Posts Tagged ‘web tools’

A Linkpost Before Sleeping

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts.
In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of miscellaneous [...]

Browser Neepery 2008 Style

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

So, like all the other serious geeks, I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a the last couple of days.
In general, I like it–it’s fast, and there are lots of nice little UI bits that I quite like, plus the deep nerd in me likes the multi-process architecture and the built-in memory profiling, etc.
However there [...]

Shadow Unit & Cool Web Tools

Friday, June 27th, 2008

You may recall that I’ve strongly encouraged people reading this to check out the Shadow Unit project on several previous occasions.
Well, the first “season” of Shadow Unit has been over for a while now, I want to take a few minutes to re-encourage you to check it out. The work got stronger throughout the season–in [...]

Cool Web Tool: The Awesome Highlighter.

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“.
And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to [...]

Microfinance, Aggregation, Kiva

Monday, May 5th, 2008

One of those concepts that most North Americans don’t run into everyday is that of microfinance. You can read about it at the link, but in a nutshell it’s the idea that even “poor” people need access to financial services.
One particular area where this is true is financing for the small–by North American standards–loans that [...]

Thursday Night Gallimaufry

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

And once again, we have my quick opinions on a variety of things I’ve run into in the last little while.

I am fascinated with the mystery of what WalMart might be doing in their giant, mysterious data center. I’m guess that it might be related to “lowering prices every day”, but doing so by means [...]

Gravatars & Identicons

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

You may have noticed a while back that I turned on gravatars for comments on the blog.
What this means, in a nutshell, for those who aren’t already down is that if you have a “globally registered avatar” at Gravatar.com, then your comments here will show the image beside the commentor name. (Assuming that you use [...]

A few geeky bits

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

OK, let’s do one of those patented link posts to clean out some of these open tabs…
Let’s start with Mario.

As far as programming goes, I’m a kernel guy–an engine guy. I don’t do UI, and trust me, you’re happy I don’t. I make it work under the covers. As such, I often deride and disparage [...]

Monday Miscellany

Monday, March 31st, 2008

It’s really a miscellany today. I was half-tempted to title this 88 lines about 44 links, and maybe even do it in some kind of poetic structure, but fortunately a combination of laziness and good sense prevailed.

Nice to see that former local (and HGPA-member) Brian O’Malley’s movie deal is actually happening–at least leads are being [...]

Maintenance

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

I’m about to move up to Wordpress 2.5.
If there are any issues apparent before midnight (EST) assume I’m aware and working on them.
After that, please drop me a comment if you see something broken.

An Oldie But A Goodie

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

The ‘net memes are often easy to pass by, but there’s something about the CD Cover one that amuses me.
My result is shown above (click for the larger version). Tons of other ones–many of which are disturbingly plausible–at the flickr pool.
The extremely Net-savvy among you will be able to place the font used for the [...]

You can put data in…

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

I’ve read all of Christopher Buckley’s satires, and have almost uniformly enjoyed them. I only recently got caught up, reading the latest one, Boomsday, just before the holidays late last year. I enjoyed it, too.
However, there was one thing in there that really caused me to lose my suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t the idea [...]

Learning Google Gadgets

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

I decided tonight to learn how to write a Google gadget.
I figured something simple, like a configurable RSS feed reader (with a little shiny chrome) would probably be enough to learn the skeleton of what I would need to know.
So I whipped up a gadget for the Shadow Unit feed, since I’m still chewing over [...]

For Fans of The Wire (and the morbidly curious)

Friday, February 8th, 2008

I was fascinated to learn that the real Baltimore Sun has an interactive page/Google Maps application that shows the location of murders, and allows you to filter by age, race, gender, cause of death, and whether or not there was an article about the murder. (It also allows you to filter by district which is [...]

Miscellany: Your lab fees at work.

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

For a long time now I’ve been asking to be cremated and buried or scattered, rather than being embalmed and buried whole. This is primarily because I find the whole embalming thing a bit icky and unnatural, and secondarily because as an engineer I realize that the conventional burial model doesn’t scale with geometrically expanding [...]