Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Anatomy of SSDs -- A teeth-rattlingly technical Linux Magazine article explaining the different types of SSDs (Solid State Disks--imagine a hard drive made of rapid-access Flash memory). Artur Bergman told me that installing an SSD drive in his MacBook Pro gave the greatest performance increase of any computer upgrade he'd performed since he went from no computer to one. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". "Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material..." This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Back in February I wrote about how Linux had gone mainstream as netbooks became ubiquitous. When my Sylvania netbook died last month and the manufacturer took their sweet time responding to me I was offered a refund by the dealer. Suddenly I was surveying the market again for a good buy on a netbook preloaded with Linux. I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.

Linux Baby Rocker -- Check out this inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command, combined to create an automatic baby rocker. (via Hacker News) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Bird-watching Turns To Technology (BBC) -- BBC News reports on technical advances in bird watching used by a group of researchers to monitor a population of guillemots on Skomer Island, employing a CCTV like system adapted for use in the wild. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Brown Cloud Marketing -- An advertorial "interviewing" the general manager of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Diesel: A Case Study In That Thing I Just Said -- A new asynchronous I/O library in Python, which earned this fabulous review from Glyph Lefkowitz who wrote the granddaddy of all asynch libraries in Python, Twisted. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Take a look at the digg engineering team's experience in alleviating confusion over key components of the Cassandra data model. Arin Sarkissian shares the team's definitions of commonly confused terms and includes a PDF download with actual examples to illustrate key points. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Python's Fraction class implements numerical operations for rational numbers.

The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- Delores Labs asks, "Which languages make programmers the happiest?" In examining recent tweets related to mentions of programming languages and analyzing whether the content of the tweet expressed something positive, neutral or negative about the language, Delores Labs has concluded that users of certain programming languages are happier than others with their choice of code. You'll be surprised at the results of this interesting study. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The dis module converts code objects to a human-readable representation of the bytecodes for analysis.

The decimal module implements fixed and floating point arithmetic using the model familiar to most people, rather than the floating point representation implemented by most computer hardware.

What The Future's All About (Webstock Words) -- Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a science fiction author explains, "We're not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don't map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn't work like a logical argument." This and more in today's Four Short Links.

In this webcast, Git evangelist Scott Chacon covers the basics of the Git source control system. He'll introduce the audience to Git basics: staging and committing snapshots, viewing the commit log, pushing to and pulling from servers, and creating, switching between, and merging branches. Finally, he'll quickly cover a few more advanced features - code annotation, advanced log options and possibly more, time permitting. Attendance is limited for this August 13th event, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts - Meet Experts Online: Energy Literacy Entity Framework Tips & Tricks Nuclear Energy: Future Directions Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Improving Health Care -- Adam Bosworth has posted the text of a speech he delivered at the Aspen Health Forum. Among his points Bosworth notes "the importance of giving us all the right to our health data online." The speech starts strong and just gets better: "We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst." This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The pydoc module imports a Python module and uses the contents to generate help text at runtime.

The whole time the dispute between the CentOS developers was in the news development moved forward and patches were released. CentOS was never a one man show. It was perhaps in danger of forking or a name change but it never really was anywhere near point of death.

Python includes several standard programming data structures as built-in types (list, tuple, dictionary, and set). Most applications won't need any other structures, but when they do the standard library delivers.