mike's web log

Handling version changes in documentation

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:12:27 GMT

Just wondering what sorts of examples people might have of documentation sets that cover multiple versions of the same product. In our doc set in MSDN, we basically republish each complete doc set, but updated for the new version with corrections and new features:

The advantage is you can go right to your version and be assured that what you're reading applies to you. The disadvantage is that the versions pile up (4 versions and counting), with a lot of overlap, which is inefficient in various dimensions.

Are you familiar with a doc set that handles versioning differently than this? (Conceptual or API reference or both.) If so, leave a comment with a link.

Thanks!

Straight into the vein

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:01:39 GMT

From a post on the O'Reilly Radar blog. I wonder if this is the year we'll start hearing about people who will try to return to the (digital) simple life and go off the (virtual) grid.

Email was the first electronic medium to raise my clock speed, and also my first digital distraction problem. After some "ding, you have mail," I turned off the blackberry notification buzz, added rationing to my kit bag of coping strategies, and kept on concentrating. Then RSS came along and it was like memetic crystal meth. The pursuit of novelty in super-concentrated form delivered like the office coffee service. Plus, no one had to worry about all that behind-the-counter pseudoephedrine run around. "Hey, read as much as you want, no houses were blown up in Indiana to make your brain buzz."

It was a RUSH to know all this stuff, and know it soonest; but it came like a flood. That un-read counter was HARD to keep to zero and there was always one more blog to add. Read one interesting post and be stuck with them forever. In time keeping up with my RSS reader came to be like Lucy in the chocolate factory with the conveyor belt streaming by. From my vantage point today, RSS seems quaint.

The good old days. I gave it up for good last year when I finally bought an iPhone and tapped Twitter straight into the vein. Yeah, I went real time.

Now I can get a hit at every stop light. Between previews at the movies. Waiting for the next course at a restaurant. While you are talking to me on a conference call (it's your fault, be interesting). When you look down at dinner to check yours. Last thing before I go to sleep. The moment I wake up. Sitting at a bar. Walking home. While opening presents on Christmas morning (don't judge me, you did it too). In between the sentences of this paragraph.

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It's not if your computer crashes ...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:03:33 GMT

We tend to think of emergencies in terms of if -- "If this [dire situation] comes to pass, be prepared." When it comes to computers, tho, if is definitely the wrong word; it is (always) when. In particular, it's "When your hard disk crashes, be prepared".

I'm thinking about this because a) I've been digitizing LPs at a steady clip, which has garnered me many gigs of .wav files[1] that I do not want to have to reconstruct; b) Jeff Atwood today recounts a bitter lesson he learned when his service provider lost a disk and took with it his archive of blog posts; and c) I had a hard-disk failure of my own last week.

Can you throw a rock and hit someone who does not regularly back up their data? Probably all you had to do was reach up and conk yourself on the noggin. Unless you've dedicated some time to a plan and unless you dedicate time to a regular routine, odds are that there is stuff on your computer that you would lose if it went kablooey in the next 60 seconds. My kids have each lost substantial collections of music when a hard disk went south, for example.

An aside ... one disaster that I am not generally prone to these days is losing a document while I'm working on it due to the computer freezing or the power going out. As I work on documents, I save compulsively (SHIFT+F12 in Word, for example) -- essentially, each time I lift my fingers off the keyboard, I just hit Save. Too often in the past I have lost hours of work on a doc simply because it was all still in memory. Not so much any more.[ [more]

"Linux Bug #1: Documentation"

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:52:49 GMT

I ran across an interesting article ("Is Bad Documentation Derailing Linux?") that floats the thesis that the lack of good documentation is hurting Linux acceptance. I don't use Linux (perhaps for obvious reasons?), so I don't have any first-hand thots on the state of docs for that product.

However, I do understand that good docs are an investment and that complete docs are practically impossible, even if you're paying a fleet of tech writers. As I've noted before, we have various reasons, some of them involuntary, to spend considerable effort on providing at least some docs for every last flippin' member in the .NET Framework. The count of a list of these members goes well into 6 figures.

At various times, folks I've worked with have done analyses of some open-source docs. There is much very fine work out there, no question. A comment that comes up, tho, is that the docs for OSS tend to cover cherry-picked topics -- there is excellent documentation for interesting features, but the quantity and quality tends to fall off as the scenarios get less mainstream. This is hardly surprising -- who wants to contribute to a community by slaving away at documentation that's obscure?

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That renumbering problem with Word lists

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:46:07 GMT

When I teach Word styles, I make the case that although the features in Word for creating lists are pretty powerful, there's an inherent limit in list styles. There's a useful chart that I found somewhere[1] that shows the kinds of styles that you can create and what attributes you can set for each type of style:

You can see that in the List column, there's no checkmark for paragraph formatting. This is evident if you create a list (as opposed to paragraph) style:

(Multi-level list styles do let you specify a different indentation for each list level, at least.)

If you use the automatic list features of Word (), or if you create a multi-level list style, you end up using a style called List Paragraph. This is technically a paragraph style, and for List Paragraph you can modify the style definition, but frustratingly, any changes you make to paragraph styling, such as indentation or spacing, appear to be ignored.

For quick-and-dirty list formatting (which probably covers most people for most situations), this isn't really a problem. At work, however, we often need to specify interlineal spacing or other paragraph-y formatting, or we need to be able to set different characteristics for different indentation levels.

What we do, and something I tell students they can do if they need this level of control, is not to create a multi-level list style. Instead, go with the approach that olde tyme Word users know -- create a paragraph [more]

Documentation survey!

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:35:27 GMT

Do you use our documentation? (Golly, hope so. :-) ) Give us some feedback -- take the survey that's posted here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=qQnlYIN2D5gQH7UhLrQyuA_3d_3d

This asks some basic information, like where you get your technical information and how you go about finding it, as well as how best to get your feedback, what type of development you do, etc.

I can assure you that we look at this stuff intently, we really do. I encourage you to go through the survey. It's only 11 questions, and it will help us out.

Thanks!

Rocket Men

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:46:34 GMT

As we know, I like reading about the history of technology, and as we also might know, I am a fan of aviation. One of my favorite books is Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, which is a history of the Mercury space program.

Recently I've been reading Rocket Men by Craig Nelson. This is a history of the Apollo 11 moon shot, with side trips into the history of rocketry, the Cold War, and related topics. Where The Right Stuff is a kind of cultural history (of test pilots and of the unexpected sainthood of the Original Seven), Rocket Men is more about the engineering that went into the Apollo program. Although it is for a general audience, it goes into quite a bit of (interesting-to-me) technical detail about the Apollo program and the moon mission in particular.

For those inclined in that direction, there are many astounding facts and stories. A small example: when the LEM and the CM decoupled in preparation for the LEM descending to the moon, the airlock between them was not 100% evacuated. As a consequence, when the LEM disengaged, it was accelerated by the small remaining air pressure (a small puff of air, basically) and ended up going 20 feet/second faster than planned. The ultimate result was that they couldn't land where they had planned, and Armstrong basically had to hunt around for a suitable landing spot. He put down with virtually no fuel to spare.

Ok, so, as I like to do, I copied out a few of the cites that I was marking as I read. If you're with me so far, maybe you'll find these interesting also. Cites are slightly edited for length.

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Standard by mistake

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:18:11 GMT

I'm pleased to be able to note that I've had a piece published on the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus site. The site is restricted to subscribers, so although I can link to it, you won't be able to read it unless you are already signed up. (And what better reason, really, than to read this article? :-) )

The theme is mispellings that come to be accepted, like HTTP_REFERER and SHStripMneumonic, because by the time someone notes that there's an error, the name is already established.

It was good fun -- I'm hoping to be able to submit some more in the future. Naturally, I'll let you know.

BlackhawkDatabase Down

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:56:11 GMT

Facebook error message:

My questions:

Does it matter that it's a database error? (Why?)
What's the difference between a temporary error and the other kind?
If the database is down, what good will it do to try again? (please)

And has been noted before, there's something unsatisfactory about clicking Okay under these circumstances. Maybe they should just change the button label to Grrrr.

This is not the Mike Pope you are looking for

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:32:54 GMT

I subscribe to Google Ads (over there on the left). It's been kind of interesting; for example, if I keep showing the ads for the next 1.8 million years, I'll definitely start making enough for them to send me a check.

Haha. It is interesting, sort of, to watch their contextualization process in action. For the first little while, alls I saw were ads for blogging software. Now and again I'll see an ASP.NET ad. Other than that, it's sort of a crapshoot.

Today I saw one that made me grin, because it indicated that the Ad Sense algorithm isn't quite foolproof. Here's the ad I saw:

Now, if you know me, you probably know that I flail away at learning to play the guitar. On odd occasions I have blathered about that here. So if there's something on the blog that's about guitar, that's not an unreasonable context for displaying an ad for learning to play bass.

But I know better. You see, there are several of us Mike Popes, and if you search Google, the first Mike Pope you get is the Mike Pope who plays jazz bass.[1] Which is to say, a Mike Pope who actually knows what he's doing around string instruments.

Thus Google ad sense has gotten slightly confused. It seems to think that folks reading this blog are fans of the jazzy Mike Pope. That would flattering to me, but ... I don't think so.

Still, if you are interested in learning bass, by all means, click through the ad. Wth Ad Sense, every little bit counts. :-)

[1] "Walk Your Dogma," how excellent a CD title is that?

More web site usability

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:56:28 GMT

I recently whined about the confusing UI that many web sites present for navigating through the (many!) options that they offer. I used to really have it in for the sites run by banks, but I am obliged to acknowledge that they've gotten much better over time.

But I am happy to say that I can still be snotty about the sites run by universities. Having two kids in college, I go through a quarterly/semesterly exercise in which I log in and behold the price of ... uh ... well, different topic.

Anyway, here's an example. This is the "menu" that the "authorized payer" site at Indiana U presents, with the one I generally need highlighted. Tell me what logic went into the order of the elements.

One reason I haven't gotten a Kindle

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:12:13 GMT

I like the idea of e-book readers. But economically it isn't making sense to me.

No wonder I get confused using Web apps

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:27:08 GMT

I am one of those people who tends to have multiple instances of multiple browsers open at any given time, usually with several tabs open in each instance:

In this way I often manage to confuse myself -- I'll Alt+Tab between browsers, hunting around for a page I was sure I had open. Which it is, just not in the current tab. (A side effect of this is that sometimes I'll just open another instance of the same page.)

So simply getting to an open Web page can occasionally be confounding. But even once I've managed to find my way to the right page, using a Web application can be a challenge. I've noticed this particularly with Facebook, in the form of people having all sorts of trouble figuring out how to post photos, write on walls, etc. Two reasons, I think. The first is that a lot of people use Facebook who are not 24/7 computer users and are not used to (good for them) doing the sort of poking around that seems to be required. The second reason is that Facebook's layout kind of sucks.

Here's a typical experience, in pictures! First I need to find my way to Facebook. Note the many choices that just the browser presents here:

1 - Menu
2 - Favorites bar
3 - Tabs

Now to Facebook itself, which presents me, by default, with no less than 5 menus that I need to navigate in order to accomplish anything other than post a simple entry:

An even worse example is Gmail, which is a mish-mash of links, buttons, and (for variety?) a drop-down list. I count 10 menu-type items, but I suppose it depends on how exactly one wants to count:

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Magical phrases for search-engine listings?

Tue, 26 May 2009 22:16:55 GMT

As with most things, I am several years behind in getting interested in attemtping to, er, "manage" how search engines crawl, weight, and display information from Web pages. I have still not gotten hugely excited about the murky field of search-engine optimization, aka SEO, which is all about trying to make your site as prominent as possible.

However, I did recently take a passing interest in if and how a body might control what a search engine displays for a site. I record some observations here largely for my own amusement; I suspect that if you have an interest in gaming search engines, this is all old news.

So. The default (or perhaps better stated, the fallback) strategy is to display the first real text from the page, which excludes headings and the like. For example, if you search for ASP.NET gridview control, the first hit looks like this:

And indeed, when one looks at the article in question, it starts off with that very text:

I say "fallback" because there are other ways to establish search-engine listing text that take precedence. A well-known one is to set the description meta tag and specify the content attribute, like this:

<meta name="Description" content="ASP.NET technical editor writes about coding, writing, editing, and more.">

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Wolfram|Alpha

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:57:02 GMT

Have you played with Wolfram|Alpha yet? Fun. Here's their own description:

[A]n ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.

There's a screencast by Mr. Alpha himself (kidding. It's by Mr. Wolfram) that shows a lot of cool stuff of what the site can do, showing examples from math, chemistry, currency, geography, etc.

The parser is pretty good, but it isn't hard to stump it. In my case, it was a case of using syntax it understood. So, for example, I started with this:

day of week Feb 19 1957

W|A didn't like it:

I tried 2/19/1957 day of week and got this:

But it did like Feb 19 1957 day:

(There's a lot more below this on the actual screen, I just cut it off for space.)

It does music, too, so I played around to see if I could type in a succession of notes and have it tell me what chord they make up. I initially tried c eb g c, but W|A parsed it as multiplication calculation:

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Tweeting Twitter

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:11:44 GMT

Social applications need to hit some sort of critical mass for success. In 2006, it was blogs. This year it's Twitter.

You know a phenom has gone mainstream when it reaches Business Week (http://tinyurl.com/58x9gz) and Forbes (http://tinyurl.com/cy55ka).

"Twitter is the stupidest application you’re ever going to see." http://tinyurl.com/bx3g4q

Why is Twitter hard for people to grasp? Maybe they describe themselves all wrong: http://tinyurl.com/cmatvh

Twitter asks "What are you doing?" Wrong question. Better: "What has your attention?" (I forget who said that, sorry.)

What to tweet? News, articles, pithy observations, commentary. NOT your lunch. Unless you want to.

Who to follow? Friends, colleagues, "influencers." Follow the most interesting of your follows' follows and followers.

Some people tweet minor things but blog major things. Some people preview blog entries with tweets.

From the perspective of size and currency, Tweeting is to blogging what IM is to email. (?)

140 characters is a useful limit. Sometimes challenging to meet. More space would not produce better tweets, imo.

Twitter really put URL "tinification" on the map. http://tinyurl.com/decd5s

Twitter v Facebook: Facebook is closed (you approve your circle), Twitter is wide (wide, wide) open.

Twitter descriptions don't convey that it's like conversation. Follow; join if you like. It's a party! (As in life, some talk too much.)

Twitter: community, community, community, community. :-)

Sarah says reading Twitter is like watching the news crawl at the bottom of the TV screen. Except you can jump in and add your own.
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DIY (almost) guitar setup

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:07:27 GMT

This post is strictly about guitar setup; for those who care naught for guitar mechanics, nothing here to see. Catch you next time.

I had an interesting guitar setup experience recently. If you have even moderate experience with guitar setup, this will probably all be old hat. (And if you have none, you probably don't care. So who's reading? Hmmm.)

I got my electric a year and some ago. It's a knockoff of a Gibson ES-330:

I like it fine. As I got it, it had some relatively high-gauge strings (11s, probably). Being new to electric, I had nothing to go by, so I used that guitar as-is. I had a setup done at one point, but didn't have it restrung. During one of my lessons, tho, we were talking about bending, and my teacher had a go on my guitar. "Lighter strings, dang!" was his recommendation, so I had one of the shop guys put on some lighter ones (10). It was sort of a rush job, which more-or-less explains the rest.

The lighter strings were a definite plus. However, it seemed to me that the guitar had developed a slight buzz. (This is where the experienced folks say "duh.") I kept thinking I should take it in for another setup, but didn't get around to it.

One night, tho, I was at guitar school (not to be confused with lessons), and the owner dude (Jay) introduced Ryan, a new guy they had. Ryan was a guitar builder, Jay said, and was open for business. Specifically, you could bring him your guitar for repair or whatever. It was the same price as taking the guitar to a shop, but -- the cool part -- you could watch and, if you wanted, Ryan would teach you to do what he was doing.

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HP support: "What, haven't you given up yet?"

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:07:25 GMT

I work for a company that's often accused of having evil intentions. If it does, that doesn't manifest at my level: we obsess about trying to do the right thing for customers, even if we don't necessarily achieve this to the level of everyone's satisfaction. As but one example in my little world, we really do go to extreme lengths to try to be sure that our text is a) readily translatable into multiple languages and b) comprehensible to non-native speakers who do choose to read it in English. (More on that in the near future.)

What brings this to mind is an ongoing, um, discussion that I've been having with the customer service (I did not actually write customer "service," although I was tempted to) at HP. I bought an HP Pavilion[1] a couple of months ago for work stuff. I specifically wanted a multi-~~processor~~core box that had lotsa-lotsa RAM because I want to run Vista 64-bit on it. The computer actually came with Vista Home 64-bit. Begone, said I. I flattened the box, loaded Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and began configuring it with goodies like Virtual PC.

A couple of weeks after I got the box, it refused to boot. After some diagnostics and some hardware switcheroo, I determined that I had one bad bank (2GB) of RAM. With that block of RAM in it, the machine froze; when I removed the memory unit, all was fine except, of course, that I was short 2GB of RAM.

I contacted (via chat) HP support. After about an hour of highly intermittent chatting, I was instructed to do what I had already done (test all the bits of RAM). This was interspersed with crap like "Don’t worry I will help you" and "I will pull up the records and resolve the issue."

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Your app just crashed! Ain't that hilarious?

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:10:38 GMT

Jeff Atwood asks "Why can't error messages be fun?" When Google Chrome crashed on him and took Gmail down, he found the error message so funny that ...

Rather than being annoyed with GMail, and blaming Chrome, I am completely disarmed by this error. It makes me laugh!

And he encourages developers to lighten up on those scary ol' error messages. C'mon, don't get so worked up about crashing ...

Remember, this stuff is supposed to be fun! Why not share some of that joy, that fun you had building your application, with your users?

I sometimes work on error messages for our stuff, so I thought I'd give Jeff's it's-all-just-fun suggestion a try. Here are some examples I came up with:

For Web developers:

Internet Explorer!

Hey, do you use Word?

I think you'll have to agree that if you saw these error messages, you wouldn't be annoyed, you'd laugh! No? Well, lighten up, then. Remember, this stuff is supposed to be fun.

Update When I closed Internet Explorer after posting this entry, I got the following:

If only the error message were funny, I'd be ROFLMAO. Instead of being, you know, annoyed.

The shrinking Shuffle

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:06:11 GMT

The new iPod shuffle from Apple has two significant features: it's tiny, and it talks. This last is required, really, because the form factor is so tiny that there's not enough space for a screen. There's not even enough space for controls: "The controls are now conveniently located on the earbud cord."

How much longer before a) you can talk to it (my phone supports voice commands, at least in theory), and b) the player is just built straight into the earphones?

Full disclosure: I might be the last person on the continent who doesn't have an iPod.

Destination path too long

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:46:52 GMT

I spent a little time today with my ongoing CD ripping project, this time with classical music. There was a surprising wrinkle to this, namely that I ended up having some trouble with file names, of all things.

I have Windows Media Player[1] set up to create file names using the following attributes:

Track number
Song title
Artist
Album

This has worked great for non-classic CDs -- pop and jazz, say. But for classical, this combination can get a bit verbose. Here's an example:

02_Symphony No. 6 in F major ('Pastoral') Op. 68- Allegro ma non troppo_Ludwig van Beethoven_Beethoven- Symphonies Nos. 6 'Pastoral'; Coriolan & Egmont Overtures.wma

Vista will, as I say, create this file, but it won't let me copy it.

Search, search. Ah: there is a limit to how long a file name can be in Vista, namely 260 characters.

If you count the name above (don't bother, I've done it) you arrive at 166 characters. Last I checked, 166 < 260. Moreover, why would it let me (well, WMP) create the file but not copy it?

Ah, the issue is that the file-name limitation is for the complete path. When the file is being created, the fully qualified file name is this (189 characters):

E:\music\cds\Classical\02_Symphony No. 6 in F major ('Pastoral') Op. 68- Allegro ma non troppo_Ludwig van Beethoven_Beethoven- Symphonies Nos. 6 'Pastoral'; Coriolan & Egmont Overtures.wma

The fully qualified target name is (or would be) this (282 characters):

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The incredible shrinking CPU unit
Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:23:05 GMT
We've gotten awful used to being able to haul a computer around with us. I myself came of age when the Compaq "luggable" came on the scene, which was basically a full-on PC packaged like a sewing machine. 


[credit]

This had been preceded by, among others, the Kaypro II, which I also used.


Note reference cat. [credit]

Real laptops came along, which could run on batteries, and more recently, netbooks, which ingeneously package everything that most people need -- less an optical drive -- into a 2-1/2-pound package. 


[credit]

(I have the larger of these -- the 1000 -- in sleek, fingerprint-revealing black.) 

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You have (outbound) mail: Outlook mysteries
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:41:35 GMT
I have used Outlook for email for years and have no reason to complain. Just in the last little while, tho (wait, am I about to complain?), I've started seeing some odd behavior in my various and many individual installations. This has to do with how the Outbox is being handled. 

My, um, desired setting is that email be dumped into the Outbox before it goes out the door. This helps me solve the hit-Send-and-only-then-notice-the-typo problem, and the less common but more important prolly-I-shouldn't-even-send-this problem. 

I regularly use four separate instances of Outlook (four machines[1]), and in each one, something different happens with outbound mail:Machine 1 (Outlook 2007, work): Email stubbornly refuses to leave the Outbox unless I explicitly click Send/Receive. Result: come in to work in the morning, yesterday afternoon's emails are still sitting in the Outbox, oops.

Machine 2 (Outlook 2007, home): Email refuses to leave the Outbox when I click Send/Receive, but eventually wanders away on its own accord after a few minutes. Result: "C'mon! Can you send the file already!? " It's coming, it's coming.

Machine 3 (Outlook 2003, work): Email does not stop at the Outbox, it passes Go, like, immediately. (I suppose it's in the Outbox for the blink of an eye, but effectively it's sent immediately.) Result: Be dang sure before you click Send.

Machine 4 (Outlook 2003, home): Works as expected. Result: Satisfied customer.
What's weird is that all of these instances of Outlook are configured exactly the same:


(My normal setting is 3 minutes, but I've been playing with this to see if it makes any difference.)

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I think I'm in love
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:10:27 GMT
Over the holidays, our household became CRT-free because I love, love, love LCD monitors and think everyone should have one. I have long since become a fervent believer in the benefits of dual monitors. (I do not as yet subscribe to Atwood's thesis that the ideal number of monitors is 3.) And I have been quite happy in my relationship with my two LCD monitors.

Ah, but yesterday my head was turned, and how. For reasons I shall explain another time, an HP w2408h monitor has fallen into my hands, and I am weak-kneed at how wonderful it is. 



We've read together, we've coded together, and we've gotten cozy and edited together. We watched a DVD together, and it was awesome. One special time we got a little wild and I flipped it 90 degrees, and we could edit whole pages together, with room to spare for comments. 

Yes, I have been smitten. My only problem is figuring out how to accommodate my Big Love for this and my other 19" monitors. But I'm sure it will all work out.


Roundup
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:53:30 GMT
Kinda went to town on the pix and quotes today, oh well.

Pizza-Pro 3000^tm. No comment. 

[v Friend Dennis]

And speaking of tools ...

The Ultimate Dogfooding Story. In the world of software, "dogfooding" refers to testing software by using it yourself. ("Eat your own dogfood.") Jeff links to a post by Erik that references a thingy named Sawstop, which is a safety device for table saws. Here's Erik:Slide a piece of wood into the spinning blade, and it cuts the board just like it should.  Slide a hot dog into the spinning blade, and it stops instantly, leaving the frankfurter with nothing more than a nick.
The interesting part of the story (read Erik's piece) is how this guy tested the device.


Fastidious spelling snobs pushed over the edge. People who get wigged out by spelling errors might be suffering additional stress, given current economic ills.[1] [via Fritinancy]


Lexicon. Facebook has a neat little app that "counts occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time." (Must have a Facebook account to use, of course.) Here are a few of examples that I found interesting (click to see larger images):

Search term: "Obama" (note spike, which is in November):



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