Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:

• FusionCharts Free – Animated Flash Charts and Graphs for ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, RoR and other web applications – Flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that can be used with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations to deliver interactive and powerful flash charts. You do NOT need to know anything about Flash to use FusionCharts. All you need to know is the language you're programming in.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
• A Really Gentle Introduction to Data Mining | Regular Geek – List of data mining blogs and related resources.
• BlackBerry SSH Tutorial: Connect to Unix Server using MidpSSH for Mobile Devices – Notes on using MidpSSH on Blackberry for remote access to servers. Seems to work, although big network lag on my BlackBerry Bold / AT&T.
• Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 – U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
• DIY: How To Find Authoritative Twitter Users Plus 100 To Get You Started | Ignite Social Media – Some comments on recommendation metrics for Twitter, trying to use "favorites" mark as an indicator.
• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."

These are my links for March 12th through March 16th:

• Aig Systemic 090309 – AIG memo outlining systemic risks of their various businesses to the global economy.
• FT.com / Companies / Insurance – AIG publishes counterparty list – AIG caved in to political pressure Sunday and released a list of some of the financial counterparties that benefited from its $160bn US government rescue, including some of Europe’s largest banks.
• AIG Counterparties List – FT 3-15-2009 (PDF) – Summary of recipients of US bailout funds given to AIG, which were passed on to CDS counterparties.
• jaikuengine – Google Code – Jaiku source code, following migration onto Google App Engine.
• Doug Lenat – I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha | Semantic Universe – More early comments on how Wolfram Alpha approaches queries and inferencing.

These are my links for February 28th through March 1st:

• Community Data – Swivel – User contributed datasets, for visualization and graphs with Swivel
• Obamameter – Map visualization of economic stimulus outlays. "Keep tabs on the the US economy, the global economy and the stimulus through our dashboard for the economy."
• recovery.gov.pdf – Slide presentation on data sources and construction of initial Recover.gov site in Jan 2009, from talk at Transparency Camp.
• Virtual Hoff : DoxPara Research – Slides from Dan Kaminsky's talk at CloudCamp Seattle on network and application security issues in cloud and virtualized computing environments.
• Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. – from Paul Graham – "If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world."
• Berkshire Hathaway 2008 shareholders letter (PDF) – Warren Buffet reviews the state of the financial markets, his worst year ever, and the outlook for 2009.
• White House 2: Where YOU set the nation’s priorities – Not the actual White House, but an interesting experiment in collaborative input for setting government agenda.
• Python for Lisp Programmers – Peter Norvig examines Python. "(Although it wasn't my intent, Python programers have told me this page has helped them learn Lisp.) Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax (what Lisp people call "infix" or "m-lisp" syntax). One message on comp.lang.python said "I never understood why LISP was a good idea until I started playing with python." Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so you can create custom languages that way. "

These are my links for February 14th through February 15th:

• Toni Westbrook dot Com » Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 1 – Step by step tutorial on building games (and other apps) for Blackberry Java environment
• Taking Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package – washingtonpost.com – Excellent graphical analysis breaking down the allocation and timing of the 2009 spending bill.

I’ve never seen a search result page like this before. The meta text “Conservative think tank claiming to report about events and nations strategically important to the United States” doesn’t appear any where in the referenced page, which doesn’t contain any useful <META> content. Searching for that text, it looks like the text originated from the DMOZ directory listing.

Another entry from the same DMOZ list, the Kensington Review, also returns the DMOZ meta text, this time in place of the <META> text in the actual page. DMOZ says “An e-magazine of political and social commentary. When the left says the glass is half full and the right says it is half empty, Kensington suggests that it might be too big.” Kensington’s own META says “An electronic journal of political, financial and social commentary”.  DMOZ is a more interesting description, but again does not originate from the content itself. 

So it appears that DMOZ editors have greater influence over certain Google search descriptions than the actual sites themselves, which is not necessarily bad, but was certainly unexpected (to me). Overall I’d prefer that Google limit its editorial function to ranking and presenting the search results, and perhaps make the editorial opinions known, but not presented as definitive. 

I’m not particularly familiar with the Jamestown Foundation, which is why I was searching in the first place. The DMOZ editor is clearly skeptical but I’d rather form my own opinion.