I've lived in Lexington my entire life. If there's one thing that has always seemed to ring true through the years about this town it's this: There are so many musicians in this town. With that, some of them decide to publicize their talents, form groups and play for crowds all around town, but you also have those who haven't quite reached the stage or who have been played long under the radar.  Lexington is home to an amazing independent, volunteer-run radio station, a premiere indie music blog, and countless talenteed musicians. Once you start looking, you'll come to find that Lexington's actually a pretty happenin' place, musically speaking.

Last night, I came from work, made a bite to eat and almost settled down into my normal evening routine. I felt bored though, anxious even. There must be something to do, I thought. I found out there was a local bluegrass band playing down at Al's Bar. It made my night. Where else can you guy to hear a bluegrass version of Talking Head's "This Must Be the Place" while munching on delicious sweet potato fries?

Drupal is a major improvement over our previous CMS solution. I like the fact that it uses standard web technologies that are widely used. I like that I can go back to the source code to answer a question or address a problem. I like that it's flexible and extensible. I like that it has a large community of knowledgeable and helpful users.



But one thing I don't like about drupal is it's documentation. For the most part it's pretty good (it's better than many other open source projects). In fact, A good portion of Drupal is very well documented, especially older features. If you're needs are basic or you are familiar with Drupal 6 you should be able to get by without too much trouble. However because Drupal is a somewhat large project, there is a large amount of documentation. This can make getting up to speed a daunting task for new Drupal developers. This is compounded by the fact that Drupal was designed to be a modular system in which many apis have an impact on the end result of any code. This means that after you grasp the Block api well enough to create the traditional 'hello world' block, to do more you need to go read the Database api, then the Render api, then the Theme api, and so on.

So if you haven’t heard yet, Facebook has teamed up with Skype to create video chat capabilities for the popular social networking site.  Now you can video chat with your friends and family right through Facebook, without having to create a separate Skype account. We tried it out in the office, and it was fairly easy to use, although quite buggy right now. I believe they just announced it on July 6th or 7th, so I’m sure there will be many bugs to work out in the days and weeks to come.  However, all you have to do is search for “Skype Me” on Facebook and download the app. It took me a few tries before it finally worked, but then you just download the file and Run it on your computer. After it’s installed, you can choose any friend from your normal chat list and click to open the chat. Now you’ll see a small video icon, and you can click that to begin the call.  It rings on your friend’s end, and they have the ability to answer or ignore your call.  Once answered, it opens a box that shows your friend’s video, with your video in a small box in the corner.

A few years ago, before the explosion of the Web into popular culture, and especially before Facebook and social networking brought the concept to surface in a directly personal concept, few outside mathematics were interested in graphs.  Today, however, they have become extremely popular for intuiting the vast weave of interconnected, but irregular or incomplete, data that's become so prevalent.  Graph databases such as Neo4j have risen in the space known as NoSQL to replace traditional relational databases for solving certain types of problems with incredible speedups.  However, tools like this require a certain level of technical arcana that make them inaccessible or uninteresting to many.  A higher level tool, and the subject of this post, are the graph visualizers.