Lightweight pdf renderers

I'm finishing up dissertation data collection in the next ~6 weeks, which means I'm going to be spending a lot less time writing code, and a lot more time analyzing data and writing papers. So R and laTex are going to be my new best friends.

Taking a good look at my workflow around these packages, I realized that viewing pdfs was really slowing me down. Every time I generate a graph or paper, I have to open up the pdf version and see what it looks like. Adobe's very bulky software takes several seconds to load -- very frustrating when you're playing with margins or table formating and want to iterate quickly.

So I went out looking for a lightweight pdf viewer. Here's what I found:

http://www.downloadmunkey.net/2008/04/random-monday-foxit-reader-vs-pdf-xchange-viewer-vs-sumatra/
http://portableapps.com/node/17260
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-non-adobe-pdf-reader.htm

Any other advice?

Based on those reviews, I'm going to give PDF-XChange a shot. I'll let you know how it goes.

Redesigned my layout

I've been meaning to do this for a while. tpmotd's nudge finally got me to make the neccesary 15 minutes.

Now all my pictures should actually fit!

Prezi: AI and games

A few months ago I first tried out prezi. Since then, I've seen it trickling into presentations here and there. The novelty is great, and the usability is a little better than last time I played with it. So I went ahead and

These are slides for my (mock) TED talk from the Hill Street TED activity yesterday.

Crowdsourcing and buzzword lumping

In general, I'm a big supporter of crowdsourcing, but I worry about lumping together too many things under one popular buzzword. A few NYTimes articles have spoken to this issue recently (ht Gloria). This one is pretty starry-eyed. This one unpacks things (a little) more.

Let me push on this idea of lumping. Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as

the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call.

As I read that definition, all of these are crowdsourcing:

• Wikipedia
• Ideo's open design lab
• Innocentive's innovation contests
• 99design's graphic design sweatshop
  
• Elections
• Spam farms
• Penny stock pump-and-dump marketing
• Bounty hunters and privateers

Trick question: so is crowdsourcing a good thing or a bad thing?

My position: We're at a place where technology is enabling new institutions. It would be backward to ignore that potential. But there are all kinds of issues with corruption, lack of expertise, bias in who participates, etc. that "crowdsourcing" doesn't solve automatically. Just like other institutions, crowdsourced institutions have to be designed carefully to head off those problems. I don't think it's a magic bullet, but I do think it can help.

Announcing SnowCrawl!

Announcing the beta release of SnowCrawl, a python library for directed webcrawls. Nice features include: saved state for backup, support for threading and client-server architecture, lots of flexibility.

The project is open source, hosted at google code. More details to follow.