links for 2009-07-04

• Lunchtime Prowl: Grandy or Charlie, Fu-Te Ni's Pitches, Big Al's Back, and Shaving Cream Pies
  Here’s one of his latest posts at The Wayne Fontes Experience, about Dave Birkett leaving the Oakland Press’s Detroit Lions beat for a gig covering the Michigan Wolverines at the new AnnArbor.com. It's a big loss for Lions coverage, and it's troubling to see good reporters (Danny Knobler, Jon Paul Morosi) move on. Detroit sports fans are losing out.
  (tags: birkett,dave oakland-press annarborcom football michigan)
• Get Your API Right « Trek
  Every project I’ve worked on in the last two years has heavily involved the use of web APIs. Libersy at the time (no idea about now) had an architecture that was extensively API based, even for communication between internal applications (an architecture I strongly argued against, bee tea dubs). Since then I’ve futzed with web APIs almost exclusively. From very narrow focused uses like University of Michigan’s Bluestream Service, to more broad but still fairly local APIs like the Ann Arbor District Library’s soon-to-be-updated API, all the way to APIs of major web applications like Twitter and Flickr.
  (tags: api design howto restful rest webservices via:trek)
• Home - Whereabouts Project
  This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant EIA-0303587 as "An Infrastructure for Wide Area Pervasive Computing" and by a grant from Intel. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Intel.
  (tags: michigan umich rfid)
• TalkingPoints: An RFID-based Orientation System for People With Blindness
  Its goal is explore the possibility of using technology as a means for blind individuals to orient themselves in both outdoor and interior spaces, and to learn more about their surroundings during their normal walking from place to place, or when they choose to explore an area to learn what's nearby. Currently, we do this by tagging objects of interest with an RFID reader, and providing an RFID reader and computer to read the tags. Unlike ordinary RFID readers, the TalkingPoints reader speaks the information conveyed by the tag to the user.
  (tags: rfid umich annarbor via:trek)
• The Ann Arbor Chronicle » Merchants Say Bring Back the Beat Cops
  Several people identified “Arthur” as one of the more aggressive panhandlers, known for walking with a single crutch. Rebecca Konieczny, owner of the Busy Hands yarn and gift store, said she’d gotten so mad that she followed him up and down Main Street, calling the police from her cell phone. Someone else suggested that perhaps merchants start carrying mace and pepper spray, to which Martelle responded: “I can’t condone the use of mace on the homeless population.”
  (tags: annarbor downtown main-street-area-association arthur pictures-not-words)
• Lard: After decades of trying, its moment is finally here. - By Regina Schrambling - Slate Magazine
  Only one thing may put lard back on the slippery slope: Google the word as news, and it might as well be lard-fearing 1969 all over again. Newspaper food pages still routinely advise using olive or canola oils rather than "fattening" or "artery-clogging" lard. Or they print idiotic utterances like "you get all the lard you need at McDonald's" (a chain that actually abandoned beef tallow for frying its fries only to be saddled with a trans-fatty substitute). Occasionally an article will make a valid point—lard is still anathema to vegetarians and halal observers—but more often there will be surprise that lard does not taste anything like pig.
  (tags: newspaper food lard fat bacon-butter warning:not-for-the-vegans)
• Handling CSV Files in Python | Linux Journal
  As a buddy of mine always says "the nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from". Take CSV files for example. CSV, of course, stands for "Comma Separated Values", more often than not though, it seems that CSV files use tabs to separate values rather than commas. And let's not even mention field quoting. If you deal with CSV files and you use Python the csv module can make your life a bit easier.
  (tags: csv python)