PUBLIC MARKS with search times

The New York Times has published 5,000 people subject headings as linked open data under a CC BY license. We provide both RDF documents and a human-friendly HTML versions.

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.

Comparing Python and Java

A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java.

How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times. On the basis of my own personal experience with the two languages, I agree with this estimate.

At the present time, we have access to countless cuneiform documents, including economic records, letters, and literary works from early Sumerian times, produced over 4,000 years ago. Many of these artifacts are essential to our understanding of the values and practices that shaped this ancient culture. Can we aspire the same longevity for our modern cultural artifacts?

justniffer is a tcp packet sniffer. It can log network traffic in a 'standard' (web server like) or in a customized way. It can also log response times, useful for tracking network services performances (e.g. web server, application server, etc.).

show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

According to a Japan Times editorial today, Japan is set to increase the number of foreign students studying in Japan to around 300,000 by 2020. This represents a 250% increase over current levels (there are currently about 120,000).

Tough economic times call for innovative approaches. An estimated 51 million people internationally are expected to lose their jobs in 2009, and with the unemployment rate on the rise, how does one find career opportunities fast? One great option is Twitter. Twitter (Twitter) is evolving as another resource, in addition to traditional methods, for both job searching and recruiting.

Ever wish you could remix the gallery experience? When I walk into a museum I enjoy the structure—the information given, which objects have been placed where, the specific sequence in which the space has been designed—but I will admit, there are times when I want something else too….something that’s a bit off the charts and possibly something that is always subject to change. I’m positive this other need has something to do with all those Choose Your Own Adventure books I was hooked on as a kid.