PUBLIC MARKS with search u-number

there was a popular blogger and he also had a Twitter account and he was complaining that his cable was out, and he was I'm going to write about this cable company, Compass and how terrible they are and its going to be the number one search result in, in search engines for year to come. And they were monitoring Twitter search for any mentions of they're brand name. And they saw that within a few minutes and they replied to him on Twitter, and they said what seems to be the problem, they were going to send a van out to your house. And they had his cable fixed in like 30 minutes, so the next day the blog post was, Compass has great customer service, and it was like a, you know a complete reversal and we were like wow, they're really smart about it,

Threading

We’re quite familiar with the idea of writing a program that follows a specific sequence of steps as outlined in, say, a main() function. A Thread is also a series of steps with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A thread’s sequence, however, can run independently of the main program. In fact, we can launch any number of threads at one time and they will all run concurrently. Visit the Java site for a more involved explanation.

This is incredibly useful when it comes to data mining, as we can have separate threads retrieving different pieces of information from the network. If one gets stuck or has an error, the entire program won’t grind to a halt, since the error only stops that individual thread. To create independent, asynchronous threads, we simply extend the Thread class.

Today the Google Maps team is rolling out a number of refinements to the look and feel of our maps, the biggest such changes since we first launched about 4.7 years ago. In that time we've been steadily adding details like walkways, address labels, bus stops, new country coverage, and improved satellite imagery, but the look of the map hasn't changed much.

in Rails, parts of the model design is actually stored in the database schema instead of in the Ruby code. I have started adding comments in the Rails model classes to be able to remember what properties they have without peeking in the Db. Typically I have a number of half-baked projects on my laptop and from time to time I forget what they do and these comments help me remember.

Simply put: We believe that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of.

Sourcemap is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind a number of everyday products (more info).

A significant weakness of HTTP in my view is its dependence on the MIME standard for media type identification and on the related iana registry. This registry is a limited bottleneck that does not have the capacity to deal with the media type definition requirements of individual enterprises or domains. Machine-centric environments rely in a higher level of semantics than the human-centric environment of the Web. In order for machines to effectively exploit information, every unique schema of information needs to be standardised in a media type and for those media types to be individually identified. The number of media types grows as machines become more dominant in a distributed computing environment and as the number of distinct environments increases.

Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.

VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is influenced by BarCamp, although the emphasis is different. Whereas BarCamps are oriented to demos and presentations, VoCamps are oriented to hands-on technical work and practical outputs; any presentations and demos should be short, highly on-topic to the vocabulary development process, and limited in number, to leave plenty of time for hacking on new vocabularies.

As data visualization often needs to reach a broad audience the browser is becoming the number one tool to publish and share visualizations. A lot of visualizations require user-interaction to unleash their full potential, thus interactive applets that run directly in the browser are a a great way to analyze the data at hand. Beside the usual suspects like Flash, Silverlight and Processing, JavaScript is quickly gaining ground in the field of interactive visualization embedded in websites. We’ve collected 13 16 JavaScript visualization libraries that help you get started faster, keep it flexible and develop with higher reliability.

Although this is an absolutely free trial, Safari Books Online does require that you enter credit card information for security purposes. We will authenticate your card at the beginning of your trial period to determine if the card number is valid. We do this by issuing a "dummy" $1 charge. This charge is never actually applied to your credit card because it disappears as soon as we verify the authenticity of the card. Occasionally, depending on how your bank or credit card issuer handles these types of tests, customers may see this charge in their account, but it always drops off. If your free trial period ends and you have not cancelled your account, you are authorizing us to automatically charge your card the monthly fee (plus any applicable taxes) for the subscription type you have chosen.

flickr_logo.pngFlickr just announced support for OpenStreetMap, the wiki-like mapping service that allows users to create and edit maps. Starting today, photos that are tagged with an OpenStreetMap node ID will include a link to OpenStreetMap (OSM) right underneath the photo. OSM assigns a random number to objects on its maps and Flickr can now read this number and also extract additional data about places from the OSM database. In addition, Flickr also announced that it will now support venue ID tags for the increasingly popular Foursquare service.

Software version numbers should be straightforward to implement. Their sequencing is hardly subtle: version 1.0 is the first production quality release; version 1.1 improves on it, version 1.2 is a little better; and so on until we get to version 2.0, which delivers more substantial changes. Then comes 2.1, then 2.2 ...

As anyone who has tried to implement such a scheme will realise, it can be a surprising source of problems, and although these problems have been tackled by many projects in many organisations there seems to be no consensus on how to reach a solution. To give an example: deriving the version number from the version control system is tempting, but ultimately turns out to be unsatisfactory.

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).