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
Google App Engine »
Google announces Google App Engine, a complete web app hosting environment on the Google platform. Currently in a limited beta, with Python as the programming language
Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The environment includes the following features:
- dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
- persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
- automatic scaling and load balancing
- APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
- a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your compute
The main demo that Google have made for it, HuddleChat, is a direct, “feature for feature, layout for layout”, clone of 37signal’s Campfire, a great web chat application made by a company of 10. “We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.”
Update: Google have taken down HuddleChat, citing widespread complaints.
Photos: Anzac Bridge and CBD, Sydney
These are some photos that I took of the Anzac Bridge and surrounds, and in the Sydney CBD.
The building facade that you can see behind the Dymocks building will only be visible from the street for a few more months whilst the Mid City Centre is rebuilt.
The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins »
On bldblog: should we preserve civic infrastructure that is historically interesting, but no longer useful?
So the question becomes: at what point do we preserve something not for its historical value but for its topological interest? If a bridge, or a highway overpass, becomes functionally obsolete, is it still subject to the rules of architectural preservation — whether or not it’s mathematically unique or culturally intriguing? Surely infrastructure is just infrastructure — i.e. when it breaks you replace it? You don’t preserve infrastructure.
Or do you?
For visual reference here I mentioned architect Alberto Campo Baeza’s 2002 proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum. Might Campo Baeza’s structure be a model for what the I-95/695 intersection would look like if it was detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways?
Scalr: auto-scaling web app hosting in EC2 »
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
The project is still very young, but we’re hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.
This looks like it could be great when it develops. I kind of think that Amazon themselves should be providing this kind of executive service to auto-scale and -heal an application deployed in their grid (and wouldn’t be surprised if they add it as their service matures).
“We” being Intridea, a web dev shop
Simile Timeline, an AJAX widget for visualising time-based events »
Simile Timeline is an interactive widget for arbitrary timelines. It implements a data visualisation that is something like what Edward Tufte mocked up as an alternative to Gantt charts for project timelines.
It gives two views: a zoomed in view of the detail, and a zoomed out view to give context. Looks great.
Lifehacker has a good example of it being used to record a personal timeline — a CV of sorts.
(That I was talking about in my last post.)
Thanks to Bowen Dwelle for the pointer.
Ask E.T.: Project management graphics »
In this thread on project management graphics, Edward Tufte shows a fantastic alternative solution to Gantt charts, which as implemented in MS Project scale badly both in the time and the task dimensions.
Would love to see an application implement this. Or maybe have a go myself.
How-to: Optimize your site for speed
Does your website load as quickly as you — and your users — would like? If not, here’s a detailed set of proven guidelines aimed at improving the speed of your site.
The benefits of speed optimized pages:
- Your visitors will be happier, and will feel much more engaged on a snappy site than a slow one. User interface responsiveness is a very large contributing factor to how users trust your content and company. Users trust and enjoy fast sites, and are quickly frustrated by slow sites.
- The faster that you can serve content to your visitors, the faster they’ll be off your servers, leaving them free to serve the next visitor. That means that you can handle greater traffic loads, with less hardware.
- Smaller overall downloads means lower bandwidth bills at the end of the month.
You can often get quite massive improvements with just a few tweaks. A few years ago I worked on a project for the Sydney Morning Herald that reduced the time to display the first story on the homepage on a modem from around 17 seconds down to 2 seconds. Broadband connections had a similar relative speed improvement.