Livia Labate shared some advice for those looking to get started in Information Architecture.
At a recent brown bag she reviewed a number of great design games for generating ideas.
If I was in Chicago, I’d be going to see “Little Brother”
A Blogging History Worth Reading?
I’m really looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg’s “Say Everything”.
I’m sure “Say Everything” will be a book I can share with others (which I do with “Dreaming in Code”) to provide them insight into why I do some of the things I do and why I get so damn passionate about them.
Writing a book on blogging’s history and how it related to the Web, Internet, and society is a difficult task. Based upon excerpts I’ve read so far, Rafe’s review of the first half, and reading his fantastic “Dreaming in Code”, I know this book is going to be terrific and insightful.
Speaking of blogging, I got to agree with Rafe – the most awesome thing about blogging *is* “corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.”.
Absolutely.
Thank you Web.
“Listening To NRBQ” by Jim Boggia
YouTube: “Listening To NRBQ” by Jim Boggia:
More on Graphviz
Reading about Graphviz
While gearing up on a content management project, a few developers were wrangling with how to share solution diagrams between Visio and OmniGraffle. While there is a level of compatibility between the two, its not ideal. While researching, I went off into a related tangent, a cross platform tool that I can manipulate from a text editor or programming language, and ended up reading about Graphviz.
Graphviz – command line tool and DSL (dot) to define and render graphs and diagrams.
Doesn’t sounds like much, but check out this magic: Visualizing traceroute output with Ruby and Graphviz or how about Maven based dependency graphing?
I think prefuse (with the unbelievable looking flare) is an excellent related toolkit to look into next (interaction and animations!!!!!) .
O’Reilly: An Introduction to GraphViz and dot
O’Reilly: Graphviz – Why draw when you can code?
Orgmode.org: org-exp-blocks.el: pre-process blocks in org-mode files in Emacs to generate diagrams – rocking!
Bernt Hansen’s fantastic Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! is a working example of the above org-mode use case (and a great org-mode tutorial)
Forever for Now: UML Diagrams Using Graphviz Dot
Haven’t read or experimented with yet, but will…
Linux.com: Create relationship diagrams with Graphviz
IBM developerWorks: Visualize function calls with Graphviz
Graphviz Resources – large list of viewers, navigators, language bindings, etc
WikiViz: A large list of related tools and libraries
ZGRViewer: a Java-based desktop GraphViz/DOT Viewer – Adds interactivity to viewing a dot defined graph.
Privacy’s not dead
Understanding CIDR notation
Good guides for those that need a quick dive:
Wikipedia: CIDR notation. Terse. Without understanding of IP addressing and subnets worthless. So the following give a better big picture:
Cisco: IP Addressing and Subnetting for New Users
MediaWiki’s guide to blocking ranges: Help:Range blocks
Yahoo! Small Business Help: What is CIDR?
Microsoft: Understanding TCP/IP addressing and subnetting basics
Pain kept me away too
Great to hear an acupuncture treatment helped Susie get back to her guitar.
Arthritis in the hands is scary. Part of me is thankful my pain stems only from the back.
Past few weeks I’ve been getting to my garage and plugging in here and there. Becoming re-acquainted with an old friend.
Speaking of that, I’ve been spending the past day transferring old recordings of myself jamming with friends and bands from long ago from cassette to my computer. Around 20 or so cassettes, so its a big job, probably will take a week or more. And I’m doing this, one side of a cassette == one .wav file (for expediency’s sake). Breaking down to individual songs will take a bit.
Getting Lisp
At work props go to Michael Bevilacqua-Linn and his great brown bag on Clojure. I think it helped a few of us not only get exposed to Clojure, but Lisp as well.
Here are some great starting points for the procedural-biased:
defmacro: The Nature of Lisp – absolutely fantastic. Uses Java and XML examples to help bridge the conceptual divide.
Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb: LispUsersAreArrogant entry.
Steve Yegge’s Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp
Stuart Sierra: Clojure is a Lisp worth talking about
News and Blog: Getting it
Steve Yegge: Emergency Elisp
Me? I have a lot of practice ahead of me to become proficient, but since Emacs is my editor, it comes naturally.