Morrie the Toupee Salesman

Like I can’t think of a good simile… Anyway based on seeing a python toolkit for the digg api, and more importantly a comment about how a generator-based toolkit would be really useful, I’ve started to build the latter thing. And it’s true, the use of generators makes the need to get multiple pages from […]

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My pollution photo continues to get a lot of play, featured today on a nowpublic story. The story is about how Canada ranks second last in a study of “consumer habits” related to the environment. It made me smile when I discovered that the U.S. was last, because there’s that whole Canadian inferiority thing which […]

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I loved this book. In 1993 it clearly set out an agenda (the importance of citations) that foreshadowed the rise of search engines. Just suddenly popped into my head tonight - it was written by a senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress.
Probably dated now, but influential without most people knowing about it.

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After that last post, I’d like to point out that trying to post code to wordpress (not wordpress.com) is a fiasco. I tried various combinations of pre and code tags, either inserting the opening and closing tags at the right place or selecting the text and clicking on the code button (not using the wysiwig […]

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Here’s the code for those images. Having something of a scientific background, I’m inclined to think that I’m stepping ahead of those other graphers I mentioned, by exposing my methodology (ha!) to public scrutiny. Open source is really just “peer review” in disguise. The program spits out data to stdout which can be piped to […]

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It seems there is a real thirst for data about digg.com and “social news” in general. Last week I read a post about the best time to submit a story to social news sites that seemed somewhat flawed. For starters it didn’t account for volume of submissions (or at least didn’t seem to). Furthermore it […]

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In a world where small software companies seem to have an expected life of less than ten years, its kind of neat to discover that a company still makes a product I used back in the eighties - Grapher by Golden Software - “Technologically Advanced Graphics and Mapping solutions since 1983.”

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Techmeme isn’t going to be usable for the next few days, as blogiarrhea takes over after the big MS-Yahoo story. It almost resembles a message board right now, with a bunch of highly paid pundits posting their equivalent of “First!” and trying to spin 250 words out of “No Deal!”

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Kinda Cruel but Still Funny

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