adoption curve dot net

"I recently had the privilege to supply the challenge for the second ever Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. I thought it pretty cool that the challenge provoked 40+ "newbies" to submit responses. As one might expect, there was some rough Ruby, but very few butcherings of the language.

In the spirit of the code review, I tried to provide constructive feedback to all participants. Following is a summary of some common suggestions that I had to offer…"

Contains an interesting example of how tests could have prevented some problems…

After a few API calls and some code and graphics work, I’ve got a map showing the colors of the physical-cultural landscape around Harvard Square. This is not simply a map of the colors on the ground, which you can get from an aerial photo or systematic documentation like Google Street View, but rather a map of the colors that people on the ground are looking at.

"A fascinating dialogue is developing between psychologists and security engineers…

…This page provides links to a number of key papers, workshops, the home pages of active researchers, relevant books, and other resources. Complementary pages include my security economics resource page and Alessandro Acquisti's privacy economics page."

Virtually no information about this training board that was provided, prior to the Hektor PT602 with a Open University course called 'Microprocessors and Product Development – a course for managers'.

The choice of the microprocessor is a bit surprising as the 8049 was more a microcontroller than a true microprocessor. Later, the 8049 will be commonly found inside dot-matrix and PC keyboards.

Timetric's here to help you make sense of data. If you think about it, most of the numbers we come across every day are things like temperatures, prices, rates, volumes: numbers which vary over time. That's what Timetric focusses on: graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time.

The fancy name for this sort of thing is time series analysis. We're building tools to make it as easy to build models on top of time series — updated whenever the data they're based on is updated — as it is to use a spreadsheet.

Where many education authorities continue to routinely block, filter and ban social networks not just for youngsters but for teaching and management staff, new research from Gartner (via Euan Semple) reveals yet more logic behind opening up networks and encouraging teachers, learners and managers to network online as well as at their twice-a-year in-service get-togethers

ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov [1] changes, we’ll let you know — via e-mail [2], Twitter [3], or RSS [4].

But ChangeTracker [5] is not a piece of software. It’s the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. Here’s how to do it yourself so you can track changes on any Web site on the Internets.

They have compiled a list of the top 30 subject specific books which they recommend bright would-be Oxbridge applicants to read as they prepare for their interview over the coming weeks. Read on to find out what they are

GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying 'good morning' in English as well as several other languages.

openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit
for creative coding.

Social capital is an abstract measure that wraps up how many people you know, the information flow in your network, how many people owe you favours, that kind of thing.

High social capital goes hand in hand with being in groups, and with knowing your neighbours. People with high social capital have better jobs, live longer, and are healthier and happier. In areas with high social capital, there’s less litter, and car drivers behave better at road junctions. It’s big things and little things.

mbed is a tool for Rapid Prototyping with Microcontrollers.

Microcontrollers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more flexible, but there remains a barrier to a host of new applications; someone has to build the first prototype! With mbed, we've focused on getting you there as quickly as possible.

"Yesterday I was posting a few thoughts on the fall-out from Jan Moir's article about the death of Boyzone's Stephen Gately. People have linked these events with those surrounding The Guardian & Trafigura earlier last week as showing a big shift in the power balance between 'the establishment', represented by the media and big business, and 'the people', represented by @stephenfry on Twitter. I think these events are a continuation of a longer term trend, where complaining about issues and whipping up a vortex of righteous disgust on the Internet has become easier and easier."

In 2004 – in Lithuania, of all places – Professor Stephen Coleman introduced me to a four-phase model for understanding how new technologies are adopted and influenced by organisations.

Don’t know if he came up with it directly but finding it beautifully simple and functional, I’ve used it countless times since to make sense of how technology use is developing in organisations I have worked for or with.

I was discussing it with Neil Williams over a cerveza recently, and decided to add a fifth phase that I’d like to share here.

The puppet and live action series of Gerry Anderson enthralled me as a child, and were the inspiration for what I do today, editing and co-publishing a number of specialist titles on science fiction and fantasy modelling and special effects subjects.

At a time in the '60s when special effects in film and television were in their infant stage, Gerry's productions were streets ahead (compare the slick visuals in Thunderbirds with those in an episode of Doctor Who from the same period), his team consistently producing realistic looking vehicles and environments and pioneering a number of techniques that would be embraced by the FX industry as a whole, one of the most notable being that of 'kit-bashing'.

Twitter exposes its data via an Application Programming Interface (API). This document is the official reference for that functionality.

If you're using the Twitter API and you issue the command to query a timeline, you'll get what looks to be a whole mess of XML. If you look closely, the XML is well-structured and hierarchical. The encompassing array is the statuses element. This houses a list of status elements which describes each individual status update. In the status element are various other elements, such as text and created_at. Nested even more deeply inside the status element is the user element, which describes the user the update belongs to.

The Twitter API (Application Programmming Interface) in Ruby on Rails is about as simple as you can get. Twitter is a RESTful Rails application. API calls that query for information are GET requests, while information that changes, creates or deletes information are POST requests. The commands themselves are the URL your program accesses. Twitter will return status codes in the HTTP response code, and data in the format of your choosing (HTML, XML, RSS, etc).

You could have sudo not ever require a password for a certain command with an entry in /etc/sudoers:

What's the command to put system to sleep?

Use applescript, like this: osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

If for some reason you want to turn off your Airport Extreme Card from the command line, simply type:

sudo ifconfig en1 down

Where en1 is the interface for your Airport Extreme Card. en0 is usually Ethernet, and en1 is usually the Airport Extrewme card. To bring it back up, just type:

sudo ifconfig en1 up

A VIRTUAL emergency response centre dubbed Collabbit could be just what relief agencies need to coordinate their aid efforts in the aftermath of a disaster when speed is crucial.

Collabbit is the handiwork of the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project (HFOSS). It acts as central repository for information, sending out project updates to workers via RSS or text message. Collabbit recently performed well in a simulated emergency.