Links on Bruno Pedro

Still using HTTP Basic Auth?

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:22:17 +0000

Great article by Steve Graham about why you should stop using HTTP Basic Auth immediately!

As well as being tremendously simple, HTTP Basic by itself is also tremendously insecure, i.e. it is implemented by simply Base64 encoding the username and password concatenated with a colon “:” character. It then follows that HTTP Basic should only be used, if at all, over securely encrypted connections.

Original article: WHY THE HELL DOES YOUR API STILL USE HTTP BASIC AUTH?

Do small experiments, often

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:11:33 +0000

A long time ago, I realized that every successful business was a continuous process of small experiments that operated in the context of a long-term vision. When an experiment worked, you did more of it. When it didn’t, you ended it and moved on. – in The $100,000 Experiment, by Brad Feld

Deliver on your promises

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 18:34:38 +0000

So if I can give entrepreneurs a single piece of advice for 2013 it would be to deliver on your promises. Not just to your investors but also to your team and ultimately to yourself. This is no time to be in denial. That is a lethal attribute in times like these. – in Advice for 2013: Deliver On Your Promises by Fred Wilson

Is the World socialist?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:18:13 +0000

Revisiting an old story by Dave Winer: Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. Rand is best known as author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She developed a philosophical system called Objectivism.

If you want to go back to the point where we decided to be socialist and try to undo it, you’re going to have to kill most of the people on the planet who depend on the current system for sustenance. And like it or not, that probably includes you. It certainly includes most of the idiots running around preaching Ayn Rand these days. – in The World is socialist

AsciiDoc

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:46:38 +0000

AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. AsciiDoc files can be translated to many formats including HTML, PDF, EPUB, man page. – via AsciiDoc Home Page.

Very interesting because it lets you export documents to DocBook and from there you can easily generate HTML and PDF.

Some books written using AsciiDoc:

Advertising’s bumpy transition

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:35:59 +0000

Advertising’s bumpy transition

Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, web users are going to be stuck seeing irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.

Black Swan Farming

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:34:21 +0000

Black Swan Farming

The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

Use sprints to maximize productivity

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:18:54 +0000

Use sprints to maximize productivity

The powerful thing about Sprinting is that it helps you break projects down into actionable steps. Checking things off your todo list gives you a great sense of accomplishment throughout the day. Looking at all the completed todos on your list at the end of the day allows you to relax in the evening, knowing you accomplished a lot that day.

Agile development & WMSS

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:16:08 +0000

Agile development & WMSS

I think what I called We Make Shitty Software is in other words the same thing as the agile process. Whatever it’s called, we all acknowledge that our software is imperfect, it’s a process, but we’re working to make it better, and more responsive to users.

A Hardware Renaissance in Silicon Valley

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:55:43 +0000

A Hardware Renaissance in Silicon Valley

Today some of the most successful hardware start-ups in Silicon Valley have been formed from the diaspora of former Apple employees who want to try their hand at companies that pair hardware and software (…)

Water LED Art

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:18:29 +0000

Water LED Art

When art and electronics meet some very beautiful things can be born. Here Antonin Fourneau made this wonderful piece, basically a wall of circuit boards with LEDs, when exposed to water the LEDs light up.

Tent: Open Social Networking protocol

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:49:09 +0000

Tent: Open Social Networking protocol

Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. Tent users share content with apps and each other. Anyone can run a Tent server, or write an app or alternative server implementation that uses the Tent protocol. Users can take their content and relationships with them when they change or move servers. Tent supports extensible data types so developers can create new kinds of interaction.

Ghosts in the ROM

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:03:48 +0000

Ghosts in the ROM

(…) we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people.

Amazon Glacier

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:45:29 +0000

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

Harvard cracks DNA storage

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:36:43 +0000

Harvard cracks DNA storage

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data – around 700 terabytes – in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

What is branch.com?

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:28:12 +0000

What is branch.com?

A mix between Convore, Google+ circles and some of FriendFeed… Their killer feature is called branching and it lets you create your own version of a conversation starting from a specific entry.

Portugal as a source of cheap talent

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 08:31:58 +0000

Portugal as a source of cheap talent

Western technology companies have traditionally looked to developing economies as a place to find cheap, abundant talent. But thanks to the Eurozone’s problems and the sovereign debt crisis, things are changing rapidly: Just ask the Portuguese, who are finding themselves subordinate to fast-growing [Brazil](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-15.75,-47.95&spn=10.0,10.0&q=-15.75,-47.95 (Brazil)&t=h “Brazil”).

pandoc

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:30:03 +0000

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.

If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:28:30 +0000

Google did a great job of slurping up some of the most talented researchers in the world at a time when places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were dying. It managed to grab not just their researchers, but their lifeblood.

Great story about some of the most under-appreciated engineers behind Google.

Force of Nature

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:41:48 +0000

I just found out about this great work by Robert Buelteman.

Where is the Web going?

Thu, 13 May 2010 13:29:42 +0000

I need to share a great video documentary by Kate Ray called Web 3.0. Here’s a transcribed quote:

If I was gonna start a news business tomorrow I would start a news business designed to produce not one new bit of news, but instead to aggregate news for individuals in ways that matter to them. – Clay Shirky (1'18")

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

More on the @replies subject

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:35:56 +0000

I just stumbled on a Buzz by DeWitt Clinton about a possible solution to the use of decentralized @replies. From the Buzz:

I want to throw some ideas out there about how it can someday be done in a decentralized fashion using open technologies such as WebFinger, Portable Contacts, AtomPub, and Activity Streams. (And maybe Salmon. Read on.)

The proposal would let you address any user of any application in a complete decentralized way.

Cliqset FeedProxy and the ActivityStreams format

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:30:24 +0000

Great news:

the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

Read the original: The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API on ReadWriteWeb.

Re: Bing Tries To Buy The News on TechCrunch

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:20:46 +0000

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

Here’s a list of links about this:

Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact on FT
Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News” on search engine land
Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google on The Business Insider
Will News Corp move its content to Microsoft’s Bing? on The Guardian

Read the original post: Bing Tries To Buy The News on TechCrunch.