PUBLIC MARKS with search systems

Sure, OpenSocial has mostly focused on consumery stuff — Ning, MySpace, Orkut — and that's cool, but it has great potential behind the firewall. Atlassian is leading the charge here, using OpenSocial to help our products exchange data and components, and opening the door to new types of interoperability between enterprise and consumer systems.

Although the Kindle doesn't make sense for me, your situation may be different. For instance, if you use an e-reader primarily for recreational reading, you may want to keep far fewer books than the 50%/year I used. If you read a bestseller a week, that's 52 * $10 = $520 a year. If your retention ratio is 10%/year, then your DRM tax would be about $70, which is a lot less painful.

This is python-jabberbot, a Jabber bot framework for Python that enables you to easily write simple Jabber bots. You can use your Jabber bots to provide information about your running systems, to make your website interact with your visitors or notify you about updates or changes you monitor with your Python scripts.

But efficiency is not the same as effectiveness, and it is that distinction (and our difficulty in understanding it) that exposes the false-logic of behind universal privatisation.

ImageSnap is a Public Domain command-line tool that lets you capture still images from an iSight or other video source. You might remember Axel Bauer's original isightcapture tool (that is no longer supported but still works on most systems). With ImageSnap I hope we'll be able to move forward and add features, adapt to the ever-changing Apple architectures, etc.

A very wise systems programmer once told me: “Don’t guess. Measure.”

— a development environment for making digital art

Field is an open-source software project initiated by OpenEnded Group, for the creation of their digital artworks. It is an environment for writing code to rapidly and experimentally assemble and explore algorithmic systems. It is visual, it is hybrid, it is code-based. We think that it has something to offer a diverse range of programmers and artists.

Based on ideas started at the MIT Media Lab, Field was in development in-house for around 6 years. But for the last 16 months it has been quietly available online as an open source project. We are pleased to announce the initial "beta" binary open-source releases for Intel-based Macs OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

Create the mathematical and physical foundations for the technologies that will form a new information ecosystem, the Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), consisting of a trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange their information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users.

What is the guiding principle to make an informed design decision regarding the direction of communication in such a replication scenario? The answer is separation of concerns with the goal of simplicity and avoiding unnecessary coupling. This leads to the question which of the systems should for which communication play the server role and which one should play the client role?

* Fixers. People that can repair existing equipment to maintain its previous function. (these people are the staple of almost all disaster fiction).

* Makers. People that repurpose existing technology through the implementation of alterations to change its function. A corollary to Makers are people that improve existing products/systems (make them more powerful/better/faster).

* Creators. People that create new tools or unique systems from scratch using raw materials (think fab lab hacks).

Recently InfoQ did a good summary of the debates around the apparent (to some) limitations of REST when it comes to creating good Web services. At issue is that REST APIs seem to expose "CRUDy" services that fly in the face of years of good services design, particularly when they are just read/write interfaces instead of the richer, full REST architecture (more on what this is later.) The discussion was spurred by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz's assertion recently that CRUD is bad for REST, which in my opinion is close but not quite right.

And so for 20 years now these folks --- *the* shining lights, in many ways, of "practical" programming language, operating systems, and general systems research --- have continued to fail to "get" the fundamental practical needs of everyday programmers working in The Real World.

a systems programming language

expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected