Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials | Smashing Magazine

I’m always struggling with the various regular expressions, even after using them for over a decade. Maybe it’s because of all the variations (perl vs. your favorite windows-based text editor’s flavor of regexps vs. bash vs. you-name-it). Maybe it’s because I’m just plain getting old. (nah!) Although better known for photography tips, Smashing Magazine has a nice collection of tutorials on RegExps – Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials.

how to be happy in business | what consumes me

Bud Caddell (via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bud_caddell/3592960452/sizes/m/) Thanks to LifeHacker (via Kottle), Bud Caddell has shown how to be happy in business by identifying (hopefully!) the area where what you love overlaps what you know overlaps what you can get paid for. I read about this some years back as practical advice one parent gave her child, but like the simplicty (and labels – what can I say, I love labels – they order my life :) of Caddell’s venn diagram.

Showcase: A High Schooler Views Her Community | Lens Blog | NYTimes.com

Touching pictures taken by a graduating high-school student in Montgomery, AL. Aside from the pictures she took, the commentary shows the struggles (in more ways than one) she is going through.

New R script: Plot Nike+ runs

I’ve been playing around with R and Nike+ and thought I’d put the two together, so I wrote a little R script that pulls your public data from the Nike+ website and plot out the graphs. It’s a little rough around the edges (see below for a list of enhancements/fixes), but it generates plots. I like SlowGeek, but found their smoothing function a bit too “smooth” – it was shaving 1/2 mph from my run speeds.

Sebastião Salgado - Back to Nature, in Pictures and Action [NYTimes.com]

Photo of S. Salgado by Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times Sebastião Salgado spends weeks with remote tribes before taking a picture. He hikes 500 miles to be where he needs to be for the shot he has in his mind. All marks of a clearly dedicated and driven photographer. With this intensity and determination, when he says “I came here for special things, but my head is there, my body is there"…“I might be sleeping in a hotel room in Los Angeles, but in my mind I am always editing pictures” you can believe it.

MbUnit - Generative Unit Test Framework for the .NET Framework

Found this interesting app to create unit tests called MbUnit - Generative Unit Test Framework for the .NET Framework. Need to look into it more, but it sounds like a useful tool.

Poly9 Globe: JavaScript-driven 3D globe app

Found a JavaScript-driven Flash-based globe application for simple GIS apps, called Poly9 Globe: the lightest, most compatible 3D globe on the web. They have full API documentation, too. Pretty slick, if your requirements are simple.

Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web | Video on TED.com

The next WWW will be linked data, rather than linked documents, according to guru Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web | Video on TED.com. [Originally seen on ReadWriteWeb’s blog post.]

User Interface Patterns

Since first reading the Gang-of-four’s book, I have thought patterns were a great idea. Now that I’m getting into design and data visualization more, I’m intrigued by the possibility of merging interface design with software patterns. Makes sense, don’t you think? So, when I found UI-patterns.com, I thought “yes! here’s the merging of the two disciplines/approaches. Great. Now if I can just merge these patterns with Tufte-based principles and OVID-based development, I should be able to come up with a potent app in any environment.

My running history via slowgeek.com

I recently found a post on the Nike+ forums that describes how to get the running history (in detail). It also shows how to access the data via slowgeek.com, a very slick adventure indeed! P.S. I was going to set up a running blog, but don’t know if I will now. Slowgeek.com gives me the data I was looking for, though I’m still itching to learn and use OpenFlashCharts!