The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."
Once the API is complete, the Times' internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc. They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."
Pilhofer and Frons both declined to give any specific dates, but Pilhofer said the API itself will be done "within a matter of weeks." In the next six months, "we'll have some of the major pieces — a restaurant guide, weekend events listings and books," Frons added.
(Link by way of the IdeaLab Blog.)
]]>What I find interesting are entirely new approaches to the interface of search. What happens when search is no longer driven by the command line and the blinking cursor? What happens when, for example, your query is informed by where you happen to be, or who you happen to be, or what you happen to be doing at the time of the request? To explore these ideas, it’s best to step outside the current box of a web browser on your PC, and think about mobility.
As Battelle says in his announcement the themes will look familiar to folks who've been following search for a while, but it should be an interesting series regardless.
]]>COFEE, a preconfigured, automated tool fits on a USB thumb drive. Prior to COFEE the equivalent work would require a computer forensics expert to enter 150 complex commands manually through a process that could take three to four hours. With COFEE, you simply plug into a running computer to extract the data with the click of one button --completing the work in about 20 minutes.
It's basically a whole bunch of existing password guessers and other cracking software into a single one-touch device — and since it works on the live computer it can bypass encrypted disks like Vista's BitLocker so long as the user is still logged in.
Apparently Microsoft isn't concerned that they're building tools that can turn any two-bit felon into a highly-skilled data thief, or that they're providing products that exploit their very own security holes. After all, they're only supplying these devices to law enforcement — so what could possibly go wrong?
]]>This is essentially the Birthday Paradox, just with bigger numbers and in a different form. For those who haven't heard of it, the canonical form of the Birthday Paradox asks what the probability is that, out of a random group of 23 people, at least two in share the same birthday. (The "paradoxical" part is that the answer is just over 50%, much higher than most people's intuition would suggest.) My question just turns that around and asks "how many random N-bit IDs have to be generated before there is a one in a million chance of any two of them being identical?"
Rejiggering the formulas given in Wikipedia, here's the approximation:
n ≅ (-2 · S · ln(1 - P))1/2
where:
For example, the number of people you would need for a 50% chance that at least two of them have the same birthday is (-2 · 365 · ln(1/2))1/2, or between 22 and 23 people. As a more practical example, you would only need to generate 77,163 PGP keys before having a 50% chance of a collision between their 8-character short-form fingerprints.
As for my one-in-a-million chance, you’d need to randomly generate roughly 2(N - 19)/2 N-bit strings before having a one-in-a-million chance of a collision, which means I would need to randomly generate around 270 of my 160-bit ID strings before there would be a one-in-a-million chance of having a collision. I think I can sleep at night.
]]>A nice side effect was he noticed the screen's hairline crack I'd gotten when the phone fell out of my pocket. From all I'd read on the Net I thought I'd have to pay $250 to have that repaired, but he said so long as it was just a single hairline crack and there was no damage to the case itself they could do a warranty replacement — five minutes later I was walking out of the store with a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone.
]]>Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor
New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
]]>]]>Designing Cute Interactive Media
in conjunction with The ACM conference on Designing Interactive SystemsCuteness has an effective design philosophy that can be used in many areas to make emotionally engaging user interactive systems, as well as evaluate existing systems. Cuteness can also be included as an engineering design framework that can assist designers and engineers when creating engaging interactive systems that motivate the user in a happy, positive manner.
The main goal of this workshop is to provide designers with a better understanding of developing ways to enhance the positive experience and effectiveness of interactive media by utilizing the psychological and culturally developed effects of cuteness. We would also like to explore a range of interactive experiences involving the idea of cuteness and examine the related components. Based on these experiences, the next generation user interfaces can be built to take advantage of the cuteness factor and its unique effects on the experience which can establish and maintain more meaningful relationships with the users and encourage happiness, self confidence, motivate the user to action, and provide overall positive experiences.
(Thanks to Nat for the link!)
]]>If you want everyone else's opinion, see the links after the cut. Here's mine: interesting play, but it's in the wrong game.
You see, Kindle is Amazon's attempt at an iPod for books. They're using what they hope is an elegant, convenient, and reasonably-priced piece of hardware (which I'd guess that they're selling at pretty close to cost when you factor in the pre-paid data plan) to sell digital copies of books (which are fairly expensive considering all the atoms they don't have to handle compared with their dead-tree counterparts).
Apple, on the other hand, is using convenient access to an extensive collection of audio tracks (which they sell at pretty close to cost) to sell a particularly elegant and convenient, but overpriced, piece of hardware. Apple isn't even in the hardware business, really: they understand that they're in the fashion business, and have made it really easy for other companies to sell accessories for iPods.
Hands up, who's going to build fashion accessories for the Kindle? Don't all speak at once... How many people are going to buy a Kindle for each of their kids? Is anybody going to let their kids loose on a piece of hardware that lets them buy books at $10/pop at the click of a button? That's what I thought.
Sounds pretty spot-on to me...
]]>]]>mkdir tmp cd tmp cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs cd emacs fink install libungif libjpeg libtiff export LIBS="-lresolv" ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local make bootstrap make sudo make install cd /usr/local/bin/ sudo ln -s emacs emacs23
The idea is to make it looks like I'm sitting in a chair riding atop a steam-powered mech that walks on two robotic legs. In reality my seated legs are false, and my real legs power the robot's legs. This is basically a variant on the age-old circus-clown costume where someone looks like they're riding a horse, and is also inspired by Ben Hallert's APU costume and the paintball mech costume called Steel Dawn.
While not fast enough to keep up with 6-year-old trick-or-treaters as they went from house to house, I was still able to walk down the street and show off to passers by. The most common reaction was along the lines of "Wow! That's the coolest costume I've ever seen — what the heck are you?!? (Best answer so far: Luke Skywalker: The Later Years.) I also got little kids (and some older kids, who really should know better) asking me how the thing was powered, several adults admitting they couldn't figure out how the thing worked, and at least one little girl bursting into tears as she saw me ambling towards her. All in all, I'd say it was a big success :).
For more information on how I actually built the thing, take a look at my Instructable.
