Tufte's Sparklines sparks discussion on ways to improve visual communications

Edward Tufte is one of the leading thinkers in how to visually present information. His latest stuff, on Sparklines, is showing up on lots of the feeds I'm reading tonight. via [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

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p dir=ltr> A "sparkline" is a very compact graph that you inline with …

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using it

Okay, now I'll have to write a 10-page article with it and see if my hand cramps...

Blogged on a Tablet PC

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Cross Pen Arrives!

My precious...

Blogged on a Tablet PC

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Dragons Over Middle-Earth in Flight Simulator?

Over on Richard Caetano's blog I see the Flight Simulator team has an SDK coming out. via [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

I'm not going to do it, but I bet you could make a cool add-on.

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Fawcette says programming has 40% greater unemployment than average

In a response to a NYT column on outsourcing, Jim Fawcette says " Unemployment in programming is 40 percent above the national average, despite the fact that the number of people in that profession has declined rapidly for four years, and salaries are down 15 percent." Nasty numbers, if true (and …

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Java as Baby Step

James Robertson thinks that Java is an interruption in the forward progress of software development....It is nice to see people returning to serious language research again. Efforts like the Feyerabend Project and more practically focused offshoots like OOPSLA’s Onward! track and the Post-Java Workshops (as well as increasing …

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U.S. Government Purchases World's Largest RAM Disk

JOEL JOHNSON -- The government has purchased a completely solid-state 2.5TB (terabyte) drive array from Texas Memory Systems... 

In related news, President Bush received a digital camera for his birthday.

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Putting the Fun Back In Programming

I know that I'm no longer untainted because I work in the big house, but I just don't get this. Do developers really want to build the same thing over and over, project to project, app to app or do they want to spend their time building cool, new stuff …

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Unit of measurement elected head of standards board

Sometimes I forget that the world is also a place of delightful whimsy. (Via Ben Hyde) via [Exploration Through Example]

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p dir="ltr"> Words can't express my delight. I used to count the smoots every day as I rode the Harvard Bridge to get to Community Boating.

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Enabling SSL On Your Server For Free

I have never really understood the machinations that you have to go through to enable SSL, but Scot Gellock has posted a script to simplify part of it, i.e. getting the certificate. And he does it with freely available tools, which is always a nice bonus.  via [Marquee de …

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