May 2008
1 post
4 tags
Sphinx For Full-text Indexing
For a few projects at work, I’ve been using Sphinx as a separate full-text engine. The configuration to get going is about as easy as I could ask for, and indexing is lightning-fast: collected 28851 docs, 6.1 MB sorted 6.0 Mhits, 100.0% done total 28851 docs, 6134126 bytestotal 7.432 sec, 825404.12 bytes/sec, 3882.17 docs/sec rotating indices: succesfully sent SIGHUP to searchd...
April 2008
2 posts
Address Parsing with Geocoder.us →
Geocoder.us has added functionality to parse an address into components. Given http://rpc.geocoder.us/service/namedcsv? address=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave,+Washington+DC &parse_address=1 it will return: number=1600, prefix=, street=Pennsylvania, type=Ave, suffix=, city=Washington, state=DC, zip=, original address lat=38.898748, long=77.037684, number=1600, prefix=, street=Pennsylvania,...
New ElasticFox Release
Amazon has announced a new version (1.4) of ElasticFox, it’s EC2 management console for FireFox 2, and a version for 3 on the way. Included in this version is support for the (awesome) elastic IP functionality, a few security updates, and user-selectable kernals. The project has also been open-sourced and moved to Source Forge so anyone with a few minutes and an idea can hack out whatever...
March 2008
3 posts
Google AJAX Translation API →
Finally!
4 tags
Google Visualization Kit API →
Google’s introduced a fantastic new API to help us mortals visualize information! Looks like its tightly integrated with Google Docs, which means you can pull information from your spreadsheets and visualize them in your documents or Sites setup. Call me crazy, but it almost looks like Google is introducing the concept of schema-free information storage by allowing people to use a...
3 tags
Multi-step Forms with Django and FormWizard →
Discusses using multi-step forms with Django’s new FormWizard contribution
February 2008
4 posts
Reddit Submit Screen Usability Issue
Reddit recently introduced a cool new feature that allows people to create their own sub-reddits. Unfortunately, they’ve opted to employ a drop-down widget for sub-reddit selection. How about an auto-completer, Reddit? Or, how about keeping the drop-down for the site’s most common sections and having an auto-completer widget for finding the sub-reddit best fit to the content.
TSA Complaints - The First Day
As of this around 9:30 PM CST, here are the stats from Google Analytics: 3,550+ uniques 18,000+ pageviews Less than 40% bounce rate (should go down once more interactive features are added, I’d imagine) 30 usable contributions to the site thus far ~1% interaction rate. Virginia is for lovers, and the web is for voyuers. Major referers are: Fark (landed on the front page!) Stumbleupon...
TSA Complaints Is Up and Running
I’ve had a ton of page views to TSA Complaints in its first few hours, hit the front page of Fark, gotten some interesting feedback from a TSA agent, and am excited to see content materialize. Im working on dropping in django-threadedcomments and testing it locally to launch tomorrow or later tonite, so that people can comment on individual complaints. The trick to this, though, is the...
11 tags
Announcing TSA Complaints
Im just about ready to launch my first big web project in a while: TSA Complaints. TSA Complaints a forum for travellers suffering from TSA-burn. Use it to describe your incidents with the TSA, and find which airports are the worst at what times. Im really excited for the statistics that will be rolling in from the site, and can’t wait to see how the whole thing goes. This project has been...
January 2008
3 posts
Extracting Data From Google Street View
Diddling Web 2.0 gives a neat look at how to manually manipulate and extract information from Google’s Street View via query string. Very cool, albeit that Street View is fairly limited (fairly limited is a relative term when used in Google-sized context) in terms of its reach. Wouldn’t be hard to wrap this into a quick-and-dirty API.
"Software Morphs Rapper Prodigy Into Global...
Rapper Prodigy’s new album could conceptually be delivered any any of almost 1500 languages IN HIS OWN VOICE thanks to speech conversion software. “The prospect of having fans understand what I’m saying and repeat it in their language (drew me to) the company,” said Prodigy in a phone interview just before he began a jail term for illegal gun possession. “Now, fans...
Macbook Air and Ubiquitous Wifi
So, what are the odds that Apple will introduce in the new firmware for the EVDO/3G/next-gen-capable iPhone the ability to (perhaps even simultaneously) use it as an iPod and as an always-on wifi connection? It’d be a smart move that wouldn’t necessarily require Apple to stick a communications chipset into the Macbook Air, and could be the tipping point for those who aren’t yet...