Question for the techies. How useful is Levenshtein distance as an accuracy measure for eg. quiz answers? Or do you know of a more appropriate method for fuzzy search comparison? What I want is for it to give a good guess at rightness if the answer is spelt slightly wrong or has punctuation added, etc.

It seems to be impossible to build a selection from a non-contiguous block, eg. I want to make a chart from the data that would in Excel be a1:a6,c1:c6, but Google just interprets that as a1:c6. Which is a bit of a pain. Surely that's not too abstruse a requirement? I can understand them not letting me build a non-contiguous selection by using ctrl ( Read more... )

One annoying feature about Windows 7 is that it now only uses (what used to be called) Windows Desktop Search, and has ditched the perfectly fine file search included in XP. (This change may have alredy been made in Vista, I never used that ( Read more... )

I could easily spend hours playing with this, and I don't even have kids. Very neat, friendly interface to the morass of data out there about various English school performance indicators.

(Via infosthetics, like many such good things.)

Interesting article on Smashing Magazine about localStorage. In summary, it's a JavaScript object that provides an improved alternative to cookies, for storing data on the user's computer. Looks extremely usable and powerful, but also there has to be a certain yikes! factor I think, about the way it can be used to get round users' cookie-storage ( Read more... )

Has anyone used the web developer tools that come with Chrome? Are they any good, how do they compare with eg. the Firefox Web Developer extension? And what about any relevant Chrome extensions?

Since my last Firefox update (to 3.0.12) my browser history hasn't been working. The History display is completely empty, and when I navigate away from a page, the Back button doesn't work. I checked the Options to see if it had magically turned itself off, but no, the "Keep my history" box is still ticked.

Anyone else seeing / seen this?

I wondered whether anyone else was seeing what I'm seeing on this page ( Read more... )

Just a quick one: those of you who use Firefox as your browser, have you upgraded to 3 yet? If so, what do you think compared with 2?

Poll Firefox versions

I think this is really terrific, I can forgive Google all sorts of evils if they keep coming up with cool ways for people to make each others' lives easier like this. (Basically, it allows the generation of all manner of cool charts, maps, etc for online use, from spreadsheet-type data, using formats and designs contributed by users ( Read more... )