Two weeks ago, AOL mistakenly released about 3 months worth of search logs. In the data, the user-ids were replaced with numbers, in an attempt to “anonymize” the data. Despite this anonymization, the release of this data clearly violated the privacy of a great number of AOL users, and AOL quickly stopped publishing the data, [...]

After watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Here is my report.
Mark Sloan’s Wild Weird and Wonderful, The American Circus 1901-1927 is my favorite book [...]

What are Tag Clouds, you ask? Here’s a sample.
I’ve provided some tips for building Tag Clouds at O’Reilly’s ONLamp website.
This is an excerpt from my longer article, Building Tag Clouds with Perl and PHP.

When I told my family I wrote an article about tag clouds for O’Reilly, they went “Huh? What’s that?” But then again, these are the same folks that thought I was writing an article for this guy, instead of these guys.
Anyway, this is a tag cloud:

.cbox { padding: 12px; background: #f0f0f0; }
.cdiv {margin-top: 0; [...]

Stranger from the Depths, by Gerry Turner, 1967. Abridged version 1970.
This was my favorite book for much of my childhood (until about 8th grade). I read the Scholastic abridged version a kajillion times. At least a couple dozen. One of the only science fiction books of my youth whose cover & blurb [...]

Here’s a new coverpop featuring the works of my favorite sf author of his generation, Philip K. Dick. The covers were provided by the Philip K. Dick cover gallery, courtesy of Jason Koornick.

I live near one of the coolest public libraries in Los Angeles, Glendale’s Brand Library and Art Center.
Here are a 10 good reasons why you should go.
1. The library sits at the the top of Western Ave in a beautiful park overlooking the valley. Excellent for picnic lunches.
2. The library specializes in music [...]

The Jesuit Polymath Athanasius Kircher is a personal hero of mine. I constructed this Kircherian coverpop, which contains a collection of images from his books, which covered such varied subjects as geology, magnetism, architecture, music, egypt, and china. Stanford University Library’s Department of Special Collections has graciously granted me permission to use these [...]

Yesterday I did a lecture for the USC chapter of SIGGRAPH entitled “Interactive Art & Toys,” in which I demonstrated how to build a Karl Marx Paddleball toy in Flash.
As a gift, chapter president Pamela Fox presented me with this really cool book:

Timeless Toys : Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them by Tim [...]

No longer a rough cut – Flickr Hacks is now in print!
Brian Sawyer, our excellent editor, posted this image, which constitutes proof.
There will be some signed copies of Flickr Hacks at the Flickr 2nd Birthday Bash this saturday, as well as some other surprises which I had a hand in. Sadly, I’m teaching my [...]