Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

I could happily spend hours playing with this. But won't, as I'm supposed to be working.
inudge
You can build up quite decent-sounding sound assemblies, very quickly and easily.

This is simultaneously completely wonderful and completely pointless, I think. Basically it's a Google Maps interface denuded of everything except the text. So you can zoom, drag and all the usual kinds of stuff, but you only see the names of things, not their shapes, terrain, linkages, etc. Hmm, writing it down like that doesn't really convey... well, have a play, zoom in on your home town, see what you think. Anyway, I like it.

The only clue as to its intent is hidden in an HTML comment:

"Seasoned explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen, set down mountains and islands on their charts where there was nothing but empty sky ... Expeditions sent out later to verify these new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further confusing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys, thereby observing a constant recreding [sic] of the image, did they prove that the land was not there at all."

Via info_sthetics, source of lots of strange and interesting things.

A fairly self-explanatory web app toy that does the connectivity thing with musical collaborations. Who would have thought that the shortest path from Pink Floyd to Men at Work passed through Roxy Music and Jethro Tull?

It's powered by the excellent MusicBrainz database, which I thoroughly recommend in its own right.

So far, after a handful of queries, the longest shortest chain I've found is 16, from the aforementioned Floyd to The Knife (which goes via Motorhead...). But I'm sure you can do much better.

The author's interesting (to me, at least) blog post about it is here.

Courtesy of ninthcouncil , ta.

Edited to add: Hmm, and now it's:


This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* kill (4x)
* dead (3x)
* dangerous (1x)

This post itself has driven up the kill and death counts (and there's some more), but where did dangerous come from?

Google may be increasingly evil, but now they allow you to generate a chart simply by passing a bunch of url parameters. How potenitally useful is that? (Very.)

To show what I mean, suppose I want to include a little pie chart in this post. Rather than go off and prepare it in some sort of charting application, I can just write it as an image tag like this:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Tasty|Pie">

which comes out like:



Of course this is even more powerful if you're using it programmatically to display interactively-generated data. As well as pie charts, you can do line, bar, Venn diagrams and scatter plots. And of course you can specify colour, fill pattern and all that sort of gubbins. All in the url parameters!

I now need to think of lots of exciting ways to use this facility. But, alas, just now I'm too busy to.

I've created a new LJ tool thing which basically compares your friends and friend-ofs lists and lists the differences. This is all just information that's on your profile page anyway, but it makes it easier to see who of your friends haven't friended you, etc. Also of course you can check it for people than other yourself. Gives a flavour of who's stalking / being stalked by whom, who not-so-secretly hates whom, etc etc...

This is fairly pointless, but then it didnt take very long to write, so hey.

The usual caveat about how if you've got loads of friends it might take a while to chug, and about how the data is cached so doesn't reflect very recent changes, apply. Any requests for additional features / improvements / bugs etc?

Here's mine:
http://www.holkar.net/cgi-bin/undying/also_friend.pl?which_username=undyingking

Almost certainly, more than mine:

This is quite interesting I think:

http://www.unifr.ch/physics/mm/work/lj/find_friends.php?name=undyingking&sort_type=on

It's like my FriendFinder only it uses a PageRank-like algorithm to weight 'votes' for suggested friends. It throws up a weird artefact right near the top, with the mysterious annedick hideously overpowered thanks I guess to being one of only two friends of Thomas Disch.

Excellent, this seems to be OK now. Lots of thanks to wimble, no thanks to chrisvenus ;-)

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Get your own tag cloud from the UKG TagClouder!

I've done a wee tweak to the TagClouder to make it work via GET, ie. you can type an url like:

http://www.holkar.net/cgi-bin/undying/tag_clouder.pl?which_username=undyingking

(replacing undyingking with your own username or whatever!) and that takes you straight to the tag cloud result. You can even bookmark it if you like!