Tag clouds are a pretty popular way of displaying and indexing data, but they’re not without their faults. I added a tag cloud to a helpdesk system I created and while it works well, it eventually suffered from a common tag cloud problem: one tag had been used much more frequently than the other and the resultant cloud had one big tag and a million tiny tags. The way to solve the problem is through weighting the data.

A popular way of weighting the data is to apply a logarithmic scale to the data. Google turns up a bunch of different ways to accomplish this, but I’m not satisfied by any of them. Most solutions rely on grouping the data into steps, and performing a …

Holycrap. It’s just come to my attention that there’s a new cave in album coming down the pike. I was just listening to them yesterday and tried seeing if there were any updates, but couldn’t find anything.

This has been near the top of my wishlist for a while (basically since they announced they were going on hiatus), and now it means the planets are aligned and I have to make another big wish, so here goes…

I wish I had a bajillion dollars.

There, I said it. Now, as soon as google figures out how much that is, I’ll be all set.

NEWS FLASH: Lars Ulrich Illegally Downloaded His Own Album.

Now I’ve heard everything. That article also has a clip recorded when their documentary, Some Kind of Monster, came out. I saw that movie primarily to confirm my suspicions that the worst decision Metallica ever made was to let Lars Ulrich be their drummer. I was right.

In the youtube video, Lars admits he’s a control freak, and it comes as no surprise. He has been the posterboy for the industry’s witch-hunt on filesharing. His argument was that filesharing is tantamount to stealing, yet somehow he has the “right to download Death Magnetic for free.” Lars can’t have his cake and eat it too. He wants to infinite control of Metallica even if that …

For a couple years now, I’ve been dabbling in web-based database projects developed in PHP. After a while, I’d grown tired of PHP and in doing some work with Python scripts, I realized python just made a lot more sense to my brain than other languages—perl looks like a Martian language and ruby feels backwards to me.

So I set off looking at some of the offerings for web-development in python. One project that looked quite promising was django. (Having spent a large chunk of time playing jazz music, I couldn’t help but love a web-framework named after a jazz legend.) After running through a couple tutorials, I’d made up my mind.

This website is my first django project, and although I’ve …