Link Archive

pytz brings the Olson tz database
into Python. This library allows accurate and cross platform timezone calculations using
Python 2.4 or higher. It also solves the issue of ambiguous times at the end of daylight
saving time, which you can read more about in the Python Library Reference
(``datetime.tzinfo``).

Digital Humanities Awards are a
set of annual awards where the public is able to nominate resources for the recognition of
talent and expertise in the digital humanities community.

My uncle, John Arthur Stump, who
was my father’s youngest brother, died on January 20, 2006.  His memorial service was held
at a Vedanta monastery in Hollywood, where my other uncle (known there as “Jnana
Chaitanya,” but to me as Uncle Dave) serves as a monk.  I was not at the ceremony, but my
family brought back some memorabilia from the service and from Uncle John’s “estate,”
including a large piece of paper densely printed with musical notation.

Marginalia are on the march. The
New Yorker reported this fall on Oxford’s Marginalia Group, which “now has two thousand
five hundred and three members, making marginalia to Oxford something like what a cappella
is to Princeton.” They specialize in finding the snarkiest of the notes that generations
of Oxford students have entered in their assigned books. The creator of the Oxford group,
April Pierce, noted that the great libraries of London also house books full of readers’
written reactions. The London Library’s copy of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations,
for example, contains such striking remarks—some clearly motivated by the text, some
apparently not—as “What the devil does this mean?” and “above all there should be cake.”
They were entered by T.S. Eliot, who bought the book at Marburg in 1914.

Project: Textexture.Com
Objective: Provide an easy-to-use online tool for text network visualization, fast
non-linear reading, and comparative analysis of textual data. Additional Info: Created by
Nodus Labs, using the open-source free Gephi software and Sigma.Js toolkit.

Android File Transfer is a
fantastic little tool for getting your files on/off your Android device on Mac/Linux.
Anyone who has used it will probably notice how it (annoyingly) starts every time you plug
in your device and often locks up the entire computer for a few seconds in the process.
Most of the time when I am plugging in my phone it is to charge it or for development, not
to transfer files, so obviously I wanted to disable the auto-start feature. Unfortunately
I quickly found that this app, while very useful, has very few features and does not
provide a built in mechanism to disable the background agent. Not cool.

We need to change the way we talk
about accessibility. Most people are taught that “web accessibility means that people with
disabilities can use the Web”—the official definition from the W3C. This is wrong. Web
accessibility means that people can use the web.