Wordle: Beautiful word clouds

I am a sucker for beautiful and interesting data visualization techniques-  I’ve long been a fan of Edward Tufte, and his work, especially his Sparklines system for representing data in “intense, simple, word sized graphics”. Of course, there are other simple systems which have been made popular of late by the web, such as tag [...]

Whither Jaiku?

I’ve been a fan of Jaiku for about six months, having gotten an invite from that awesome outlaw, Fabian Scherschel. Even though I don’t currently do a whole lot of microblogging, I think Jaiku is a clear winner, being that it  has a richer feature set, and generally doesn’t completely suck, unlike Twitter. Lately though, [...]

Adeona: For simple users and dumb thieves

Not to pick on any one of the catch a thief in the act and Lojack style stolen laptop tracking software solutions out there (too much), but really, these solutions are designed for people who take no pains to secure their machines in the most basic sense to begin with!
If you haven’t heard the fanfare [...]

Why does it even have to be a BIGfoot?

OK, prepare to be excited!
There’s a new breakthrough in the supernatural world of funky creatures which might exist but are apparently so close to extinction, that they’re only seen one at a time in isolated geographical regions, and never leave behind any physical evidence except footprints…UNTIL NOW!
I’m talking about BigFoot (Sasquatch or whatever you choose [...]

Bitbucket: like hosted Trac with Mercurial

I’ve been using the Mercurial distributed version control system for projects which require any kind of VCS for years now. I have these folks1 to thank for the introduction to this fine solution for managing versions of complex projects involving [...]I cut my teeth on hg through constant daily with certain documentation projects at rPath [...]

Ann is an awesome boss!

Today, I am going to do something atypical with my weblog- I’m not going to complain and groan about technology that doesn’t work well, or that spies on you, or even ponder out loud on the confusion something or someone instills in me at any given time. There’s not even a shred of nerdspeak to [...]

I *knew* we’d learn more about this guy!

So, here’s a QnD before I hit the sack.  Back a couple years ago, I started a series of comparison images, called “coincidence? you decide!”, and my very first one was a striking comparison (by my low standards anyway).  Behold, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed vs Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force: (more…)

Yo ho ho and a haul of reddit treasure!

I’ve been visiting reddit for a couple years now, mostly lurking, but never really submitting links or commenting. When I learned that reddit was being released under an open source license, I quite literally checked out the code the same day, and commenced to tinkering!
While chatter and fanfare across the intartubes rolled on, even the [...]

Drupy: Porting the Drupal CMS to Python

Had I not taken a look at the project page, I probably would have thought that anyone pointing this project out was either crazy or engaged in a bout of wishful thinking, or both! Alas, it is quite real though, and stirs up all kinds of wobbly thoughts in me on the subject:
Drupy is a [...]

jQuery Mania!

I’ve been a fan of jQuery since around the time it started creeping into Drupal back in the early 5.x days. The philosophy of progressive user experience enhancement with graceful degradation in the absence of JavaScript is something I think everyone can agree makes the web more exciting these days. (more…)