Simon Katan on teaching peripheral skills around computing, computation, and code. I agree wholeheartedly with his description of tools that shield users from complexities to the extent of hiding how things actually work. I also loved his idea of "flour babies for looking after code properly".

Filed away as a nice introduction to computational sensing, vision, and how computers don't see.

"This is all very preliminary, but here is a first pass as a Processing Kinect library." Ooh.

Trap streets – yes, of course. But trap rooms; trap architectures? That's iiinteresting.

"Bookland is a fictitious country created in the 1980s in order to reserve a Unique Country Code (UCC) prefix for EAN identifiers of published books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN space can catalog books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system." Awesome. Via Kim (who else?)

"This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction . . . all the while sneaking in little nuggets of UNIX® wisdom and lore. It serves as a textbook, a manual for self-study, and a reference and source of knowledge on shell scripting techniques. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation, under the premise that the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts." Really good stuff, which Nick pointed me at this morning when I revealed I couldn't write bash scripts.

"With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code." Hammersley on the value to journalism of sensible datastorage. Data-driven journalism in the sense that it is not *about* data, but in that it is *treated as data* – and from this more stories can flow.