Paths through the U.S. states considering temperature

I am heading on a road trip soon that will last more than a year and will visit every U.S. state. In planning this adventure, I started to think about paths to take through the states. As I plan to camp for a good part of this road trip I wanted to ensure staying relatively warm throughout the entire trip. I decided to build a script that would help me figure out these paths and thought it would be useful to share with others.


Ideas of March

Chris Shiflett's recent blog revival post calls for much needed action among the community to blog more. I think this is a great idea. I haven't really jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and have always found blog posts to be more useful and discussion friendly. For me, blog posts are easier to find than Twitter conversations and stick around longer.

Pulling in useful blogs into a reader and usually filtering by a PHP tag is something that I think most people in the community already takes advantage of, if not, I would recommend it. It helps keep you apprised of the current ideas, problems, and information that the community is involved with and can be really useful in your own work and endeavors. With more people in the community writing, perhaps we can help push down all the riff raff that is out there when people google topics involved with PHP.

Thanks Chris for the call. I intend to answer it and write more. Cheers!



Search autosuggest and n-grams

Having an interest in computational linguistics, I'd like to spend some time explaining an example use that we see a lot. Often times when browsing the web we use search forms to find what we are looking for. Many search forms try to help us find what we are looking for by automatically suggesting common search terms as we type. If you are searching an online shop you may only see suggestions for items for purchase, whereas searching on Google even very obscure terms may have suggestions. What exactly is going on here and how can you make your auto suggestion more robust and/or relevant?