Tsukiyumi

It’s all bubbly out there.

My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing. The vast majority of programming is not conceptually difficult (contrary to what a lot of people would have you believe). We only make it difficult because we suck at writing. The vast majority of programmers aren’t fluent, and don’t even have a desire to be fluent. They don’t read other people’s code. They don’t recognise or use idioms. They don’t think *in the programming language*. Most code sucks because we have the fluency equivalent of 3 year olds trying to write a novel. And so our programs are needlessly complex.

OpenPlans is a non-profit technology organization focused on open government and livable streets. We build open source software. We help agencies open up their data. We report on urban issues.

Brewery is a Python framework and collection of tools for analysing and mining data. Goal is to provide functions and tools for:

• streaming and processing structured data from various sources, such as CSV, XLS files, Google spreadsheets, relational (SQL) databases, MongoDB (no-sql database),…
• data quality auditing
• data mining

Imagine a future where you can hold your phone up, take a picture of a stranger and immediately get a full social profile of them – their Twitter account, Facebook profile, their job from their LinkedIn account and much more. While in some cases this would be incredibly cool, it would also be incredibly frightening for many people, and the opportunities for it to be misused for criminal purposes are many.

Producing Open Source Software is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software. The book is released under an open copyright: it is available in bookstores and from the publisher (O’Reilly Media), or you can browse or download it here.

The Internet Archive will now keep a physical copy of every book, record and movie that it is able to attract or acquire, all with the goal of making sure that there is at least one physical copy of a book or record or film preserved.

Although it has built a large storage facility in Richmond, California, this isn’t a physical library per se. As before, the Internet Archive will emphasize the digital access to the content. In other words, this new physical archive isn’t about retrieval or “checking out” materials, but is about long-term preservation.

Kahle likens the project to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank that is a way of “storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe.”