Archives for November 2007

Better Explained is a web site cre­ated by Kalid Azad based on the idea that 

There’s always a bet­ter way to explain a topic. Insights are fluid, muta­ble, and work for dif­fer­ent people. 

He focuses on math and pro­gram­ming (web tech­nolo­gies) with a lit­tle bit of the kitchen sink thrown in.

His abil­ity to use a nar­ra­tive voice and the free­dom to add graph­ics put these expla­na­tions in a dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory from the more author­i­ta­tive voices heard on wikipedia but avoid the we have every­thing and here’s five ads too feel of about​.com.

His Another Look at Prime Numbers takes the oth­er­wise for math freaks only topic of these oddly behav­ing num­bers and looks at them from a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive Chemistry. Odd and amus­ing and likely to stay with you for while. 

While some experts quib­ble with a few of his state­ments. (Politely.) The ideas are made clear for the lay­man — and read­ing the com­ments will show you where the lit­tle gaps were cov­ered over.

Nice job.

I’ve got his two arti­cles on ver­sion con­trol queued up for “wait­ing around for other peo­ple” reading. 

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing a bunch of our old fam­ily web­site (Black Dog Farm) to a new server (Blackdog and Magpie.) It’s not the pret­ti­est web­site you’ll ever see but it serves well as a sandbox.

At the moment I“m work­ing on build­ing a new set of weather report­ing pages. We have a fairly com­plete set of weather obser­va­tion instru­ments and an old machine in the server cab­i­net that records that data from them. Here at the MCWD I can fire up a pro­gram called Virtual Weather Station and look at many (many) graphs, charts, and reports. The trick now is to get all that lovely data up on the web. (I’ll detail some of the strengths and weak­nesses of VWS in another post.)

In addi­tion to dis­play­ing our total geek­i­ness by hav­ing live weather report­ing on our web­site, we use the reported data to keep track of some of the highs and lows of rural life. Like power line destroy­ing winds and freez­ing temperatures. 

Today’s quandary is about what data to put where on which page and how to arrange it.

The main item on the first page is easy. VWS pro­vides a nice sum­mary graphic called “Broadcast” that is uploaded via ftp. 

But what to do with the rest of the space? In par­tic­u­lar what to do with the left col­umn? I’m torn between pro­vid­ing cool stuff for vis­i­tors, like a rotat­ing Northwest weather trivia and pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at the house. 

I find the con­cept of man­aged knowl­edge to be sort of like steam­punk. How the world would be if we had been able to hang onto some cher­ish anachronism. 

So why do I do it?