Mike Singleton

Interactive Historical NYC Maps

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:42:00 -0500

The NYPL maps division has done an amazing job digitizing historical maps and atlases (of varying degrees of completion). They provide exports of buildings, districts, POIs, transport and hydrography in ESRI Shapefile, WMS, KML, CSV, GeoRSS. They also provide a url where they host tiles themselves.

This makes it trivial to add these atlases as a layer on any map, I made a demo including 1857, 1916, and 1924 maps that you can play with here (try toggling to layers).

If you’re into this type of thing, consider contributing to their map rectification project

Did You Mean?

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:25:15 -0500

I took some time this weekend to hack together a simple suggestion engine called ‘Did You Mean?’.

Check out the demo

It creates a BK-Tree of words you provide, and compares those words to a query using Levenshtein Distance (edit distance). It’s basic, but useful for small dictionaries of words when you want to let the user know they’ve likely made a typo.

https://github.com/msingleton/DidYouMean

Reading Harder

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:39:02 -0500

Over the last few years my reading retention has slowly regressed. I find myself re-reading emails, unable to finish long form articles, and generally skimming anything I set my eyes on. It feels like my brain has taken the way I read twitter and applied it to all text.

So this year I’m focusing on reading harder (term borrowed from @hotdogsladies). More books, more articles, and more focus. I’m paring down the number of people I follow, filtering out email I know I won’t read, and giving text the time and attention required for retention.

Test Accounts

Fri, 20 May 2011 23:02:58 -0400

It’s always a good idea to give your test accounts the first name:

Array length caching

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:43:00 -0400

Remember to cache your array lengths when iterating over big arrays (30-50% optimization with my tests in Chrome 12 and Firefox 4)

for(var i = 0, l = bigArray.length; i < l; i++) { // do something}

HTML5 Goodies

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 01:23:00 -0400

HTML5 Goodies:

The W3C has a great page hosting HTML5 logo resources. Grab a badge for your site, a shirt, or some free stickers and help fight the good fight.

http://www.w3.org/html/logo

Shady Characters

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:48:00 -0400

Shady Characters:

Shady Characters is a stunningly detailed series of articles profiling uncommon punctuation. The first three part series went through the dramatic history of the Pilcrow touching on religon, politics and everything in between.

This week: the Interrobang!?

shadycharacters.co.uk

Back to tumblr

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:09:07 -0400

After giving wordpress a fair shot, I’ve decided to come back to tumblr. Not sure if i’ll be porting my old posts over, though currently feeling unlikely.

"It is infinitely harder for a platform to spawn value added applications than it is for an..."

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:42:22 -0500

“It is infinitely harder for a platform to spawn value added applications than it is for an application to evolve into being a platform.”

- Andrew Weissman