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?