Richard Klancer

Watch the video: "We're familiar with DabbleDB, but Pouzin says Data Applied takes things much further than data visualization. "Simple reporting and dashboards are boring," Pouzin says. "They force analysts to manually visualize all possible combinations in the hope of finding some interesting facts. We do that automatically!" Data Applied performs a whole lot of data visualization functions as well, it's social and offer a multitude of related features while running on one or more computers." - Richard Klancer

Faviki now allows delicious import, uses Common Tags: "Common Tags are a new open tagging format introduced this year which help eliminate some of the problems inherent in user-generated tagging systems. Prior to common tags, users could create a number of different tags that mean the same thing. For example, "new_york" and "nyc" could both mean the New York, the city. Also, there is the problem of one tag that refers to different things such as "jaguar" the animal and "jaguar" the car. With the new standardized format, tags are linked to concepts complete with metadata and their own URLs." - Richard Klancer

The famous no-knead bread recipe. Will try it with my new Chefmate dutch oven. - Richard Klancer

Full slides and course notes for MIT 6.813/6.831 • User Interface Design and Implementation -- right now I'm using the slides on user testing and experiment design - Richard Klancer

paper in Advances in AI - Richard Klancer

"After reading a recent post by Steve Souders concerning a free tool called dynaTrace Ajax, I was intrigued. It claimed to provide full tracing analysis of Internet Explorer 6-8 (including JavaScript, rendering, and network traffic). Giving it a try I was very impressed. I tested against a few web sites but got the most interesting results running against the JavaScript-heavy Gmail in Internet Explorer 8. I typically don't write about most performance analysis tools because, frankly, most of them are quite bland and don't provide very interesting information or analysis. dynaTrace provides some information that I've never seen before - in any tool on any browser." - Richard Klancer

Clay Johnson: "We should create a service that analyzes and finds popular words per lawmaker that are statistically improbable on a given day, month, year, or term. Take for instance, "biologics" http://capitolwords.org/lawmake... At time of writing it turns out to be a frequently used word of Ana Eshoo's. What makes this interesting is, well, often times representatives use words like this because they've been supplied in talking points memos from lobbyists or outside influences. See, for instance, this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009... A statistically improbable word (or better, phrases) list on some certain date ranges, compared with what's normal, seems pretty useful for finding out stuff like this fairly automatically." - Richard Klancer

efficient css selector rules, from Google - Richard Klancer

dbpedia relfinder - Richard Klancer

Really well done interactive, continouus zoom on biological objects from a coffee bean to a carbon atom. - Richard Klancer

in depth. Read soon: "Bangladesh: Where the Climate Exodus Begins -- An E&E Special Report E&E examines how climate change may trigger widespread migration in Bangladesh and throughout the world." - Richard Klancer

"How computational journalism can uncover what polluters would prefer to hide." - Richard Klancer

Wild. " After a few API calls and some code and graphics work, I’ve got a map showing the colors of the physical-cultural landscape around Harvard Square. This is not simply a map of the colors on the ground, which you can get from an aerial photo or systematic documentation like Google Street View, but rather a map of the colors that people on the ground are looking at." - Richard Klancer

"On reflection, Joe's reply above would make perfect sense to the airline mindset. As I understand it, the traditional carriers have for years been engaged in basically a trench warfare/zero sum mindset. They're constantly playing little games with their prices in order to steal a little bit of the marketshare from the other guy, and having the other guy know your moves in advance would be a strategic disaster. (At least, I think this is what happens between bouts of price fixing, bankruptcy, and government bailout.) So I imagine there's quite a strong mindset of paranoia in the traditional airlines about having any of their competitors find out anything about their trade secrets. No wonder the JetBlues and Southwests are eating their lunch. They have a different set of costs, a different culture, and therefore the luxury of focusing on their customers instead of their competitors. The lesson for the rest of us? Watch who you work for, I guess. The culture of the place where you work..." - Richard Klancer

"I blame business schools and the MBA/management consultant mindset. Afer all, having your mid-level professionals reach out to their colleagues and do a good job is a disaster. They aren't part of the club! Who knows what crazy things they might say--without even knowing it they might even leak the Brilliant Strategy For Certain Success That Only We Are Strategically Brilliant Enough To Have Strategically Thought Of! (TM) Brilliant, un-guessable things like, oh, having a separate sales and promotions team or going to an airier layout. You'd think it would be a little more important to focus on *doing a good job*. But to b-schoolers (some of whom are genuinely smart people) they're not showing their manly Brilliant Strategic Thinkerness if they're not out there trying to out-strategize the other guy." - Richard Klancer

"Scripts still block, even in IE8, Safari 4, and Chrome 2 Fortunately, there are ways to get scripts to download without blocking any other resources in the page, even in older browsers." - Richard Klancer

Developed (by? for? to help?) NYTimes' cool DocumentCloud project, curiously enough: "Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux. Underscore provides 45-odd functions that support both the usual functional suspects: map, select, invoke — as well as more specialized helpers: function binding, javascript templating, deep equality testing, and so on. It delegates to built-in functions, if present, so JavaScript 1.6 compliant browsers will use the native implementations of forEach, map, filter, every, some and indexOf. " - Richard Klancer

"So, where are the high-end restaurants of software development? One place to look is in the "boutique software shops." I don't know where I first heard that term, but for me it is a "catch all" for all of the small software development houses that I see springing up all over the place. I'm talking about companies like 8th Light, Obtiva, Hashrocket, and EdgeCase. The thing which ties all of these places together is an emphasis on hand-crafting software for clients, pushing excellence. Many of the people I know in these companies are refugees in a sense. They did "Big Corporate IT" and left to start something smaller, more personal and focused. As well, many of them are in the nascent Software Craftsmanship movement, they share a set of values, and they are running apprenticeship programs and trying to build a grassroots community of like-minded people." - Richard Klancer

" Matt’s mentioned in the past few summaries of weeks that I’ve been working on ‘material exploration’ for a project called Ashdown. I wanted to expand a little on what material exploration looks like for code and what it feels like to me, because it feels like a strange and foreign territory at times. This is my second material exploration of data for BERG, the first being at the beginning of the Shownar project. There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it’s about what material explorations look like when performed with data. Partly, it’s about the role of code as a tool to explore data. We don’t write about code much on the site, because we’re mainly interested in the products we produce and the invention involved in them, but it’s sometimes important to talk about processes and tools, and this, I feel, is one of those times. At the same time, as well as talking about technical matters, I wanted to talk a little about what the act of doing this work feels like. " - Richard Klancer

good exercises - Richard Klancer

Pretty good description of why to mind the HATEOAS constraint of RESTful design: "After pondering this for a while I did reach the, rather unsurprising, conclusion that Roy Fielding is correct ... A URI that is constructed by a client constitutes a permanent, potentially huge, commitment by the server. Any resource that may be addressed by the constructed URIs must forever live on that particular server (or set of servers) and the URI patterns must be supported forever. Effectively, you are trading a small one time development cost on the client side for an ongoing, and ever increasing, maintenance cost on the server side. When it is stated like that it becomes obvious that URI construction introduces an almost absurd level of coupling between the client and server." - Richard Klancer