Boston [Still] Rocks
My internet radio station had it’s third birthday a couple months ago. I made a bunch of updates recently to Exploit Boston Radio so it’s up to 20 hours of (past and present) Boston area rock, pop and alternative bands. It streams 24 hours a day, every day. Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed by [...]
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The Boston T Party
I attended my first TypeCon last summer. This year, as luck would have it, the conference is happening August 9-13th at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Boston. They’ve got an interim website up (by Boston’s Stolze Design) with more in the works for later this month.
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Where's the data?
There is a wealth of information on the web, presented in many cases by an impressive set of well-designed websites that enable a casual user to find and interpret the data easily. However, most websites only present the 'presentation layer' of the data to a user, i.e., rendered HTML. Very few websites allow direct access to the data behind the presentation layer. Some do an admirable job. Amazon offers Amazon Web Services, allowing third parties to build completely new storefronts on top of Amazon. InfoWorld's headlines are available as RSS feeds, allowing integration of the data into another website or application. However, for the most part, access to the raw data behind the web pages is not available, and people rely on screen scrapers, such as HTML Scraper to try to gain access to the data.
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Unusual Stocks: Moller International (MLER.PK)
Moller International could be considered yet another penny stock trading on the pink sheets with a far-out idea. However, this one is a bit different from the usual. Moller is in the business of designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing personal vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The intended first product is the M400 Skycar. This automobile is intended to have a top speed of 350 MPH while achieving 28 miles per gallon. They aren't shipping anything yet, but are accepting deposits to ''secure delivery positions for our M400 Skycar''. The company has been involved in an SEC dispute recently, which appears to have been resolved, and doesn't seem to be in a big hype mode - the message board at Raging Bull, a hotspot for penny stock chat, is pretty quiet. Despite being a pink sheet stock, they are fully reporting to the SEC, although their financial situation seems poor at best, with only $14,037 of cash at the end of 2002.
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Building a Wine Finder website
An ongoing project of mine has been to create a 'wine finder' website. This will allow people to search for wine using a variety of methods. Example queries might be 'What wines are produced that contain Cabernet Pfeffer?', 'Which wineries produced a Bien Nacido Vineyard Syrah in 1998?' or 'What wines that received a 90+ rating in both Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator are available online for < $30?'. To support queries like this, I needed to create a relational database to store information about wine.This seems fairly straightforward at first. The 2000 Franciscan Oakville Estate Chardonnnay Napa Valley has 4 data elements - the vintage (2000), the producer/brand (Franciscan Oakville Estate), the varietals used (Chardonnay), and the appellation (Napa Valley). However, things can get a bit more complicated.(continued...)
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