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Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter.

Good luck today John & team I know its going to be a long day!

1. Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington rese...

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1. Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington rese...

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In 1906 a researcher realized that in the 13th century a book of Archimedes' treatises had been over-written with prayers. Almost a century later the original manuscript was recovered through the high-tech efforts of Dr. Will Noel. In this Ignite talk he shares the secrets of the Palimpsest and the technology used to uncover them.

As described on the Archimedes Palimpsest on Wikipedia:

Archimedes lived in the third century BC, but the copy of his work was made in the tenth century AD by an anonymous scrib...

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Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins
and I serving as co-chairs. Back in
November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight "best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company's bottom line." Much of my work focuses on the how of improving performance - tips developers use to create even faster web sites. What's been missing is the why. Why is it important for companies to focus on performance?

That ques...

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1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click i...

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The code for Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock has been released. The open-sourcing of the site's system were apart of the Knight News Challenge Program. Everyblock is very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data -- news, crime, fire, restaraunt inspections and reviews - and then lets users define their interests down to the block-level.

Adrian made the announcement on 6/30. Here's the list of newly open-sourced, GPL'd goodies found on Everyblock's new Code page:

The main package (probably...

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On Monday Neil McAllister posed the question "is the hacker ethic harming American developers?" Slashdot picked it up and Tim forwarded it to the Radar list. As you might expect, it resulted in some spirited discussion.

James Turner kicked things off with this response (it has been slightly edited from its email form). After James lays out his argument I'll reply with my thoughts. Then we hope to hear from you. Let us know what you think.

I've worked in a lot of organizations that thought that the ki...

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The theme for the Web 2.0 Summit this year is Web Squared. It is rooted in the idea that as the web morphs into less of a hub and spoke distribution model and more of a network of connected people and things, innovation and opportunity on it are growing exponentially. There has been a little bit of discussion on the Radar back channel about exactly what this means, or should mean, and Nat started things off with a thoughtful response that probably should be blogged as well. In particular he introduced f...

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In the past year or so, I've been urging people to work on stuff that matters. The world is faced with serious problems, and we in the technology community have a unique contribution to make, as the tools we've created help us to collaborate and organize at an unprecedented scale outside of industrial-era top-down organizations.

One area where technology and real world concerns meet is in the challenge of remaking democracy in a Web 2.0 world. With the support of the President of the United States himse...

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This article is the second in a series leading up to the

Personal Democracy Forum.
The
first article
was posted on June 16.

I never cottoned to the term Government 2.0. Stripping away RESTful
interfaces and OpenID accounts, the new practices in government
transparency are just intensifications of things democracies have done
for a long time: public comment periods, expert consultation,
archiving deliberations, and so forth. So let's look back a bit at
what democracy has brought to government so far.

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I am an evangelist of social media and an active participant: on Linked In (business), MySpace (music) and Facebook (increasingly my online identity), I blog on several sites and I am a daily user of Twitter. I also make my living speaking to companies about the value and operating principles of these more open, participatory technologies.


I have read the proponents that abound (Why I Love Twitter, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody etc.) and found much to agree with. I have read the detractors (

Guest blogger Brian Boyer is a hacker journalist who writes about the intersection of technology and journalism. He's worked at public-interest journalism site ProPublica and is now at the Chicago Tribune, building their new News Applications team.

It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2....

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At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take much to convince someone from the NSA to talk on-camera about the Enigma. (I did decide to submit the video to the NSA public affairs office for final ...

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Question: When you plug something in do you say Im using electricity or Im using the wall socket? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of innovation in energywhere the discussion centers on the design of plugs & sockets.

Eduardo Jezierski, in Phones Don't Change the World, People Do.

P.S. It's unbelievable that more people don't follow Edjez on twitter, or read his blog. He doesn't blog or tweet often - he's out saving the world. He's worth paying attention to.

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with stran...

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Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware):

1. Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation si...

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