Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 12th February 2010

My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous) professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.

Suw Charman-Anderson

# 9:13 am / buzz, email, followers, friends, socialgraph, suwcharmananderson

Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes).

# 9:21 am / appengine, deployment, django, ian-bicking, modwsgi, python, toppcloud, ubuntu, varnish, wsgi

Google Image Charts: Mathematical (TeX) Formulas (via) I’m not sure when they added this, but you can now use the Google Charts Image API to render mathematical formulas, specified using TeX syntax. Wordpress.com and Wikipedia have both offered this feature for quite a while, but now you can use it anywhere on the Web.

# 9:42 am / formula, google, google-charts, maths, tex

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub. Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations.

# 1:17 pm / github, matt-biddulph, recruiting, socialgraph

ElasticSearch: Your Data, Your Search. A neat example of how ElasticSearch’s schemaless indexes and native JSON support make it ridiculously easy to index different types of data and run queries across them.

# 3:22 pm / elasticsearch, java, json, schemaless, search

Around the World by Zeppelin. If you’re in the UK, you have four days left to catch this fantastic 90 minute documentary on iPlayer. It covers the first ever flight around the world, in the Graf Zeppelin in 1929, from the point of view of Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, a reporter for the Hearst media empire and the only woman on the voyage. The archive footage is incredible.

# 10:37 pm / bbc, documentary, zeppelins