By riedl on
Scientific American has some fun examples of people who have been doing spamming the blogosphere. They create an identify that in some way conceals their ulterior motives, and then post blog comments or posts that push their agenda.
By riedl on
Google has announced that they are providing versioned hosting of the major AJAX libraries. Very cool! They’ll put the libraries on their servers, so they’re fast to access from anywhere in the world, and they promise to keep all versions going forward, so you can always get the one you want.
The big win, according to the article, is that browsers will already know that they have a version of a library if many apps use the same libraries from the same host. In that case, the browser won’t even have to download the library when the app requests it.
My favorite quote from the discussion: “Is this charity, or world domination?”
John
By reid on
So if you had the string
POST /wfs?request=Null&log&foo:bar=1,2:3,2:4,2&baz=x,y:y,z
and wanted to turn it into the list
['foo:bar:1,2', 'foo:bar:3,2', 'foo:bar:4,2', 'baz:x,y', 'baz:y,z']
How could you do it? Well, you could define a grammar & pass that into a parser… or you could have a pile or for loops…. Or, how about a triply-nested list comprehension contained within a reduce call? Like this!!!
reduce(operator.add,
[[(tag + ':' + value) for value in values.split(':')]
for (tag, values)
in [b.split('=') for b in a.split('&')[2:]]])
By harper on
I’ve been a moderately happy citeulike user for quite some time, but their community-developed scrapers have been growing less consistently useful over time – more and more, I have been forced to add citations to my repository by hand. I’m going to try something new, perhaps you’ve heard of it?
Zotero is a Firefox extension that is (also) able to scrape citations from many types of web pages. It also incorporates a nice feature set for tasks like organizing, note taking, and exporting. The site claims it will support sharing citations in the future, though I admit that I’ve never used citeulike’s community features in a serious way. Finally, I was able to move my citations from citeulike to Zotero in about a minute (!).
Have fun citing things!
Max
By riedl on
Interesting article on Code Climber about why working at night can seem so much more productive. I think he’s nailed the most important issues (e.g., No interruptions!) — though he’s missed one of my faves: if I’m up late working, it’s important to me to get it done, and since I’m not going to sleep until it is done, I’m harder to distract. (During the day, Google Reader is taking away from the man. At night, it’s taking away from me!)
Reminds me of Don Knuth’s arguments about why he doesn’t use email. He says that most the work he cares about requires long periods of concentration, and that email distracts him from the concentration he needs. It’s interesting that for me lots of the work I care about the most requires lots of concentration — but that I still use IM, email, &c. Perhaps these tools help me stay connected to my network, and perhaps my most important jobs are related to being connected to that network. It would be interesting to see what sort of work would get done if we separated from that network for a while, and did more solo work. The productivity would be very different. Better? Worse?
John