Books from my childhood

posted: 2008-05-03 05:26:28

Books that I remember from my childhood:

The Perpetual Learning Machine - a gift from my grandmother.

The Great Brain series - borrowed from Brian Rudolph as a kid.

The Mad Scientists Club - bought through a grade school book club.

The Funk & Wagnel Encyclopedias of animals and insects - my parents picked these up one volume at a time from Krogers when we did our grocery shopping.

The World Book Encyclopedia - my parents bought the set for the family.

I wonder if my son will even have fond memories of specific web sites when he grows up...

Am I full of shit? Tell me why.

A note from the author

HackerMojo.com is using a fluid layout based upon work by Dave Reeder. I'm trying to take CSS a little more seriously; but I'm having a hard time because of all of the bad syntax, browser compatibility hacks, and non-fluid layouts. If any of the other technology I used were like CSS, I'd have to set myself on fire and jump off of a cliff.

Lab Sites

* denotes django powered sites.

Test driving DropBox

posted: 2008-05-01 01:03:00

Just got my DropBox account set up. For those not familiar, it is versioned storage that you can just mount on any of your machines. Instant synchronization, and versioning. Behind the scenes I think it is just svn, macfuse, and growl, but having such a simple interface is very nice. I'm only just starting to play with it, but you can think of it as off-site-timemachine without the star trek interface plus it has ...

Twitter versus RSS Smackdown

posted: 2008-04-20 00:40:25

I have been in the RSS camp for many years. Originally, I really panned twitter. Then I joked that pownce was the new twitter, and eventually that twitter was the new twitter. But lately I've been embracing twitter, though mostly as a travel tool. This got me thinking...

Media ...

Me too! Me too! Me Too!

posted: 2008-04-18 08:33:28

DangerMouse-2:~ gfranxman$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn
102 vi
58 ls
56 python
47 cd
43 ssh
28 curl
22 date
18 crontab
12 cat
8 ifconfig

franxman@franxman.com:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for ...

Google App Engine

posted: 2008-04-08 13:25:12

Wow! Google just announced Google App Engine which will allow users to host their python applications on their server infrastructure similar to Amazon's EC2 services, but in a more straight-forward manner. The timing is perfect, as I am in the middle of evaluating virtualized hosting for our newspaper websites ...

Visual demonstration of traffic waves

posted: 2008-04-06 21:41:28

I suspect people don't trust simulations of traffic as being real enough. And infographics can be a little too cutesy sometimes. I like this video because it is a real world test, but it demonstrates the phenomena so well that is feels like a simulation. Zombie Feynman would be proud!

MetroPulse launched

posted: 2008-04-05 02:35:56

We just launched the new MetroPulse and I'm still in the 'keep an eye on it' mode. The site looks great and will only improve as we round out the features and their staff get more content plugged in. One of my favorite things about the MetroPulse is their photography. ...

SEO Rapper

posted: 2008-03-28 13:38:50

I'm off to Chicago

posted: 2008-03-12 11:06:22

I'm off to Chicago for PyCon 2008. I've set up a quick mashup of twitter, flickr, timeline and crowdvine at timelines.hackermojo.com. You can see the the con is ramping up. A few quick lessons learned: Twitter isn't that reliable or even predictable. IE is still a remarkably broken browser, though ...