NotesRandom morning thoughts: how many people actually visit this blog? Where do they come from? What if I could just spend a little time to build my own analytics?Unfurl
NotesIt is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths.Unfurl
NotesThe fundamental problem is that in using most modern consumer-oriented applications, we lose control of the data we share with those applications. In creating documents, writing emails, or tracking our exercise or other activities, we share data with an application that’s useful for a particular purpose, but also allow the data live in a database controlled by the application’s owner. With the data outside of our control, it can then be restricted, lost, leaked, sold, resold, and exploited. The groups that control these databases accrue most of the benefits, and we accrue most of the costs.FeedUnfurl
NotesCruft Manor has Halloween traditions every year:
1. We give out full size candies
2. Make a listing of all costumes
3. Make a timelapse movieUnfurl
NotesTangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.Unfurl
NotesI’m not planning on stopping doing these any time soon, as I need them for my own porpoises, but I thought it might be worth having a few instructions out there, so people can run their own conversions of the EVE SDE. Just in case I get hit by a bus, or mauled by crazed Cetaceans.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesHave you ever wanted to track your movements, sleep, what you eat, who you spend time with, and all sorts of other personal data? In this talk I'll describe the tools I've been able to successfully use to track aspects of my life.Unfurl
NotesTreat our data like it matters. Keep it secure and protect our privacy, of course—but also maintain serious backups and respect our choice to delete any information we’ve contributed.
No upload without download. Build in export capabilities from day one.
If you close a system, support data rescue. Provide one financial quarter’s notice between announcing the shutdown and destroying any user-contributed content, public or private, and offer data export during this period. And beyond that three months? Make user-contributed content available for media-cost purchase for one year after shutdown.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesUsing html2canvas how can I save a screen shot to an object? I've been exploring the demos, and see that the function to generate the screenshot is generated as follows:FeedUnfurl
NotesData migration is a complicated problem. It’s one of those things nobody wants to do, because it’s mostly tedious, not engaging, and also important to get right. Often times you have to compromise. I’ll talk a bit about the history of SUMO’s data, decisions the product and development team have made regarding its migration, and things I’ve learned from the experience.Unfurl
NotesObvious to Damien, but not at all obvious to the rest of us: it's fairly simple to make a view that includes both the content of the blog post document, and the content of all the comments associated with that post. The way you do that is by using complex keys. Until now we've been using simple string values for the view keys, but in fact they can be arbitrary JSON values, so let's make some use of that:Unfurl
NotesIn case it helps, I hereby declare the following iron law of “free” internet services:
If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.
This is an important corollary to the law “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”.Unfurl
NotesFrom CTO of 10gen
First, I tried to find any client of ours with a track record like this and have been unsuccessful. I personally have looked at every single customer case that’s every come in (there are about 1600 of them) and cannot match this story to any of them. I am confused as to the origin here, so answers cannot be complete in some cases.Unfurl
NotesThe data: URI scheme is now supported by the most current version of every major browser, including Internet Explorer. Because of this I wanted to use CSS background images encoded with data: URIs in a current project at Shepherd Interactive. Why? The first rule of High Performance Websites is to Minimize HTTP Requests. By storing background images directly in the stylesheet only one HTTP request is then necessary to fetch the stylesheet and the images all at once. Furthermore, by giving that stylesheet a far-future cache expiration date the browser will never need to request it again.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"This is a tale of three images. I found these images while investigating the internals of several different applications. There are some really neat software projects emerging at the moment, and as a developer I always find it interesting to take a look at the implementation details, because there is often a lot to be learned. It’s not always something you might need right now, but maybe a few years down the line you may be confronted with a similar problem. Plus – in my opinion – knowing a bit about the internals of a program helps reasoning about its behaviour."Unfurl
Notes"I guess what I’m saying is that my decision to use NoSQL, and I’m guessing others’ decisions to do so, has less to do with the fact that we can’t squeeze a few thousand writes a second out of MySQL and more to do with management and cost overhead. NoSQL solutions allow us to serve absurd amounts of data for a really, really low price. I’m happy to put my $/write, $/read, and $/GB numbers for my NoSQL setup against anyone’s RDBMS numbers.<br />
<br />
We’re not nearly as dumb as everyone thinks we are; I promise."FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"Sorry I ever brought it up, sorry for any hurt feelings. It was wrong of me to think that I could make any progress without the support of the organization providing the data, and wrong of me to press on regardless of the cost. Someone else will have to care - I give up. It's just not worth it and it's bad for my health to care and to spend too much time around parking structure fumes."Unfurl
Notes"So if I ask for that page of numbers as the spreadsheet it was originally, and a public records officer for a public body gives it to me as a bitmap, I'm going to ask again and keep asking publicly and perhaps uncomfortably until we both understand that this is a routine request and that compliance with routine requests is much easier than making everything an exception - because maybe, just maybe, I can replace that FOIA letter with a tiny shell script and we can just go about our business."Unfurl
Notes"The call to action is to build on the Lizard Feeder concept with anything from ideas to pixels to code. I hacked up a grease monkey script that weights the data-source checkbox & label on the left according to the volume of flow. This provides a bit of focus + context for the recent stream. The implementation is a minimal, bit-of-an-evening starter kit (MPL) for more interesting creations."Unfurl
Notes"Anyway, here’s the question I want to put into the reader’s mind: should one spend time and effort making a frontend into an informal API through microformats, or to instead spend it on building a fully supported API or data publishing system that exists and operates separately? I think my stance is clear - i’m not against the theory of microformats, but i’m certainly going to differ with anyone who thinks it’s practical."Unfurl
NotesThis is just about time tracking, but with personal data tracking looking like the next big thing I wonder how well Tinderbox could be pressed into used in recording and studying personal data points in general?Unfurl
Notes"Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. As a user, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite's processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in GraphiUnfurl
Notes"David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton's Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials abandon the dream of developing usable web sites, and instead focus on providing raw public data such asUnfurl
Notes"It contains data from about 150 users, mostly senior management of Enron, organized into folders. The corpus contains a total of about 0.5M messages."Unfurl
Notes"The future for large websites’ data storage is likely a collection of special purpose data stores: GFS/MapReduce for batch jobs, inverted indexes for search and fast retrieval of small result sets and relational databases for smaller datasets which neeFeedUnfurl
Notes"For me, web screen-scraping provides the kind of challenge that other people get from, say, solving crossword puzzles. But it’s not the highest and best use of anyone’s time."FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"A “Star Trek: The Next Generation” era prop of Data’s head from the episode ‘Time’s Arrow’ is up for auction. This unique piece of Star Trek history is a collector’s dream."EmbedUnfurl
Notes"here I am using radically different software, in a completely different world, and these pieces from my past are lost, irretrievable because of the formats used to save them (as well as the hardware on which they’re saved: it’s getting harder to readUnfurl
Notes"My CD-ROM is accessible only to cranks and connoisseurs, members of the "dead formats society" who've invested in the dead tech required to play it."Unfurl
Notes"This document describes the protocol used by the Google data APIs ("GData"), including information about what a query looks like, what results look like, and so on."Unfurl
Notes"Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom."Unfurl
How I Track My Blog’s Analytics with Val Town
Maintaining control of our data with personal databases | N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Halloween 2024. Cruft Manor has Halloween traditions… | by Michael Pusateri | Oct, 2024 | Medium
Tangle: a JavaScript library for reactive documents
EVE Online data dumps
Low Friction Personal Data Collection - Aaron Parecki
Proposed standards for the care and feeding of user generated content – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
javascript - How to upload a screenshot using html2canvas? - Stack Overflow
Don't use MongoDB | Hacker News
Detecting Support for data: URIs | Weston Ruter
NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin! – stu.mp
Design Proposals
Visualizing Mozilla Community :: The Mozilla Blog
tinydb.org
the ryan king » Introducing Conveyor
Overcoming data friction « Jon Udell
poshformats - Microformats
Data’s Head For Sale - Slice of SciFi