Biweekly links for 06/08/2009

  • On Google Wave – Five detailed posts
  • EtherPad Blog: Google Wave Joins EtherPad in Real-time Collaboration
    • Interesting comments from EtherPad about how EtherPad compares to Google Wave.
  • Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact
  • YouTube – Sasquatch music festival 2009 – Guy starts dance party
    • Things like this have always happened, but I really wonder if we’re not just getting a whole lot more used to the idea of collective action.
  • Google I/O – Mercurial on BigTable
    • “Project Hosting on Google Code is a web-based platform for open source development, providing mailing lists, an issue tracker, a source code repository, download areas, and so on. This talk will focus on a new version-control component of Project Hosting on Google Code: Mercurial backed by Bigtable. Mercurial/Bigtable is designed to scale over thousands of machines and use Bigtable’s replication to run over multiple datacenters. It is built to be able to host hundreds of thousands of open source projects. Come learn about Mercurial’s architecture, and how we’ve extended it to grow to “Google size”.”
  • What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect? – Stack Overflow
    • Many interesting answers to this StackOverflow question: “I am doing some research into common errors and poor assumptions made by junior (and perhaps senior) software engineers.

      What was your longest-held poor assumption that was eventually corrected?

      For example: I at one point failed to understand that the size of an integer was not a standard (depends on the language and target). A bit embarrassing to state, but there it is.

      Be frank: what hard-held belief did you have, and roughly how long did you maintain the assumption? It can be about an algorithm, a language, a programming concept, testing, anything under the computer science domain.”

  • The Occasional Pamphlet
    • Stuart Shieber’s blog – Shieber helped lobby for the Harvard Open Access policy.
  • Community Principles ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎
    • “The Google Wave Federation Protocol is evolving as an open source project, and as the community and technology grows, here are the guiding principles:

      * Wave is an open network: anyone should be able to become a wave provider and interoperate with the public network
      * Wave is a distributed network model: traffic is routed peer-to-peer, not through a central server
      * Make rapid progress, together: a shared commitment to contribute to the evolution and timely deployment of protocol improvements
      * Community contributions are fundamental: everyone is invited to participate in the public development process
      * Decisions are made in public: all protocol specification discussions are recorded in a public archive”

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