B2Brev

B2B tool reviews by startups. Nice idea! Goldmine of component information.

Less talking, more doing

And now I'll violate that by writing about it. I had a partial payment from a customer today with whom I have about 10 open invoices, and there was no telling which invoices the payment was intended to cover. After dithering, I decided that really I should be able to write a brute-force knapsack search to find if there was any combination that matched. (Turns out there wasn't, but there was a combination that came within 2 Euros, so at least I can flag something as paid in the database, close enough.)

It took me about an hour, which is pretty damned pathetic, really. About two minutes of that was realizing it was a recursive problem, and 58 minutes was spent debugging it. I'm pretty sure that I could come up with a programming system that would allow me to express this algorithm without being quite so brittle in its implementation. I mean, essentially that's what I want to do in the first place here.

To that end, I'm wondering if I shouldn't start looking for this kind of algorithmic problem and implement more of them. At least I'd stop dithering about whether it was a good use of time or not. I'll bet I could shave most of those 58 minutes off, anyway.

IPEDS

More public data online: the National Center for Education Statistics has published databases of colleges in the US.

Blitzsummary of linguistics for NLP

Good summary of How Linguistics Works.

Unbounce: component and target

Unbounce is a quick way to build landing pages for pre-startups or other purposes.

Fast test for startup ideas

Some of the pieces of this procedure could be automated. Maybe all of it, essentially...

DARPA Shredder Challenge

Solve all five puzzles first, win $50K. Not bad pay for November.

Marketing one product under two names

Another little technique for company construction.

Shakespeare, the programming language

So there's a cute little language called Shakespeare that I've run across before. It's a little silly, of course (well, that's the point!) but it came up on HNN, as does everything eventually, and one of the posts there suggests a "sort of obfuscator" that would, you know, write Shakespeare for you.

Which I think is a pretty dandy idea, in conjunction with a Shakespeare interpreter. It might use a Markov chain to generate the fluff, select characters at random, and so on and so forth - and everything should compile/interpret correctly.

Underlying the Shakespeare, of course, is a kind of bytecode language. That would be the interpreted language, and that would have a more normal expression as well that could be Shakespearified.

This could showcase parsers in Decl, and might not be a bad way to start doing some fun NLP-type stuff, too. Think about it!

Perl tutorials suck

They have a point.

Dissection of a viral launch

Interesting data-packed post about viral marketing.

Hello from a libc-free world

A fascinating look at melding assembly with C.

Target application: listofthingsforsale.com

This is very cool.

GUI vs. CLI

A post by Vivtek Haldar musing on the differences between a GUI and a CLI, boiling down to the fact that a GUI is an operating interface while a CLI is an expressional or definitional interface. Honestly, though, I don't like CLIs; they require too much memory capacity for me. I much prefer a model of GUI plus scripting API.

The not-so-secret capitalist cabal that owns us all

Here's kind of an interesting analysis: turns out just 147 investment companies own 60% of the global economy. Article in New Scientist, publication on Arxiv.org. Seems like really a very straightforward query of the Orbis 2007 database of corporate information and some nifty visualization.

Language: Elephant

I don't believe it was ever actually implemented, but John McCarthy proposed a language he called Elephant based on speech acts, largely commitments, questions, and the like.

It's an intriguing concept, but he loses me pretty quickly on the implementation details. But the notion bears further thought.

Math: sympy

A symbolic manipulation library for Python.

Here's what I want to do:

• Handwriting recognition on a tablet PC to be translated into OpenMath and thence TeX.
• Selection of portions of a large mathematical formula and specification of specific operations to be carried out (e.g. "solve for this" or "call this theta" or what have you, said operations to be discovered by observation of my private theoretical physicist)
• Maintenance of a log of the trajectory through formula space
• n-fold productivity increases for theoretical physicists
• Public perception of my private theoretical physicist as highly productive physics genius
• Live on p.t.p.'s CERN salary while enjoying Geneva

It's freaking brilliant!

Nice interactive graphic

Data journalism! Here's a neat interactive graphic for exploring gas prices over time in all 50 states.

Analysis of Steve Jobs tribute messages

Nice application of NLTK to get some interesting statistics about the tribute messages to Steve Jobs on Apple's site.

Rocketcharts

Nice library for statistical/financial charting in HTML5: Rocketcharts.