Category: Computers
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Schmedium Data: Building little data pipelines with bash
Over at plotdevice.bengarvey.com I have a bunch of one-off dataviz projects, experiments, and analyses. They all run on data, but sometimes it’s not easy to get, so I end up trimming and transforming data into something I can work with. We’re not talking about big data here, more like small or medium data. Schmedium data.…
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Best Things this Year (2017)
Every year I write a recap of things I did and enjoyed. 2017 was packed. I re-read my 2016 recap and there’s a lot of despair, but I’m glad it didn’t slow me down. Maybe it was motivating. TV / Movies Twin Peaks: The Return Silicon Valley The Leftovers The Big Sick Coco Get Out…
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Best Things This Year (2013)
Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of people shook up their lives in 2013. I certainly did. Here are the best things that happened to me in 2013. 1. RJMetrics – In March I started working at RJMetrics, an e-commerce data analytics firm in center city Philadelphia. Leaving Garvey Corp was a difficult decision, but…
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Creating a comma separated list
For years, whenever I have to create a comma separated list from an array I have been writing code that looks vaguely like this. $first = true; foreach($arr as $m) { if ($first) { $first = false; } else { echo “,”; } echo $m; } I’ve had it. There has to be a cleaner…
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Philadelphia Hackathon
I’ll be doing a short talk about Dungeon Adventure tomorrow at the Philadelphia Ship It Society’s Hackathon. Tickets are available here. The Ship It Society is all about getting together and rapid prototyping a project to see if its feasible. Should be a fun time.
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Rob Kolstad is an Asshole
This month’s Wired has a great article (not online yet, so no link) by Jason Fagone about the International Olympiad in Informatics where high school students from all over the world compete to solve problems through software. It’s fiercely competitive and has its own sub culture of super stars, namely Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus, who…
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Vista
My first Vista startup. Hmmm….
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Could Twitter Have Worked in 1999?
For many years the Internet has brought us ideas and services that we wish we had thought of first. ?Most technologists wish they could go back in time and hit big with online auctions, classifieds, blogging software, and social networking. ?Microblogging (ie. Twitter) is the latest and greatest of these facepalming ideas because it’s so…
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iTunes Genius
I finally got around to downloading the latest version of iTunes and with it came their new Genius playlist feature. Here’s how it works: You pick a song in your library you like, hit the Genius button, and it generates a playlist from your library of 25 complimentary songs. I was skeptical, but tried it…
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Top Ten Programming Languages
I’m currently learning Ruby on Rails, and since Ruby is a new language for me I got to thinking what my favorite programming languages are… 10.? Assembly 9.? ASP / vbscript 8.? JavaScript 7.? Visual Basic 6.? C 5.? C++ 4.? SQL 3.? PHP 2.? Java 1.? perl Honestly, the more I program in any…