Follow me on Twitter: @edd
I'm a tinkerer with technology, and occasionally strike lucky with it. I co-chair the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and I'm in charge of designing O'Reilly's conference software platform, Expectnation.
I've written a few computer books, most recently "Learning Rails", in collaboration with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent.
Data Pointed is the home of artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley's data visualization research; a journal of interesting information imagery and news from around the world; and a place where you can spend a few minutes, have a laugh or two, and discover something new. Learn more!
A lot of people talk about how wonderfully expressive is Clojure. However, expressiveness is not the goal of Clojure. Clojure aims to minimize accidental complexity, and its expressiveness is a means to that end.
I am loving everything Nathan writes about Clojure right now. This concluding paragraph is a wonderful summary of the primary attraction of Clojure to anybody who's written software for more than a few months.
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Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you) and access your analytics reports in real time.
Web analytics started for me with open source ('analog', anyone?) so it's nice to see that the open source solutions are starting to keep pace with commercial web services.
(via Hacker News)
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There's an interesting phenomenon which was explained to me once as a key cybernetic principle: in order to create simplicity amidst complexity, your system must be equally complex. The corollary to that would be that if you're trying to manage something very complex with too simple a system, it will over-complexify it! And that's just what I've seen over these many years as a coach and educator. People's lives are way more sophisticated, intricate, and multifaceted than the systems they are using to manage them. A calendar and to-do list pale as puny weapons against that kind of universe. In some ways their incompleteness and insufficiency just make the situation worse.
In the rest of this essay he goes on to acknowledge that overcomplicating your systems is also a trap: premature and overly detailed structuring. Allen's belief is that GTD is just complex enough (or just simple enough), and I'm inclined to agree.
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I played with this a bit over the weekend and was impressed. An easy install, a good community, sensible and straightforward customization, internationalized. I'd recommend it as a first point of investigation if you have cause to set up an online store.
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Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics. We are creating a software and website in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and to create a pcb layout for professional manufacturing.
This is very cool. I wonder if there's a place that Arduino circuits and the like can be socially shared, using Fritzing layouts.
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Clojure gets data structures right
This quote comes from a detailed explanation of why the author uses Clojure. But this simple sentence resonates most. The whole post is very much worth reading.
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As a proof-of-concept we've1 been studying the mood2 of all of the public tweets. While there are many services that will allow you to study the mood of your own tweets (and also an neat little DIY project to show you the global average of twitter), much less effort has gone into studying how the mood breaks down according to geography. Below, I show a brand new video displaying the pulsating 24-hour twitter mood cycle of the United States (I'll explain just what you're looking at, in the following).
This is a wonderful piece of work, posted on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog, showing an analysis of how happy the US is over a day. There's something about the swelling angry red that is very evocative of the grumpy unhappiness, and the fat bulges of happy green in California and Florida demonstrating their peaceful contentment.
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