I’ve been looking into the various infographics sites trying to do something different (more on that in a future post) and I came across something interesting. I was trying out some tag cloud services and realized just how powerful a visual look at your data can be. On my first shot, making a Wordle, I [...]
I have a guilty pleasure. I like to game occasionally. Not a lot, mind you; I have zero spare time. But occasionally, when I’m waiting for something, I might pick up my iPad and play a game. In particular, I like this game where you … well, I won’t tell you exactly what the game [...]
OK, one thing that I put off learning for a long time is how to use Java ResourceBundles. It just seemed like something complicated that I didn’t really need to do. After all, I could always just drop information into a standard file and read that, right? But this approach has its limitations, as pointed out [...]
As a developer, I very often use open source software, but sometimes you run into a situation where the binary (that’s that package you just download and stick in your classpath) needs to be patched. Maybe it’s an obscure bug fix that you need that hasn’t been released yet, or maybe it’s a feature that’s [...]
One of my clients was mentioning to me a huge newspaper archive that he was getting ready to put online. What he was doing with the search — trying to provide access to a huge amount of data with very good throughput speeds, all available on the web — sounded like something that the Apache [...]
As you may have noticed, I’ve got a poll over there on the left that lists some topics I might write tutorials about. I’ve been doing a ton of jQuery work lately, so I thought I might put that on the list, but there is apparently a ton of good material out there already. Specifically, [...]
Over at Manning Press, we are building a system that relies heavily on the Subversion version control system, but more and more authors are coming in and saying that they are using Git instead. Git is not, as I had originally thought, a fork of SVN, but instead a distributed system, in which every user [...]
Today I was introduced to an incredibly handy plugin for jQuery called Boxy. You know those Facebook-type modal dialogues that pop up on a web page and grey-out everything else? Well, Boxy lets you do that with one simple Javascript command, as in: $(‘.boxy’).boxy(); It includes all sorts of options as well, including a handy [...]
I’ve been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I’m actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody’s trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in [...]
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