my unavoidable homepage
Feb 21 2007
You’ve got to check this out.
distellamap is an artistically beautiful project by Ben Fry, where he visually deconstructs some Atari 2600 games’ source code. The result is a visual map of all the source code, jumps and blocks of bytes representing the games’ visual elements, like letters or characters. Just hit the link and see for yourselves. Gorgeous.
Feb 15 2007
Now and then, something incredible appears on the Web. This time, it’s Yahoo! Pipes, the new mash-up service from Yahoo!. Those guys are really improving their services and are a major competitor of Google.
Anyhow, this is awesome. Nowadays news are feeds, images are feeds, blogs are feeds, comments are feeds, hell… even feeds are feeds. Syndication has really improved universally understood data transfer, and seems that its potential is unlimited.
Pipes uses a very common Unix feature: pipes! Yeah, original huh? Well, Unix pipes are a way to connect 2 applications, redirecting the output of one to the input of another, thus creating a constant stream of information that we can use to output new data derived from the original data.
Yahoo! Pipes uses that same concept but with feeds. Imagine you read the New York Times’ headlines news feed. Those are just simple headlines. How about reading those headlines, while watching images associatied with it? Here it is, the New York Times thru Flickr feed. It was easily made with Pipes through a visual editor. Just have a look at its “source code“:
Now that’s some serious information piping.
This is a new service, and more and more interesting feeds are appearing every day, and I think this will bring us many new ways of distributing information. Here are some pipes and links:
I’ll sure be playing with these beatutiful pipes when I get some time and imagination.
Feb 12 2007
As usual, I was reading my favorite time-saving blog, when I reached the 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen list of Wordpress themes I probably hadn’t seen. I gave it a quick look, and immediately one of them called my attention. The theme on which your are now reading this blog is called Hemingway and was created by Kyle Neath.
It has beautiful lettering and simplicity in design, allowing for content to really matter. It was just the thing I was looking for when I first idealized my blog. I’m on design ecstasy right now.
By the way, my previous theme is also on that list.
