A few people at work use SPSS to do statistical analysis. The language is (still) horrible. As of v14, however, Python can be used to access SPSS. This link contains a few starting points for Python-SPSS integration.

Back in November, Bill Bumgarner bought a sampler pack of safety razor blades. Week by week, he wrote a review of a different blade. The posts interested me, having recently switched to a Merkur razor. All blades have been trialled, and the results are in. Bill writes, “The Dorco, Derby, and Wilkinson Sword blades all … Read more

Ian Bicking introduces toppcloud, a light and simple deployment tool inspired by App Engine, but which strives to be better. I’ve been following development through Bicking’s toppcloud tweets, and it seems promising. I can’t wait to give it a try. Now if only I had something which needed to be deployed.

Apparently there’s a port of Freeciv (a Civilization clone) for the HTML5 Canvas. “Google Chrome 4.0 has the absolutely best performance results, while Internet Explorer 8.0 has by far the worst performance results. Firefox performs worse than Google Chrome and Safari. […] The results from Google Chrome are pretty impressive, over 10 times faster than … Read more

Here’s a nice article on one person’s attempt to reproduce the famed hockey stick graph from 3GB of tarballed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data using Closure. The author isn’t a climatologist, or even a scientist, so his differing output shouldn’t be a sign of manipulation. However, the post goes into detail as to how … Read more