Posts

If you’re a CTO moving heavily into cloud services, one of the things that keeps you awake at night is what happens if one of your providers goes under or just becomes so unreliable you have to move. Let’s face it, lock in goes along with the cloud as the fact of the matter is you code to exploit a specific platform.

The amazing thing about Fog is that it acts as a universal interface in front of the cloud, allowing you to control a variety of cloud services though a unified API. It deals with both servers and storage already supporting EC2, Rackspace servers, vCloud and Slicehost and numerous cloud based storage vendors S3 and Rackspace Files.

The first organism created from a totally artificial and constructed genome - the first creature since the beginning of creatures with no ancestor to put it in perspective, was unceremoniously announced in the pages of Science on the 20th of May.

Sure, analogies to Frankenstein’s creation will abound (particularly since they had to use the “dead” body of another organism to get the DNA to do its stuff), but the fact is this is probably one of the quietest, most monumental breakthroughs in the history of science. Humanity has paved the way for the creation of designer life.

Yeah, just geeking out…

For reasons astronomers can’t currently explain completely, Jupiter has lost an entire ginormous and very visible stripe from its surface, altering the face of the solar system’s largest planet.

The entire SEB (South Equatorial Belt), which is twice as wide as the Earth and twenty times as long, just vanished, 2001: A Space Odyssey style. I love all the mysteries about Jupiter and how little we actually seem to know. Like, why the Big Red Spot is red or has been a sustained, raging Earth-sized atmospheric storm for so incredibly long.

Wow. Constantly amazed at how Umair Haque keeps making such amazing observations and good calls on what really needs to be done for the future. Love this post on The Betterness Manifesto .

Here’s the score. The global economy faces a series of tectonic structural shifts. The great gears of this vast machine must be reset over the next decade. Consumption must fall. Savings must rise. Investment must be more productive. Incomes and wealth must be shared more broadly. Borrowing from tomorrow must slow. The rate at which we value the future must grow. Growth itself must be revitalized.

The recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policies are civil rights eroding and a maze of complexity in my personal opinion. Even being careful, using this bookmarklet showed me I was still leaking information despite my best intentions at plugging all the holes. So, if you value your privacy I really advise using it to make sure you’re sharing only what you want to share (and particularly now that your friends can inadvertently share information about you you wouldn’t want being shared).

Loved the BoingBoing subject for this post: Pew pew! For science! Lasers map ancient Mayan temples… ;-)

Scientists using LIDAR mapped 802 miles of dense jungle-choked terrain around Caracol in Belize… in under four days flying over the area with planes and ground pointing laser radar. Not only that, the laser mapping turned up stuff ground-based surveying had been unable to spot: house mounds, roads and farms.

So freaking cool. NYTimes: Using lasers to map ancient civilization in a matter of days

GetUp! has been campaigning for months with the nocleanfeed and EFA coalition to kill off Conroy’s Internet filter (read: censorship) initiative. Rudd has blinked and taken it off the cards for the election and is on the defensive. We just sent this rather epic video to our awesome superhero-like membership to thank the ones who took action and to urge everyone to keep up the pressure to pull the plug completely.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, check out our original CensorDyne spoof ad which started the campaign.

Really great blog post from Mark Cuban on the fact Wall Street has gone from being about value creation and allocating capital to arbitrage speculation and value hijacking .

The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.

Watching the UK freak out over the prospect of a hung Parliament and a (gasp) minority government, while amusing I have to admit I’m never going to be sad to see the end of simple two party political systems. While proportional representation failed in Canada, I think it’s a good idea to take a queue from John Cleese’s beautifully sarcastic short on PR.

While I’m not sure anything can save the UK after living there, this would be a good start.

I’m posting this because someone I did a Hack night with hadn’t yet checked out the awesome rvm in order to muck around with Rails 3. If you’re a Rail or Rubyista you need to install it and start messing around with 1.9.x and the wonders that are Rails 3. Here’s how.

Rails is now at beta 3 which means a release candidate is right around the corner. While fundamentally more complex under the hood than 2.x (though the devs claim it’s easier to understand now), 3 provides some fundamental advantages (and some key changes) you probably need to get up to speed with if you don’t want to be left behind.