SPSS and Python
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.
Posted on January 31st, 2010 in links - No Comments »
DE Razor Reviews Summary
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 proved to be quite good. Of the three, I would lean to the Dorco but may need to give the Derby a try every now and then, too.” There you have it folks.
At the end of the review, Bill offers his remaining blades to anyone who is interested in performing the same experiment. I’ve since sent him an email. We’ll see if I’m the lucky recipient.
Posted on January 30th, 2010 in links - No Comments »
Introducing toppcloud: A new way to deploy web applications
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.
Posted on January 29th, 2010 in links - No Comments »
Analysis of HTML5 Canvas Javascript performance in various browsers for Freeciv.net
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 Internet Explorer in this test.”
Posted on January 29th, 2010 in links - No Comments »
Global Warming Vs Clojure!
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 one might manipulate 3GB of compressed data (50GB of raw text) on a laptop within a reasonable amount of time using Clojure.
Posted on January 28th, 2010 in links - No Comments »