Yearly Archives: 2009

Side by side: Python, Common Lisp, Clojure

By gavin | Published: November 25, 2009
UPDATE: Find the rest of the code at http://bitbucket.org/gavinmcgovern/clj-bayes/. My holiday project (of the sort that doesn’t involve cooking at least) is porting the Bayesian spam code from Peter Seibel’s great book “Practical Common Lisp” to Clojure. This will be a big part of the next-gen Big In Twitter that’s slowly coming together. Although I’ve been [...]
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Google’s Chrome OS is pessimistic

By gavin | Published: November 22, 2009
Listening to the motivation behind Google’s Chrome OS I was struck by how pessimistic it sounds. What do you get in an OS designed for tomorrow’s netbooks? You get a lot less. You’ll more than likely run it on a very cheap feeling plastic computer. Keep in mind today’s $300-400 netbook isn’t what Google is [...]
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San Francisco 1958 on Vimeo

By gavin | Published: October 30, 2009
San Francisco 1958 from Jeff Altman on Vimeo. A relaxing way to start Friday. Nice soundtrack too.
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Big in Twitter is offline for good

By gavin | Published: October 27, 2009
Remember that? Big In Twitter was a little hack I threw together earlier this year. Briefly, it collected band names and searched for them on Twitter and tracked the number of mentions and where (geographically speaking) they were being mentioned. However I’m no longer interested in pursuing this particular solution. As a post-mortem, I’d say you [...]
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The Pencil

By gavin | Published: October 22, 2009
Words such as “fantastical,” “enigmatic” and “breathtaking,” often accompany detailed shots of their coveted writing utensils, thus painting a portrait of these collector’s world. A Time To Get finds some great photography from the pencil collector’s world.
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Tungsten from H&FJ

By gavin | Published: September 16, 2009
It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another. Works for me. Check out the new font Tungsten from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
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Time to bring back the briefcase?

By gavin | Published: September 2, 2009
That ballistic nylon every single laptop bag manufacturer uses is getting kinda boring. Sure you can get whatever color combo your heart desires–big deal. Has no style. Surely this “attache” fits a MacBook Pro? Attache. Sounds so much better than messenger bag.
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A Delicious Visualization

By gavin | Published: August 24, 2009
“Continuing my experiments using Sunflow for web data-based visualizations, I recently finished one using data from my delicious bookmark collection. By popular demand, here’s a brief run-down of the process I used to make it.” Kyle Buza makes something very cool using Delicious, Python, ObjC, a gravity simulation and renders it all in Sunflow.
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Tangible Objects & Font Exploration

By gavin | Published: July 31, 2009
“Fontplore is an interactive application designed for searching and exploring font databases.Fontplore helps you to easily find the right typeface for your project in a collection of several thousands of fonts. It lets you browse, preview, compare and print the fonts you are interested in. And the clou is: It does all that on an [...]
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MAYA Design, U-forms and Today’s Document Databases

By gavin | Published: July 21, 2009
I’m intrigued by MAYA Design and their portfolio. They continue to craft novel, unique and useful environments, products and ideas, spinning off companies, both for profit and not, and publishing their research. In particular, I like how MAYA’s Research practice takes the notion of “design” and applies it all the way “up”. Pervasive, ubiquitous computing is [...]
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