I'll think of a good title later

Really fascinating article all about the rise & fall of Iceland's banking industry. Lots of interesting stuff about the social dynamics in Iceland too, many observations that I would have never have expected given the little knowledge I have about the country.

I've been thinking about tag clouds recently & I thought it would be really nice if you could tag all of your bookmarks in Opera then view the results as a tag cloud.

I found that the tagging could be done easily enough using the description field for each bookmark.

As for creating the tag cloud I wrote a simple app that creates an HTML file directly from Opera's bookmark file (Opera6.adr):

http://www.twjc.co.uk/goodies/Tags.exe (329kb Windows only)

I'm sure this program could be implemented better as an online service very easily. Source code (Delphi 5) is available on request.

The instructions are (also included on the app):

1. First use Opera to go through all your bookmarks, right click (or press alt+enter) to open up the properties dialog, tag each bookmark with whatever tags you like seperating each tag with a comma (or some other character).

2. Open up the Tags.exe program

3. Specify whatever you used as a delimiter when tagging your bookmarks in step 1.

4. Next select your bookmarks file (you can go to opera:about and copy and paste the full path to the file from there into the box provided).

5. Enter a minimum and maximum font size in pixels (experiment with these until you get a nice cloud).

6. Then click Go to create your tag cloud (this will create a single HTML file in the root of c:).


I think this tag cloud would make an excellent alternative to the current Speed Dial set up.

undeuxtroiskid has provided the map (read: hard) work for the latest map based SVG game, see how you fare with the Counties of Michigan.

While I'm at it I might as well share this tip: you can cut Inkscape filesizes by often over a quarter by rounding all the dimensions in the paths from 5 to 1 decimal place without losing any noticeable image quality. I wrote a simple javascript tool to automate this - just copy & paste your paths (as many as you like) into the text area click round, then copy the results back & save.

The UK Office for National Statistics looks like it will be a good source of interesting SVG examples. See the Personal Inflation Calculator & more recently an excellent Interactive pyramid chart of the UK age structure.

Presenting my pet Snake.

So what if there are a lots of other snake clones on the net?

Why should you play this one over all the others? Well:

1. The snake looks cute.
2.
3. Profit.

Controls:

Enter to play
Arrow keys to change direction
P to pause.

Whatever it takes is an article from The New Yorker Magazine about the use of torture in 24.

I absolutely love the film Dark City which stars Keifer Sutherland so it is strange how I've never seen a single episode of 24. If 24 features torture in the way that this article suggests I don't think I will.