly I have no interruptions (irc, email, phone, in-person, clients) and finally, all my projects are just so much more interesting than previous things I’ve worked on. And yep, that includes a satellite control system! :)

Miraz Jordan: From black and white to rainbows

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:46:36 +0000

It’s almost 20 years now since I had a job encouraging community organisations to use email. That was even before we started using the Web in New Zealand. In fact, few people had even heard of the Internet then.

The training sessions would start with the words: There’s a thing called the Internet and you can use it to send messages to other people….

The most common responses were along the lines of Why would we want to do that? We can send letters.

The 90s: computers, faxes and the web

In those 20 years though, we’ve come a long way. Now many community organisations have not only grown used to using desktop or laptop computers, but also often rely on email, and commonly visit web pages. Many also run their own website.

The upheaval of all we know

But now we’re comfortable with the technology of the 90s it’s all gone and changed. In the last 5 years, little by little, we’ve experienced a total revolution.

The boundaries have all blurred; capabilities and features have all leaked out to smudge things nearby.

In the good old days of black and white, just a few years ago, computers were computers and phones were phones. A camera took photos, and a GPS device used satellite signals to tell you where you were and where you were going.

Each gadget had a clear job to do, and it knew its place.

Chips with everything

In the rainbow of 2010 that world no longer exists. Computer chips have found a place in almost everything, along with cameras, GPS, speech and networking features such as WiFi or 3G cellphone signals.

Smartphones include GPS, Internet and cameras, while cameras may include GPS and use the Internet to automatically send photos to a website.

Computers come in all shapes and sizes, maybe including network games, video cameras and the ability to show TV, or video chat with friends and family.

Game consoles may allow you to check in with friends on Facebook, and to play movies.

GPS receivers may display Google Maps and read travel directions aloud.

MP3 players may record and play movies, along with music.

Ebook readers may read books aloud, and download new works directly from the Internet.

Starwalk.

A device like the iPad may allow you to hold it up in front of a constellation of stars at night then automatically sense where you’re looking and display information about that part of the sky. (See Starwalk.)

The pot of gold

There’s a lot of work going on with robots, artificial intelligence, polymers, 3D and energy. It seems pretty clear that gadgets are going to become even more confusing over the next 5 years. The thing is, the pace of innovation is increasing. We can’t even imagine today the devices that will be essential in 2015.

Our pot of gold is flexibility. We need to be open to the possibilities each new day brings.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, August 2010. This article has been modified for publication here.

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Rowan Simpson: Got any grapes?

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:27:57 +0000

Love it. :-) See also: Getting to the third user Filed under: Usability

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:48:51 +0000

Part of the new iTunes 10 software, announced and launched yesterday, is a significant new social networking feature for iTunes called Ping. It allows you to comment on music, 'like' it a la Facebook, or rate it. Ping is also very similar to Twitter, in that you can 'follow' people and music stars. All of this happens inside of the iTunes application, either on your computer, iPhone or iPod Touch.

We took the new feature for a spin and came away intrigued, despite some initial flaws. We do however wonder at the overly commercial focus of Ping. Is this really about social networking, or mostly for Apple and artists to sell more music?

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How to Get Ping

To access Ping, you first need to download iTunes 10 onto your computer. You'll need to also download 300+ MB worth of iPhone Software Update, to get it on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

On the computer, once you've downloaded iTunes 10 click the iTunes Store link in the sidebar. You'll see a "Get Started" link in the top right of that page (also 'Ping' appears as a menu option in the sidebar). You'll need to turn on the Ping feature and agree to Apple's privacy policy. After that, create a profile.

Note that you may encounter issues with uploading a profile photo and connecting to Facebook. If you wait for about 10 minutes, eventually your photo will upload. However Facebook Connect appears to be broken at this stage. We assume these are technical teething issues.

Once you have your profile set up, you're invited to follow other people and also stars like Lady Gaga and U2. This is very similar to how Twitter works, except that it's all happening inside of iTunes (on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod Touch).

Social Networking, or Prodding You to The Cash Register?

Ping isn't entirely intuitive. It took some head scratching to figure out that to actually post content, you need to be in the iTunes Store. You can't create new content from within Ping itself, although you can comment on what others have added.

To add new content to your Ping stream, go to the iTunes Store and either comment on an album, 'like' it or give it a star rating.

The fact that you need to be inside the iTunes Store to create new content or like something, seems a rather cynical move to encourage people to buy more music. Why not let users search inside Ping for a song or album? Or, even better, let them right-click and comment, like or rate music from within the iTunes player?

Follow The Stars

To track - and optionally comment on - what others are doing, click on the Recent Activity feed in Ping.

Ping places more focus on feature accounts than Twitter, inviting you to "set your inner groupie free by following your favorite artists on Ping." The service comes pre-loaded with accounts for some leading pop, rock and other music acts.

These accounts don't offer much more than what the stars can already do on Facebook and Twitter. The main difference is that it's within an application where people can buy the music.

I'll Follow You (If You Share My Music Tastes)

Overall, I can see Ping being useful for following friends who have similar tastes in music to me. In those cases, if they 'like' a new album then it's a great recommendation - and yes, I'm more likely to buy it. Also the ability to see which concerts they plan to go to is a useful feature.

However, Ping is probably not going to be very useful for following friends who don't share my music tastes. That could be most of them. You may be a mate of mine on Facebook, but if you listen to electronica then sorry I'm not very interested in the content you're liking (you probably feel the same way about the alternative music I tend to favor).

Have you tested out Ping yet? Let us know your verdict in the comments!

Discuss

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 2 Sep 2010

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic.
v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability.
Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter project to fund a 6-hectare/14.8-acre off-the-grid artists retreat, cultural preservation and technological education space in the remote Pacific island of Vanuatu. Kickstarter is incredible. (via BoingBoing)
Orbiter (XKCD) -- names are human artifacts, as every Internet mapping company knows. I'm reminded of how Gracenote, who run CDDB, store every datum submitted to them, and consequently have nearly fifty spellings of Britney Spears.

Rachel Cunliffe: Adventures in Life Streaming, Archiving Tweets and Facebook Status Updates

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:44:19 +0000

Last year, I started a blog on social archiving – about creating physical archives of digital memories. I’m still fascinated by that, but also wanted to revise again how I could archive in one spot (if possible) my personal blogs and interests online.

I’ve been blogging on a few different personal blogs since 2002 and have finally got around to aggregating them all together in one spot, over at rachelcunliffe.com. (I’m using the default Wordpress design for now while I focus on content.)

Combining my blogs

It was surprisingly easy to take my original journal blog which had been offline for ages, it was running Wordpress 1.5 (what a blast from the past seeing the old admin interface). That blog was my entry into the world of blogging and I met so many wonderful people through that. Ahh, the good old days of blogging where it was so fresh, so new and such a small world (it seemed).

To start resurrecting the blog, I updated the wp-config.php file to the new host database login information, disabled all the plugins, deleted all the spam, made a backup and uploaded Wordpress 3.0. After seeing a number of problems upgrading Wordpress in a big leap, I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog all back and running, using a theme I made in the summer of 2006! An export of the blog posts split up by about six month chunks (you don’t want the import files to be bigger than 2MB) and then importing into rachelcunliffe.com didn’t take long at all.

The next step was exporting from a Wordpress.com blog I wrote on for a while in 2008 then abandoned. This time it was a much simpler process a quick export and import.

Importing my Tweets

I’ve been also investigating how to archive my tweets. Twitter tools is perfect for tweets you do after adding the plugin to Wordpress, but I also wanted all my old Tweets stored in Wordpress.

There’s a really simple plugin (Twitter importer) which actually imports all your old tweets into a certain category of your choice in one step – no need to worry about exporting your Tweets first. However, the plugin current currently has no options e.g. no filtering out of “@” replies or retweets. I got around this by quickly tweaking the plugin code:

Add:

if (substr($post_title,0,1) != "@" && substr($post_title,0,2) != "RT")

before:

$post_id = wp_insert_post($post);

I did notice that sometimes the plugin didn’t work first time around or didn’t pull them all in, wait a while and then run it again – you can run it multiple times and it won’t make duplicates.

Until I work out how best to display all these tweets, I’m using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin to hide all the old tweets from the homepage and the feed, and just put have on their own tweets category page.

Importing my Facebook Status Updates

Facebook is a little buggy when it comes to this, but I’ve made a simple script to export your Facebook status updates to a CSV file. It’s buggy because sometimes it works, sometimes later on it doesn’t work. It’s also buggy because it only pulls out actual status updates, not links you share or photos you add in your status box. Oh, and it doesn’t go back before about August 2008 when they released a new version of Facebook. That being said, it still exported out over 700 of my status updates.

I then played around with the CSV file a little to get it into the right format that the Wordpress CSV importer plugin requires. These all went into my Facebook status updates category and are also hidden from the homepage for now. Going forward, I’ll either need to use Twitter again to update my Facebook status (using Selective Twitter or find a way to bring in status updates one-by-one automatically (just like Twitter tools does).

David Petrie: Links for 2010-09-01 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Dave Moskovitz: NZ Institute: Be customer oriented, collaborative and prepared

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:41:07 +0000

The New Zealand Institute has just released a report calling on NZ businesses to adopt three key behaviours in order to increase international success:

Be customer oriented – too often Kiwi companies build what they want and values, rather than what their potential customers want and value.
Be collaborative – we’re not good enough at building strong partnerships with directors, specialist managers, international partners, investors, advisors etc – we’re too self-reliant.
Be prepared – “she’ll be right” doesn’t cut it in the big bad world.

For more info, read the report, or view the presentation.

Lance Wiggs: The Yike Bike

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:19:57 +0000

I’ve just had a go on one of these amazing Yikebikes. They look beautiful, and that to me is why so many people want one. It’s up there with Apple products in its ability to attract desire. Riding it is relatively intuitive - In my short but quick burst on the bike I found that [...]

Miraz Jordan: Work and play in The Cloud

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:16:20 +0000

Everybody is talking about The Cloud these days. But apart from those white fluffy things in the sky, what is the cloud?

Files in prison

A few years ago, if we created a word processing document, a spreadsheet, or a photo, we probably saved it on our own computer.

If we wanted to share that document with a friend or colleague we probably put it on a floppy disk. A colleague would put the floppy disk into their computer, cross their fingers that the file format would work and then open up the document.

More recently we might exchange files by putting them on a thumb drive or a CD, or perhaps by sending them by email.

But still the document would originally be locked away on our own computer.

If we were away from our computer for some reason it would be almost impossible to access that file.

For example, we might be visiting a friend and want to show them holiday photos. With the photos locked away on our computer back in the office we’d be out of luck.

Google cloud apps.

Files fly free

That was the old days though. These days we have more options for where to save and store files. There are many many services that let us save and use our files online, or “in the cloud”.

A good example is Flickr. If we upload our photos to Flickr we can share them with certain people or the whole world, and we can look at them from any computer that’s connected to the Internet.

If we make videos we could upload them to You Tube. And just like Flickr we can share them or look at them how ever we like.

It’s not just photos and videos though. We could use Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, or a service such as Xero for our accounts.

Software such as Evernote not only runs as an application on our Mac, Windows PC, Blackberry, iPhone or other devices, but we can also access the notes we create through a web page.

The Dropbox service lets us setup a folder on our computer whose files are automatically synchronised with any other computer we choose. Those same files are also available through a secure web page.

Dropbox also lets us go back to see older versions of our files. That’s very handy if we accidentally save changes we didn’t mean to make.

All of these services are “in the cloud”. All of them make it much easier to access our files over the Internet any time we want from wherever we are.

It means documents are no longer locked in the prison of a single computer.

Take a look at the services I’ve mentioned above, most of them are free, and see if they’d fit with your way of working.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, August 2010. This article has been modified for publication here.

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Mauricio Freitas: Datacom is our new home

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:20:00 +0000

For the last seven years we have been hosting Geekzone with Auckland-based ISP and hosting provider ICONZ, but since our two year contract was coming to an end it would be only good business practice to investigate alternatives in terms of cost, bandwidth, location.

And with that in mind, a few weeks ago we started talking to some colocation providers. We had very few requirements - we are not the largest online publisher in New Zealand, but Geekzone does sit regularly on the top 50 New Zealand-based websites in unique visitors, according to Nielsen.

According to our analytics data, 75% of our New Zealand visitors come from Auckland, with the majority of these using Telecom New Zealand, followed by (in order) Callplus/Slingshot, Orcon, WorldxChange, Vodafone and TelstraClear.

Since site speed is something that I consider one of the most important things for a good user experience, it made sense to us to consider Auckland-based service providers, with good Internet access and peering.

Also, when deciding location we had to consider that while New Zealand readers make up 70% of our page views, in absolute number of users it's only 40% - so we still needed to be located somewhere with good international connectivity, close to the submarine cables leaving the country.

Of course we also considered physical security access, power source, etc.

We managed to get into a great conversation with Datacom, through an introduction from Ben Gracewood. After considering services, infrastructure and prices I think we managed to agree on a deal that will allow us to continue running Geekzone with more "space" to grow, thanks to the savings we will be making.

After we have the server up and runnng, me and Nate (one of our moderators who helped me move the gear) were given a tour of the Datacom Orbit Data Centre. What an impressive building.

You will see this new box at the bottom of all our pages in the main site:

These logos represent the companies or services that help Geekzone run as fast as possible, serving more than 600,000 unique visits every month. Huge thanks to Datacom, RedJungle, Aptimize, HP ProLiant DL servers and Microsoft SQL Server. Also thanks to ICONZ, whose skilled technical people helped us grow to where we are today.

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): Moving Tales: Do Animated eBooks Have a Future?

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:36:27 +0000

Recently we've been exploring how the book industry is adjusting to electronic books. There are pros and cons to eBooks, but regardless the industry is moving to digital formats fast - even to the point of the Oxford English Dictionary considering not publishing another print edition.

Some book publishers aren't just adjusting to eBooks, they're embracing them with open arms. Moving Tales is one such publisher. It recently released a book as an iPad app, called The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross. Moving Tales, as the name implies, is a producer of animated books. It's a mix of movies and books, but does it work?

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Moving Tales aims to "bring stories to life," through multimedia features such as 3D animation, music, voice overs, sound effects, alternate views and animation of text "using the iPad's accelerometer." The company also makes use of features native to a tablet-like device, such as page swipe or tap for page turning and what it describes as "extras to ensure no two viewings [are] alike."

The Pedlar Lady is a book about "the journey of a poor pedlar woman who, guided by the shifting line between the real and the unreal, discovers a surprising and wonderful treasure." It costs $4.99 in the App Store.

The story is told almost as if it's an animated film, with voice over and sound affects optionally accompanying the animation. The words are also present of course, allowing you to read the text sans sound if you prefer.

Novelty, or The Future of eBooks?

The overall effect of The Pedlar is akin to a graphic novel, in that the animation is a core part of the experience.

With traditional works of fiction, the reader uses her imagination to bring the text to 'life.' And that's much of the fun, as anyone who has seen a movie version of a novel before reading the novel will attest. If you see the movie first, when you read the book you then have a set picture in your mind about what the characters look and act like. Whereas if you read the book first, you fill in those details in your own mind - even adding bits of yourself or people you know to the fleshed out characters in your head.

Reading this iPad book took some of that internal magic away from me, but arguably added enough magic of its own to compensate.

So is this the future of eBooks? My answer is that it's one future. There are certain works of fiction that would lend themselves well to animation and sound effects: childrens books, poetry books where the poet wants to augment their words with the help of animation, books with strong imagery where animation would enhance the experience (the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, for example).

Many other books will be best left to the reader's visual imagination, or are simply too wordy or complex to convert into an animated story.

This form of eBook also is very insular, in that it has no social features and no links to external Web content. This perhaps says more about what Apple allows an iPad application to easily do. Still, it's worth noting that eBooks are capable of a much more expansive experience than what Moving Tales presents.

The Pedlar Lady is an impressive eBook though, visually stunning and stylishly delivered. What are your thoughts on animated eBooks? Also let us know in the comments if you've come across similar eBooks - on the iPad, PC, or other devices.

Discuss

Juha Saarinen: Zune 4.2 software available now via Windows Update

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:52:00 +0000

Installing it as we err, blog. How very… Apple iTunes.

The Zune Software push is very likely in preparation for the impending Windows Phone 7 launch. I'm curious to see how it replaces or complements Windows Media Player/Centre.

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone 7,Microsoft,Zune

Juha Saarinen: Police says no evidence Google committed a crime with Street View Wi-Fi snooping

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:20:00 +0000

Received a media release from the NZ Police a moment ago, that seems to say that if you leave your Wi-Fi connection unencrypted so that others can snoop on your data… "tough, you have yourself to blame".

We'll see if the Privacy Commissioner takes the matter further. Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff has expressed surprise that Google didn't tell the public more clearly that the information would be collected and has asked for further details about.

Police has referred the matter of data collection from Wi-Fi networks by Google Street View back to the office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The Privacy Commissioner formally referred the matter to Police in June following concerns over Google obtaining unencrypted Wi-Fi data while collecting panoramic digital images for its Street View service.

An investigation by Police has determined that there is no evidence to suggest a criminal offence has been committed.

Police has now handed the matter back to the Privacy Commissioner for further consideration.

Detective Senior Sergeant John van den Heuvel of the Police National Cyber Crime Centre says the matter is a timely reminder about Wi-Fi security:

"Anyone using Wi-Fi needs to ensure they have appropriate security measures in place. People should not underestimate the risk that information they broadcast might be accessed by others, either inadvertently or for more sinister purposes."

Robert O'Callahan: New Google Maps Imagery Of Auckland

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:47:19 +0000

At some point relatively recently, Google added much higher-resolution images of Auckland to Google Maps. These images appear to have been taken by aerial photography and they're quite amazing.

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 1 September 2010

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

R Library for Chernoff Faces -- faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data)
Piwik -- GPLed web analytics package.
Pomegranate -- a data store for billions of tiny files. (via the High Scalability blog interview with the creator of Pomegranate)
New Backpack Makes 3D Maps of Buildings -- the backpack indoor equivalent of the Google Maps cars, from Berkeley researchers.

Mauricio Freitas: PriceSpy app for Android now out

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:16:00 +0000

Just a heads up that PriceSpy has officially announced their Android app supporting New Zealand. Here's a screenshot:

With this app you can:

• Check the best prices for a product.
• Check PriceSpy user reviews for a product.
• See stores selling a certain product laid out on Google maps.
• Get directions to stores selling a product.

It should complement the PriceSpy website nicely...

Robin Capper: The Bach - Dan & Zac’s Revit & 3ds Max Tutorial

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:52:00 +0000

Dan Jurgens has posted a great Revit/3ds Max tutorial originally presented at RTC 2010. A detailed white paper, Vimeo hosted screen capture videos and sample datasets are available via their post below. An awesome resource for the Revit/Max community, especially if (like me) you didn’t get to see it at RTC.

Visualise Revit designs fast with 3ds Max, mental ray and V-Ray (2010) | nzdan | RTC 2010

Zac and I presented the “Visualise Revit conceptual designs fast with 3ds Max, mental ray and V-Ray ” whitepaper at the RTC 2010 conference in May, please see all the details below.

Visualise Revit conceptual designs fast with 3ds Max, mental ray and V-Ray (2010)
Dan Jürgens, Bates Smart & Zac Arato, Atomic 3D

“The Bach” is an ongoing project designing the renovation of a typical New Zealand Bach (holiday home) at Riversdale Beach. This paper explores the process of rendering the early conceptual designs in Revit and then migrating these models to 3ds Max to develop the renders using two of the most prolifically used render engines; mental ray and V-Ray. This class will provide an overview of both render engines, enabling attendees to choose and immediately produce the highest quality renders in either application…

Jeff Waugh: Best (Scott Pilgrim) meta film review ever

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:39:10 +0000

Here’s what I’m saying: I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I hope I’m not, you know, blowing your mind.

– Linda Holmes in her incredibly cool meta-film-review, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

Ben Kepes (Mostly): Is Google App Engine Silently Gaining Traction?

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:48:48 +0000

When Google released its PaaS offering called Google App Engine, it attracted Web 2.0 developers in big numbers but it didn't gain much traction like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft platform. In fact, in May 2010, Network World had an article quoting a Forrester Survey which put the percentage of developers using Google App Engine at a meager 8.2%.

Built for hosting Web applications, App Engine services more than 500,000 daily page views, but App Engine's 8.2 percent usage rate, based on a Forrester Research survey of developers in late 2009, trails far behind Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which has nearly a 41 percent share. Microsoft's newer Windows Azure cloud service edges out App Engine, taking a 10.2 percent share. Forrester surveyed 1,200 developers, but only about 50 of them were actually deploying to the cloud.

The initial traction gained by Google App Engine was with Web 2.0 boys and newbies trying their hand with their projects. There were some serious social apps built on top of GAE but the traction among the developers was very slow as pointed out by the survey. After the initial days, Google announced the support for Java with enterprise developer community in mind. We didn't see any large scale adoption of Google App Engine by Java developers initially. However, two things happened after that which seems to be evoking interest towards Google App Engine among the developers.

Google announced the roadmap for App Engine for enterprises. This was the first step taken by Google targeting the enterprise market. It was followed by a partnership with VMware where they announced support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine. They touted it as an easy way to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers could build Spring applications in a familiar and productive way and have the flexibility to choose to deploy their applications in their current private VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud partner clouds, or directly to Google App Engine.

These two announcements brought in renewed interest among developers and the announcement by Google that they will offer support and strong SLAs were attractive enough for enterprises and developers in smaller organizations to consider Google App Engine as the platform for the deployment of their apps. This trend is now confirmed by a report released by Elance, one of the top talent sourcing company, where they announced that there is a large increase (to be specific 10X increase) in demand for developers developing apps for Google App Engine. With this increase in demand, Google App Engine has even moved past Amazon Web Services as the cloud platform in demand.

The IT category however remains the top performing job category with a 44% increase in provider earnings in Q2 year over year. Fueling this growth are companies embracing cloud computing platforms and mobile devices that need to tap into highly skilled and qualified work teams. After making an entry into the top 50 skills in Q1 2010, Google App Engine, the cloud-based application development platform, showed the single largest increase in demand with over a 10x growth quarter over quarter. With this increase, Google App Engine (#37) moved past Amazon Web Services (#40) as the cloud platform highest in demand in Q2.

With Microsoft pushing hard on Azure, we are in for some good competition. If this trend holds universally, we can see that a trend towards platform services exists moving developers away from the IaaS offerings like EC2 consistent with what I say about the future of platform services. I think the next two years will be interesting to see how the market develops for platform services, in general, and Google App Engine, in particular. What do you think? Will enterprises ever take Google App Engine seriously? With today's vFabric announcement, how serious VMware will be in their support for Google App Engine?

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Kirk Jackson: 10 things YOU are doing wrong!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:18:01 +0000

Here's the presentation I delivered at the Auckland Code Camp 2010. It covers 10 things that I found when surveying attendees websites :)

.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

10 things YOU are doing wrong! on Prezi

Chris Double: Dependent Types in ATS

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:30:00 +0000

Dependent types are types that depend on the values of expressions. ATS uses dependent types and in this post I hope to go through some basic usage that I’ve learnt as I worked my way through the documentation, examples and various papers.

While learning about dependent types in ATS I used the following resources:

Most of the examples that follow are based on examples in those resources.

Sorts and Types

Some dependently typed languages allow types to depend on values expressed in the language itself. ATS provides a restricted form of dependent types. The expressions that types can depend on are in a restricted constraint language rather than the full language of ATS. This constraint language is itself typed and to prevent confusion they call the types in that language ‘sorts’. References to ‘sort’ in this post refer to types in that constraint language. References to ‘type’ refers to types in the core ATS language itself.

Here is an example of the difference. The following is an example of a function that takes two numbers and returns the result of them added together. This is in a hypothetical dependently typed language where types can depend on language values itself:

fun add(a: int, b: int): int (a+b) = a + b

Here the result type is the exact integer type of the two numbers added together. A mistake in the body of the code that resulted in anything but the sum of the two numbers would be a type error. In ATS this function would look like:

fun add {m,n:int} (a: int m, b: int n): int (m+n) = a + b

Notice here the introduction of {m,n:int}. This is the ‘constraint language’ used for values that the types in ATS can depend on. Here we declare two values, m and n, of sort int. The two arguments to add are a and b and they are of type int m and int n respectively. They are the type of the exact integer represented by the m and n. The result type is an integer which is the sum of these two values. Note that the dependent type in ATS (the m, n and m+n) are variables and computations expressed in the constraint language, not variables in ATS (the a, b, and a+b).

Having a restricted constraint language for type values simplifies the type checking process. All computations in this language are pure and have no effects. Sorts and functions in the language must terminate. This avoids infinite loops and exceptions during typechecking.

For more information on the reasoning behind restricted dependent types see Dependent Types in Practical Programming and other papers at the ATS website.

In ATS documentation the restricted constrainted language is called the ‘statics’ of ATS and is documented in chapter 5 of the ATS user guide.

Simple Lists

Before I get into datatypes that use dependent types, I’ll do a quick overview of non-dependent types for those not familiar with ATS syntax. A basic ‘list’ type that can contain integers can be defined in ATS as:

datatype list =
  | nil
  | cons of (int, list)

With this type defined a list of integers can be created using the following syntax:

val a = cons(1, cons(2, cons(3, cons(4, nil))))

Functions that operate over lists can use pattern matching to deconstruct the list:

fun list_length(xs: list): int = 
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => 0
  | cons (_, xs) => 1 + list_length(xs)

fun list_append(xs: list, ys:list): list =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => ys
  | cons (x, xs) => cons(x, list_append(xs, ys))

A complete example program is in dt1.dats (html). This can be built with the command:

atscc -o dt1 -D_ATS_GCATS dt1.dats

Note the -D_ATS_GCATS. This tells the ATS compiler to link against the garbage collector. This is needed as types defined with datatype are allocated on the heap and require the garbage collector to be released.

Polymorphic Lists

Instead of a list of integers we might want lists of different types. A list that is polymorphic can be defined using:

datatype list (a:t@ype) =
  | nil (a)
  | cons (a) of (a, list a)

Here the list can hold elements that are of any size. This is what the t@ype refers to. The functions that operate on these polymorphic lists are similar to the non-polymorphic list versions. The difference is they are ‘template’ functions and are parameterized by the template type:

fun{a:t@ype} list_length (xs: list a): int = 
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => 0
  | cons (_, xs) => 1 + list_length(xs)

fun{a:t@ype} list_append(xs: list a, ys: list a): list a =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => ys
  | cons (x, xs) => cons(x, list_append(xs, ys))

fun{a,b:t@ype} list_zip(xs: list a, ys: list b): list ('(a,b)) =
  case+ (xs, ys) of
  | (nil (), nil ()) => nil ()
  | (cons (x, xs), cons (y, ys)) => cons('(x,y), list_zip(xs, ys))
  | (_, _) => nil ()

The {a:t@ype} immediately after the fun keyword identifies the function as a template function. These are very similar to C++ style templates. See the ATS Parametric Polymorphism and Templates tutorial for more details.

This example adds a definition for list_zip now that lists of things other than integers can be created. In this example we return a list of tuples. Each tuple contains the elements from the original source lists.

The complete example program is in dt2.dats (html). The example program has the following code:

val a = cons(1, cons(2, cons(3, cons(4, nil))))
val b = cons(5, cons(6, cons(7, cons(8, nil))))
val lena = list_length(a)
val lenb = list_length(b)
val c = list_append(a, b)
val d = list_zip(a, c) // <== different lengths!
val lend = list_length(d)

Note that the length of list a is 4, whereas the length of list d is 8. Calling list_zip with these two different lengthed lists results in a list of length 4 being returned.

We can encode the length of a list as part of the type to get a compile error if an attempt is made to zip two lists with different lengths. The length that is part of the type would be a dependent type (as the length is the value of an expression - the integer length of the list).

Dependently Typed Lists

The following datatype definition defines a polymorphic list of length n, where n is an integer:

datatype list (a:t@ype, int) =
  | nil (a, 0)
  | {n:nat} cons (a, n+1) of (a, list (a, n))

It is very similar to the previous polymorphic list definition except for the additional int. The type constructor for nil has this set to 0. A nil list is a list of length 0. The cons type constructor shows that the cons of a list of length n will be a list of length n+1. The {n:nat} constrains the type of n to be natural numbers (non-negative integers).

The implementation of the functions shown previous for this new list type are function templates as they were in the previous example. They also have the additional parameter for the length value:

fun{a:t@ype} list_length {n:nat} (xs: list (a, n)): int n = 
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => 0
  | cons (_, xs) => 1 + list_length(xs)

fun{a:t@ype} list_append {n1,n2:nat} (xs: list (a, n1), ys: list (a, n2)): list (a, n1+n2) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => ys
  | cons (x, xs) => cons(x, list_append(xs, ys))

fun{a,b:t@ype} list_zip {n:nat} (xs: list (a, n), ys: list (b, n)): list ('(a,b), n) =
  case+ (xs, ys) of
  | (nil (), nil ()) => nil ()
  | (cons (x, xs), cons (y, ys)) => cons('(x,y), list_zip(xs, ys))

Notice the type of the return value of list_length is the type for the specific integer value of n - which is the length of the list. This means that any error in the implementation that would result in a different value being returned is a compile time error. For example, this won’t typecheck:

fun{a:t@ype} list_length {n:nat} (xs: list (a, n)): int n = 
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => 1
  | cons (_, xs) => 1 + list_length(xs)

Similarly the type of the return value of list_append is defined as being a list of length n1+n2. That is, the sum of the length of the two input lists. The following will fail with a compile error:

fun{a:t@ype} list_append {n1,n2:nat} (xs: list (a, n1), ys: list (a, n2)): list (a, n1+n2) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () =>  nil
  | cons (x, xs) => cons(x, list_append(xs, ys))

It is now a compile error to pass lists of different lengths to list_zip. This is because both input arguments are defined to be of the same length n. This list_zip usage from the previous polymorphic list example is now a compile error.

The complete example program is in dt3.dats (html).

Filter

It is not always possible to know the exact length of a result list which could make encoding the type problematic. A filter function that takes a list and returns a result list containing only those elements that return true when passed to a predicate function for example. In this case the typechecker would need to be able to call the predicate function to be able to determine the length of the result list. The following does not type check:

fun{a:t@ype} list_filter {m:nat} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  f: a -<> bool
  ): list (a, m) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs) => if f(x) then cons(x, list_filter(xs, f)) else list_filter(xs, f)

In this erroneous example the result is defined as a list of length m. But it won’t be of length m if the result of the predicate function means elements are skipped. A definition that typechecks uses an existential type definition (the [n:nat]) to define the result length as being a different value:

fun{a:t@ype} list_filter {m:nat} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  f: a -<> bool
  ): [n:nat] list (a, n) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs) => if f(x) then cons(x, list_filter(xs, f)) else list_filter(xs, f)

This unfortunately means that the typechecker won’t detect some examples of erroneous code. We’d like this to fail to compile if it results in a result list which is larger than the original list which should be impossible:

fun{a:t@ype} list_filter {m:nat} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  f: a -<> bool
  ): [n:nat] list (a, n) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs) => if f(x) then cons(x, cons(x, list_filter(xs, f))) else list_filter(xs, f)

The solution to this is to limit the existential type in the result to be all natural numbers less than or equal to the length of the input list:

fun{a:t@ype} list_filter {m:nat} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  f: a -<> bool
  ): [n:nat | n <= m] list (a, n) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs) => if f(x) then cons(x, list_filter(xs, f)) else list_filter(xs, f)

Note the [n:nat | n <= m] which defines the limit. This will now fail to compile the erroneous code but sucessfully compile the correct code. It won’t catch all possible errors but is better at catching some errors that the previous version.

The complete example program is in dt4.dats (html).

Drop

The implementation of a list_drop function, which removes the first n items from a list, also has a similar problem to that of list_filter. This definition won’t typecheck:

fun{a:t@ype} list_drop {m:nat} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  count: int
  ): list (a, m) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs2) => if count > 0 then list_drop(xs2, count - 1) else xs

Like list_filter this is due to the wrong size being used in the result list. We could use the same solution as list_filter which is to set the size using an existential type definition but in this case we actually know the result size. It is based on the count that is passed as an argument. The result list size should be the same as the input list, less the count. Here’s the new definition:

fun{a:t@ype} list_drop {m,n:nat | n <= m} (
  xs: list (a, m),
  count: int n
  ): list (a, m - n) =
  case+ xs of
  | nil () => nil ()
  | cons (x, xs2) => if count > 0 then list_drop(xs2, count - 1) else xs

This version will typecheck correctly. It will give a compile time error if the implementation incorrectly produces a list that is not exactly the expected size. It will also be a compile time error if the given count of items to drop is greater than the size of the list.

This is done by making count a singleton integer. Its type is an integer of a specific value, called n. When n is declared we state that it must be less than the size of the list, m, as seen by the definition {m,n:nat | n <= m}. The result list is required to be of size m-n.

The complete example program is in dt5.dats (html).

Lists that depend on their values

The previous list examples were datatypes that were dependant on the size of the list. It’s also possible to depend on the value stored in the list itself. The following is the definition for a list that can only hold even numbers:

datatype list =
  | nil of ()
  | {x:int | (x mod 2) == 0 } cons of (int x, list)

The cons constructor takes an int and a list. It is dependant on the value of the int with the constraint that the value of the int must be divisible by 2. It is now a compile error to put an odd number into the list. This won’t typecheck due to the attempt to pass the odd number 3 to cons:

val a = cons(2, cons(3, cons(10, cons(6, nil))))

The complete example program is in dt6.dats (html).

Another example of a list that depends on its values might be a list where all elements must be less than 100 and in order. It should be a type error to construct an unordered list.

datatype olist (int) =
  | nil (100) of ()
  | {x,y:int | x <= y} cons (x) of (int x, olist (y))

An olist is dependent on an int. This int is an integer value that all elements consed to the list must be less than. The nil constructor uses 100 for the value to show that all items must be less than 100. Like the previous example, the cons constructor depends on the first argument. It uses this in the constraint to ensure it is less than the dependant value of the tail list (the y).

Out of order construction like the following will be a type error:

val a = cons(1, cons(12, cons(10, cons(12, nil))))

Whereas this is fine:

val a = cons(1, cons(2, cons(10, cons(12, nil))))

The complete example program is in dt7.dats (html).

Red-Black Trees

The paper Dependently Typed Datastructures has an example of using dependently typed datatypes to implement red-black trees. The paper uses the language DML. I’ve translated this to ATS in the example that follows.

A red-black tree is a balanced binary tree which satisfies the following conditions:

All nodes are marked with a colour, red or black.
All leaves are marked black and all other nodes are either red or black.
For every node there are the same number of black nodes on every path connecting the node to a leaf. This is called the black height of the node.
The two sons of every red node must be black.

These constraints can be defined in the red-black tree datatype ensuring that the tree is always balanced and correct as per the conditions above. It becomes impossible to implement functions that produce a tree that is not a correct red-black tree since it won’t typecheck. This can be defined as:

sortdef color = {c:nat | 0 <= c; c <= 1}
#define red 1
#define black 0

datatype rbtree(int, int, int) =
  | E(black, 0, 0)
  | {cl,cr:color} {bh:nat}
     B(black, bh+1, 0)
       of (rbtree(cl, bh, 0), int, rbtree(cr, bh, 0))
  | {cl,cr:color} {bh:nat}
     R(red, bh, cl+cr)
       of (rbtree(cl, bh, 0), int, rbtree(cr, bh, 0))

The type rbtree is indexed by (int, int, int). These are the color of the node, the black height of the tree and the number of color violations respectively. The later is a count of the number of times a red node is followed by another red node. From the conditions given earlier it can be seen than a correct rbtree should always have a color violation number of zero.

The constructor, E, is a leaf node. This node is black, has a height of zero and no color violations. It is a valid rbtree.

The constructor B is a black node. It takes 3 arguments. The left child node, the integer value stored as the key, and the right child node. The type for a node constructed by B is black, has a height one greater than the child nodes and no color violations. Note that the black height of the two child nodes must be equal.

The constructor R is a red node. It takes 3 arguments, the same as the B constructor. As this is a red node it doesn’t increase the black height so uses the same value of the child nodes. The color violations value is calculated by adding the color values of the two child nodes. If either of those are red then the color violations will be non-zero.

The type for a function that inserts a key into the tree can now be defined as:

fun insert {c:color} {bh:nat} ( 
  key: int, 
  rbt: rbtree(c ,bh, 0)
  ): [c:color] [bh:nat] rbtree(c, bh, 0)

This means our implementation of insert must return a correct rbtree. It cannot have a color violations value that is not zero so it must conform to the conditions we outlined earlier. If it doesn’t, it won’t compile.

When inserting a node into the tree we can end up with a tree where the red-black tree conditions are violated. A function restore is defined below that pattern matches the combinations of invalid nodes and performs the required transformations to return an rbtree with no violations:

fun restore {cl,cr:color} {bh:nat} {vl,vr:nat | vl+vr <= 1} (
  left: rbtree(cl, bh, vl),
  key: int,
  right: rbtree(cr, bh, vr)
  ): [c:color] rbtree(c, bh + 1, 0) =
  case+ (left, key, right) of
    | (R(R(a,x,b),y,c),z,d) => R(B(a,x,b),y,B(c,z,d))
    | (R(a,x,R(b,y,c)),z,d) => R(B(a,x,b),y,B(c,z,d))
    | (a,x,R(R(b,y,c),z,d)) => R(B(a,x,b),y,B(c,z,d))
    | (a,x,R(b,y,R(c,z,d))) => R(B(a,x,b),y,B(c,z,d))
    | (a,x,b) =>> B(a,x,b)

The type of the restore function states that it takes a left and right node, one of which may have a color violation, and returns a correctly formed red-black tree node. It’s time consuming and error prone to look at the code and determine that it covers all the required cases to return a correctly formed tree. However the type checker will do this for us thanks to the constraints that have defined on the function and the rbtree type. It won’t compile if any of the pattern match lines are removed for example.

The use of =>> in the last pattern match line is explained in the tutorial on pattern matching. The ATS typechecker will typecheck each pattern line independently of the others. This can cause a typecheck failure in the last match since it doesn’t take into account the previous patterns and can’t determine that the color violation value of a in the result will be zero. By using =>> we tell ATS to typecheck the clause under the assumption that the other clauses have not been taken. Since they all handle the non-zero color violation case this line will then typecheck.

The insert function itself is implemented as follows:

fun insert {c:color} {bh:nat} (
  x: int,
  t: rbtree(c ,bh, 0)
  ): [c:color] [bh2:nat] rbtree(c, bh2, 0) = let
  fun ins {c:color} {bh:nat} (
    t2: rbtree(c, bh, 0)
  ):<cloptr1> [c2:color] [v:nat | v <= c] rbtree(c2, bh, v) =
    case+ t2 of
    | E () => R(E (), x, E ())
    | B(a, y, b) => if x < y then restore(ins(a), y, b)
                    else if y < x then restore (a, y, ins(b))
                    else B(a, y, b)
    | R(a, y, b) => if x < y then R(ins(a), y, b)
                    else if y < x then R(a, y, ins(b))
                    else R(a, y, b)
  val t = ins(t)
in
  case+ t of
  | R(a, y, b) => B(a, y, b)
  | _ =>> t
end

The complete example program is in dt8.dats (html). For another example of red-black trees in ATS see the funrbtree example from the ATS website.

Linear constraints

The constraints generated by the dependent types must be ‘linear’ constraints. An example of a linear constraint is the definition of ‘list_append’ earlier:

fun{a:t@ype} list_append {n1,n2:nat} (
  xs: list (a, n1), ys: list (a, n2)
  ): list (a, n1+n2)

The result type containing n1+n2 will typecheck fine. However an example that won’t typecheck is the following definition of a list_concat:

fun{a:t@ype} list_concat {n1,n2:nat} (
  xss: list (list (a, n1), n2),
  ): list (a, n1*n2)

The n1*n2 results in a non-linear constraint being generated and the ATS typechecker cannot resolve this. The solution for this is to use theoreom-proving. See chapter 6 in the ATS user guide for details and an example using concat.

Closing notes

Although I create my own list types in these examples, ATS has lists, vectors and many other data structures in the standard library.

There’s a lot more that can be done with ATS and dependent types. For more examples see the papers mentioned at the beginning at throughout this post. The paper Why Dependent Types Matter is also useful reading for more on the topic.

Brenda Wallace: a cat named linux

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:54:54 +0000

a cat named linux, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

In memory of our old family cat, my sister's old kitty: Linux.
1996 - 31st August 2010.

Brenda Wallace: a cat named linux

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:54:54 +0000

a cat named linux, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

In memory of our old family cat, my sister's old kitty: Linux.
1996 - 31st August 2010.

Jack Yan: What’s possible with open government

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:10:00 +0000

When I go on about free wiﬁ, it’s not just some vague election promise. Someone mentioned that I should have put the reason behind the message on my ﬁrst billboard, but the reasons are too plentiful.
It’s not just about giving businesses and tourists the access they expect in a modern society. It’s also about signalling that Wellington is open for business, especially the type that can grow this economy with Kiwi entrepreneurship at its core. And it’s a great tool for transparency.
Brad Gallen shared this link, and while these weren’t the apps I had in mind originally, they show that in a creative world, people will come up with great ideas if you give them the infrastructure.
While the Open311 API has come from San Francisco, under Mayor Gavin Newsom—Jen’s husband—there’s no reason we couldn’t have come up with it here. But now that it has been developed, we should use it. There are ﬁve apps that Mashable has identiﬁed—and these are the sorts of things I can envisage popping up in Wellington if I am elected mayor.
Wellingtonians can elect someone who will give little more than lip service to transparency and technology, or someone who will use both to create and grow the city we deserve.

Meanwhile, yesterday, Simon Young shared this link with me: a story on the live Taupo City Council stream. Yet another thing we should have done ages ago. Now, like Dunedin and free wiﬁ, we ﬁnd ourselves catching up and being reactive. When we should be rearranging the letters and being creative.

Phil Wheeler: Testing Your HTML5 Pages Through ContentType

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:07:50 +0000

As web developers, we typically strive to adhere to best practice and comply with accepted HTML and CSS standards. Ordinarily, to test that our site’s code meets these standards, we’d use an online validation service such as the W3C HTML Validator but this requires actually having your page in a publicly-accessible location – typically a production environment – so that the validation service can review the markup.

However there is a new content type introduced in the HTML5 Specification that effectively serves the same function and is supported by all “HTML5 browsers”: application/xhtml+xml.

This content type instructs the browser to expect all HTML on the page to conform to proper XHTML and XML standards. The advantage in using this content type is that you can still add your own custom HTML elements (not sure why you would, but you still can) and – assuming you have marked them up correctly (i.e. closed your opening tags, attributes, etc) – your page will still validate and render successfully.

So what happens if you have invalid markup in your page? Let’s assume your HTML code looks like this:






	Index








My Page Title



Home
Contact



Index


     div > 

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In in augue lectus, in volutpat lorem. Etiam nec risus urna. Duis tincidunt lorem lacinia nisl cursus sit amet gravida lacus gravida. Proin quam dui, sodales nec bibendum vitae, adipiscing suscipit sapien. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Praesent ornare sollicitudin tincidunt. Aenean pulvinar tempus diam ut iaculis.

Notice the extra <div> tag in the page’s first paragraph. (Edit: I’m having a few problems getting my code to display bugs properly. Assume the paragraph in the code above looks like this:
<p><div>Some paragraph content</p>

When you try to open the page in your browser, you’ll see an error page similar to this:

Invalid markup error in Firefox 4

Google Chrome is a little more helpful, trying to render out as much of the page as possible before things went sour:

Invalid markup error on Google Chrome

It is important to remember that using this content type is probably Not A Good Idea in your production environment unless you’re really, really confident that your code is pitch-perfect. Still, as a fast and easy validation tool, HTML5 provides some very useful functionality.

Rachel McAlpine / Alice Hearnshaw (Contented): Accessibility problem in Word: don’t rely on colour

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:37:18 +0000

Today I struck an accessibility problem in an otherwise perfectly clear Word document. Though small, it was a healthy reminder that web content accessibility guidelines, as in WCAG 2.0, apply to everything we write on a computer.

Later this week I’m to present a couple of awards. I received the script, and because I want to read the judges’ comments accurately on the night, I printed it. On paper, what else?

Only then did I notice the problem.

“MC part in black font. Reader’s part in blue font (Rachel).”

Why is this a problem?

First, I use a black-and-white-only printer most of the time, for good housewifely reasons. So the printed version was not entirely satisfactory, even though blue font appeared grey, very different from bold-black for the MC’s words.
Secondly, the printed script covers three pages, and the colour cue was only visible on page one.
Thirdly, while I’m not colour blind, as a fully fledged older person with incipient cataracts, I don’t have perfect sight. I regard my own responses as a valid test case for whether content (on the web or elsewhere) is distinguishable to millions of slightly disabled people.

Being a playwright, I instantly fixed the problem by inserting characters’ names before each of their speeches— “MC:” or “Rachel:”

Let’s keep this in proportion: this was a tiny problem that affected only me, and was easily fixed.

But it’s a good reminder that content is not only web content, and many WCAG 2.0 accessibiilty guidelines have much wider applications. Bear them in mind also whenever you’re writing any electronic documents.

Image via Michael Lee’s blog, 2002

Jeffrey Wegesin: The land of the free

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:33:52 +0000

After two months of packing and unpacking my suitcase I’m back in Wellington. I spent seven weeks of summer in America.

While growing up, some of my friends had summer cottages along the lake and other friends drove to famous landmarks with their parents. My family drove to Florida every summer. Driving away from a hot summer towards an even hotter one makes as much sense as taking a hot bath in Death Valley. But July means summer vacation, free from the burden of school. It’s the only time a family can holiday together. By the time I was a teenager I hated it, so I avoided Orlando until this year.

Within a week of arriving in Chicago my family flew to Disney in Orlando, Florida and we spent ten days together. I was nervous. Before my nieces and nephews were born, I was the youngest boy in my family, the second youngest child in my extended family. I’ve never been around kids. Babies, yes, but they only dribble.

The first day at the Magic Kingdom was shocking. Everything seemed tiny, like I was walking through my primary school hallway and thinking were the lockers and chairs always this small? But the parks are made for little people, and it seemed like they had fun, I think. It’s hard to tell. Children are hard to read.

For example one day at Animal Kingdom it was around 37 °C (98 °F). To battle the heat we decided to go on a water ride. It was a large family raft, where everyone sits together, and as the raft floats down a river it’s squirted with water. But my niece didn’t want to go because she didn’t want to get wet. She was a little irritable from the heat. She lost the battle with her parents. She got wet. As the line was unusually short we wanted to go again but she fought and whined to stay off the ride.

At home my sister asked, “What was your favorite part of the theme park today?”

“The water ride,” she said.

What.

My brother-in-law told me to practice safe sex.

New York was the same size. Most of my favorite spots were different. I stayed a few blocks away from Central Park with a friend I met in Wellington. Throughout my stay she was plagued with psoriasis, which made her itchier than a baby with chicken pox.

Her doctor asked for samples of everything her body secreted and excreted. Urine, saliva, feces. It was three days of planned meals and frequent visits to the toilet, to bag and tag her leftovers. She boxed her stuff to post to California, where her preferred doctor practiced.

On the way to the mailbox we were distracted by mannequins and shop windows along the avenue, so we ended up browsing merchandise with a box of excrement in tow. “Megan, I don’t think we should be carrying that through these stores,” I whispered.

She laughed, “Don’t worry Timmy. No one knows. It’s our little secret.”

She calls me Timmy because once upon a time she found me similar to the retarded South Park child in the wheelchair.

A few years ago, after a friend in Wellington drove through America, someone asked her to describe the states in one word. She picked consume. At the time I couldn’t see it, but because I returned to Wellington with two suitcases each weighing 25 kilograms (55 pounds), I can see her point.

Most tourists want to see Los Angeles or New York, skipping Chicago altogether. Big mistake. It’s clean. There’s a big frickin’ freshwater lake. It feels friendly.

My friends in the city showed me their favorite bits of their neighborhood, and their pride reminded me of the time Amber arrived in Wellington. I took her to all of my local spots and we had a great time. I still felt the same when I landed at the airport in Wellington. It’s good to be back.

Mike Riversdale: It Was Back In 2001 That I Applied To Be Manager Of A "Sex Shop"

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:38:40 +0000

I had returned from my two year "single man adventures" in Sydney* with a pot of gold under my arm and no great desire to work for the man. I joined any number of societies, clubs and communities. I had dinners, lunches and even the odd breakfast with friends. I even managed to desist from trying to shag the whole of Wellington after it was pointed out to me that I was off on that particular circle of life once again.

The life of leisure. A man with more money that time ...
God I got bored pretty bloody quickly.

And so I started looking around for something to do.
I most certainly did not want to go back to working in IT every again ... hmm. In fact I wanted to do something more people focussed. Now I can't remember the exact order of things but there was the Counselling Degree at WelTec and ... well, something very different.

I spotted in the local paper (ah, the days of physical newspapers :-) that d.vice ("Quality Adult Toys for Adventerous Everyday People") were expanding from the one shop to another (or moving to bigger premises ... or something). Anywho they wanted a Manager for their shop.

I like adventure, pretty keen on sex and love making people smile.
So, I found a PC somewhere and set about trying to make my very IT-centric CV as relevant as I could which, as you can imagine, was a labour of creativity and a lot of fun.

Popped the application form and CV into the post and then set off for another lunch meeting with the local art society (or some such activity I was prone to get up to a lot back then).

The post came, my CV was returned to me and I was regretfully not suitable for the position. Ah well, no big surprises there and nothing ventured nothing gained. I was disappointed but by no means down-and-out, I mean who knows where my life may have gone if they had said, "Yip, you're the man for us" - interesting to speculate eh. Ok, I confess, I did think for a few seconds it was because I was a man of the male species but I may have been looking for any excuse to make it general and not about me, hey we all do it :-)

Hang on though, what's that yellow sticky poking out of the CV ... oh lordy lord, they had inadvertently left their notes on the CV as they, I assume, passed it around the three owners of the company. And the one that will always stick in my mind was:

Totally qualified but I would be worried he would steal our ideas

Wow, really ... that was a thought that had never crossed my mind.

Firstly I recall thinking (and still do), "If you think that then surely you'd want to at least meet me!", I mean the people that may go into competition with you (and boy-oh-boy was that never gonna happen) are exactly the sort of people you should be hiring.

My second thought was, "How bloody rude!" ... they'd never met me and I was tarred with the brush 'industrial espionage'. Hurumph.

I never really lost a lot of sleep about it and to be honest, apart from having a giggle with my mates at the time (yip, I showed them) it's never even popped into my mind.

Until this floated across my Twitter stream from @dviceNZ

Are you a sales super star and experienced retail manager? Lead the D.VICE Welly team…find out more. http://www.dvice.co.nz/vacancies/12

HA HA HA HA - I RT'ed it with "I once applied for this, blog post to explain hilarity coming" and @dviceNZ asked what the "hilarity" was to which I said give me an email address and I'll send you this post. They did, and I did ... [silence] ... :-)

BTW: Their Wellington position is still open, applications must be in by 14th September - have at it!

* Yes, I know, it's time to put fingers on keyboards and add to the life story with "Chapter Six: The Hellraiser Years (Sydney)" ... sometime very soon.

Sue Tyler: Random Acts of Kindness Day

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:36:21 +0000

Here at Craft2.0 we’re all for Random Acts of Kindness. And today just happens to be the official day to celebrate doing such things.

So why don’t you put some extra money in a parking meter, pay for a stranger’s coffee, or just leave a nice note somewhere for a passer-by to find?

Better yet, why don’t we all try to do little things once in a while to be a little charming? It always improves my day no end when I take the time to chat with the check out person at the supermarket, or comment on someone’s gorgeous outfit, or simply take a moment to notice and care.

Luigi Cappel: Finger in ear phone and skin touchpad

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:39:16 +0000

The technology is still being developed, but while friends are arguing the merits of the latest Android mobiles (and iPhone is dropping on the list off desired product for some reason….) other manufacturers are heading towards the computing implants, step by slow step. I’ve written about haptic suits before, but this could allow us in [...]

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): ReadWriteHack: Our Latest Channel Launches

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Today we're launching our fifth channel, ReadWriteHack. Sponsored by the Intel Atom Developer Program, ReadWriteHack is a resource and guide for developers. In this channel we will outline best practices for designing and developing applications. We will also provide examples of hacks and how they work, to inspire you and show you what's possible.

ReadWriteHack will be authored by two talented developers, Jay Cuthrell and Ben Barden. Jay is a strategic technology consultant from North Carolina and Ben is a Web developer from the U.K.

Sponsor

If you're a developer, you'll want to subscribe to this channel - keep an eye out for the Hack of the Day series in particular!

ReadWriteHack joins our four other channels: ReadWriteStart, ReadWriteBiz, ReadWriteEnterprise and ReadWriteCloud. The aim with our channels is to provide technology guidance and resources to a specific audience. In the case of ReadWriteHack, we're all about serving developers. Check it out if you're of the hacking persuasion.

Discuss

Ben Kepes (Mostly): Will Tweet for Beer: How Epic Beer Is Reaching Customers

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:39:47 +0000

Epic Beer is a boutique, premium brewery based in New Zealand. It’s winning accolades all around the world for the quality of its product, but more relevant to us here at Zengage, they’re doing it via direct conversations with the... Read more

Robin Capper: AutoCAD for Mac and AutoCAD WS for iOS Devices Announced

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:15:16 +0000

Shaan has the details, Apple Mac + AutoCAD without the need for virtual machines and a hosted solution for the iOS hardware!

AutoCAD for Mac and AutoCAD WS for iOS Devices Announced by Autodesk - Between the Lines

“AutoCAD natively on the Mac is no longer a myth or urban legend like bigfoot, UFOs, and unicorns”

“AutoCAD WS extends AutoCAD DWG to Apple iOS based devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and of course the iPad”

Mike Riversdale: Be Prepared For Something Quite Spectacular

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:08:54 +0000

The Wilderness Downtown - http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ - is a Google Chrome experiment that will have you dropping your jaw. The words used to describe it, "An interactive film by Chris Milk, featuring "We Used To Wait" built in HTML5" don't really do it justice.

And for full effect, enter the real address of the house you grew up in.

Note: this requires the latest browser (I used Google Chrome), speakers and a fairly grunty machine (although I use my wee widdle Dell laptop with nothing else running and all good).

Enjoy your very own music video

Ben Kepes (Mostly): Zetta Wants You To Forget Using Traditional Backup Solutions

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Zetta, the two year old company offering storage as a service targeted towards enterprises, yesterday announced the availability of Zetta Data Protection Solution and they are demoing their offering at the VMworld booth at San Francisco this week. In this era of big data, even enterprises have tons and tons of data which becomes too cumbersome to manage using traditional tools. Zetta is eyeing the enterprise storage market with their cloud storage offering. In this post, I will dig into their solution to understand how it fits into the enterprise storage needs.

The Enterprise Storage Problem

In today's world, the digital data is everywhere. Starting with individual households to fortune 100 companies, data is getting accumulated in huge amounts. In fact, one of the estimates claims that the enterprise demand will create more than 600,000,000 new terabytes of unstructured data globally over the next four years, which is more than three times the total deployed universe of all enterprise and consumer storage to date. Handling such huge volumes of data using traditional storage techniques is next to impossible due to

high capital expenditure and other scalability issues
the traditional systems are inherently incapable of managing such huge volumes of data
complexity of managing an infrastructure to suit these needs
high operating expenditures including huge labor costs associated with hiring good storage admins

etc.. The new cloud storage services focussed mainly on consumers and SMB sectors are not a good fit for enterprises. The demands for the enterprises are too high. Some of the enterprise cloud storage requirements are

High Availability (enterprise grade SLAs)
High Scalability (public cloud like instantaneous scaling)
High Data Integrity
High Data Security and Privacy
High Performance
Standards based

Along with such high expectations from the enterprises, they are also looking for cost effectiveness of the solutions which can easily integrate with the existing infrastructure.

Zetta's Solution

Zetta tackled the enterprise cloud storage problem head on with their offering. They offer a truly multi-tenant architecture designed from the ground up to offer the integrity, security, reliability, performance, compatibility and value necessary to meet the primary storage needs of the enterprise. The main priority for Zetta while designing their storage technology is data protection. Zetta identified drive failure, bit rot, network failure, controller failure and controller corruption as the main causes for data loss and developed the RAIN6 N+3 encoding algorithm which is configured to offer 3 parity copies of encoded data. This enterprise class redundancy is one of the crucial aspects of Zetta's technology which ensures one of the top levels of data integrity. Not only this redundancy, they also use an advanced algorithm to constantly seek out and correct corruptions in the data at multiple layers of the Zetta File System. When coupled with their worry free rich snapshot and replication solutions, the enterprises are presented with a truly state of the art cloud storage solution.

The other features of Zetta's storage technology include

Compatibility with the existing enterprise infrastructure by relying on POSIX compliant standards for storage systems and support for widely used protocols like NFS, FTP, sFTP, WebDAV and rsync, instead of proprietary APIs used by some of the storage vendors focussing on consumer and SMB market . This makes it easy for enterprises to add Zetta storage solutions as an extension of their existing infrastructure. They fully implement the native file system which will be handy for enterprises to use it with existing native file system apps like the ones used for eDiscovery
Comprehensive security that meets or exceeds the compliance requirements customers face for their data storage is another salient feature of their platform. Along with the necessary support for encrypted movement for data, they also offer encryption for data at rest with the key securely stored in government-grade, FIPS 140-2 certified hardware security modules. When the 100% logical separation of data through virtualization is combined with the key per volume practices, the privacy of the stored data is maintained at the highest levels in the industry
High SLAs with excellant performance compared to the same levels of latency offered by on-premise storage solutions
Highly cost effective with pricing starting at $256 per Terrabyte per month. The ROI is very high. In fact, according to Marc Staimer, founder and senior analyst at Dragon Slayer Consulting. “The TCO of the Zetta Data Protection solution removes the financial reasons or rationale for not having a BC-DR plan.”

These are some of the features of Zetta solution that makes it attractive to the needs of today's enterprises.

Conclusion

Zetta's solutions combined the cost effectiveness and scalability of public clouds with the reliability and security of traditional storage solutions to offer a solution that could effectively solve the enterprise storage needs. There are many other cloud storage players targeting this market segment but Zetta is positioning themselves as a strong player by focussing on building a truly solid data protection technology and offering at a very low cost. This is definitely an interesting company to watch in this space.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Aristotle Pagaltzis: On the 12th of Never

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:25:28 +0000

James Morris:

Mobile security was one of the core issues discussed at [Linux Security Summit] (and during the rest of the week), with the year of the Linux desktop now apparently permanently canceled due to smartphones and similar devices.

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): iPad Newspapers: Ripe For Innovation

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:47:20 +0000

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Guardian, USA Today, Financial Times, and others. There are also new forms of news services that have arisen based solely on the iPad's touchscreen interaction and multimedia capabilities: Newsy and Flipboard come to mind.

In this post we'll look at how some of the leading newspapers are using iPad, what the user experience is like, and what could be improved still. We'll specifically look at WSJ, NYT and Newsy.

Sponsor

The Wall Street Journal

The default front page of the WSJ app immediately shows that the WSJ has thought a little outside the box in making its iPad edition different from the print and website editions. It offers up two versions of the paper: a daily one and a "Now" one. The "Now" version is updated with breaking news coverage throughout the day. It also features "top article picks from Journal editors." Users are invited to choose one or the other as their default version when they open the app. Both versions offer a mix of content from the print and online versions of WSJ.

As well as two versions of the paper, the WSJ iPad app has three useful sections: My Watchlist, Saved Articles and Saved Sections (the latter is only available to subscribers). It should be noted that the WSJ iPad app offers only limited content and features to free users. Subscribers get the full experience for $3.99 per week. A good portion of the content of the iPad app isn't available to non-paying users.

From a user experience perspective, the WSJ iPad app is very slick. The now familiar 'swipe' and 'pinch' iPad functions are deployed smartly and the only new thing users need to learn is that pinching returns them to the section homepage.

The New York Times

In contrast to the WSJ and many other newspapers with iPad apps, the New York Times offers only a limited amount of content in its iPad app. Called NYT Editor's Choice, the app features "a selection of latest news, opinion and features" from the venerable paper.

The NYT app has been heavily criticized for its lack of content. Gizmodo argues that the NYT's deal with the Amazon Kindle could be a big factor behind that decision. Politics aside, what is the user experience like?

The app is divided into sections: 6 content ones (News, Business, Technology, Opinion, Arts, Features) and one for video content. The first thing that struck me about the app is its relatively small default font. There is an option to select a larger font, but - like some of the Zinio magazine apps I profiled yesterday - one can't magnify the content. The content also has few images. Navigating the app is via the same swiping motion in WSJ, but it felt clunkier.

The video section was good, but (you guessed it) there wasn't a lot of content.

Overall, the NYT iPad app is rather disappointing from a content perspective - and just average from a user interaction point of view.

Newsy

The fact that both WSJ and NYT offer only limited free content on iPad surely leaves room for other companies to innovate. And that's exactly what video news service Newsy has done. It was probably the first iPad app that I used regularly, when I bought the device.

Newsy creates short video summaries of daily news. They're presented by people who wouldn't look out of place on the E Channel. Each clip runs from 2-5 minutes and is comprised of commentary based on TV news networks, news web sites and (refreshingly) blogs. They're concise summaries of the news of the day, taken from sources across the Web and other media.

I often watch Newsy on my iPad during my lunchtime - it sure beats watching midday TV! Here's an example clip, about the iPad's WiFi problems back in April:

iPad Newspapers Lite on Innovation Currently

There's no shortage of newspapers that offer iPad applications, many of them with much more free content than WSJ and NYT. However the sector is ripe for innovation, which is what apps like Newsy and Flipboard are doing.

Over time, newspapers will add more interactive features - video, infographics, slideshows. Much of the type of content that the Wired iPad app is experimenting with.

Newspapers could also do a lot with personalization on the iPad. Every newspaper reader (obviously I'm referring to older generations - joke!) has their favorite sections. But more than that, newspapers should offer in-depth news coverage on topics of interest to individual readers. It could even be esoteric content that doesn't often make the print edition due to space restrictions. The iPad is a Web-connected device after all, so it could theoretically pull down any content from a newspaper's archives - in the case of WSJ and NYT, those companies have decades of content that could potentially be accessed by iPad users. Imagine reading a news story about the BP oil spill, and wondering what other oil spills there have been through history - why not scroll through the WSJ or NYT archives on that topic within your iPad.

Let us know in the comments what your favorite iPad newspaper apps are. Also, what features would you like to see in these apps?

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by NYT, although not on the iPad. Image credits: ReneS.; stevegarfield

Discuss

David Preece: Combust in Unity

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:35:15 +0000

So ... in 2008 bunny bought a camera with him to Kiwiburn. Then Bunny and Paul sat around and turned it into a movie and, right now, are pimping it around the indie movie circuit. This is their trailer.

It appears my words are not all that good today. Hmmm.

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 31 August 2010

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Rules for Revolutionaries -- Carl Malamud's talk to the WWW2010 Conference. Video, slides, and text available.
Self-Improving Bayesian Sentiment Analysis for Twitter -- a how-I-did-it for a homegrown project to do sentiment analysis on Twitter.
LUXR -- the Lean User Experience Residency program. LUXr brings user experience and design services to early stage teams in a lower cost, more efficient way than traditional project-based consulting. The latest from Adaptive Path's Janice Fraser.
My Top Ten Assertions About Data Warehouses (CACM) -- Michael Stonebraker's take on the data warehouse world, and his predictions cut across a lot of our O'Reilly trends. Assertion 5: "No knobs" is the only thing that makes any sense. It is pretty clear that human operational costs dominate the cost of running a data warehouse. [...] Almost all DBMSs have 100 or more complicated tuning "knobs." This requires DBAs to be "4-star wizards" and drives up operating costs. Obviously, the only thing that makes sense is to have a program that adjusts these knobs automatically. In other words, look for "no knobs" as the only way to cut down DBA costs. (via mikeolson on Twitter)

Miraz Jordan: Jumping with the wind

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:39:26 +0000

There was a stiff and chilly breeze at Lyall Bay beach this afternoon when I took the dogs for a walk. The kite surfers were out though — just one to start with, and 4 by the time I left.

Kite Surfer at Lyall Bay.

One surfer sped along towards the airport, then turned back and jumped high and long into the air.

That’s when I found my Flip mino video camera and kept an eye on him. After several recordings I managed to catch him again — first with some small jumps over the waves, and then high into the air again.

It’s not the world’s best video — I fumble in the middle, and there’s wind noise and a playful dog barking — but here it is in all its 30 second glory.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhDxDUzTTwA

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Ben Kepes (Mostly): Timepass: If You Thought The Bidding War Between HP And Dell Over 3Par Was Ugly

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:07:15 +0000

If you thought the bidding war between HP and Dell over 3Par is getting ugly, you will be surprised to know how personal it gets among the folks in these organizations . The following picture starring @HPStorageGuy, @3parfarley and @DellServerGeek should convey you the tensions :-).

This LMAO moment was bought to you by Stuart Miniman.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Jeff Waugh: The Naked and Famous

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:46:12 +0000

If your eclectic tastes include legendary modern music-as-art heroes such as Radiohead, MGMT, Florence and the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, you simply must check out upcoming New Zealand band The Naked and Famous.

Their debut album will be released in early September, but they’ve put out some mind-blowingly good singles already… here’s Young Blood:

Update: Okay, I can’t just link the one. Here are my other favourites so far…

Phil Wheeler: Amplify Your Ajax In jQuery

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:13:50 +0000

There’s a lot more out there in the jQuery domain than trusty ol’ $.post() and $.ajax(). In this post, I’m going to cover off some of the less-used but incredibly useful Ajax helper functions for events when your Ajax calls start, stop, succeed, fail and complete. These functions allow you to add a lot more to your UI and user experience by providing a set of consistent design behaviours or responses that work collaboratively but independently of your main Ajax calls. They also allow you to maintain a much more modular and cleaner code base.

Introducing the Cast

For our demonstration, we’re going to look at the following functions:

$.ajaxStart()
$.ajaxStop()
$.ajaxSuccess()
$.ajaxError()
$.ajaxComplete()

Let’s use an example where we have a list of products and I want to update various properties such as price, description and quantity. When I click the “update” button, I want to disable the button while the Ajax event is occurring and provide some sort of visual feedback that something’s going on. I’ll use everyone’s favourite: the Ajax Load gif.

Let’s have a look at the basic Ajax call we’re making and then we’ll add the AjaxStart and AjaxStop functions.

$.AjaxStart()

$.ajaxStart() is a function that is fired whenever any Ajax call is commenced. It is not responsible for any data transmission in its own right; rather serving as an event listener.

You would use the $.ajaxStart() function in cases where you wanted to provide some form of user feedback when data is being transmitted over a network, or when you wanted to prevent the user from performing some action while an Ajax request was being executed.

The syntax looks like this:

$('#myElement').ajaxStart(function() {
  $(this).text('Triggered ajaxStart handler.');
});

The “myElement” identifier used here is an element that acts as a sort of container or target for listening to Ajax requests. Typically, this would be the element within which you are providing the user feedback.

Within the $.ajaxStart, you can define any number of actions to be carried out as soon as an Ajax call is being made.

$.AjaxStop()

Unsurprisingly, the $.ajaxStop() function fires once all Ajax calls have completed. This is compared to the $.ajaxComplete() function, which will fire whenever any single Ajax request is finished. Again, here’s the syntax:

$('#myElement').ajaxStop(function() {
  $(this).text('Triggered ajaxStop handler.');
});

As a rule, it would be reasonably uncommon to have a listener for $.ajaxStop() without also listening for the start event. You would ordinarily be reverting any UI changes or feedback you’d made at the commencement of your Ajax calls.

Pro tip: Remember that you can chain jQuery calls, so rather than including two separate declarations for your Ajax handling, your code would look (and perform) better like this:

$('#myElement').ajaxStart(function() {
  $(this).text('Triggered ajaxStart handler.');
}).ajaxStop(function() {
  $(this).text('Triggered ajaxStop handler.');
});

Summary

Using Ajax event listeners is a really important and valuable tool for providing useful information to your users. It’s easy to implement and very quick.

In my next post, I’ll look at the $.ajaxSend() and $.ajaxComplete() function and how you can use them to garner detailed information about the actual request and display customised feedback based on the content of that response. In the meantime, check out the demo at my demo site.

Chris Crowe: The row value(s) updated or deleted either do not make the row unique or they alter multiple rows.

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:55:09 +0000

I had a user ask me today how they can delete a duplicate row from their database table. They were receiving the following error message when they tried to delete the duplicate row.

The row value(s) updated or deleted either do not make the row unique or they alter multiple rows.

The reason that the user gets this message is because the table did not have a Primary Key or other Unique Index defined. Why, that’s another story and not one I know!

An example table

Some example data

Notice the duplicate row (row 1 and row 3)

So the user in this case would select the first row and hit the delete button

They would then see this message

So how do we get rid of the duplicate row?

Two options

Option #1

Add a new column which contains unique values

We could run the following code to add the new column and populate the new column with unique values

ALTER TABLE Table1
ADD TempID int IDENTITY(1, 1)

After issuing this command we will have something like this.

The user can now select their row and hit delete because SQL Server can uniquely identify this row.

You could then remove the new column

ALTER TABLE Table1
drop COLUMN TempID

But this adds a new column to the table which is not really the best option so on to option #2

Option #2

We can simply issue a simple delete command taking advantage of the Set RowCount command.

SET ROWCOUNT 1

DELETE FROM Table1
WHERE id= 1

What this does is limit the delete command to one record. Since the data is duplicated you do not care which row is deleted as long as only one of the rows is deleted. No adding and removing columns.

Decisive Flow: Successful Social Media Marketing

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:27:41 +0000

The reason Im not a millionaire is because when people say things like ‘how about we make a website where people can upload and share video on the internet’, my first thought is ‘no one would possibly ever use that!’

It ruins YouTube for me. Every time I go there (or hear the word ‘Farmville’), I remember that I have no understanding of people and what’s important to them.

The internet moves so quickly, but we adapt quickly. You actually have to sit and focus on how life used to be a year/2 years/a decade ago to realise just how differently we behave and socialise and buy stuff now.

People are starting to ask me more and more about running social media campaigns. Everyone wants a Facebook Page but few people know how to avoid trying to stuff new media full of old marketing techniques and even IF they manage to get people ‘liking’ them, the impact of all that time and effort on their bottom line is minimal at best.

The good news is that IF you are likable, interesting and offer something of value, you can get a lot of eyes on your brand/product/service for small change, the bad news is there is a fine line between try hard and popular beyond your wildest dreams.

For those of us who find the whole thing fascinating, it’s really cool to watch marketers becoming more clever with how they use social media to attract customers, and watching customers using and enjoying the power they have gained to ensure companies are answerable to them.

John Hart: Saving the building industry

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:05:27 +0000

The building industry is slated to shed 20,000 jobs as the recession hits construction hard through to 2012. As we’ve already seen in manufacturing in NZ, once jobs and infrastructure leave a country, they are very difficult to re-build when needed.

Meanwhile, the government is stumping up $1.7 billion for the construction of a 38km stretch of “holiday highway” between Puhoi and Wellsford that will achieve little more than allowing tourists to easily avoid some of our our small towns.

What have these two events got to do with each other? We have an industry in strife, needing stimulus and an expensive boondoggle that would be far better spent elsewhere.

If we spent that same $1.7 billion on retro-fitting solar hot water systems to NZ houses we could achieve the following:

Install 212,500 solar hot water systems at an average cost of $4,000-$8,000 (I’ve used $8,000 for this calculation so the actual number of installs might be doubled).
Create 1000’s of jobs in manufacturing and installation (and mop up those leaving construction).
Provide half a million or more Kiwis significant electricity savings (preferably targeted at those most impacted by high power prices).
Reduce electricity generation demand roughly equivalent to taking 63,000 homes off the grid (solar hot water provides 75% savings on water heating or about 30% of total bill). Ask the generators how they’d feel if we could give them a Hamilton-sized power load holiday.

While building motorways, bridges and roads will generate some short-term employment, the vast majority of those in the building trade won’t benefit. Wouldn’t it be smarter to foster a vibrant local manufacturing and service industry with a future?

Given the choice of a step towards an energy-secure future or building pointless roads with a limited future, I know which I’d choose.

Ben Kepes (Mostly): Updated: Openstack.org – A Rackspace Hailmary Pass?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Last week, Clouderati Twitter stream was full of back and forth arguments on possible dumping of Amazon API by Openstack. It all started with a recent Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group meetup on Openstack. One of the takeaways from the meeting is that Openstack is dumping the API compatibility mode. Nebula, the cloud computing project out of NASA, had support for Amazon API, much like Eucalyptus. Once Nebula became part of Openstack, it appears they have taken a decision to drop Amazon API compatibility. This started the twibate among the Clouderati and I thought I will offer my take through a blog post.

So, what is the big deal?

When Nebula adopted AWS API compatibility, the idea is to let users manage Nebula cloud with the same tools they used with AWS, making it interoperable with the largest public cloud provider. There were expectations among some folks that there will be continued support for Amazon API when Openstack.org was launched. Now those people feel let down by this news and starting to wonder if the whole Openstack attempt was a hailmary pass by Rackspace to close the gap with AWS. On the other hand, there are some passionate folks in the Openstack community who feel that the right approach to compete with Amazon is by not following them but by offering an alternative. One of the major reasons for dropping the AWS compatibility is lack of support from Amazon and possible legal risks in the future. Of course, when passions run high in the tech community and the topic contains the term "open", you will also see doomsday predictions about anything "open". There are also some folks who say that Rackspace is abusing the term "open". With VMware wanting to push their cloud offerings to the forefront, there are some spin coming along from the supporters of VMware technology. The net result is a cacophony which, as usual, confuses bystanders and other users wanting to step into the cloud.

My take

When something like this happens with the term "open" in the middle, I get the itch to jump in and offer my soundbites to it. Even though I am an unabashed supporter of anything "open", I will try to be as objective as possible in analyzing this issue. These are some of my thoughts on the topic.

If anyone thinks that the Openstack move by Rackspace is not a hailmary pass, he/she is just being ~~nice~~ naive. Rackspace is a business organization and their move towards Openstack is not altruistic to begin with. This being a hailmary pass by Rackspace is only a very small part of the whole story. By focussing only on this part, some people are missing the big picture
It is important for us to realize that Rackspace has put their compute and storage platform under open source license. This, by itself, is big because anyone in this world can set up a Rackspace like infrastructure easily and without spending their resources developing the same thing again. Imagine a hosting company or data center in Europe or Asia being able to set up a cloud infrastructure service to serve the needs of customers in those countries who are required by their governments to keep the data inside their borders. Imagine a small provider setting up a cloud like infrastructure serving a local community where the users want to actually interact with the folks who run the infrastructure. This is the kind of federated ecosystem we are talking about while discussing the potential of Openstack. There are some who claim that such a federated ecosystem cannot scale like the Amazon cloud. They are plain wrong. A federated ecosystem with an open platform can seamlessly scale if the providers figure out a working relationship with other providers using the same platform. I have already written about German provider Scaleup Technologies partnering with Japan's XSeed Co. Ltd. to allow their customers to their customers to tap into XSeed's infrastructure and vice versa. They could do it easily from Scaleup's UI because both the providers run the same Applogic platform. Even though it is not absolutely necessary to use the same platform to burst up in another cloud, I am just arguing that being a smaller player is not a handicap as long as we have an open federated ecosystem. In this sense, Openstack opens up lots of possibilities in the cloud infrastructure world
The Openstack design is intentionally componentized. Combine this design decision with a liberal open source licensing. Anyone (including Amazon themselves) can build a component that makes Openstack compatible with AWS API again. The problem here is not Rackspace's intentions or any misguided direction of Openstack but the actual problem is Amazon's unwillingness to either open up their API or give a commitment to not sue anyone who offers interoperability with their API. With their margins high, Amazon may not have any motivation to open up their API or play nice with other players in the space. But, if Openstack gains steam like many (including me) expect, Amazon may be forced to "open up".
The other big concern is about Rackspace's influence on the project. Let us be frank folks. If anyone expect Rackspace to not exert their influence after putting so much money and resources, they are just being naive. Being a for profit business, it is natural for Rackspace to exert their influence on the project. In this age where we want to have our name for buildings in academic institutions after our big donation, expecting Rackspace to just give money and let everyone else (including their competitors) control the project is just short of madness. Being the largest supporter, they will influence the project. What matters is the governance model. When I spoke to ~~Rackspace~~ Openstack folks during OSCON, they assured me that the governance model will be set in such a way that no single company can exert influence over the direction of the project. They also pointed towards 25+ companies, some of them are competitors to Rackspace, joining the ecosystem. Plus folks, Openstack is an open source project with a liberal license. If someone or some organization doesn't like the governance model, they can easily fork it out and have the right governance model. We all know this about any open source project but we choose to conveniently ignore this in any debate
Openstack's decision is also strategic. If Openstack supports multiple APIs, there is no way they can influence any standardization of APIs. When there are legal risks involved in using Amazon API and a better API is available from Rackspace without the legal risks, it is only natural to support Rackspace API and be an influencer in any API standardization process.

Conclusion

Well, Rackspace's intentions may have played a role in the dumping of Amazon API compatibility mode from Openstack project but it is irrelevant because Openstack is much more than just a Rackspace hailmary pass. The moment it enters the Open Source space, Rackspace loses control over the code and a strong and vibrant community can easily minimize their impact by pressing for a good governance model. Otherwise, they can just jump like John McCain and say "fork, fork, fork Openstack". There is nothing we can do about Amazon compatibility. Only good sense from within their organization or market pressure can make them support openness. I wouldn't worry much about this move and, rather, focus on driving the direction of Openstack project in a direction that empowers its users, in particular, and the world, in general.

Update: Simon Wardley pointed out to me on Twitter that Rick Clark (of Rackspace) has made it clear that they are not dumping AWS compatibility. Plus, unlike a commenter's inference below, my post is based on the discussions at the meetup. More importantly, even if Openstack is not dumping AWS compatibility, my post still stands. More than anything else, this post is an attempt to highlight how the very open source nature of Openstack empowers the community to take the project in any direction irrespective of what Rackspace intends to do with the project. I hope readers of this post take that message clearly than giving their own inferences.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Juha Saarinen: Got to touch a pair of Windows Phone 7 devices

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:53:00 +0000

Been running around Tech Ed 2010 here in Auckland, checking out what's new in Microsoft-land. The one thing that most people are curious about is Windows Phone 7, so here it is.

Check out my piece in Computerworld on my initial impressions of Windows Phone 7.

One thing's for sure - I wish Microsoft had called it something else. Writing about Windows Phone 7 phones sounds stupid.

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone 7,Microsoft,Tech-Ed 2010,New Zealand

Robert O'Callahan: A Night Out

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:04:23 +0000

I had a very nice dinner at "Wildfire Churrascaria" courtesy of Microsoft. Lots of yummy, fatty, salty meat.

I went to catch my bus and missed it by one minute. At 10:41pm, the next bus was at 11:10pm.

Being impatient, instead of waiting for the next bus I ran home ... well, half-ran, half-walked ... 5.5km In 42 minutes. Not fast, but then I had a backpack full of Microsoft swag plus my laptop, and a belly full of meat. Faster than the bus anyway.

Mike Riversdale: A Thought Experiment Around "Intentionality" For You

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:00:50 +0000

Imagine this ...

A vice President of a major corporation goes to the Chairman of the Board and says, "OK, we've got this new policy and it's going to make huge amounts of money for our company but it's also going to harm the environment". And the Chairman of the Board says, "Look, I know this policy is going to harm the environment but I don't care at all about that, all I care about is making as much money as we possibly can. So let's go ahead and implement the policy." So they go ahead and implement the policy and sure enough it ends up harming the environment.

Question: Did he harm the environment intentionally?

Now, let's change one word, "harm" to"help" ...

A vice President of a major corporation goes to the Chairman of the Board and says, "OK, we've got this new policy and it's gonna make huge amounts of money for our company and it's also going to help the environment". And the Chairman of the Board says, "Look, I know this policy is going to help the environment but I don't care at all about that, all I care about is making as much money as we possibly can. So let's go ahead and implement the policy." So they go ahead and implement the policy and sure enough it ends up helping the environment.

Question: Did the Chairman of the Board help the environment intentionally?

LEAVE YOUR THOUGHTS ...

Via PhilosophyBites podcast with Joshua Knobe

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb): iPad Magazines: The Pros & Cons

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:30:28 +0000

When the iPad was launched earlier this year, one of the big talking points was that the iPad might be the savior of magazines. By now many magazines are available on the iPad, either in their own standalone app or in a virtual magazine store. In this post we look at how magazines are using the iPad, what the user experience is like, and what iPad magazines still need to do to improve.

We'll analyze a standalone iPad magazine app (Wired) and a service that offers access to many different magazines (Zinio).

Sponsor

Note that we're focusing purely on the user experience of iPad magazines, rather than business matters like profitability or number of downloads.

Wired

Wired magazine has been the most high profile magazine to utilize the iPad's interactivity. Each new edition costs US$4.99 and is a fairly bulky download - the most recent 'Web is dead' edition was 482MB. But it is packed with interactive goodies.

The iPad version of Wired features videos, touchscreen infographics, slideshows, music and more. For example, a story about a small American town called Picher that has been "devastated" by lead and zinc mining, is accompanied by a video featuring Picher locals talking about the impact of mining on their town. It augments the story nicely and brings the reader closer to the issue.

There are some oddities to the Wired app, however. For example, you can't do the usual pinching motion to enlarge text that is present in most other iPad apps. So if the font type is too small for you to read, you're out of luck. The blog iA has a thorough critique of this and other issues. Also see our own Sarah Perez's thoughts on the sometimes confusing features of various iPad magazines.

But overall, Wired's app is the best example currently of a mainstream magazine utilizing the iPad's touchscreen and interactive capabilities. Below are two examples of the touchscreen functionality: on the left, the user scrolls with their finger to see a history of dogs; on the right, the user swipes their finger to see a graphical illustration of 'spin.'

Zinio: Multiple Magazines

Online magazine shops like Zinio offer up multiple magazines for purchase. Zinio aims to duplicate the print magazine reading experience in digital format. This description of itself on Google sums up what Zinio aims to deliver: "Same content. Same design. Delivered over the Internet."

Reading many of Zinio magazines on iPad is pretty similar to reading PDF files on iPad - there is little in the way of interactivity other than clicking the odd hyperlink and zooming in and out of articles. Some of Zinio's offerings have interactive features, but not the ones I've subscribed to.

So far I've purchased subscriptions to an art magazine called Juxtapoz, popular music magazine Rolling Stone, and a lifestyle magazine called The FADER. The main benefits to me are speed of delivery and lower cost. I've appreciated getting the latest editions as soon as they come out and not having to pay the premium that international magazine readers pay for print versions.

The reading experience leaves something to be desired, mostly because the text is generally too small to be read on an iPad without zooming in and out constantly. One zooms in to read an article, then zooms back out again to flip to the next page or navigate to another section. So there is more pinching and other finger movements than ideal.

Although I still read iPad magazines the same way as print magazines - sprawled on my sofa or bed - there are differences in the reading experience. For example, with the Juxtapoz print edition I used to flick through the magazine randomly admiring the artwork. Often I'd start reading whatever article happened to fall open in my lap. With the iPad edition, it's harder to randomly flip through pages and so you lose some of the serendipity of casually flicking through a magazine.

One benefit of the iPad edition of Juxtapoz is that you can zoom in and inspect art works close up - although given that it's essentially a PDF, the resolution is not ideal.

I still prefer print magazines from a user experience perspective, although I like the experimentation of Wired and others. However, overall I prefer iPad magazines due to speed of delivery, cheaper price and ability to access a whole archive from one app.

How Can Magazines Improve User Experience?

Wired's use of touchscreen functionality and interactivity is a start. But it feels a little too much like a self-contained app, with not enough tentacles reaching outside. No wonder they declared the Web to be dead. How about some commenting and rating features? Or links to Twitter and Facebook?

Also iPad magazines should take a leaf out of eBooks and provide features like highlighting, notes, word look-up, and search. When I am reading an article in Rolling Stone, I sometimes come across a pithy quote from a musician that I like - so it'd be great to have a way to highlight and share that.

If you're an iPad owner, what do you think about magazines on the device? Or if you don't have an iPad, let us know your thoughts on digital magazines in general. What features would you like to see?

Image credit: HAMACHI!

Discuss

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 30 August 2010

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers". This, in turn, triggered a wave of gleeful "yay, now we can use H.264!" around the web. Mike Shaver from Mozilla points out that the problem was never that users might be charged, but rather that the software producer would be charged. The situation today is just as it was last week: open source can't touch H.264 without inviting a patent lawsuit.
Crowdsourcing for Pakistan Flood Relief -- Crowdflower are geocoding and translating news reports from the ground, building a map of real-time data so aid workers know where help is needed.
Dirpy -- extract MP3 from YouTube. Very nice interface. (via holovaty on Delicious)
Three Rules of Thumb for Bloom Filters -- Bloom filters are used in caches and other situations where you need fast lookup and can withstand the occasional false positive. 1: One byte per item in the input set gives about a 2% false positive rate. For more on Bloom Filters, see Maciej Ceglowski's introduction. (via Hacker News)

Miraz Jordan: Learn Keyboard Maestro at MacTips

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:22:27 +0000

I love work: I could watch it all day — at least when it’s my computer doing it and not me.

One of my favourite things is finding ways to make my computer work harder so I can work less. Sometimes that means Applescript, or using utilities like Launchbar or TextExpander.

Sometimes it means setting up macros in Keyboard Maestro, so that I click once or type a couple of characters and then a string of actions happens as if by magic.

That’s one reason why in August I wrote a series of MacTips about how to work with Keyboard Maestro:

Keyboard Maestro action sequence.

Turn 100 steps into 1 with Keyboard Maestro: Keyboard Maestro lets you set up sequences of actions, or macros, and then does them for you. Watch your computer do the work, instead of the other way round. Let me show you how it works.
Point and Click with Keyboard Maestro: Keyboard Maestro can operate programs and point and click for you. Here’s how to avoid mindless repetitive and annoying actions.
Keyboard Maestro Triggers and Actions: Use Keyboard Maestro to work your Mac for you. Here’s how to set up Triggers, select options in Actions and quickly record a macro.
Keyboard Maestro Clipboard and Scripts: Keyboard Maestro can do some very clever things with the clipboard and that’s great for anyone who writes. It’s also a good way to run Applescripts and Shell scripts. Here’s how to get even more work out of Keyboard Maestro.

Peter Lewis is the developer who makes this magic happen. He kindly offered a 20% discount to my readers. There’s information about the discount at all the Tips listed above, and you can download the software for free to try it out.

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