Monday, June 30th, 2008
Announcing Haiku Of the Day (HOD)
I helped put together a simple website and RSS feed of Haiku published by Bronze Man Books. Read the announcement or check out today’s haiku of the day!
home > web
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
A clean, fast Markdown implementation in python.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Maybe the funniest SNL Digital Short yet.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Hidden Dictionary on The New York Times
Woah, I just randomly double-clicked a word while reading an article nytimes.com and it popped up a definition/theauraus with information on that word. Seems to work while reading articles, but not on the front page.
It is actually more than just a dictionary. For example, go read about Led Zeppelin finally doing digital downloads and when you click Zeppelin, it gives a short bio on the band. Says it’s powered by Answers.com.
Friday, October 12th, 2007
I’m starting to really like the Humanized weblog. A few interesting articles:
- how good software/UI is good for both Beginners and Experts
- some suggestions for open source software in Make OSS Humane
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Adam Engst of TidBITS has me convinced to try Twitter.
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
In the never-ending search for commuting content, I stumbled upon listening to words. It has a decent collection of interesting video and audio lectures available for free. Give it a listen.
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
A CSS framework that “gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.” Check it out. By the way, Google Code is starting to host some great stuff lately …
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Sometimes it is nice to be able to send huge files to people over the web without hosting a server. pando and YouSendIt are both good solutions for doing that. Pando gives 1GB free while YouSendIt gives 2GB.
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
I love the tagline “A really fast dictionary … fast like a ninja.” ninja words really is litening fast with instant results that show up in your browser window without reloading.
Nice use of AJAX.
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
Farecast predicts airfares.
OpenDNS makes browsing faster and helps with URL typos.
The Biomedical Imaging Group (BIG) has some great reviews on sampling and image interpolation.
Erik Meijering presents A Chronology of Interpolation.
Maps of War gives a 90-second visual History of Religion.
MAKE suggests open-source gifts.
Mac Geekery explains how to decrypt and transcode TiVo recordings on your Mac. I contributed some comments.
The TiVo File Decoder software allows decryption of .TiVo files into MPEG-2 format.
iLounge offers great iPod-related reviews and a beautiful iPod buyer’s guide. Here’s their high-end iPod speaker system ratings.
Sunday, September 10th, 2006
Babynamewizard.com has a tool called NameVoyager that shows a graph of popular baby names over time. The data is massaged out of the Social Security Administration’s records. The really cool thing is that you can type parts of names and get instant feedback as the popularity graphs change. It’s fun to explore — check it out.
The plots show the 1000 most popular names versus time whre the popularity axis is the number of names per million babies. When looking at the “all names” graph (the first graph that comes up as you visit the website), it’s interesting to see observe an upward trend in name diversity since the 50’s. This trend shows up directly as the thickness of many name-lines decreases and indirectly because the overall number of top 1000 names displayed goes down. In the 50’s, 95% of the names were in the top 1000 while in 2005 only about 75% were in the top 1000. Go find interesting trends.
(via David Pogue)
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
Powerful photo essay on the Chernobyl disaster.
Sunday, April 16th, 2006
Anyterm and Ajaxterm provide a way to use SSH (remote login) through any browser. Once this is setup, it would be slightly easier than downloading PuTTY.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
You can create a website in no time at infogami.com (a service created as a Y Combinator startup by Aaron Swartz). So, of course, I made a Daily Burrito site. Some good infogamis have already popped up; I like Y Rumors and Yet Another Javascript Reference.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
I like iStockphoto. It’s much easier that looking through huge clip art galleries — you just search and buy royalty-free photos right on the website. I enjoy looking for burros, donkeys, and mules.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Face and text recognition for your personal photos. Upload, do little training, then search by face. “Hey computer, find me all the photos that have both Tim and Chad because I’m to lazy to browse my 30000 thumbnails.”
Try it. (only Firefox and IE6 currently supported)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Using mod_rewrite to make pretty URLs
Here’s a nice guide for using the mod_rewrite Apache web server module for making nice URLs. I use it to make my blog URL dailyburrito.com/blog instead of dailyburrito.com/blah/blah/morecrap/blosxom.cgi and to make www.dailyburrito.com map to dailyburrito.com (for some reason, I really hate that www).
I altered the configuration of Apache web server that comes installed Mac OS X in two spots to accomplish the above goals. First, I edited the main Apache configuration document by adding the following line at the very end of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, instructing Apache to look at my own configuration files.
Include /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf
Then, I created the file /private/etc/httpd/users/alan_apache_setup.conf that looks like this:
# Blosxom script redirect
ScriptAlias /blog /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/blosxom.cgi
# Redirect visitor by domain name
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dailyburrito.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dailyburrito.com$1 [R,L]
Voila! Missions accomplished. URLs are pretty.
Sunday, November 13th, 2005
Web Application Development Platforms
Ruby on Rails vs Django vs TurboGears. Ready … fight!
For the first round, we’ll look at two O’Reilly articles:
Which brings me to my point: why no article on Django yet? Is it because they don’t have a cool demo video?
Oh yeah, I’m thinking that Blog engines are not really the same thing as these web application platforms. Or maybe they are a focused special case.
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
FlightAware has real-time tracking of flights, current flights to/from OHare, and an awesome animation of all US flights in one day. Toward the end of the animation, you can see the country wake up starting with the east cost, then midwest, then west. Impressive. (via reddit)
