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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Feel free to browse... Dipping into the data poolIn last week's column, we talked about data published by the Census folks and available on the Web. The government-funded data meme continues with this site submitted by local data lover Geoffrey W. Patton, Ph.D, at the University of South Florida. This Web-based, free application helps us "understand complex relationships between environments, places and people." And it does it very well indeed. The killer feature is the map you can draw yourself while applying data sets, such as agricultural, biological and transportation, over the map. Slice and dice away, baby. Even more factsThe Glossarist bills itself as "a searchable and categorized directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries." How clinical. And, I suppose, it could be deemed as such. But during my visit, I was introduced to a "Rasta, Patois and Reggae" glossary, and a "World Music Instruments" collection. It's pure fun. It's got a Yahoo-ish hierarchy to almost 6,000 entries. It's bookmarkable by anybody's standards. A spam stopper?Because I have nothing better to do with my time than to fiddle with odd operating systems and languages and file my columns late, I get to crash test tools such as Vipul's Razor. It's a geeky tool that helps block unwanted e-mail from unscrupulous sources. The idea is each e-mail has a unique footprint. And if it is spam, you send it to a central service that keeps track of such things. When enough folks moan about mail from a particular source that looks the same, it's flagged as spam. So if you use this free service, theoretically your daily dose of unwanted mail drops. There's a bit more to it that that but you get the gist of it. Currently, it works on Windows Outlook 2000 or XP. Outlook Express folks will have to wait, though it's apparently coming soon. Organic typeI'm openly weeping at the wonder of this Flash-based site. Folks from adjoining offices are bringing me tea and sympathy. Check out the ultra groovy ASCII-O-Matic, which takes an image and converts it to super-low resolution text. Upload your own images if the stock ones don't cut it for you. The visual composer is pretty good, but my musical abilities are limited to hitting Play on my iPod. This one's visually cool and interactively entertaining. Speed checkNetworking folks flat out lie to us humans all the time. When was the last time you actually got the theoretical 56k out of your dialup connection? Think you're getting 100Mb out of that local area network connection at your office? Dream on. And, worst of all, how would you know what your connection speed is? If you find yourself mumbling, "Boy, the Net's slow tonight," this free application is for you. It keeps track of all kinds of statistics about your connection while providing instant feedback on how things are flowing. This application for the connection curious is Windows only. And it looks like it has been fixed to work with Windows XP, too.
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From Tech Times
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