I’ve been using a new in-car GPS for about 2 months now, and I wanted to share my thoughts in case other people are on the fence. I think these units have come a long way since the last time I seriously looked at them, and they’re pretty effective at getting you to where you are going.
I’ll write this from the perspective that you haven’t taken a serious look at what a recent unit can do, so I’ll list out what I think are the key features.
- A flexible route-generation algorithm. Stuck in traffic? Click the “detour” button and have it route you around the area you are currently entering. Take a wrong turn and it can generate a new route for you in a few seconds.
- A large, searchable index of locations, stores, parks, restaurants, museums etc. It can be searchable both near where you are, near your destination, or find matches along your current route. As an example, my wife and I were just out running errands and remembered that we needed to buy a new bed frame. I typed “mattress” into the GPS and it pulled up the name, address and phone number of half a dozen nearby stores.
- A map that you can scroll through by touch-screen. Drag your finger on the screen and the map drags with you to allow you to see nearby map areas without zooming out.
I found that pretty much all of the units I looked at had the same features listed regardless of price, but when I actually used them in the store there were huge differences in the implementation of those features.
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Car Navigation Systems’
There have been many articles written about how terrible the default charts are in Excel. They are full of details that detract from the actual information that you are trying to convey. I recently discovered a few great tips for easily improving the quality of your charts. It doesn’t take much effort to set up, and it very easy to apply once you are done.
The easiest thing to do is to install the free Clean Charts Excel plugin by Juicy Analytics. This very nifty macro just finds all of the charts in your open worksheet and gives you the option of applying some more sane formatting to them. For example:
- The axis labels will all have the same number of significant digits (no more 1 1.5 2 2.5, instead 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5).
- Axis labels are changed so that they are most meaningful (100,000 becomes 100k so you have less digits that aren’t telling you anything).
- Line and bar colors are changed to be high contrast and distinct from each other.
- The gray background is eliminated. It only reduces contrast to the chart contents.
- Superfluous lines and boxes are eliminated. You are trying to present data, so all elements should contribute to that presentation. Continue reading ‘Make Excel charts less terrible’
Papers is another “iTunes for PDFs” program, only it seems to be dripping with 10.4 programming magic. It’s aimed at mac using researchers (and the pre-release features are geared toward PubMed users), so the general audience won’t care, but for a small subset of people it’s really fantastic.
I think this thing incredible, but I’ll go ahead and start with the caveats:
- It’s a “preview release,” which means it’s far from done.
- It crashes periodically.
- The preference pane is completely empty.
- It only supports PubMed right now (but has a plugin architecture which will eventually allow for many search engines).
Now, even given the above, I still plan on using it as my main journal article program because it gets so much else so right.
Continue reading ‘Papers – iTunes for research articles’
As I set up my blog I want to post my minireviews of different components that I find useful. After a brief stint with Google Analytics I’ve convinced myself to buy Mint.
First, a word about how web analytics works. There are really two different classes:
- Log parsers. Your site keeps logs of visitor information in standard log files. There are many packages out there which read those logs and prepare reports. The information they can extract is limited by the kind of data that happens to be logged. A popular example would be AWStats.
- Javascript triggered loggers which interrogate the visitor for additional information and save those data to a SQL database. Examples here would be Google Analytics and reinvigorate. Generally this second option provides you with much more information than the first, but the data are all collected by (for example) Google, stored and analyzed by google, and presented back to you by Google. The examples listed are free to the web site owner, but have a cost in that you are essentially trading away your user’s browsing habit information. This may or may not be a concern for you.
Now back to Mint. Functionally, Mint falls into the second category in that it collects additional information from your users and stores it in a SQL database but with two key differences. First, Mint is a PHP software package that you buy for a one-time price of $30 per domain (sub-domains are included in the main domain license) and install it on your hosting in the /mint subdirectory. So it is running on your own server, and you own the data. Note that you also need to provide it with a SQL database to store data, but for most hosting companies this is a 10 second process to set up a new database, and it will happily coexist on an existing database if you prefer not to create another.
Continue reading ‘Mint web statistics’