Recent Posts
I [something] Cedar Rapids.
Everyone loves Milton Glaser's classic I Heart NY t-shirt, but not everyone is from New York. This is a tragic circumstance best captured by the following Venn diagram. As you can see, some of us are from other places. Like me, for instance. I was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And maybe ...
Gary, Indiana.
If, like me, you're up keeping an eye on whether Obama might come from behind, I get the feeling you might enjoy the following. Written, of course, by my fellow Iowan, Meredith Wilson.
Mixed media.
So I'm browsing through Christopher Hitchens' latest screed over at Slate tonight, and what do I bump into but an advertisment for the New York Times. Seems a bit funny, seeing as Slate is owned by the Washington Post Company. I've always thought of them as competitors with the NYT. But ...
Ubuntu Recipe: How to automagically post your Last.fm feed to Twitter.
I signed up for Twitter this morning, opening an account at http://twitter.com/palewire. Since I haven't seen or heard from my cell phone in a week or two, don't count on much on the scene reporting. But I did take a few minutes this morning to line up my Last.fm feed, ...
Python Recipe: Connect to a MySQL database, execute a query, print the results.
Today let's take a look at how you can use Python to connect to your MySQL database, issue a SQL query and do things with the results. It's not that hard to write a simple SQL command by hand and muck with the results, so why bother? Like earlier recipes, our ...
Wright ‘01 vs. Wright ‘08.
I had a little excess energy available tonight while watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright's appearance on Bill Moyers' program, so I dumped the transcript of his new statements into Many Eyes and ran it against what the Guardian bills as an "excerpt" of his famous post Sept. 11 sermon. See anything interesting?
Uranus J. “Bob” Appel.
The greatest name of all time. Read all about it.
More Many Eyes.
Today we sprung what might be the LAT's first ever data app plugged directly into the front page. Some new foreclosure numbers came and we were able to quickly turn around the data so users could pop in their zipcode, or drill down and browse around the vast five county ...
Python Recipe: Print a future date in the format you want.
Enough with all the talky talky, here's a simple snippet I cooked up for a friend this morning to solve his problem of the moment: how to coax Python into printing out a future date (6 weeks in the future, to be exact) in the format he wants. Hope it's ...
Creationism > George Clooney?
Box Office Mojo's weekend numbers are registering Ben Stein's creationist documentary Expelled above George Clooney's screwball comedy Leatherheads (3.1 million vs. 3.0 million), despite Expelled showing on 37 percent as many screens. Granted, it's Expelled's opening week versus Leatherhead's third, but it still seems like an eye-popper. It looks Stein ...