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.

Revision Control

If you worked on software in collaboration with multiple developers, then you've probably used (or wished you used) some sort of revision control system. The Google Search Volume Index plot below suggests some trends surrounding the currently available tools.
(Note: by no means is this very scientific, due to the fact that people searching with these terms could have been searching for something entirely different.)
CVS, although huge in its time, is on the decline, while SVN, Git, and Mercurial are on the rise. I have used plenty of CVS and SVN to be ready for change. I am now using Git which I have really liked so far. If you have already been using SVN as I had, I would recommend the Git-SVN Crash course to get started quickly.

Google Releases a Browser

Google Chrome is the new Web browser that was just released for Windows. It is much faster, elegant, and easy to use than Firefox, IE, and Safari. After using it for a day, the I love everything about it except for the following:

• It is not available for Mac yet (currently only for Windows)
• Nifty plug-ins are not yet available (Firefox wins here)

I would predict that the above shortcomings will be quickly overcome and Google will end up having the dominant browser.  If interested, learn more about the features of Google Chrome or why they decided to build a new browser.  

Update: as you probably guessed, development of Mac and Linux versions is underway.  Sign up to be notified when Mac or Linux versions are ready for download. 

Google's Picassa 3 (Beta)

Picassa 3 is now available which has some pretty nice updates. Watch the video above to hear about what has been added. I just wish they had a Mac version available as it is superior to iPhoto. (Note: The current release is still Beta, which means that there will likely be a few minor bugs here and there.)

Eclipse for Web Development

Well, I've been doing quite a bit of programming lately, however, it has been in a number of different languages. Naturally, I have considered Eclipse as a possible editor. Vanilla Eclipse is usually geared to toward Java development and can become tricky and tedious to setup for Web Development (hence the rise of Aptana). Eclipse can be great to work with, but only when you can get it working how you'd like. The following update sites may be helpful to get Eclipse setup how you hope to have it:

JavaScript
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall (JSEclipse)

Python
http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ (PyDev)

PHP
http://update.phpeclipse.net/update/nightly (PHPEclipse)

Java Tapestry
http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update (Maven2)
http://jettylauncher.sourceforge.net/updates (Jetty)

Currently, all of these plugins can be loaded into a single installation of Eclipse Europa. However, I'm not sure that they are all compatible with Ganymede (latest version of Eclipse).

ForwardTrack

ForwardTrack is an open source tool (now entirely written in php) that allows email campaigns to be tracked and mapped as they are forwarded from person to person. This is definitely useful as it reveals the spread of information and some of the underlying social network.

Political Campaign Contributions

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) requires that all campaign contributions over $200 (per donor) be reported publicly. The reported information includes the donor's name, job title, zip code, and even address. All of it, since 2001 is available electronically via FTP at ftp://ftp.fec.gov/FEC/electronic/.

In collaboration with Political Scientists here at BYU we have been performing record linkage (aka. entity resolution) on this data, so that they will be able to more accurately perform their studies.

Fundrace
On a related note, fundrace.org has created an interesting mashup (shown below) that maps donors on a Google map colored by the party or candidate donated to. It also, reveals donor information and appears do do some coarse record linkage.


FEC Maps
Additionally, the FEC itself has started to produce maps both for the Presidential Election and House and Senate Elections.  The maps they provide aggregate the donated funds by state, party, and candidate.

Freebase

At the SIP Symposium (at Stanford), there were some guys from the Freebase development crew. This was my first exposure to Freebase and I was intrigued with the idea. According to Kurt Bollacker (the Chief Scientist) the reason they were at the symposium was to "get people using our data". I also learned from him that they were VC funded and currently had about 60 developers.

They have built upon the existing data sources, such as Wikipedia, and have added structurally typed data to go along with it. The resulting data repository is then easily accessible via the Freebase API.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with it.

Firefox 3 Extensions

As Firefox 3 nears graduation from the Beta phase, many of the great extensions are finally becoming available. Here are links to the extensions that I find essential:

• Firebug (version 1.1 Beta)
• Web Developer (version 1.1.5)
  
• SiteSays (version 1.1.0)

What extensions do you use?

Bandwidth

The Bandwidth Place is a nice site that tests the bandwidth available with you current network connection.

Star Rating Widget

Here is a rating widget and how to use it. It can be used for collecting ratings from website visitors. Typically, it will be used for five-star rating, but you can pass it any number, so that it can be used as an n-star rating widget.

Social Capital Simulation Updated

The social capital simulation has been improved! The usability has been improved, preset examples have been added, and additional information in now reported.

Topic Tool

Today, I put together a web page topic tool by using the web service that Nathan Davis made available. The tool takes in one or more web pages (i.e., a list of URLs) and then extracts the topics given the text on the web pages. The topics, or more accurately, the most likely topic components are extracted using an algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

One potential use is for quickly generating blogger profiles to be used for implicit affinity networks. You can try it out at:

http://dml.cs.byu.edu/matthewsmith/tools/topictool/

Nathan uses his web service to make the query expansion service for Google searches called GooEgg.

Subversion

Handy Links for Subversion:
Download Subversion Client
http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html

IP Country Lookup Tool

Here is a link to a tool that I created to lookup the countries for all of the IP addresses in a mess of text.

Exploring Bayesian Methods

Bayesian methods can be used to deal with uncertainty.
Here are some links that help to explore the area:
Bayesian Inference
Empirical Bayes
Hierarchal Bayes
Bayesian Network
Bayes' theorem

Statistics Topics
Expected Value
Likelihood
Mean
Variance
Mean Squared Error (MSE)
Posterior Probability
Conditional, Joint, and Marginal Probability
Utility Functions (Link  2)

Distributions
Normal
Gamma
Poisson
Beta
Binomial
Conjugate Prior

Other Related Topics
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
Simulated Annealing
Tabu Search (Link 2)
Kalman Filter (Link 2)
Particle Filter
Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG)
Markovian Random Field (MRF)
EM Algorithm (Bayesian Structural EM - Friedman)
Reading List of Bayesian Methods

Helpful Software
JavaBayes
Graphviz

Useful Java Libraries
Colt
Tomato

Website Log Analyzers

AWStats | Comparison to the below Log analyzers
Analog
Webalizer

Web Log Analysis Tools
There are several free log analysis tools. AWStats seems to be the most popular open source tool, however, I'm not sure if it is as nice as some of the commercial products such as Omniture's SiteCatalyst.