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A False Sense of Security with Test-driven Development
Test driven development is great as long as you have proper tests. The problem is that it’s very hard to predict enough edge cases to cover the field of possible scenarios. Code coverage analysis will help developers make sure all code blocks are executed, but it doesn’t do anything to ensure an application correctly handles…
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Democracy 2.0 with Micro-voting
The democratic process hasn’t changed much. The public elects a representative, representatives make decisions. The average citizen is essentially limited to three tools for affecting change. First, we elect the representatives who best convince us they’ll make the decisions we would want them make. Second, we can send correspondence to our representatives hoping to influence…
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Getting Wikipedia Summary from the Page ID
While working on my forthcoming checkin.to project, I needed to use the MediaWiki API to get the summary paragraph of wikipedia articles pertaining to places. Checkin.to relies on the Yahoo Where On Earth Identifiers (woeid). Yahoo also conveniently offers a concordance API so from the woeid I get the Geonames ID and the Wikipedia page…
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A continuous, blocking python interface for streaming Flickr photos
As I explained in my last post, Yahoo! claims their Firehose is a real-time streaming API and it’s not. So to make life a bit easier for app developers I wrote a python wrapper that provides a continuous blocking interface to the Flickr polling API. Effectively it emulates a streaming API by stringing together frequent…
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The Yahoo Firehose "feed" isn’t a feed at all
The web has been on a big trend of real-time for the past couple years. Friendfeed was one of the first services to show real-time updates across your social network and real-time feeds took the stage in a big way when Twitter started its streaming API. In April, Yahoo! announced it’s Firehose API claiming “it…
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Resolving HTTP Redirects in Python
Since everyone is using short urls these days and sometimes we just need to know where that URL leads I wrote this handy little function which finds out for us. Redirection can be a kind of tricky thing. We have 301 (“permanent”) and 302 (“temporary”) style status codes and multiple layers of redirection. I think…
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Simple Skew Animation with ActionScript 3
I couldn’t find any good examples on simple tween of a skew effect in actionscipt 3 so I thought I’d share what I came up with. The problem is that skew is not a property on the MovieClip like x or height or others you’re used to tweening with fl.transitions. To apply a skew effect…
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Three Alternative Inputs for Video Games
When you use a computer enough it can start to feel like the mouse becomes a part of you. Very quickly you forget about consciously moving it right or left to control the cursor as it becomes second nature. Essentially it is an extension of your physical self, with which you manipulate the screen as…
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Visualizing Wikipedia As One Large Node Graph
As a network visualization tool, node graphs are an intuitive method of communicating relationships between entities. I’ve been thinking a lot about the semantic web lately and thought it would be cool to visualize all of the links between articles in Wikipedia at once. I want to pull back and get the 10,000 foot view…