James Tauber

journeyman of some

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James Tauber's Blog 2007/02/09

Introducing Cats or Dogs

Okay, just under four hours later, here it is...

Cats or Dogs

Have fun! I look forward to the results.

by jtauber : Created on Feb. 9, 2007 : Last modified Feb. 11, 2007 : Categories cats_or_dogs : 12 comments (permalink)

New Little Site Coming Soon

A few years ago, I read about a phenomenon that I always wanted to test for myself, but I could never work out how.

Well, tonight, over dinner, I came up with an idea for a fun little website that would test for said phenomenon and also a bunch of other interesting stuff.

So armed with half a bottle of Coke Zero and a can of Red Bull, I'm going to spend this evening coding it up.

What is it? Well, you'll just have to wait a few hours and see :-)

by jtauber : Created on Feb. 9, 2007 : Last modified Feb. 9, 2007 : Categories cats_or_dogs : 2 comments (permalink)

Yahoo Pipes and Reading Plans

Congratulations to the team behind Yahoo Pipes. As I've said to a lot of people recently, I still think Yahoo is a very exciting company to watch.

One thing I'd like to see possible with Pipes, which I couldn't work out how to do in the 10 minutes I played with it, is reading plans of the sort I described back in a post in 2004.

I've thought about reading plans like this for the Poincare Project. Basically, each reader gets a feed specific to their start date which, starting from the beginning, just adds a new item at some set interval, either daily or weekly.

Recently it occurred to me that this would also work for things like running plans as well (the "5K in 5 weeks" sort of thing).

So the pipe would take as an input a feed, a start date and an interval and introduce the nth oldest item in the feed on day = start date + (n -1) * interval. The input feed would have to be a complete feed, not a sliding window.

But I couldn't see quite how to do this in Pipes as it currently stands.

Of course, one could whip up a quick website that did the same thing too. Hmm, maybe someone already offers this service.

by jtauber : Created on Feb. 9, 2007 : Last modified Feb. 9, 2007 : 1 comment (permalink)