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My name is Dan Nguyen and I'm a journalist, programmer and photographer.
Follow me on Twitter: @dancow
Read my guide to programming: The Bastards Book of Ruby.
Author Archives: Dan Nguyen
Big Faces – a mashup of The Big Picture and Face.com
Just put up another quick side project: Big Faces, which aggregates the excellent Big Picture Blog (by the Boston Globe and its many contributors) and just shows the faces. I used the Face.com API to crop the faces before uploading… Continue reading
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Category works
Best subway music ever: Super Mario Bros. theme
Musician Gypsy Joe Trane played the classics, including the theme to Nintendo Classic Super Mario Brothers on the R-train heading uptown Manhattan the other night. I can’t believe that no one else was (or at least looked) as amused as… Continue reading
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Category visuals
Woody Allen: Every step is part of the writing process
One of the best books I’ve picked up recently is Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking, which is basically a 400+ page interview, spanning decades, between the author and Allen. I’m a fair-weather fan… Continue reading
Google’s search has been dumbed down for the novices and solipsistic
In response to Google’s latest plan to combine all your usage data on all of its platforms (GMail, Youtube, etc.) into one tidy user-and-advertiser-friendly package, I’m mostly sitting on the fence. This is because I’ve always assumed everything I type… Continue reading
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Category thoughts
Analyzing the U.S. Senate Smiles: A Ruby tutorial with the Face.com and NYT Congress APIs
Who’s got the biggest smile among our U.S. senators? Let’s find out and exercise our Ruby coding and civic skills. This article consists of a quick coding strategy overview (from the full code is at my Github). Or jump here… Continue reading
A Million Pageviews, Thousands of Dollars Poorer, and Still Countlessly Richer.
Update: This post rambled longer than I intended it to and I forgot that I had meant to include some observations on what I’ve noticed about Flickr’s traffic pattern. I’ve added some grafs to the bottom of this post. My… Continue reading
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Category thoughts, visuals, works
SOPA Opera now on ProPublica
Moved my SOPAopera.org site over to my employer’s home, ProPublica: http://projects.propublica.org/sopa It’s the same data, just with a facelift and respectable color scheme:
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Category thoughts
New York in 2011, the photo version
A little late on this but I posted a few photos I took in NYC this year over at my Tumblr, Eye Heart New York. This year seemed like my most sheltered, uncreative year yet…even so, according to Flickr’s count,… Continue reading
The SOPA Debate and How It’s Affected by Congress’s Understanding of Child Porn
Update (1/22/2012): SOPA was indefinitely postponed by Rep. Lamar Smith on Friday (PIPA is likewise stalled). Rep. Smith also has another Internet rights bill on deck though: the The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which mandates that… Continue reading
SOPAopera.org – A hand-made list of SOPA / PROTECT-IP Congressional supporters and opponents
I’ve always been interested in exploring the various online Congressional information sources and the recent SOPA debate seemed like a good time to put some effort in it…also, I’ve always wanted to try out the excellent isotope Javascript library. I… Continue reading