1. Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
2. Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
3. Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, …

We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Turn MySQL into blazing fast NoSQL.

Tomorrow's augmented reality is being built today on mobile devices. The Tasker application for Android is a fun platform for prototyping personal automation and sensing applications. Described modestly as an application which "performs tasks based on contexts," it gives non-programmers access to the sensing and system features of the phone.

Following a simple rule metaphor of taking action upon matched conditions, Tasker can respond …

1. 12 Months with MongoDB (Worknik) -- every type of retrieval got faster than their old MySQL store, and there are some other benefits too. They note that the admin tools aren't really there for MongoDB, so "there is a blurry hand-off between IT Ops and Engineering." (via Hacker News)
2. Dawn of a New Day -- Ray Ozzie's farewell note to Microsoft. Clear definition of the challenges to come: At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today. But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated …

1. Go to Profiles
2. Click on Advanced
3. Highlight Active profile
4. Click on Menu and select Edit
5. SMS Text/Phone/MMS etc.
6. Select Tone
7. Ring Tone: Change as desired
8. Volume: High/Medium/Low
9. Click back button
10. Select Save

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license and concern over the openness (or closedness, depending on your perspedtive) of the latest devices. Amid all of it, we’re pleased to present our latest long-form report, CAOS 12 - The Myth of Open Source …

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks.

On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an opportunity than a threat following Jay’s post about the company releasing more code under open source licenses.

Nik Cubrilovic over at TechCrunch, meanwhile, has written an interesting …

It's been a while since the last post. This is mostly due to me entering new territory in several ways. For one, I have been digging into JavaME development lately (platform change #1), building a mobile data entry and manipulation application that uses a an embedded database and talks to its server via Webservices, if connected. Otherwise data will be queued up locally and sent as soon as the

One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of …