This is so cool! UC-Berkeley has joined Stanford in the Apple iTunes U program, which makes lectures publicly available through the iTunes interface. And even better, they have standard RSS links available for even more lecture feeds than iTunes U has! As Jon Udell stated a few months back, any access is better than nothing, but the more easily available the content, the easier it is to fold into our new “remix” culture!
link from Jon Udell
I certainly knew this, but I didn’t know Google did….
Interesting: C-Store – C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS that contrasts sharply with most current systems, which are write-optimized. Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of column-oriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures. I’m hooked…I’ll have to check this out!
link from bitworking
This is awesome — Love Lewisham :
It’s as easy as 1-2-3!
Imagine the following scenario. As you are walking down your street, you notice some graffiti that you’d like removed. You have already registered and downloaded the free application to your mobile phone. So what can you do?
Take a picture of the offending graffiti, enter some details and send it to us. It’s simple!
We review all images sent to us a decide what to do. If you have asked us to keep you up to date by text messages we will send you messages to keep you informed of our progress (at no cost to yourself)
We will resolve the problem and take a picture of the clean wall after the graffitti has been removed.
SUPER clever! They also have a spot on the site to review existing (approved) pictures, and a place to upload them manually, in case you don’t have a camphone, but you do have a digital camera of some sort. What a great way to get people involved, and get the data needed to handle the cleanup.
link from Jon Udell
Fascinating. As reported by Mark Wallace at Walkerings, Anshe Chung (a real estate entrepeneur in Second Life) is considering (or threatening, depending on how you take her annoucement) to introduce a competing currency to the Linden dollar; the Anshe$. I agree 100% with Mark Wallace here; this is a really, really interesting development, and could actually work if it got enough traction. Anshe is a huge economic force in SL, all by herself, and could conceivably have enough “internal traction” to make this work on her own. By that, I mean that she’s considering changing her rental fees to be in US$ or Anshe$ only…no longer accepting Linden$. With the number of renters she has, that automatically gives her currency value; almost as if Target or Wal-Mart not only had gift cards, but ONLY accepted gift cards…suddenly, the cards have their own value.
Over time, other merchants might begin to accept Anshe$, and the race would be on. Anshe’s reasoning is purely economic; she has to hold large quantities of Linden$ right now, due to her constant land rental fees coming in, and the Linden$ has fallen almost 60% against the US$ in the past 18 months. She’s bleeding (virtual) cash…but she turns said virtual cash into US$100,000/year. The deterioration in the Linden$ hurts! Her hope is to halt that slide by breaking the explicit connection between her rental charges and the fees she pays in turn to Linden Labs…and it’s not very often that you’re able to watch as someone creates their own currency, is it?
I LOVE this stuff!
Interesting: Zopa appears to be mediated, peer-to-peer lending.
Damn it! I whacked a perfectly good, long blogpost earlier by shutting down Firefox while it was sitting, unsaved, in another tab. Crap! Yet another reason to add an “editing” flag to my database schema for posts, so that I can save early, save often without having half-baked posts show up.
It WAS a discussion of one of Jon Udell’s latest posts. Good stuff from both fronts; in the practical sense, he taught me some much-needed JSON hacking. In a more contemplative mode, his thoughts on the boundaries between public and private data on the Internet (especially WRT social networks) match up well with a post I’ve been working on in my head over the past few days. I love it!
*sigh*…This version of this post sucks SO much more than the other one. The saving grace is, of course, that is exists, and the other doesn’t. *grin*
PS: by the way, you can see the results of my new little javascript hack on my website homepage…the “recent links” block used to be a static, manually updated list (which hadn’t been updated…um…in a long time), and is now a live mix-in of links from my del.icio.us feed. Fun!
GetDemocracy is the distribution website for the Democracy Player, which is basically a specialized browser for downloading (via Bittorrent) and viewing online videos, video blogs, video RSS feeds, etc. It’s part of a grand scheme by the Participatory Culture Foundation to provide tools for free and open media sharing over the Net. All their various projects are GPL’d, and they’re using a lot of cool stuff…the Mozilla XUL-Runner platform, Bittorent, VLC and Xine, and Python!
The player is really sharp, I have to admit. I may have to break down and get another big-ass drive for all this stuff! Check it out…pretty cool.
Well, I didn’t have high hopes, but I figured I’d give Vongo a try (since I had a 14-day free trial). It’s one of the on-demand movie D/L sites…yada, yada. I figured it’d be a change of pace.
But they committed what is for me a cardinal sin. I can’t even view their website from my Linux box (well, without lying about my browser user agent, anyway); they “detect” the OS, and send you straight to an “Incompatible OS” page if they don’t like it. Note: I can’t even see the homepage; it’s not like it was the client download page or something! Sheesh. No one without Win2000/XP can even view their site…so the hell with them. I knew I’d have to reboot to Windows before installing anything, but I can’t even surf and and check things out. Which is typically a good idea when you’re trying to sell something. So bye, bye, Vongo…
Oh, that’s right; I got new BG 2.0 episodes from Netflix yesterday. That’ll do! Lovely, lovely Netflix! You rock.
Wow…here’s a reference to a new paper describing “a considerable speedup of MD5 collision generation. His improvements of Wang’s method enables one to make MD5 collisions typically in one minute on a PC; sometimes it takes a few minutes, and sometimes only a few seconds.”
As noted in the paper, the “few seconds” attacks have a reasonable probability, and if they succeed, they are quick enough to allow collision finding during protocol executions that rely on MD5. Zoinks. It’s amazing, really; hardware improvements give steady, compounding, year to year improvement in the speed of cryptanalysis. But the truly revolutionary change comes out of thin air, from the minds of mathematicians who just come up with A Better Way. Makes me so jealous that it hurts sometimes! *grin*
link from The Cryptography Mailing List at metzdowd.com (subscribe by sending “subscribe cryptography” to majordomo@metzdowd.com)
