Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Reviews

Warning: contains some spoilers. ... read more

The Wars that Inspired Game of Thrones

Mozilla is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most

I’ve always been a huge fan of Mozilla (and not just Firefox, but the foundation behind it). This article is very difficult for me to read. It doesn’t offer possible ideas or plans to stop the ongoing decline of Mozilla, it just highlights how bad the current situation is.
Saying “ongoing decline of Mozilla” maybe sounds worse than it is, or maybe I’m just in denial. ... read more

How North Korea got so Crazy

Why Blue Origin's rocket landing shouldn't be compared to SpaceX

There's a Crisis of Legitimacy within Islam, and it's fueling ISIS

Iyad el-Baghdadi’s interview with Vox is a must-read for any one who’s trying to understand ISIS and how to stop it. ... read more

Islamic State's Goal is 'Eliminating the Grayzone' of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West

Reading into ISIS’s writings sheds a light on their goals. ... read more

Don't Give ISIS What It Wants

Important basic concepts in choosing the strategy to fight ISIS ... read more

How to Escape Education's Death Valley

Robots that fly ... and cooperate

Making Robots

Teacher's Role (Hanselminutes 488)

From episode 488 of the Hanselminute podcast with guest Omoju Miller. She talks about the role of a teacher in the context of Computer Science education. Starting around 11:10

I have this fundamental idea that you can't teach anybody anything, what you can do is guidance and facilitation. They have to decide they want to learn it. Once you turn on the light, they will go in and get the knowledge for themselves and you will be the human that can help them figure out the bottlenecks faster. The world is so different now, everything you need to know is available to you somewhere online. So, the idea that I'm, the teacher, the expert is no longer the case. I have a certain skill that I can support you in your learning but I'm by no means the expert. You might end up being the expert for that area. I just need to unravel the blocks that are holding you back and get you on your way.

Scott’s response is exactly like mine: Wow, that really just blew my mind. The ‘factory line’ way of teaching is a thing of the past given the student’s access to knowledage in ways that far superior to the abilities of the teacher in front of them. No longer is it sensible for teachers to act like they’re the source of knowledage, they have to move to the role of enabler and facilitator. ... read more

Best YouTube Videos Viewed Together

Veritasium and Smarter Everyday are two of the best YouTube educational channels out there. But this is really something special. They teamed up to make two videos are best viewed together. Not back to back, but at the same time. It’s a treat to watch, as well as to learn about toilt swirl.
Start playing the two videos at the same time, make sure to follow the sync instructions. ... read more

Introducing the Lily Camera

Fear of Apple

Things went south In 2012, when Ivanovic launched a new version of the Pocket Casts app on the Android Play Store first, rather than Apple's App Store. The launch was a real success, and he publicly shared the good news. Before he knew it, his Apple Developer Relations representative stopped all contact. The representative would not even answer his emails. Ivanovic had been completely shut out.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

This article is part 1, there's also part 2. The two parts maybe long but are definitely worth the read.
The article was recommended by Elon Musk. ... read more

After Jobs Dry Up, What Then?

Forty-seven percent of all employment in the United States is susceptible to automation over the next two decades, according to a study by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael A. Osborne, an associate professor of machine learning, at the University of Oxford.

The billionaire’s typewriter

Still, I wouldn’t say that Medium’s ho­mo­ge­neous de­sign is bad ex ante. Among web-pub­lish­ing tools, I see Medium as the equiv­a­lent of a frozen pizza: not as whole­some as a meal you could make your­self, but for those with­out the time or mo­ti­va­tion to cook, a po­ten­tially bet­ter op­tion than just eat­ing peanut but­ter straight from the jar.

The JavaScript World Domination

There were essentially two (more-or-less) well-known laws in the IT community that contributed to (predicted, even) JavaScript’s world domination.

Moore’s Law has been generalized in several ways, how it is really about "exponential progress, in the wake of tiny revolutions and paradigm shifts" 

Atwood’s Law by Jeff Atwood: "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

Anatomy of a Hack

Because all this guy's accounts were somewhat connected, getting access to one meant getting access to all the others. One security opening in one service meant that all other services were at risk. The hacker always wants something: money, short twitter username, etc.
Great story. ... read more

Reader Mode lands in Firefox Nightly

To enable it:

Go to about:config and enable reader.parse-on-load.enabled to be true.

Rise of the IndieWeb - Amber Case

What happens when an online service you use freezes your account, loses your data, or goes out of business? Have you ever used a service by a company that suddenly went under, stranding your data? What happened to the Internet in 2003? Do you own your own identity or do you sharecrop? Who owns your data and why? Case will talk about data ownership, identity and the Indie Web, a movement that is taking back ownership of one's own identity and data instead of sharecropping on 3rd party websites.

Geoengineering is an insane way to deal with climate change. Let's consider it anyway.

The second report, however, dealt with far more controversial ideas like putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to block some sunlight and cool the planet.

Introducing Spot

Our future robot overloards. More robot goodness is the Kiva Robot. ... read more

Responsible Social Share Links

That’s 11 additional requests and although it took 1.29 seconds to load on my connection, my connection advertises 50-105 Mbps. When I throttle the loading to an EDGE network, it takes 7 seconds.

The Birth & Death of JavaScript

Great talk by Gary Bernhardt about how Javascript will be the assembly language of all applications, not web applications, but all.
This reminds me of a blog post by Scott Hanselman about Javascript becoming the Assembly Language for the Web (and follow up blog with reactions from Javascript gurus).
Hanselman's point was about how all Javascript is machine-generated and not directly written by developers. Bernhardt's talk is the next step to that; how we can take existing languages and compile them to Javascript to run those applications in the browser. Then, use the isolation model of the browser to achive better process isolation and remove overhead.
These are not predications. ASM.js is a Mozilla project to enable running C/C++ (and other) languages in the browser at near native speed. ... read more

We Suck at HTTP

We have broken HTTP. We've done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away.

What will be hot in geo in 2015? predictions from the GeoHipster crowd

Vector maps will finally be broadly available and the client side will eat more of the server side stack.
The architectural paradigm driving all this is very cloud- and horizontal-scaling-oriented: everything has to be chopped into tiny pieces, everything has to be embarrassingly parallel, everything is a URL, and everything Has-To-Be-In-JavaScript.
More Spatial, Fewer Maps
Even More People Doing GIS, Without Knowing They're Doing GIS

Forgetting Firefox

Interesting proposal that Mozilla should focus on Thunderbird instead of Firefox to do to the groupware space what they did to the web space. ... read more

What is your definition of personal?

One of these you want. The other you should be wary of, if not downright terrified. The thing is, how do you tell the difference?

Sandstorm is an open source platform for personal servers

Open Source. Host your own or sign up for hosted version. There's a growing list of apps. ... read more

Send Tab to Device Addon for Firefox

Firefox Sync syncs your browser profile (bookmarks, history, tabs, etc) across multiple devices (desktop and Android). Use this addon to send a tab from one desktop to another or to Android. This functionality is built into Android but an addon is required on Desktop. I use this all the time when I come across something at work or on the go but would rather look at when I'm home. ... read more

How the Public Actually Uses Local Government Web Maps: Metrics from Denver

#1 Single-Topic maps get 3 times the traffic of the traditional Map Portal
#2 60% of map traffic comes directly from search engine requests
#3 Auto-complete drives clean user queries
#4 Map Usage is Spiky
#5 People Look Up Info on Maps, and Leave
#6 People Actually Interact with Balloon Content
#7 People Rarely Change Default Map Settings

Insightful findings. ... read more

Stories as diagram curves

That's why you feel like you've seen this movie before. ... read more

TIL James May was fired from Autocar magazine after he put a hidden message using the initial letter in each page

'May confessed that in 1992 he was dismissed from Autocar magazine after putting together a hidden message or acrostic in one issue.'
'May's role was to put the entire supplement together, which was extremely boring and took several months'.
'May's original message, punctuated appropriately, reads: So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.'.
'The editors of Autocar missed the 'joke' and only became aware of it when readers started calling in about it, thinking there might be a prize. '