Twitter is great for following the link streams of knowledgeable folks. Snagging interesting tweets for later perusal is also easy, as you can mark a tweet in your timeline as a favorite.

However, I now try to do all of my information aggregation in NetNewsWire. So going to a Twitter client to see my favorites is a bit of a pain.

Enter Twitter RSS feeds: http://twitter.com/favorites/crossjam.rss

Now I can subscribe to the above link and see my favorites stream along with my inflow. The only downside is that NetNewsWire doesn’t auto link the URLs in the tweets. Google Reader is smart enough to do this, but I’m not using GReader on a daily basis. The quick and dirty solution is to pop to the tweet in a browser tab and then follow the, typically shortened, link from there.

So in my continued possession by Evol Intent’s Us Against the World mix CD, I got captivated by the following, perceived sample:

Did you realize no one can see inside your view? / Did you realize the one inside belongs to you?

You can always distinguish the ethereal Beth Gibbon’s vocals, especially from a great Portishead track like Strangers. But I wanted to be sure I had the correct lyrics, since it’s a little tricky to make out. All I kept finding though was this:

Did you realize no one can see inside your view? / Did you realize for why this sight belongs to you?

spread across a bunch of sites designed to sell ringtones. I wasn’t hearing any of that for why… stuff though which made me suspicious. Turns out that’s from the Portishead Roseland NYC Live version of Strangers.

However, going back to the original Dummy CD, I heard the following:

Did you realize no one can see inside your view? / Did you realize the world inside belongs to you?

With some confirmation from the web, mystery solved. You’re welcome America!

Back to back, Jack!! Two wins in a row. My only win streak of the year. A nice solid victory, although I had to sweat a little on Monday due to extended gar-bage time.

I have to give credit to an officemate. Even though we’re competing for the final playoff spot in our league, he tipped me off to playing Percy Harvin. You can roll like that when there’s no money on the line.

Even so, I was this close to benching Harvin on Sunday morning. Missing practice for an “illness” is fantasy-speak for “game time inactive” and zero fantasy points. But I rolled the dice and won big with 33.5 on the ledger.

Add in Aaron Rodgers 37.5, along with another inspired gamble on Roy Helu for 20.2, and that’s 90 points in the till. Everybody else on my team underperformed (I’m looking at you DeMarco Murray) but totaled enough to get me to 118.

Per usual my opponent chalked up over 100. I had a 36 point lead going into the Monday game and was feeling confident but slightly nervous. Maurice Jones-Drew was the last player left in the tilt. He hadn’t scored over 20 points all season. Jacksonville has been awful this year. No way he goes for 30+.

Still, it’s been one of those seasons.

Jones-Drew was over 25 by the end of the third quarter. The Chargers were so far ahead, I had visions of them laying down like dogs for a 60 yard touchdown run or something like that. Thankfully, Blaine Gabbert got a lot of throws, Jones-Drew got some rest, and the clock moved quickly.

The playoffs start for me this week, even if I’m not in the playoffs. I win and my buddy loses, and I’m in. We both win or both lose and I need to outscore him by 60 points. Not gonna happen. He wins, I lose, and it’s over. So losing isn’t much of an option.

Here. We. Go.

Given I’m aware of Python as an embedded procedural language in PostgreSQL, I should have anticipated that someone would stuff JavaScript into PGSQL. Enter plv8:

plv8 is shared library that provides a PostgreSQL procedual language powered by V8 JavaScript Engine. With this program you can write in JavaScript your function that is callable from SQL.

In the context of PostgreSQL, this means you have a surprisingly useful durable document store you didn’t know you had. The previous link focuses on XML in Postgres, but with plv8 there are plenty of JSON tricks you can do inside a sophisticated relational data management system.

Don’t know how mature plv8 is, but I have a few big piles of Tweet data in JSON format that might be subject to the extension’s charms.

Hat tip to Hacker News

Just dropped dead in the middle off Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, (unfortunately on IFC). Despite the commercials, forgot how damn good, and twisted, a film it is. Apocalypse Now, Redux best captures what I know (being of the generation after) the fucked-upness of the Vientam war. And it’s just a better movie.

But Full Metal Jacket is a straight up mind fuck. War is hell. Must be that Jungian thing.

Link parkin’: wikistream, an experiment in real-time display of Wikipedia edits using node.js and redis. Neat interface within the browser page.

Mainly stashing to note that Wikimedia recent changes are streamed using IRC. I always thought monitoring Wikipedia would be a great sensor for various goings on in the world. Should do a literature search for any uses of the real time stream and then see about the potential for future advances.

Link parkin’: PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers.

When this link first started kicking around, I thought it was just a gimmicky way to pull data into Postgres (PGSQL), destined to be slow and finicky. Boy was I wrong! Turns out Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW) are an SQL standard that the latest version of Postgres, 9.1, heavily supports. Turns out there are all sorts of interesting uses for FDWs. Turns out that Multicorn makes writing the wrappers in Python relatively straightforward.

At work, I’ve got some hairy data ingest challenges for Postgres. Maybe FDWs can help solve them.

Hat tip, Ben Lorica’s Big Data Twitter stream

A long time ago, I called Google’s MapReduce distributed programming model, a force multiplier. Some, admittedly self-interested, parties are projecting a billion a year Hadoop industry. Some are just projecting that 2012 will be a big year for Hadoop. Given that Hadoop is the open source version of MapReduce, I might actually be on target with that prediction.

But enough self-congratulation. I found myself recently wondering what’s next on the MapReduce frontier. Should have known there’s an academic MapReduce workshop for that. Third edition no less.

I’m definitely down with meta is murder, but small doses aren’t fatal.

Stupidly forgot to post yesterday, ending my 60+ day streak. Simply had a lot of stuff going on at work and home and lost track of time. Adam Fast recently posted on why he was blogging every day and I greatly sympathize. Which is why I take keeping posting streaks going seriously.

No big deal though, just get back on the horse and start a new streak!

Victory! By the thinnest of margins no less, 0.23 fantasy points. I’m still barely alive for a playoff spot. Maybe The Fantasy Gods are starting to smile on me.

I say that because most of my guys underperformed. DeMarco Murray went over by a point or so. Meanwhile, Rob Bironas, my kicker, exceeded expectations by 5 points. It’s a sad day when your kicker is essential to a win.

My opponent’s team was equally bad, except for one player, Jimmy Graham of New Orleans. Going into Monday night, when the Saints played, my lead was a tick over 23 points. Graham’s been having a good year, in a high powered offense, so 23+ was not out of the question. Given the year I’ve been having, I anticipated this happening. By the 4th quarter, Graham had 22.9 points, I assumed a loss, and I went to bed early. Graham almost had one more catch but got busted up on the play.

And I woke up the next morning with the closest fantasy victory I’ve ever had. Keep hope alive!

Previously, I had pondered what could bring down ESPN’s, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports, virtual programming hegemony. My creativity wasn’t too far off, as Comcast is retooling the Comcast Sports Network plus Versus, into the NBC Sports Network. But it remains to be seen if this can really be a viable alternative.

My thoughts didn’t stray to that most American of disruptors: scandal. For the longest, I’ve wondered how the sports media industry in general, and ESPN in particular, could never “break” the Major League Baseball steroids story. Given the amount of coverage of baseball, and the porous revolving door between “journalistic” organizations and the baseball franchises, some intrepid reporter should have been able to find at least one smoking gun. It’s odd that it took Jose Canseco going rogue in a bitter snit to bring that house of cards crashing down.

Enter the Bernie Fine fiasco at Syracuse and ESPN dubiously spiking its own foray into the story as ably chronicled by Sports By Brooks. Makes me start to ponder what else the news side of ESPN has decided wasn’t newsworthy or verifiable over the years. Considering all the insider connections that a lot of the on-air talent brings to the table, how is it that ESPN can’t confirm anything that goes on in the sports world?

Right now, since the Bernie Fine/ESPN affair is mostly percolating in the blogosphere, it’s really only a “smoldering” gun. But chain a few of these incidents together, continue the theme of particular odious crimes, sprinkle in a few higher profile reporters, and cracks could start to show in the Worldwide Leader’s foundation.

Who knows, maybe this theme will catch the eye of another (jealous?) major news organization that runs with it. However, we know there’s at least one such crew that’s right out.

Hat tip to the The LaVar Arrington and Chad Dukes show (warning overdone Flash site).

Proper curly quotes courtesy of admonishment from Brent Simmons and Tim Bray.

Way back in January of 2009, I noted that Discogs.com had a REST API. It’s been awhile (at least since I last looked) and Discogs has updated their API for the modern era. Bonus! They now have monthly data dumps!!

Hat tip Paul Lamere

Since noonish last Tuesday until 5PM today, I’ve been on the road for the Thanksgiving holiday. The wife’s side of the family is all from Chicago, and I lived and worked there for close to 9 years. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law is a bit technophobic so doesn’t have Internet at her house. Heck, she just upgraded to cable this summer and I was lucky enough to finally have a full slate of turkey day sports for once.

This of course makes regular blogging a challenge. More after the break. Really!So I decided to give the WordPress for iOS app, a serious test drive on my iPhone. I cheated a little, but I’m giving it a thumbs up. With relatively minimal extra effort, I managed to successfully post the last 5 days, without using my laptop. In fact, I only once had to drag myself to a Starbucks and crack the laptop simply to check the time and numbers for a potential Monday telecom. Come to think of it, I probably could have gotten away with a text to deal with that situation.

How’d I cheat? I built up a backlog of mostly cooked posts, that needed minimal editing. These were then posted to my WordPress site with draft status. Then the WordPress iOS app was used for some light editing and clean up, before adjusting the publish date and switching the status to published.

I did however, do one full post completely in the iOS app. This wasn’t too bad, although the on-screen keyboard is obviously quite a bit slower than a real keyboard. So longer posts seem somewhat prohibitive. My main observation is that collecting and adding links definitely has high friction. On the desktop, you can multitask and fast switch between the browser, to look up stuff, and your favorite blog post editor, MarsEdit for me. Doesn’t work quite so well on the iPhone, although maybe that’s something I need to work on. I’ll also start thinking about the types of posts that make sense for a combo of an iPhone and WordPress. For example, impromptu photo posting feels like it would be quite natural, as opposed to my longer form text entries.

Link Parkin’: infochimps now provides a geocoding API to translate textual geographical references into lat/long coordinates. Also includes a confidence score.

Sigh. Another disappointing loss that pretty much puts me out of the fantasy playoffs in my league.

The opponent yet again scored over 100 fantasy points against me. That makes 10 out of 11 weeks. I only really had one disappointing performer, Denarius Moore for 1.9 points. That was enough damage though, especially when facing two big scorers like Victor Cruz and Ray Rice.

The injury bug strikes yet again. Fred Jackson goes down for the season with a broken leg. Criminy! I didn’t even play the guy this past week. The Fantasy Gods are really out to get me.

Now I have to win out my last three games, and get a big dose of help against the fourth place team in my league. The Rangers will compete until the bitter end though!

Even though I’ve been using UNIX for over 20 years, there are some simple, elegant, tools that I’m really now coming to appreciate:

• cron and crontab for automatically running things at scheduled times, especially the GNU extension that supports @reboot allowing normal users to run scripts at machine startup
• logrotate lets me keep dumping data into a single file, but break it into smaller, more manageable chunks. Combined with crontab I can easily collect gigabytes of data in a straightforward manner, but have the results in well organized, compressed multi-megabyte units. That expedition with Python and argparse? That was driven by usage of logrotate.
• curl for grabbing anything off the Web. Okay, it’s simple and elegant like a Swiss Army Chainsaw, but it always works, never crashes, and can be configured six ways to Sunday.

When people ask, “How ya doing?” my stock response now is, “Oh I can’t complain.” And if they tell me, “Yeah, you can,” I say “No I can’t. No one would care and it would make me look ungrateful for all that I’ve been given.”

Which usually gets a thoughtful pause.

So in the spirit of the day here’s why no-one should catch me complaining.

1. Family. My Little Guy (™) and the wonderful wife I’ve been granted with. Not to mention relatively healthy parents, lovable in-laws, a spry 85 year old grandmother, and an overachieving kid sister.

2. Friends. I don’t have a big gaggle of ‘em, and I don’t keep in touch as much as I should, but boy are they an interesting and successful lot. From going up in the Space Shuttle to doing startups to just grinding away for one company for 20+ years. I’m glad for each and every one of them.

3. Work. I’ve got a job. It doesn’t completely suck. The tasking is often quite interesting and there’s a decent bit of creative latitude. It pays well. The people are mostly smart. My boss likes me. His boss likes me. Other high muckety mucks seem to like what I’ve done.

4. Health. Okay, so I can’t really play Ultimate anymore, but with any luck I’ll be able to at least fake my way through a pickup game this upcoming summer. Maybe even play summer league. And thanks to my job, I can afford a Cadillac health plan, which I have definitely been using. Every time I go to the doctor, they tell me nothing’s wrong and the reimbursement coordinator gawks at how little I have to pay.

5. Finances. No personal debt. No mortgage. No auto loan. A sizable emergency fund. A decent, if not great, retirement account.

Now if I could only get back on a roll with a hobby hacking project and read more books, life would be pretty close to complete.

This is a little Python conundrum that I had to solve at work. Hopefully it’ll save someone else some time.

Python’s argparse is the fabulous, back ported, standard, built-in Python 2.7 module for parsing command line arguments. Very helpful for building scripts that are a little too complex for bash. One thing you can do with argparse is specify that an argument is supposed to be an output (or input) file like so:

[sourcecode language=”python”] parser.add_argument(‘—log’, type=argparse.FileType(‘w’), default=’-‘) [/sourcecode]

argparse has built-in knowledge of the UNIX convention that - represents standard input or output as appropriate. The above basically defaults to assigning stdout as the logging target unless a filename is supplied on the command line. Unfortunately, this always overwrites the target file, which is not quite what you want for log files. You really want to just append any new output, not wipe out the old stuff.

But! The following, natural correction, doesn’t quite work, with argparse throwing an error:

[sourcecode language=”python”] parser.add_argument(‘—log’, type=argparse.FileType(‘a’), default=’-‘) [/sourcecode]

Turns out the argparse.FileType is hardwired to throw an exception for appending to the - pseudo-file.

However, there is a solution. You can supply a Python file object for the default, like so:

[sourcecode language=”python”] parser.add_argument(‘—log’, type=argparse.FileType(‘a’), default=sys.stdout) [/sourcecode]

Works great. Defaults correctly, but appends to existing files if specified. Happy hacking!

Also, my first trial with WordPress’ programming language shortcodes. So far so good.

About mid-October, I started to seriously focus on losing a little weight. Through a combination of portion control, quality control, and some cardio work I’ve managed to shave off a few. I also think I’ve got a sustainable plan to keep it off and keep going in the right direction.

Per usual, in the course of doing something like this, you start to pay attention to food labels. They’re all baselined to a 2000 calorie diet. This got me wondering. Why 2000 calories? Based on what reasoning?

Turning to Google, I landed on Marion Nestle’s blog Food Politics. She’s got a pretty substantive post on where the 2000 calorie diet came from. Interestingly, 2000 calories is 20% below the low end of the scientifically determined average caloric requirement for males. Which means if you’re a guy, calorie counting with food labels, probably leaves you with quite a bit of wiggle room. I’m not particularly fastidious about counts, but I’m trying to stay away from the some of the sneakier high calorie items that are easy to get hooked on. I’m looking at you Starbucks Banana Nut Loaf. An extra yogurt or two, won’t bust the budget though.

Nestle closes with the following advice about caloric intake:

As to how many calories you personally need, I think they are too difficult for most people to count accurately to bother. The bottom line: If you are eating too many, you will be gaining weight.

The best advice I can give is to get a scale and use it. If your weight starts creeping up, you have to eat less.

I’ve already taken her advice and it’s working to good effect.

Oh yeah, Nestle’s got a good bit of credibility on the subject. Go Bears!!

A few years ago, I had an automated script that would backup my starred items in Google Reader. It got busted when Google Reader made some changes to its unofficial API.

Luckily a few other folks have updated the old pyrfeed module, and put the results up on GitHub. Mauro (brutuscat) Asprea’s googlereader fork seems to be the most recent.

Gave it a quick test drive against my starred items feed and seemed to do what it says on the tin. Interestingly, you can get the results out in JSON, which means another potential application of MongoDB.

For the longest time, I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good GMail backup solution. I’ve stashed a lot of links, but never really cottoned to any of the potential applications. However, thanks to Mike Johnson, I might finally have something that fits my tastes.

Johnson describes how to use offlineimap to download your GMail contents using of course the IMAP protocol. offlineimap is written in Python, so it should work on both Linux and MacOS.

Offlineimap is meant to take an IMAP folder offline for later reading by copying the contents of the IMAP server to a MailDir folder, which is an older Unix standard that organizes emails into local mail folders. Once copied locally, the mail folder can be read by any number of email programs. At it turns out, this is also awesome for making backups.

There are a couple of great things that fall out if this actually works

• The backup procedure can be hosted on my own home Linux box or better yet my Linode VPS. No lockin to a particular vendor.
• cron can be used to run the backup process automatically. I won’t forget to do it.
• offlineimap allows you to select specific folders. So I finally might have a convenient way to download my @Notes folder locally to my MacBook for indexing by Spotlight. Alternatively, I can use my own full text search engine.

Link parkin’: Django Chartit, for leveraging Django to create nice front ends to lots of data.

With Django-Chartit you can create interactive charts effortlessly. Charts are rendered using Highcharts JS library and jQuery.

One of the tracks on DJ Heather’s Tangerine that really stands out is DJD’s Shake It For Me. Probably the top track of the mix, highly memorable.

I’d like to think it was some serendipitous hand of a deity that made me dial up Scott Hardkiss’ United DJ’s of America, v17 entry this week, but it was probably just randomness. I hadn’t listened to this mix in over a year according to iTunes. The only reason I carry it on my iPhone is that I’m a completist for the United DJ’s series. Imagine my surprise when Shake It For Me hits the headphones.

But I was even more surprised at how solid end-to-end the entire mix is. Discogs.com classifies the CD style as: “progressive house, house, disco,” and it’s damn hard to pigeonhole. Shake It For Me isn’t even the best track, transcended for me by Static Revenger’s Happy People, the whacky Disco Rockin’ by Plastic vs Conga Squad, C-Mos’s 6-2 Young, Boozy + Swan’s Don’t Touch That, and Armand Van Helden’s Full Moon featuring a guest appearance by Common.

Shake It For Me definitely kicks off a great run off tracks, and I’m glad that I rediscovered this treasure. Definitely in the rotation for the near future.

Back on an even week, and got a win. Broke two streaks. First, a three game losing skid, and then the opponent scoring 100+ fantasy points every week so far.

However, the injury bug strikes yet again. This week Julio Jones goes down early to a hammy.

Otherwise, this was a laugher. DeMarco Murray delivered 26 big fantasy points, along with Larry Fitzgerald finally going nuclear for 30+. The supporting cast included contributions from Steven Jackson and Rob Bironas? Gotta love it when your kicker chips in 13 points. Raspberry though for the KC DEF, who only scored 1 point against Team Tebow.

With those four guys, I beat my opponent. He made the unfortunate choice of starting both Darren Sproles and Mark Ingram for a combined total of 4.2 points. A final opposing total of 76 points was much appreciated.

Oh! Almost forgot about the 34 points that Aaron Rodgers threw in for me. It’s starting to feel like 25+ is routine for him.

Let’s see if I can get back-to-back wins and lurch back into the playoff hunt.

Link parkin’: Jesse Noller’s Good to Great Python Reads. Does what it says on the tin.

Once upon a time, I was developing a small scale RSS feed aggregator for hundreds to thousands of feeds. Man the intricacies of repeated HTTP fetching were hairy. Getting HTTP headers right, obeying robots.txt, throttling domain access, dealing with domain resolution, avoiding spider traps, scheduling revisits. Not to mention that if you surmounted all of those hurdles, you still had to deal with people’s often ill-formed RSS. Good times!

While not a one-to-one mapping of concerns, I still found quite interesting this deep dive into the technical details of SpiderDuck, Twitter’s scalable, real-time URL fetcher. They’re not really crawling sites, just trying to fetch URLs as quickly as they flow through the Twittersphere, so Twitter doesn’t have to worry about recursive fetching. Probably don’t have to deal with revisits, but still have to throttle request rates to particular domains. I guarantee there are some twisted souls out there trying to suck their fetching into infinite URL traps.

A lot has changed since I was doing my half-baked tinkering. For example, the whole Hadoop/HDFS/Cassandra/Memcached scalable computing infrastructure flat out didn’t exist. At the same time, a lot of the same issues are still there. The Web is still The Web, warts and all.

Hat tip: Nelson Minar’s Pinboard

Link parkin’: Zed Shaw is bringing his “The Hard Way” style (worked well for Python) to SQL:

This book will teach you the 80% of SQL you probably need to use it effectively, and will mix in concepts in data modeling at the same time. If you’ve been fumbling around building web, desktop, or mobile applications because you don’t know SQL, then this book is for you. It is written for people with no prior database, programming, or SQL knowledge, but knowing at least one programming language will help.

Learn SQL The Hard Way. It’s only in Alpha though, so I wouldn’t rush out and start working through it, unless you want to file bug reports.

Regarding some recent purchases, DJ Marky’s FabricLive.55 and Marcus Inatlex’s FabricLive.35 are both definitely keepers and getting repeated play. Both discs of Pete Tong and Felix Da Housecat on All Gone Ibiza are solid but don’t feel like goto listens. Noisia’s FabricLive.40 was better than anticipated on second listen, may have to reevaluate. And finally, I thought I would have listened to DJ Heather’s Tangerine a little more, but I’ve really been groovin’ on the DnB purchases.

On its recent 10th birthday, I’m acknowledging Nelson Minar’s Some Bits weblog as another site I routinely enjoy. As Minar says:

My weblog is an old school blog, a public diary of things that personally interest me. I mostly write as a way to summarize what I’m learning about something new like living in Paris or flying airplanes. … Go ahead, write something, it’s not hard! Even if no one but yourself ever reads it it’s worth your time.

I’m not so much into the foodie or GA posts, but I usually find the tech nuggets quite good. For example, I was tipped off, by Some Bits, to Adam Fast’s Neogeography blog, which looks top notch.

At work, I was thinking up a Python script to stream through a bunch of compressed text files. I was starting to devise the logic to run through a list of filenames and present it as one input stream, when I thought “maybe There’s One Obvious Way To Do It already”.

A little Googling and voila! Python’s fileinput module. Does exactly what I need it to do, right down to being able to detect and decompress gzip compressed files. Even better Doug Hellmann has done a Python Module of the Week (PyMOTW) entry for fileinput, meaning there’s clear usage examples on top of the excellent documentation.

I had a script to cleanly zip through a 100+ Mb of compressed data in under a hour. Python, it’s a beautiful thing.

While the even week win trend was busted last week, the odd week losing skid continued. Brutality abounded in multiple ways:

• The opponent, in the league’s last position, was 1 and 7 entering play.
• I had a great matchup with Aaron Rodgers and the Packers going against the San Diego Chargers. Problem was the other side had Philip Rivers and Vincent Jackson. Rodgers gave me 30 points, but Rivers, despite two pick-sixes, and Jackson teamed up for 66+.
• Miles Austin pulled a hamstring in the first half. Thanks for the 6 points buddy.
• For the second time this season, I played a defense that went for negative points. 7 players versus 8 is a tough get.
• I knew I had lost by the end of the 4 PM games. I was down 7 points, and the opponent still had two players left to go. So I lost 7 versus 6.
• The final killer, I had Julio Jones and DeMarco Murray on the bench leading to a net of about 28 points wasted. I didn’t start Murray because I didn’t want to go with 3 Cowboys on my roster. But I didn’t really consider benching Austin for Jones and playing Murray. Duh!

I’m in 7th out of 8 teams, with 5 games to play. Every opponent this year has scored 100+ fantasy points against me. I lead the league on Points Against by 130+. A player in my starting lineup has gotten injured each week. This just might not be my year.

Back in 2006, I caught the movie V for Vendetta at a matinee. As a middling comic collector in the ‘90s I had the foresight to get in on the limited series at the ground floor. So seeing the movie rendition, even though Alan Moore disowned it, was mandatory.

When I walked out, I was pretty satisfied but a little disappointed. The film was a solid adaptation, taking modern liberties where needed, yet keeping most of the spirit of the graphic novel. For the time it was released, 2006, the movie spoke deeply about government, and society writ large, falling apart. The US administration of the time mirrored some aspects of V’s Britain, and I believed a really great film could have sparked some change.

Turns out the times have caught up with the film. John Scalzi called it in the moment, that V for Vendetta could be a hidden gem of the new millennium’s first decade. Of course he’s correspondingly patting himself on the back, but I also enjoyed how he put the Occupy movement’s appropriation of V imagery in context. The Guy Fawkes Mask now carries symbolism in the US as well as Britain. But, depending on your perspective, it might be a good thing that most Occupiers don’t “remember, remember the 5th of November.”

Makes we wanna do an Amazon Instant or iTunes rental this weekend.

I’ve long enjoyed Maciej Ceglowski’s, well thought out, if rambling, writings. He’s got that wry tone of Olin Shivers at his best. Recently Ceglowski unloaded The Social Graph is Neither. Seems to have struck a nerve in the blogosphere. Choice quote:

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that’s the social graph.

Summarizations and armchair analysis don’t do it justice. Check out his essay in full. Well worth the time.

The Overweight Lover is no longer in the house. Heavy D. passed away on Tuesday in LA. As a child of 80’s and 90’s hip-hop this stings akin to the passing of Guru.

One could argue Heavy D. was of middling importance in the history of rap. Not the greatest (but still pretty good) lyricist. Never really connected with any innovative style. In no way edgy. Cuddly and friendly on purpose.

You could argue that, but you’d be wrong. In concordance with his girth he had outsized impact. He and The Boyz cranked out a decent sized body of work, and a ton of appearances. Three platinum albums are no joke. Heavy D. was always good for a quality guest spot on an up and comer’s track. The theme song for In Living Color helped put real hip-hop on prime time TV. His rap for Janet Jackson’s Alright added a little street to one of her biggest hits, along with spicing up a great video. He helped expand the boundaries of hip-hop by teaming up with Teddy Riley and blending rap into the broadly accepted New Jack Swing style. This was a precursor to today’s hip-hop infused (dominated?) top of the pops.

Godspeed, kind sir.

On a personal note, Heavy D. was exactly 2 days older than me. That’s it. As Morpheus says Death can come for us at any time, in any place. Granted I’m due for a mid-life crisis, but it makes one stop, evaluate, and reconsider the arc of one’s life.

Through work, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Matt Madigan and Sean Gorman (along with a few others) at GeoIQ, nee FortiusOne. Love their browser based mapping products, and even snuck a few maps into some projects. Failed to ever ignite a larger project, but there’s still hope.

Thanks to an Andy Hickl retweet, I got wind of GeoIQ’s streaming data features. The capability for real-time ingest of data and updates to maps was something I was really looking for in my work projects. Congrats to the GeoIQ team!

Now that I’ve got a pile of geo-tagged data, I might try and test drive the features on GeoCommons as a hobby project. Chris Helm also does a great job of going a layer down and highlighting the tech GeoIQ is using to implement this capability. Hmmm, a vote on the positive side of the ledger for MongoDB.

Link parkin’: Speaking of Torkington’s 4 short links, comes a link to an in-depth interview with William Gibson in The Paris Review.

I liked what I’ve read so far about MongoDB, but that doesn’t mean the actual experience will match in practice. Just to temper my enthusiasm, I’ve been keeping an eye out for critical commentary on the NoSQL database.

The comical animated short above takes down some of the common fanboisms at a high level. Meanwhile, Michael Susens-Schurter has a deeper critique of MongoDB with more technical detail from down in the trenches.

I still think MongoDB might be the best fit for my Twitter data noodling, mainly because the streaming data comes out in JSON format. Even if MongoDB fails on a few core DB capabilities, it seems so tuned to storing and querying JSON the reward might be worth the risk. And besides, I’m not doing anything mission critical or at Web Scale.

Link parkin’: Charlie Stross comments on System D:

System D is the planetary unregulated black market, concentrated in the developing world. Excluding traditional criminal activities (robbery, illegal narcotics, extortion) but including small-scale entrepreneurial activities that don’t bother with red tape or taxes or safety regulations, it employs up to 50% of the planet’s work force (1.8 billion workers) and is estimated to be worth $10 trillion a year.

Over and above an apparently important emerging trend, the term System D just has a cool origin (check the link).

Also, another shootout to a blogger (and author) who’s work I really enjoy.

Just wanted to take a moment to show my appreciation for Nat Torkington’s work at O’Reilly Radar. The eclectic “Four short links” typically makes my day and has an impressively high hit rate of links I like to stash for further reading.

Well only banished from inside Chrome. Turning on the Chrome process tracker revealed that the 1Password extension would blow up to over 100 Mb of virtual memory. Then when I would kill that specific process, Chrome would wholeheartedly lock up. A force quit was needed to take out the crashing browser. My laptop was showing a load of over 35!!

AgileBits doesn’t seem close to solving the problem, so I’m just going to stick to using the 1Password extension in Firefox. There it seems much more well behaved. Meanwhile I just completely disabled the extension within Chrome. Now my laptop is a much happier camper.