Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 items tagged “tomarmitage”

2009

Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like. Useful advice from Tom Armitage on the exploratory development approach required when starting to build a project against a large, complex dataset. Tips include making sure you have a REPL to hand and using tools like gRaphael to generate graphs against pretty much everything, since until you’ve seen their shape you won’t know if they are interesting or not. # 26th October 2009, 9:34 am

Learning to Think Like A Programmer. Outstanding advice aimed mainly at journalists, but important to anyone who collects information for a living and might want it to be automatically processed at some point in the future. # 22nd January 2009, 6:06 pm

2008

The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word “Internet” in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says “Internet”. So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word “Internet” in its name—a browser that seemingly can’t be beat no matter how hard we try—than the Internet Company itself making a browser?

Tom Armitage # 3rd September 2008, 10:19 am

Consumption is also about choice. Tom Armitage’s thoughtful response to Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 talk on television as “cognitive surplus”. # 1st May 2008, 1:01 pm

Making bridges talk. Tom Armitage hooked Tower Bridge up to Twitter: “I am closing after the MV Dixie Queen has passed Upstream”. # 4th March 2008, 11:07 pm

2007

The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago. # 6th July 2007, 12:02 pm