links for 2009-03-11


  • Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started below.
  • Redis is a key-value database. It is similar to memcached but the dataset is not volatile, and values can be strings, exactly like in memcached, but also lists and sets with atomic operations to push/pop elements.

    In order to be very fast but at the same time persistent the whole dataset is taken in memory and from time to time and/or when a number of changes to the dataset are performed it is written asynchronously on disk. You may lost the last few queries that is acceptable in many applications but it is as fast as an in memory DB (beta 6 of Redis includes initial support for master-slave replication in order to solve this problem by redundancy).

    Compression and other interesting features are a work in progress. Redis is written in ANSI C and works in most POSIX systems like Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and so on. It is licensed under the GPL version 2 license.

  • CAKE is a scenegraph library for the canvas tag. You could say that it's like SVG sans the XML and not be too far off. This page is a showcase of CAKE feature tests.
  • Maps From Scratch was a 2009 E-Tech Tutorial by Stamen’s Michal Migurski and Shawn Allen. We’ve collected some of our notes and relevant links here where they might be useful to people who didn’t attend the tutorial but would like a bit of hand-holding in generating your own maps from geo data.