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

The way I see it, Apple is distinguishing between appliances and computers. The iPod, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV are appliances. If performance on these appliances falters, Apple looks bad. The MacBook, iMac and Mac desktop line are computers. Apple knows people expect to do what they want with computers, and that bad things sometimes … Read more

“rpy2 is a redesign and rewrite of rpy. It is providing a low-level interface to R, a proposed high-level interface, including wrappers to graphical libraries, as well as R-like structures and functions.”