Four short links: 1 September 2010

Faces in R, Open Source Web Analytics, Small File Store, Building Mapper

by | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 1, 2010
  1. R Library for Chernoff Faces — faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data)
  2. Piwik — GPLed web analytics package.
  3. Pomegranate — a data store for billions of tiny files. (via the High Scalability blog interview with the creator of Pomegranate)
  4. New Backpack Makes 3D Maps of Buildings — the backpack indoor equivalent of the Google Maps cars, from Berkeley researchers.
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  • Andy

    This new design is really bad.

    Before I could see all 4 links at a glance from the home page without having to click on the article.

    Now I’m forced to click on it to find out what the 4 links are.

    Does anyone at O’Reilly care about usabilty?

  • A. Nonymous

    I agree. Put the links on the front page.

  • DC

    I agree, the new format sucks. I won’t be clicking through to see the four (but I really did enjoy scanning them on the top page for something of interest)

  • led

    Agree with above comments. Too much form, too little function in the new redesign. Bloody ridiculous in a daily post titled ‘Four short links’ to have to click through to actually see them all!

  • Mike

    Add me to the list of people who agree about the missing 4 links.

  • Allen Noren

    Fixed! Thanks for the feedback.

  • We replaced Google Analytics a while ago with Piwik and so far it’s performing great. Lately they released an iPhone application and there are more plugins to come. It’s a reliable solution and best of all it’s free (not free as in GA as you give all your data away).