magpie's shiny things

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?

Last week I had one of those days. There was noth­ing urgent on deck. Not that there’s not a lot of stuff hang­ing around. It’s just that I was stuck wait­ing for a lot of things that I don’t con­trol. So rather then bang my head against a lot of stalled projects I took the day off to explore. 

It’s good to once in a while take a day off from the cur­rent work, and pop my head up above the cubi­cle walls. (No i don’t real­ly have a cubi­cle — the Magpie cen­ter for world dom­i­na­tion is much bet­ter pro­vi­sioned that that.) 

I have an ongo­ing list of ‘cool’ and ‘inter­est­ing’ and ‘not urgent but try to find’ things. 

I looked at some job inter­view sto­ries, played with Eclipse, and browsed Etsy, and read a ton of sewing machine reviews. (I have a bad feeling … )

And what ever else passed my way. Because some­times it’s impor­tant to have look around at the world beyond the walls of the fort. You know?

I caught up on all the stuff I’ve not been read­ing in the feed-reader. I end­ed up ditch­ing anoth­er set of feeds. I think weed­ing on a reg­u­lar basis is impor­tant. Often a month or two or read­ing a blog is suf­fi­cient to fig­ure out what the author’s main point is and what issues you are going to want to fol­low in that blog. Then when a par­tic­u­lar top­ic is cir­cu­lat­ing you can go back and check in with that writer and get their take on it. But you don’t have to read it every­day. Does that make sense?

Smashing Magazine con­tin­ues to impress. List blogs are often dull and unin­for­ma­tive. But these guys (gals?) do it right. Pick a top­ic — go look at as many of the tools, resources, posts, what have you, as they can find. Give each one a good look­ing over and write it all up. Not just a bunch of links but insight com­ments about what you’re look­ing at — com­ments informed by expe­ri­ence in the field. For a design new­bie like me it’s invaluable.

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing my hus­band’s weath­er data pages from our old host­ing sys­tem to our new host­ing sys­tem. As part of the new look I’m adding links to some of the sources of weath­er infor­ma­tion that he uses reg­u­lar­ly. One of these is the NOAA local fore­cast page. A few days after he sent me the URL he sent me an updat­ed one:

He writes:

I’d always kept a favorite link to the NOAA web site, where I get weath­er fore­casts. they have a lit­tle click­able map where you can click your spe­cif­ic loca­tion and get a spe­cif­ic fore­cast. but it’s a lit­tle map, and accu­ra­cy is dif­fi­cult, so I just clicked around ’til it said ‘5 miles east of duvall’ and fig­ured that was close enough. But no (OCD? me? not a chance, baby!). a few days ago I hap­pened to notice that the URL is obvi­ous­ly encod­ing the dec­i­mal lat-long in a sim­ple to read (and mod­i­fy!) format:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/...
&textField1=47.7425&textField2=-121.98444
textField1 and textField2 are obvi­ous­ly lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, in dec­i­mal for­mat. so I went to our local coun­ty GIS sys­tem, found my house, got the exact lat/long and cus­tomized the URL in my favorites fold­er. tada: a url that is cus­tomized ‘exact­ly’ for our loca­tion. not that it makes much dif­fer­ence, but it illus­trates the use­ful­ness of trans­par­ent URLs. 

Pretty slick huh? The URL is prob­a­bly not eas­i­ly read­able to most peo­ple to to a weath­er geek the lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude num­bers are both mean­ing­ful and recognizable.