Rails Lessons Learned the Hard Way
Things I've learned the hard way in Rails: Layouts run inside views, not the other way round. Set an instance variable in app/views/monkeys/show.html.erb and it will be defined in...
View ArticleParsing Names with Honorifics
In Railscast #16, Ryan Bates goes over Virtual Attributes in Rails, using the standard example of storing first and last names but getting/setting full names. He uses the following simple snippet: def...
View ArticleCopyright Disputes are usually Failures of Imagination
Hasbro is trying to shut down Scrabulous, a successful online Scrabble game -- perhaps the most successful Facebook app to date. On the one hand, I think that Hasbro is completely within their rights:...
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The power of a good visualization
I just found a program called Grand Perspectivethat present your disk usage as an interactive mipmap (see pic on right). Helping web nerds save hard drive space isn't finding hidden heart defects or...
View ArticleThe 2007 Feltron Annual Report
The 2007 Feltron Annual Report is available now. In a series of elegant infographics, see the ambit of places he walked to in Brooklyn and Manhattan, review how many albums Mr. Feltron bought in the...
View ArticleMore things I wish someone else will write
More random software ideas:Google search, restricted to find bug reports only. You'd crawl usenet, sourceforge/google code, debian etc. build farms, open issue trackers, mailing list archives and...
View ArticleReference Cards
Here are some pretty reference cards I made a while back:Scale Landmarks: What's something you're familiar with that is about 10 nm big? How do the speed of continental drift, a raindrop, a champion...
View ArticleOwning my Metadata
Dear Lazyweb, I'd like someone to invent a 'Metadata reclaimer': a program to screenscrape all my amazon ratings, flickr tags, facebook posts, etc. I try, as far as possible, to only use apps that let...
View Article50 years of Baseball Play-by-play data mashed with 50 years of hourly weather...
Note: I found this sitting in my drafts folder, unpublished. It actually dates from October.I've had two interesting realizations from the Retrosheet Baseball data vs. Hourly Weather information mashup...
View ArticleTime Machine is neat-o, but I want a Time and Space Machine for my files
I've long wished for a versioned home directory, but the svn/ish seem too heavyweight, and it's nice to have a live copy and not an opaque DB-ball. The right answer the stunningly elegant Time Machine....
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Old-School Shop Guide
ShopGuideFront300dpi.pngI rediscovered this super-compact reference-and-tool-and-measuring device while looking for a tool. It is jam-packed with handy information for anyone doing things mechanical or...
View ArticleLeveraging the Bittorrent Underground for semantic data and media
I just ran across a pretty interesting site called coverbrowser.com, which uses a variety of image APIs to pull in comic book, game, book, music, movie and other cover art. (Read the technical details...
View ArticleMoving from Perl to Python with XML and Templating
Mr. XKCD is correct in this. (My friend Dr. Larsson has been saying this all along). As I'm moving from data munging to data working-with, I've been moving from perl to python. Recommended:lxml is a...
View ArticleHourly Weather data for each Retrosheet game
I noticed some suspect entries for game conditions in the eventfiles and realized I could not only fix it but add a pretty useful dimension to the retrosheet collection. The National Climate Data...
View ArticleRetrosheet Eventfile Inconsistencies II
I've found a few more inconsistencies and minor inaccuracies in the retrosheet event files and game logs. I made a diff (applied using the 'patch' tool) to mechanically recreate these corrections:...
View ArticleThe Asdrubal Carrera Hall of Fame
Inspired by one of Tim McCarver's flights of fancy during the ALCS, I present The Asdrubal Carrera Hall of Fame, open to anyone in unique possession of a particular first name among Major League...
View ArticleRetrosheet Eventfile Inconsistencies
Here are a few inconsistent records in the retrosheet.org event files of 2007 Sep 23. I'm using chadwick and not the retrosheet DOS utils, but I think I've source all these to the original event files....
View ArticleRules of thumb for Rack Leave in Scrabble
This isn't exactly within the ambit of this blog but at least it's about data. While I should have been doing work, I instead made an awesome spreadsheet to find rules of thumb for what the best...
View Articleas3mathlib (formerly WIS math libraries)
I've just imported the WIS mathematics library -- an excellent collection of mathematics routines -- onto Google Code. (You'll find the Actionscript 2 version of the library at its original site)This...
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Subway Geography and Geometry
I've written an applet that lets you reimagine the geography of greater Washington, DC area with "distance" measured by subway-travel-time, measured by subway-travel-cost, or as the standard clarified...
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![ONEW – KAKERA -Unmei no Piece- – EP [iTunes Plus M4A]](http://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music221/v4/d0/fb/86/d0fb86a5-ba60-4bea-41fb-7f54c125f518/VEATP-45908.jpg/296x296bb.webp)
