As usual, a lot of interesting things are going in The Internet, here are some that caught my attention:
1) Mozilla Persona
A better way to sign in.
It can be used to implement SSO (Single-Sign-On), in someway it is similar to OpenID.
The identity provider is not notified, which is very good for privacy.
It is focused on the browser (built on the BrowserID protocol)
Take a look https://persona.org/
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2) IDEs in the Cloud
Many things are moving to the Cloud, and IDEs are not the exception.
Cloud9 the IDE (not the restaurant with tasty food) is a popular one.
This link lists more options.
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cloud-ide-developers/
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3) Visual Regular Expressions
Chances are that you know the saying
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
Attributed to jwz.
Well, that is less true with Debuggex, a pretty cool tool to visualize JavaScipt, PCRE and Python regular expressions. Debuggex eases the problem of using regular expressions. It integrates Mozilla’s Persona and embedding in StackOverflow.
RegexPlanet is another good option but isn’t possible to visualize regex…
One thing I would like to see: Debuggex is open-source instead of Debuggex is not open-source.
http://www.debuggex.com/libraries
Check it out
http://www.debuggex.com/
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4) FreeBSD in the PlayStation 4
Seems like the PlayStation 4 will be running Orbis OS, a modified version of FreeBSD.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI
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5) Synchronization via procrastination
The article Structured Deferral: Synchronization via Procrastination overviews how to maintain data synchronized using a lazy approach.
It compares reference counting, hazard pointers…
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2488549
Recommended article
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6) On Java garbage collection
Article explaining the G1 Garbage Collector.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/G1-One-Garbage-Collector-To-Rule-Them-All
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７) Serval Project
Serval Project brings Open telecommunications using mesh networking.
These are the features that make it interesting:
1) Opertaes in normal phones (there is an app for Android)
2) The nodes keep the phone number
3) All calls are end-to-end encrypted
This has wide range of use cases, e.g., using cell phones in over-crowded places, communicating during disaster, freely communication during civil resistance, communicating with friends without using carrier’s networks…
An article in MIT Technology Review
A related TED’s talk video
The project page in indiegogo
Open Garden is a similar project that is worth looking
http://www.servalproject.org/
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8) The Process of Innovation
A software guy named James Gosling (not a Senior Consultant, not a Principal Engineer, not a Dr, just a plain Software Guy) talks in Standford’s Computers Systems Colloquium about the process of innovation. Among other interesting facts and anecdotes he talks about:
- The cost of risk. For a company, going into a research project is a risk because, research project takes time (time is money, and researchers are not cheap), and there are big chances that the research couldn’t be capitalized.
So, from the risk point of view, it is safer/better to acquire a company that has already developed a product as result of a research project. This is also better from the accounting point of view, even if the price to pay is high, the company’s is not exactly spending money but just changing the form of an asset, as opposed to literally spend money in a research project until it becomes profitable, if someday turns out to become profitable. For companies is better to buy instead of develop. Around 20′
- He compares the ‘success rate of R&D projects’ in IBM with 1%-5% considering more than 3% highly productive, and Sun with 10% – 20%. The fact that Sun’s outperformed IBM might be due to the fact that almost every manager at Sun had a technical/engineering background. Around 30′
- How to do technology transfer? Create something new, killing the old…or transform the old into something new
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN3FZKTgdR0
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9) A different approach to schedule public transportation
Self-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systems
This interesting and not conventional paper, argues that self-scheduling public transportation is more efficient than the typical approach where vehicles come at regular intervals.
Take a look
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021469
ModProbe 