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This month
Physics and Pixie Dust » American Scientist
The excesses of the Schön case—like the fantastic forgeries of previous eras—throw light onto habits and practices that have come to seem normal. The relentless rat race to produce new results quickly in order to secure the next round of funding or promotion is not without consequences.
Sponsorised links
October 2009
Time/Weather Desktop on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.
Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.
In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".
Times are generated by running shell commands like
env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"
every 20 seconds
The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.
FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)
From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.
Official Google Blog: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months
Wolfram|Alpha Webservice API
Adding meaning to your HTTP error pages! - Opera Developer Community
When searching for something on the web we’ve all had the experience of clicking on a link in a search engine’s results page only to find that the page no longer exists. If there’s no information on that page other than a default error message, the most likely course of action on the user’s part is to press the back button and try the next search result.
As site authors we can make our error pages more meaningful to our users, so that an error becomes an opportunity to bring the user back into a site and show them content that’s relevant to what they’re looking for. In this article I’ll show you how to do just that.
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part One
answer Right. And it results in a type of error that doesn't teach you anything. You have chaotic errors where all you can say is, "Boy, this was really screwed up, and I guess I need to go in and go through the whole thing and fix it." You don't have errors that are proportionate to the source of the error. And that means you can never have any sense of gradual evolution or approximate systems. So, the real difference between the current idea of software, which is protocol adherence, and the idea I'm discussing, pattern recognition, has to do with the kinds of errors we're creating. We need a system in which errors are more often proportional to the source of the error.
PhotoSketch
We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.
September 2009
Lucid Imagination » Solr’s New Clustering Capabilities
One of the new things in Solr 1.4 that I am particularly excited about is the new document and search results clustering capabilities. This is an optional module that lives in Solr’s contrib/clustering directory and was added via SOLR-769.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using named anchors to identify sections on your pages
We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn't involved in any way, so you can't pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just "Section 2.1"), and that your page includes a "table of contents" which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won't see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.
FitNesse
Pipes: flickr image search
Browse Pipes: Pipes using 'flickr.com' (7428 results)
SML Wiki: Interestingness(note: work in progress)
The Soulmen | We Got It! › Ulysses 2.0
Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine
Geographic library
GeographicLib is a small set of C classes for performing conversions between geographic, UTM, UPS, MGRS, geocentric, and local cartesian coordinates and for solving geodesic problems. The emphasis is on returning accurate results with errors close to round-off (about 5–15 nm). In addition, various properties of the Transverse Mercator Projection are described and an accurate algorithm for Geodesics on the Ellipsoid is given.
Amazon - Constrained Search vs. Random Results
Build External Links with Social Bookmarks
browsertests - Project Hosting on Google Code
This project is about running test cases automatically on several versions of the main Web browsers available today. See the StartPage for more information. Tests and results are visible on http://www.browsertests.org.
