Slow
Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are great browsers – if you want a slow, bloated, and crash-prone web browsing experience. I grew tired of having my browser control my Internet experience and did a little snooping around in search of something better. Two that I came across and am currently testing are K-Meleon and Arora.
K-Meleon and Arora are two extremely lightweight browsers that SCREAM.
I was shocked at how much faster they perform than my old standby, Firefox. Mind you I am not using any sort of scientific method whatsoever, but it’s pretty clear these newbies are the winners in my decidedly unscientific tests. K-Meleon is Windows-only and Arora has a version for every system imaginable. I know these are 2 of many so if you know another, pass it on!
Continued…
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with ClickToFlash, Firefox, Gecko, GNU General Public License, K-Meleon, Microsoft Windows, Safari, WebKit.
By Josh Kitlas
– October 29, 2011
This has nothing to do with the post, but I like dogs. Image by Getty Images via @daylife
For the past couple months I have been hammered by SPAM user registrations, some weeks I was getting 10-15 a DAY. I tried several WordPress plugins without success. Then I came across SABRE – Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine and my fake user registration woes ended (I have had it installed for two weeks now).
If you are in need of help determining who is real and who is a robot or zombie, I cannot recommend it enough. It is free and French to boot (though it does come in English).
Continued…
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with Blog software, CAPTCHA, Computer security, Computing, Content management systems, Internet, IP address, JavaScript, PHP programming language, Registered user, SPAM, Technology/Internet, University of New Zealand, User (computing), Website, WHOIS, WordPress, World Wide Web.
By Josh Kitlas
– October 12, 2011
You want jobs? I have jobs! Especially if you are a librarian (I also have some for museum folk).
Despite all the doom and gloom surrounding libraries and their future, there are still a ton of jobs out there for public, academic and special libraries. I for one think there is a bit of a renaissance going on in libraryland and if you are a creative, dynamic LIS professional, you will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent the librarian position and the institution itself.
The list I put together has mostly RSS feeds and a few job-site URLs. Some are geography specific, some are library specific, some general, and even one in French.
Good luck with your search and have at it!
- Denver Public Library Jobs – Website
- ACRL/NY Events and Jobs – RSS Feed
- Connecticut Library Jobs – RSS Feed – Website
- Library Jobline Postings – RSS Feed – Website
- LibWorm: Jobs – RSS Feed – Website Continued…
Posted in Future, Library.
Tagged with Education for librarianship, Employment, Librarian, Libraries, Library and Information Science, RSS, Sierra Nevada, Syndication and Feeds.
By Josh Kitlas
– October 9, 2011
One Large Network
If you haven’t checked out LinkedIn Labs, get on it! The site hosts a small set of projects and experimental features built by the employees of LinkedIn. They are billed as ‘low-maintenance’ experiments by the LinkedIn team, but they yield some very powerful help to the networker or job seeker. There are a number of really interesting tools that you can use such as:
- Integrating LinkedIn directly into Google Chrome
- Viewing your connections across the timeline of your career
- Getting your personalized LinkedIn Today headlines read to you on your mobile phone
- And many more…
I found Resume Builder, the Hackday Winner of March 2010 to be the most useful for me. You can “build, save & share beautifully formatted resumes based on your LinkedIn profile.” Providing you have a well defined LinkedIn profile, you will get some impressive results.
I was really interested in InMaps, which is classified as ‘LinkedIn Analytics‘ and enables you to “visualize your professional network, clustered in realtime based on their inter-relationships.” Unfortunately I was a very early adopter of LinkedIn and have been methodical about growing my connections and my network is now too large to be mapped. Cool idea though.
Posted in Design, Information, Technology.
Tagged with Business, Employment, Facebook, Google, Health, Information, Interesting, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media, Social network, Technology.
By Josh Kitlas
– October 6, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
I have been working on this (mostly) annotated collection of tools and articles that I believe would be of help to both the data dabbler and professional. If you are a data scientist, data analyst or data dummy, chances are there is something in here for you.
I included a list of tools, such as programming languages and web-based utilities, data mining resources, some prominent organizations in the field, repositories where you can play with data, events you may want to attend and important articles you should take a look at.
The second segment (BONUS!) of the list includes a number of art and design resources the infographic designers might like including color palette generators and image searches. There are also some invisible web resources (if you’re looking for something data-related on Google and not finding it) and metadata resources so you can appropriately curate your data.
This is in no way a complete list so please contact me here with any suggestions!
Data
Tools
- Google Refine – A power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks)
- The Overview Project – Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data, by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or Freedom of Information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read.
- Refine, reuse and request data | ScraperWiki – ScraperWiki is an online tool to make acquiring useful data simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor. In the free version, the code and data are shared with the world. Because it’s a wiki, other programmers can contribute to and improve the code.
- Data Curation Profiles – This website is an environment where academic librarians of all kinds, special librarians at research facilities, archivists involved in the preservation of digital data, and those who support digital repositories can find help, support and camaraderie in exploring avenues to learn more about working with research data and the use of the Data Curation Profiles Tool.
- Google Chart Tools – Google Chart Tools provide a perfect way to visualize data on your website. From simple line charts to complex hierarchical tree maps, the chart galley provides a large number of well-designed chart types. Populating your data is easy using the provided client- and server-side tools.
- 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis Continued…
Posted in Design, Information, Technology.
Tagged with Amazing, Apache Cassandra, Bigtable, Data, Data mining, Google, Interesting, Internet, Knowledge, Library, List of Google products, Machine learning, Open source, Programming, R (programming language), Technology, Uniform Resource Locator.
By Josh Kitlas
– October 6, 2011
