Hot Dorkage

In case you hadn’t heard, our local newspaper publishers (Gazette-Times/Democrat Herald owned by Lee Enterprises) have taken a giant step future-ward with the launch of the new mid-valley voice social network. If you are not local, I would hazard a guess that other historically print based publishers are doing a similar thing to try to compensate for dwindling print subscriptions, so this article is not just for locals.
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For the next 8 days this dork will be taking a hiatus from blogging. I will answer your comments when the hiatus is over.

Your faithful dork recently had to be hospitalized for surgery.  Everything went well and full recovery is expected, but I did get a midline incision that incapacitated my core until it heals. You use your core for EVERYTHING, so that nasty little side effect could not clear up too soon!

While convalescing I knitted these geek mittens. I adapted a pattern created by flibbertigibbet bunny and graciously shared opensource style. Ain’t the internet amazing!!! If you are interested, the pattern is available on bunny’s blog, and I’ll only post it here if it ever becomes unavailable there. Bunny definitely deserves not only link luv, but a few clickthroughs from here as well. The blog is worth a perusal for some other interesting projects as well.
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Warning:  HARD CORE DORKAGE!!!! I hope beyond all the hope that I have obtained the book that will drag me over the learning curve for Zend Framework for real.  The book I am referring to, Zend Framework In Action by Allen, Lo & Brown, was meant to come out in September, but it finally made it.

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This little TweetCC Twitter App makes it very easy for you to license your tweets, according to any of the various flavors of the Creative Commons License. All you do is press the button by your chosen flavor of creative commons, it tweets the appropriate message as a reply to @tweetcc, and then they will link to your twitterstream on their webpage.

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In a recent blog post on the Twitter Mosaic Web App I showed an example from a twitter app that randomly tiles your follower avatars into a grid and then tries to sell you the design on shirts, mugs, etc. This is not a true mosaic. In a true mosaic you place the tiles taking into consideration their color, in a way that forms a bigger meta picture. There is free software that will do this if you give it a folder full of tile graphics. So all I would need to do is download the follower avatars for any given user. I wrote a script to get the avatars of the followers of any twitter user. Then I fed those files to a free Desktop Mosaic creator. The graphic at the head of this article is a reduced version of the result of this experiment. Click it to see a larger, but still quite scaled down version where you can see the component avatars more clearly.
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