Blog Posts Increasing and Cyclic

During the span of a year, the over 200 blogs aggregated above show very cyclic behavior. It shows very prominently that these bloggers post significantly more posts during the week rather than on the weekends.

Additionally, as time went on, these blogs as a group posted more frequently.

I would guess that the sink during December was caused by the Christmas holiday.

Christmas Gift Giving Tool

Christmas is a time for gift-giving --- sometimes, families and friends need a quick way to determine who gives to who. So, I created this little tool that allows families and friends to quickly enter the names of people (that will be giving and receiving gifts) to have gift-giving list automatically (and randomly) generated.


It is nice to have a tool like this so the lists can be generated early and gift-giving becomes that much easier --- you don't have to wait until somebody gets the old hat out and writes down everyone's name. Additionally, it seems to be more fair and is less complicated. ;)

The program was built using Python and Google App Engine.

LaTex: Vertical Text

Scientific publications in computer science are often created using LaTeX. Here is a little tip for making text appear vertically in Latex.
First, you need to include the following library:

\usepackage{rotating}

Next, you can use the sideways environment, as follows:

\begin{sideways}YOURTEXT\end{sideways}

Finally here is an example used within a table:

\begin{tabular}{|r|r|c|}\hline
\begin{sideways}Letter\end{sideways} & \begin{sideways}Frequency\end{sideways} & Words \\
\hline
A & 0.05 & Apple, Algebra, Altruistic, Angel \\
B & 0.45 & Basketball, Ballroom, Bear, Bountiful \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

Which produces:

Obama: 44th US President

Barack Obama has been elected as the next President of the United States of America. I enjoyed following the election coverage this season as it was particularly exciting. Although my first choice for President was Mitt Romney, I believe that Obama will work to unite the country and improve International relations.