Here's a to-do manager built in PHP on a NoSQL backend

This is something small enough to work as a good first step in understanding PHP architecture: a to-do list manager that stores JSON in a NoSQL database.  Cool!

AsciiDoc

Learned about a new markdown variant today, AsciiDoc [cheat sheet].  It's in Python, but that doesn't necessary mean it's bad.  (ha)  I'm considering using it for my notes application.

Also, there's talk about standardizing Markdown.  Interesting.

How to use SSH for fun and profit

I've never been good at SSH.  Here's a great blog post about using it.

Also: ssh-copy-id.

Druid: open-source real-time analytics store

Druid has just been open sourced.  It appears to be a competitor for Hadoop.

Prose

Prose is an online editor for your Github documents.

Zoomstra

A training workbook service.  Pretty cool, actually.  This is both a target application and a monetization strategy.

Substance Document API

This is kind of interesting.  A company named "Substance" has published an API for documents, to be used for Web applications involving group editing of documents - with annotations and a change history.

That's pretty neat.

Evolving regexps

This is neat.

History of the United States in 141 maps

DDD-based page that really rocks.

Bot links

I'm collecting too much stuff in the tabs, so here's a little link dump, some of which is redundant within this blog:

• Scrappy (blog post by the author; it's been rebuilt on Moose)
• WWW::Wikevent::Bot - a useful example of a bot
• Javascript in Perl!  Seems a little static (2010) but it's better than anything I've built yet.
• Example code for Mechanize - good for reimplementation, you see.
• TreeBuilder.  Everything coming into Bot::Page will be parsed.
• RDF::Scutter.  I still don't know what this does, except maybe it's gathering semantics?
• The Spidering Hacks book (2003) from O'Reilly.  Mine it for examples.

Web scraping

And yet I just can't get past thinking about Web scraping as something fun and profitable.

If it could just be simplified, a lot.  So I'm thinking again about declarative means of describing the "shape" of a site in terms of where the useful data is - and I'm coming up empty.  Again.

The only way to get my mind around it is to build some Web scrapers.  Elance is not going to be an interesting place to find challenging scraper specifications, so I'm going to have to look at the ones on ScraperWiki and go from there.

Oh, ho! The Mechanize Cookbook is replete with interesting examples.  I shall start there.

Update: Those seem boring and old.  Instead, I've subscribed to the ScraperWiki mailing list, which involves requests to the masses.  Here's a cool one already: find all the churches in Germany, with lots of links to start with.  So yeah.

The state of job boards

The last time I looked at Elance was 2008, and there were reasonable amounts of jobs by people who seemed to know what they were doing.  Now I'm looking there and it's all people who have a fantastic idea that they want implemented for five bucks.  (Or so it seems.)

And none of it seems well-specified.

Maybe that particular strategy is dead.

Mathematics/computer algebra

So SFTP under Perl requires Net::SSH::Perl, which in turn relies on Math::Pari, which interfaces to PARI [wiki], a computer algebra system that implements a lot of number theory algorithms.  PARI is a library that is normally accessed through GP/PARI, a scripting language specifically written for it.

Here's the thing.  Math::Pari doesn't install on Windows (nothing I tried tonight installed on Windows) and, reading into it, the implementer of Math::Pari seems like a real ... ahem, doesn't seem to play well with others.  Math::Pari will only install if you have built PARI on your own machine; it requires the build directory to build the Perl.  Period.  Unfortunately, it doesn't react at all well to the current version.  Like, "Perl dies" levels of poor reactions.

I'd like to wrap PARI a little better.  Maybe Inline::GP or something, I don't know, but there is most definitely room for improvement.

But that aside, I ran across Sage again.  Sage is essentially an open-source mathematics Swiss Army chainsaw.  What it is, is Mathematica re-implemented on open-source, and it includes PARI, SymPy, and a boatload of other open-source tools of that nature.

There's a whole comparison list here.

There, my friend, is a domain crying out.

The Prime Pages

Model this.  It's a database of information about prime numbers.  Way Web 2.0 before that was even a concept (founded 1990-freaking-4, before even I got into online databases...)

uiji.js

... is JavaScript in reverse.  I don't know what it means, but it all looks neat.

Carbon: compiles to C

This is pretty neat: a really thin OO C extension (libco2) that has a higher-level C-like language defined on top of it (Carbon).  Carbon supports direct object orientation, exceptions, and some other stuff, and compiles to C.

It compiles to C.  Like Decl could compile to Perl.  (Or to C, I guess.)

Visual programming doesn't work because it fails to scale

Good post on visual programming, the point being that it can't deal with any complexity at all without becoming incomprehensible.

Although you kind of think that maybe it could still work if it's just organized well enough.  There should probably be a limit of 7±2 items on any given view.

Online JSON editor

This is kinda neat: http://jsoneditoronline.org/

LispyScript

A macro-enabled JavaScript variant.  Now that's what I call cool!

Free texts on machine learning

Someday I'll have time to get back to ML.