Jarvis: LightTable-ish IDE for Python

Looks like it's steam engine time.

Beta-testing technique based on nginx

Here's a cool approach to beta-testing, routing different users to different versions of a site using nginx.

Handsontable: minimalist Excel-like tables with jQuery

I love this kind of stuff these days.

SEO overview tool for Jekyll

Interesting.

Ourmine - data mining toolkit project

Here's a pretty fascinating project - a data mining toolkit along the lines of the one I want to build, but in bash/Java (looks like).  Here's an example topic page (Naive Bayes classifiers).

Virtual receptionists

Another component of a minimalist company: the virtual receptionist.  I'm currently researching solutions, but essentially the idea is to have a human answer the phone during business hours, talk to callers, and route calls.  Prices vary widely.

Chord analysis of 1300 popular songs

Neat effort to analyze the chord progressions of popular songs, with lots of statistics.

The economics of Valve virtual worlds

Yanis Varoufakis's account of his involvement in the economic design of Valve's worlds.  Pretty cool!

Machine learning link dump

And a few ML-relevant things:

• A short list of possible ML projects for learning.
• Question answering at Microsoft Research Labs.
• Stiltwalker, a captcha breaker (sadly obsolete) that could solve Google Captcha at a 99% rate!  Lessons learned.
• Typing analysis with Mathematica.

API survey

Good overview of APIs provided by various companies.  I haven't read through it yet, though.

Testing 3 million URLs

Wow.  Here's a nice article on lessons learned from policing dead links on StackExchange.

Craigslist spam tactics

Nice analysis of the design of Craigslist spam - noting that it's difficult to see a true dividing line between aggressive marketing and outright spam.

Data modeling in MongoDB

Here's a nice practical example article: e-commerce with MongoDB.

Andrew Cantino: personal outsourcing

Some lessons learned about outsourcing tasks.  Filed under "workflow" as a kind of catch-all for automation of human tasks.

A couple of Web design links

So many of these great little libraries and components for Websites come up:

• Chosen, a jQuery-based module for attractive and useful select boxes.
• A nice icon set.

Busy week - time for a link dump!

I've been in San Diego this week at Cisco Live! - the high points of which were a promising (and expensive) dinner meeting and the Weezer concert - and so I've been stacking up interesting pages without the time to write about them.  Now it's time!

Shanties

Just a thought for later.

File::Find

I've decided to hack out a little script to publish my Vivtek.com site to a directory amenable for Githubbing (a dry run for Heckle development), and in the course of that, ran across File::Find in my ongoing attempt to find a decent paradigm for directory walking in Perl.

File::Find isn't it.

Oh, I'll grant you that it works essentially the same as Unix find, and it's part of the standard distribution, but it's still opaque.  I need a presentation that's not opaque.  There are lots of different directory walkers out there, and I still have a hard time following the code.

So, lame as this may be, directory walking is still an open topic for me.  It will be good to get back to active Decl development.

StartupSea - target application treasure trove

You want katas?  I'll give you katas: pick anything on StartupSea, and clone it.  When you're done, repeat step 1.  Do that until you can whip out an app in a day, in your sleep.

The startup scene in Vienna

This is even further afield from my perceived purpose for this blog, but ... here's a great overview of the current state of the Viennese startup scene.  As I will be in Budapest for at least a year starting (gulp) two and a half weeks from now (no, the house isn't ready to be abandoned), I find it personally interesting.

Shipping a Common Lisp app on Windows

I wrestle with this sort of post.  Am I honestly ever going to ship a Common Lisp app on Windows?  Of course not.  And yet...  How it works is somehow oddly compelling.

Nice overview of the new HTML5 navigation elements

Alistapart really does have some good articles.

Managing scanned input

Freecode.com and SourceForge and GitHub all agree: there's no such thing as an open-source scanner manager.  And that seems like such a no-brainer - the utilities that come with scanners uniformly suck for any practical purpose.

What I'd like would be something that would just sit there and assemble my scanned input into either (1) a multipage TIFF document or Word document or ... you know, something, or (2) put each file, dated, into a directory, or yeah, (3) open it up in an editor, but still dated in a directory by default instead of calling it "Lastscan.jpg".

And apparently nobody has done that.  There are some APIs, and the "SANE project" (which says a Windows port is underway, with a link to oblivion), but no simple little GUI tool.  Also, a link to the TWAIN group itself.  (TWAIN = Technology Without An Interesting Name, ha.) And Github finds me something called an Aljex client.

Machine learning instead of A/B testing; behavioral targeting

Now here's a fascinating post about replacing A/B testing with more sophisticated adaptive programming.  I like this!

And as if by magic, a post on behavioral targeting.  Combine the two and you will conquer the world.

Google Blockly

Visual programming at last: Blockly.

Statistics::Descriptive

Does what it says on the tin: descriptive statistics in Perl, quick and easy.

Daystack

A minimalist to-do manager in Perl: Daystack.

Einhorn: shared socket manager by Stripe

Stripe has open-sourced their shared socket manager; it's language-agnostic.

Redactor: WYSIWYG editor based on jQuery

A useful component.