Hurricanes in Scandinavia. Ice in Austin. Snow in Malibu. And now, an inch and a half of snow in Tucson and Phoenix.
I think we broke it.
The weather
(Visited 7017 times) Misc
Jan 222007
Misc
Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Dual widescreen
(Visited 14792 times) Misc
Jan 102007
Mmm.
At work, we got dual 4:3 monitors, and I loved it. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using MaxiVista to extend my desktop onto my Tablet PC. But that has some issues — though the new version that just came out is pretty nice. For one, I use WiFi, and it really works better over a wired connection. For another, the Tablet’s TFT and my widescreen monitor are not the same physical size. Lastly, getting them to sit level with one another was annoying.
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
(Visited 5342 times) Misc
Jan 102007
This is geek heaven. A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a triumph of cool infodesign in and of itself. It’s a periodic table, where each element is instead a means of visually displaying information. Naturally, as in the real periodic table, “elements” are clustered based on similarity. It’s done via pop-ups, which perhaps Edward Tufte might disapprove of… but I could probably fiddle with it for hours.
Visual history of the Middle East
(Visited 6234 times) Misc
Jan 062007
I am so happy to see this animated map of the history of the Middle East, because for many years I’ve dreamed about seeing a map like this for the history of the world. This only covers the major empires and other large developments, not each small country or tribe (hmm, how hard would the four-color problem be with a time axis? Automatic switching of colors?), but it’s still a wonderful and illuminating 90 second history lesson.
Site downtime again
(Visited 5494 times) Misc
Jan 022007
Looks like SQL was unhappy again, and my host helpfully locked down the site for me. This time, it looks like it was the “get recent comments” plugin, because there’s 30,000 comments on the site (that’s after deleting all the deleted ones and all the spam ones).
I’m opening the site temporarily just to see if we get errors again — if we do, it’ll shutter again briefly while I ponder what to try next.
Edit: looks like disabling the plug-in did the trick. However, it also looks like there’s a newer version of the plug-in that hits the database a lot less often (instead of every time the site is hit, it only hits it when a comment arrives). So I will try installing that tonight when I get home from work when I can watch the site to see if it is overloading again.
