Links
Jared Tarbell’s Gallery of Computation »
A beautiful set of digital artworks, mostly created in Processing. Source code is included.
My favourite is Substrate, which I’ve been running as my screensaver. It looks like crystals growing, or an aerial view of a city developing.
Game/Space: An interview with Daniel Dociu »
BLDBLOG interviews game world designer Daniel Dociu:
Are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu’s work? What about vice versa: could Dociu’s own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today’s architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing “real” cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments.
There’s some really beautiful concept design artwork included in the interview.
150 clocks working as one »
The starting point with this project was a personal study about form & time. I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”.
Via Long Views
NSW to review freedom-of-information laws »
NSW’s FoI laws will get an independent review by the state ombudsman after the State Government repeatedly failed to act on recommendations that it conduct one. The laws haven’t had a review since the legislation was written in 1989, despite every state ombudsman since calling for a review.
Mr Barbour did little to hide his irritation with the NSW Government in a release yesterday. “For almost 14 years, each NSW Ombudsman, including myself, has called for an independent and comprehensive review of the FoI Act.”
“In the absence of the NSW Government initiating a review of the act, I have decided to conduct my own independent review.”
Last year’s NSW Ombudsman annual report highlighted the abysmal state of NSW’s freedom-of-information laws. The report found that applications released in full in NSW dropped from 81 per cent in 1995-96 to 52 per cent in 2005-06. This compared with the Commonwealth where 78 per cent of requests were granted in full.
Estimating salaries by comparing job ads »
This is clever: job classified aggregator Indeed estimates a job’s salary when it lacks that data by comparing the text to ads that do have a salary posted.
When people search for jobs, they want to put in a salary floor. They don’t want to see jobs that don’t at least pay a certain amount. Problem is most job listings on the Internet don’t include salaries.
What Indeed did was built a system that estimates salaries on all jobs.
We use a proprietary methodology based on an analysis of similar job listings that include salaries. We start by extracting salaries from all job listings containing this information - about a fifth of the total - and then estimate salaries for the rest.
Example: CFO jobs in NYC that pay more than $200k per year
Fred Wilson: Adding intelligence to search
Monocole design notes »
Dan Hill has written a detailed piece on the design and production of the Monocole website. It’s a great insight into the team’s creative process — lots of sketches and mockups, and a review of the project path and decision points.
Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 »
Amazon is adding persistent storage as an option to EC2 — currently it’s in private beta.
Previously, disk storage on an EC2 was transient:- when the machine was shut down or crashed, it felt like a hard drive crash. (And you’d lose your IP address too, but Amazon added static IPs a little while ago too.) The path to reliability was to use S3, but that can’t be mounted as a native file system.
The persistent storage appears as a raw, mountable filesystem that needs to be formatted. You’ll be able to make a quick snapshot of the data, for backup. No word on pricing or its performance, but you’d expect it to be aligned with S3.
There’s been the option of mounting S3 in EC2 using davfs, which mounts with WebDAV, but that’s a bit of a hack and one wonders what the performance would be like.
Malware visualisations »
Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.
Alex Dragulescu
Bob Metcalfe and the “one pair of glasses” theory »
Bob Metcalfe will solve global warming, by applying lessons learned inventing Ethernet in 1974:
I call it the “one pair of glasses” theory. You see it all the time. People know one thing and they think that this one thing can be applied to every problem, because it’s the only way they know how to look at the world. They’ve got one pair of glasses.
Usually the results are just silly but this stuff can be dangerous in the hands of guys who’ve become fabulously rich with their one pair of glasses and now have too much free time on their hands. (eg, Metcalfe and Grove.) Experience has convinced them that their one pair of glasses is a super-duper magical pair that never fails. And now they’ve piled up enough money to make themselves into a huge pain in the ass.
I love the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs — hilarious and insightful.
Fairfax Digital launches The Vine »
Fairfax Digital has launched The Vine, a news site targetted to GenY. It features lots of social network components — UGC, member profiles, recommendations and the like.
“We found that there are three key things that young people seek when they are consuming media. That they can participate, that they can express themselves and that if they contribute to the site, the prospect that they could become famous.
“They want their fifteen megabytes of fame - that desire to have peer recognition.”
This is the Kwerky project that got some press pick ups back in January. It’ll be interesting to see how the site develops.
Senior product manager Cinnamon Pollard