Month: April 2015

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Genius Beta Lets Anyone Annotate Any Page On The Web

Rap Genius was just the first step to fulfilling Marc Andreessen’s Netscape dream of letting people annotate the whole Internet. Today, the lyric explanation startup tries to achieve its destiny with the launch of its new genius.it/ prefix that lets you add annotations to any web page.

Just put the prefix before a URL like http://genius.it/techcrunch.com/author/josh-constine , highlight a piece of text or image, and you can append a back story, explanation, context, or extra links. Other users who visit the genius.it/ version of the same site will see your annotation, and can upvote or downvote it, reply, or share the annotation. 

Genius Now Lets You Annotate Any Web Page, Not Just Rap | TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/?ncid=rss

Another entry into the “annotate the web” space. It seems like the tech is finally maturing and will be a welcome addition for educational use.

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Amazon Web Services Makes Amazon Machine Learning Available

Amazon Machine Learning is a service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology. Amazon Machine Learning provides visualization tools and wizards that guide you through the process of creating machine learning (ML) models without having to learn complex ML algorithms and technology. Once your models are ready, Amazon Machine Learning makes it easy to get predictions for your application using simple APIs, without having to implement custom prediction generation code, or manage any infrastructure.

Amazon Machine Learning http://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/

This is intriguing. I wonder what might happen if I throw 4.5 million state court opinions in there. I’d like to be able to sort them by round topics. I think I’ll take a look.

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5 Common Pitfalls To Avoid When Building Dev Team

Bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to expensive resources like programmers and developers. Many startups that fail in the first year or two of business spend most of their money (read: their investors money) on “development,” thinking that product building is traction. However, constantly building can be a distraction and detrimental to building a company culture around success.

When a business relies on technology like an app or website, it is important to keep costs as low and as efficient as possible. This is so that when true emergencies arise, your company can not only survive, but adapt to the situation

Inc. : 5 Common Mistakes When Building Out a Development Team. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw2KiRmCE

While written with large dev teams in mind, this advice is worth keeping in mind even if you’re still working solo out of your garage.

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My Twitter Digest for 04/09/2015

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Git Large File Storage Extension Allows for Better Versioning of Large Files

Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.

via Git Large File Storage.

This could represent a solution not only for projects with large media assets, but also for doing things like keeping database dumps within a project. There is an API that lets you build a backend so you don;t need to use Github. The Reference server that uses the API is at https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server.

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FBI Warns of ISIL Defacement Attacks on WordPress Sites

The FBI issued a public service announcement today [April 7, 2015], warning concerning WordPress website attacks being carried out by individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). The perpetrators of these attacks are defacing sites across various platforms such as news organizations, businesses, government sites, and religious institutions.

via FBI Warns of ISIL Defacement Attacks on WordPress Sites.

Everyone running WordPress out there needs to make sure they’re patched up and security is tight on your WP sites. CALI’s Classcaster and other WordPress sites are up to date and secure.

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My Twitter Digest for 04/06/2015