I’m always struggling with the various regular expressions, even after using them for over a decade. Maybe it’s because of all the variations (perl vs. your favorite windows-based text editor’s flavor of regexps vs. bash vs. you-name-it). Maybe it’s because I’m just plain getting old. (nah!)
Although better known for photography tips, Smashing Magazine has a nice collection of tutorials on RegExps — Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials. Check it out.
I’ve been playing around with R and Nike+ and thought I’d put the two together, so I wrote a little R script that pulls your public data from the Nike+ website and plot out the graphs. It’s a little rough around the edges (see below for a list of enhancements/fixes), but it generates plots. I like SlowGeek, but found their smoothing function a bit too “smooth” — it was shaving 1/2 mph from my run speeds. I wasn’t happy with that 
Read more to get the source code, below.
Sample: 
For an example of what it might look like, you can see my plots.
Since first reading the Gang-of-four’s book, I have thought patterns were a great idea. Now that I’m getting into design and data visualization more, I’m intrigued by the possibility of merging interface design with software patterns. Makes sense, don’t you think?
So, when I found UI-patterns.com, I thought “yes! here’s the merging of the two disciplines/approaches. Great. Now if I can just merge these patterns with Tufte-based principles and OVID-based development, I should be able to come up with a potent app in any environment.
Found this interesting app to create unit tests called MbUnit – Generative Unit Test Framework for the .NET Framework. Need to look into it more, but it sounds like a useful tool.
I’m a little behind the times, but I just saw this posting of how Google and Facebook are using R, my favorite new tool: How Google and Facebook are using R : Dataspora Blog. From the CRAN network to the easy chart/graph construction, R makes data analysis dangerously easy. Maybe too easy??? I mean, all those formulae have to mean something, right? I just scratch the surface of R with my tinkering, but it is clearly a very potent tool for crunching lots of numbers. And who has more data to crunch than Google? I mean, with a database called “Big Table” who doubts that they’re the biggest brother on the block.
Anyway, I plan on using R more and more in the coming months. Maybe I’ll be able to hear more about how Google is using it, too.
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