This is cool and disturbing – an instant dossier on anyone, as an iPhone app, so you can (discretely or not) find out facts about someone as you meet them.

http://www.refresh.io/

At some point, I need to write a nice, detailed analysis of all the problems that the NSA is getting America into – and how we can shut it down.

Every few days, something even more horrible is released.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&utm_medium=twitter

https://www.kaggle.com/c/dogs-vs-cats

Sounds like something that would be interesting to try.

More and more, I like Docker. I just also want it for Mac and Windows.

Flat Docker images

This is a very thoughtful article on Clayton Christensen’s two theories of disruption.

WHAT CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN GOT WRONG

The main thesis is that the theory of low-end disruption itself is incomplete (or wrong?) and so Apple isn’t in trouble from it.

I just found out about this

http://www.llvmpy.org/

This is a Python wrapper around the llvm C++ library. This will now feature in my next weekend project.

http://semantic-ui.com/

I think the name is a little high-falutin’, but it’s par for the course nowadays. It looks interesting at first glance.

Yahoo’s new logo. A few weeks ago I was on the Yahoo campus (attending a Meetup on large data), and all the month’s worth of logos were displayed running down the sides of a pillar in the (brobdingnagian) lunchroom; there was a clear implication that they were running a contest of some sorts, to pick the new best logo.

The good and bad is that this was not the case – they’d already decided on the new logo, and were just having fun. The bad is that their new logo is worse than the old one. It’s been fun reading a bunch of design pros write articulate and angry columns about the new logo. One of the best I’ve seen so far is here:

http://ia.net/blog/logo-bullshit-co-inc/

Another good post is: http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2013/9/6/yahoos-logo-reveals-the-worst-aspects-of-engineering-mindset

Mailpile is a new project to do self-hosting email. The front-end is a webmail client, but the back-end is a Python server you host somewhere.

http://www.mailpile.is/

LWN has an article on it: Mailpile targets webmail and attemps to raise funds.

Slide deck: http://www.mailpile.is/files/OHM2013%20-%20Rescuing%20e-mail%20from%20the%20cloud.pdf

Most importantly, the source is on Github, because it’s open-source: https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile

Seek the simplest possible system that works well now as well as into the future.

• works well now – most important
• simple – almost trumps “works” but #2 by a hair
• extends to the future – distant third

This is not to be confused with the uber-system that solves all problems. In fact, it’s an indictment of that mentality. Uber-systems don’t work well now, they take a long time to get to that state. They are by definition not simple. And, as it turns out, they don’t extend to the future, because the uber-system turns out to be incomplete when the future changes.

This is also not to be confused with “minimum viable product” or “prototyping” or being reactive. You do want to have a clear design. But you want to spend all your effort on the parts that will be used right now. The worst you want is a Pareto distribution, where 20% of your functionality is used 80% of the time. You do not want a system where half of it is used 1% of the time or less. The ideal is that all of the system is used all of the time. We will never get there, but that is the goal.