Alasdair Watson – Page 57 – Unreliable information since 1972

Links for Thursday September 8th 2011

WebGL "Ginger" manipulation demo: Blend shapes, morph targets with Three.js / Stickman Ventures
This is all happening in real time in your browser. Remember when Toy Story took entire buildings full of servers and custom software and specially trained technical staff years to make?

Mastergram
Instagram is an absolutely brilliant thing – I'd be using it for my photoblogging, if it hadn't launched about three weeks after I started 365bullets, but it's going to be the tool I use for the next photo project after that. But, as this project shows, it's not the filters that make the photo (and they're not why I think instagram is great). Sure, sometimes they enhance what's there, but they'll destroy a great shot more often than they'll rescue a mediocre one.

Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Jess Nevins
Jess Nevins does a guest stint on Warren's site, and, in the process, teaches us all something about the history of fandom. I imagine a good number of you will have seen this already, but if you're someone with a connection to fandom who doesn't read Warren's blog in some format, I commend this particular post to your attention. Don't you want to know what Byron thought of about fandom?

Monsters of Grok: fake band t-shirts for history’s greatest thinkers by Jeremy Kalgreen
I just need to decide which of these to buy.
It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
This is an excellent summary of how to run an effective daily stand-up meeting, and how to fix problems with it, should they arise.

Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure
If you're using wordpress, you should probably do these things. None of them are hard, and all of them will help.

New Android spyware answers incoming calls – SC Magazine US
Anyone want to bet me that there was a governmental intelligence agency involved in the development of this, at some point?
Home – Readmill
I've just signed up for the beta of this service. Will dump books across to it in the next day or so, and give it a go. The app certainly looks nice, just as a shame apple don't expose an API to pull books out of the iBooks app, meaning I'm going to wind up with (quite a lot of) duplicate data on my iPad.
FOSS Patents: Samsung cites Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie as prior art against iPad design patent
This one is really interesting, and I kind of hope they succeed, just so sci-fi writers all over American can get really litigious with big corporations going around turning all their ideas into reality.
What Does Google Mean By “Evil?” (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
This has been on my mind lately, and it's an interesting perspective. Swartz is suggesting that Google's definition of "evil" is "not making things worse for users in order to make more money". It's not a bad suggestion, and if it's accurate, it's still more than many companies even attempt, but (as is probably obvious if you've listened to me bang on for a while) I think it's perfectly possible to be "evil" and still hew to that definition. (I also don't agree that the G+/real names nonsense passes that definition of "evil", but that's another thing.)

rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack
If you are running the LAMP stack on your websites, and not doing all this, you need to do some work.
Bootstrap, from Twitter
Here's a nice framework for building web-app interfaces. I can see myself using this to put stuff together.
13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World
I wish I'd been that clever when I was 13. Hell, I wish I was that clever now.

This has made my morning 382% better. Absolutely superb editing.