More Olympic Medal Visualisation

After speculating what this year’s medal table might look like, I came across this visualisation of the medal standings in this year’s Olympics.  As you scroll into the map, the total number of medals for a country splits out into gold, silver and bronze medals won.

Visualising Olympic medals

Via the ever interesting FlowingData, I discovered this visualisation in the New York Times of medals won by country.  There’s a slider that lets you select which Olympics and a choice between a ranking view and a geographic view.  Selecting a country will show you the medals won by that country in that Olympics.  This is an interesting and engaging way of presenting the medal data.  I wonder how the results from this year’s Olympics will look.

Made Up Technical Terms #14

Napplication - An application that freezes intermittently.

Made Up Technical Terms #13

Emptyty - a class that is simply a data structure, i.e. it has no behaviour.

Ruby Tuesday #15 : Ruby Round Up

There’s a few things I’ve noticed over the last week in the Rubyverse that I thought it was worth highligting.  In no particular order, here we go.

In my Ruby doodlings, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with REXML.  GIven that I’m focussed on learning Ruby rather than deploying code, there’s no issue.  However, this post from RubyInside shows there are alternatives such as libxml-ruby.

Testing, both TDD and BDD style, are prominent in the Ruby community.  This post examines the reasons to unit test, questions the emphasis placed on unit testing and highlights the importance of remembering why you test.  Well worth reading and relevant regardless of your preferred language.

Finally, I came across a couple of resources that those who, like me, are learning Ruby may find valuable.  The first is the news that there is a new chapter in the Book of Ruby.  The second is a couple of posts about learning Ruby for C#ers.  These posts also mention IronRuby, so well worth reading.

Made Up Technical Terms #12

Interfarce - an unreliable means of transferring information between systems.

Are you experienced?

Everywhere I go these days there’s a new experience awaiting me.  My local supermarket, for instance,  proudly boasts that it offers the best shopping experience.  Every time I see the word experience used in this way I am reminded of the following quote:

"Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want."

Thinking of it that way makes me wonder if the supermarket should be so keen to boast…

Made Up Technical Terms #11

Commentator - a developer who puts so many comments in their code that reading the code is like watching the entire codebase being created from scratch.

Made Up Technical Terms #10

Virtual-I-sation – the process of creating an online personality.

Made Up Technical Terms #9

Narkitecture - an irritating architecture.