O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Four short links: 8 May 2012

2012-05-08T10:00:00Z

Gmail Vault -- app to backup and restore the contents of your gmail account. (via Hacker News) Leaving Apps for HTML5 (Technology Review) -- We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development....

Four short links: 25 April 2012

2012-04-25T10:00:00Z

World History Since 1300 (Coursera) -- Coursera expands offerings to include humanities. This content is in books and already in online lectures in many formats. What do you get from these? Online quizzes and the online forum with similar people considering similar things. So it's a book club for a university course? mod_spdy -- Apache module for the SPDY...

Four short links: 24 April 2012

2012-04-24T10:00:00Z

3D-Printing Pharmaceuticals (BoingBoing) -- Prof Cronin added: "3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It's entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises. "Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to health care in the developing world,...

Four short links: 20 April 2012

2012-04-20T10:00:00Z

Tupac Coachella Behind the Technology (CBS) -- interesting to me is Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were considering taking Shakur with them on tour. Just as Hobbit, Tintin, etc. are CG-ing characters to look normal, is the future of "live" spectacle to be this kind of CG show? Will new acts be competing against the Rolling Stones forever? Javascript...

Four short links: 19 April 2012

2012-04-19T10:00:00Z

Superfastmatch -- open source text comparison tool, used to locate plagiarism/churnalism in online news sites. You can pull out the text engine and use it for your own "find where this text is used elsewhere" applications (e.g., what's being forwarded out in email, how much of this RFP is copy and paste, what's NOT boilerplate in this contract, etc.)....

Christopher Schmitt and Simon St. Laurent discuss HTML5

2012-04-12T15:30:00Z

HTML5 author Christopher Schmitt talks with O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent about why it's a great time to be a web developer.

Four short links: 11 April 2012

2012-04-11T10:00:00Z

Inside Apple (Amazon) -- If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the "DRI" (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top...

Four short links: 10 April 2012

2012-04-10T10:00:00Z

The Instagram Architecture (High Scalability) -- great summary of the Instagram team's post about the technology that runs Instagram. Lots of Python goodness in here. Mosh -- ssh that lets you roam and stay connected. UTF-8 native. Android Economics -- working back from Google's declared valuation of Android royalties to figure out how much they have and how it's...

Four short links: 6 April 2012

2012-04-06T10:00:00Z

FBI Uses Agile (Information Week) -- The FBI awarded the original contract for the case management system to Lockheed Martin in 2006, but an impatient Fulgham, who was hired in 2008 to get the project on track, decided to bring it in house in September 2010. Since then, the agency has been using agile development to push the frequently...

Four short links: 5 April 2012

2012-04-05T10:00:00Z

Who Else Uses Masonry Style? (Quora) -- list of sites using the multi-columns effect as provided by the jQuery plugin. Will Hatchette Be First Big 6 Publisher To Drop DRM? (Paid Content) -- DRM “doesn’t stop anyone from pirating,” Hachette SVP digital Thomas said in a publishing panel at Copyright Clearance Center’s OnCopyright 2012. “It just makes it more...

Four short links: 4 April 2012

2012-04-04T10:00:00Z

Typing Club -- lessons to improve your touch-typing, building you up letter by letter to speed and mastery. Like how I learned, only without the typewriters and the bibs and the roomful of girls. It wasn't easy being the only boy in typing class, but somehow I managed. (via EdTech ideas) SQL Injection via HTTP Headers -- excellent introduction...

Four short links: 3 April 2012

2012-04-03T10:00:00Z

Why Our Kids Should Be Taught To Code (Guardian) -- if we don't act now we will be short-changing our children. [...] their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don't have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of...

The Secret Yanni Technique, with key changes

2012-04-02T09:00:00Z

What if the game's audio engine kept track of what key was playing, and generated bonus sounds to match? I wanted to demonstrate this approach, and so wrote a game for the Android platform called LandSeaAir that uses the FMOD Interactive Music System to do just that.

Four short links: 30 March 2012

2012-03-30T10:00:00Z

TypeConnection -- a game that teaches you how to match fonts and why successful matches work. (via Sacha Judd) Lessons Learned Building Open Source Software (Mitchel Hashimoto) -- the creator of Vagrant talks about the lesson he's learned building a great open source project. Kickstarter Post-Mortem (Ze Frank) -- excellent dig into the details of his campaign, what worked,...

Four short links: 28 March 2012

2012-03-28T10:00:00Z

MS Office Exploit In The Wild, Targeting Mac OS X -- This is one of the few times that we have seen a malicious Office file used to deliver Malware on Mac OS X. (via Hacker News) Please Do Not Take Down The Sality BotNet -- best responsible disclosure ever. 3Difficult -- I’m an industrial designer at heart, and...