ResearchBuzz

I haven’t been doing much nerdy on ResearchBuzz, but in my job I have been spending time with Amazon ECS and I quite like it. The Amazon ECS — Amazon E-Commerce Service — is a way to search Amazon’s listings and merchants, either in toto or one at a time. You can get more information at http://aws.amazon.com (click on the “Amazon E-Commerce Service” link on the left.)

I bring this up because a new version of Amazon ECS has been announced. This new version introduces a few new variables and includes lots of coverage of Amazon tags. I have mentioned Amazon’s tags recently.

If you want to get a sense of how popular Amazon’s tags are, check out the tag cloud at http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/cloud/ref=tag_cld_cl_icld_sm/104-7921062-4880723?ie=UTF8&length=250 . See that &length=250 at the end? It’s editable; I found it worked to set the number up to 1000. The resulting huge cloud goes from 1080p to zen zombie zombies. Click on a tag for products tagged with that information and pointers to additional information, like forum discussions.

I was pleased with Amazon ECS before, but I can see a whole new set of experiments now that tags are so extensively supported. There’s not enough time in the day…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Groovy guy Philipp Lenssen has an excellent post about how to pull data from Google into Google Spreadsheets.

As he notes the syntax is =GoogleLookup with two variables; to find the population of Boston you could use this syntax:

=GoogleLookup(”boston”; “population”)

When you paste that into a Google Spreadsheet, Google will load the results (in this case with a citation year.) I couldn’t get everything to work — I tried a pounds-to-Euros automatic conversion and it would never come out right. Google has a fairly extensive docs page but I suspect they’re not covering everything.

(Google’s full slogan, if you didn’t know, is “Do no evil, do lots of easter eggs.”)

I would love to combine this with a scraper to extend the functionality a lot. I’ll have to look into the possibilities of offline spreadsheets like Excel — see what they can pull up….

I’m still trying to find the ideal Linux distribution to use in Internet access terminals at work. I have tried Ubutunu (too slow), Xubuntu (couldn’t get it to work), and Puppy Linux (great but it refused to recognize any of my USB devices.)

Reader DM suggested I take a look at Damn Small Linux, available at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ . Damn Small Linux (which is also called DSL, and isn’t that nice and confusing) is a 50MB download which is designed to fit on a mini CD, a USB pen, flash drive, or whatever.

I downloaded it and recorded it onto a CD, and ran it as a LiveCD. It ran at least as fast as Puppy Linux, and accepted my USB devices with nary a complaint, so in that respect it was great. It also automatically configured my ethernet connection, which Ubuntu did but Puppy didn’t. (In Puppy’s defense, it was really easy to set up the ethernet connection and took about 30 seconds.)

Using Damn Small as a terminal, I don’t expect to have any problems — it’s going to be used for Firefox and Firefox only. If I were using it for anything more extensive, however, I’d be nervous. I am a Linux newbie and didn’t find it friendly at all. There’s no menu bar, which makes it difficult for me to figure out what’s going on. If you’re an intermediate Linux user, you’ll probably like it a lot more than I do.

Here’s where I am right now Linuxwise. If it would run my USB devices, I would be sticking with Puppy Linux. If I could figure out why it runs so slow and fix that, I would be trying to put together an Ubutunu Linux computer for my mother. And once I get some more Linux experience under my belt, I’ll be taking a closer look at Damn Small…