StumbleUpon is the August 2006 Site of the Month on DonationCoder.com Links Page:  https://www.donation...com/Links/index.html

StumbleUpon may currently be the best place to discover new sites on the internet. While much of the charm of digg.com and its clones has faded as they become subject to more manipulation and mindless rating based on headline keywords, StumbleUpon has only gotten better and better as its audience grows. The premise is simple, using a toolbar installed in your browser, you can rate sites you visit with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Or click a button to be taken to a random page rated highly by others who have similar tastes as you. By clustering similar people together, StumbleUpon is able to do a great job of showing you new sites you are likely to appreciate.

Despite its large and growing user base, StumbleUpon still feels like somewhat of a class project.. It needs a major v2 facelift, and better organization of some of its social networking features. Regardless, some of the features are wonderful, like the ease of sending links you like to your friends via the stumbleupon network or email. We love StumbleUpon and we highly recommend you install the toolbar and give it a try. StumbleUpon makes money by providing an enhanced account feature you can opt to pay for ($20), which is nice but not essential, and by occasionally delivering you a page that has been paid for by a sponsor instead of the usual random page.

Visit: StumbleUpon.com

For those of you so inclined, here's a wonderful opportunity to get exposure to statistical techniques different than the Analysis of Variance models commonly described in scientific investigations.....

The following links point to a set of tutorials on many aspects of statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine learning and data mining algorithms.

A member on our forum has posted a very slick utility he wrote called TweakMPE, for Maya Paint Effects screensaver.

It solves a problem several people have brought up with let's the free Maya Paint Effects screensaver, by letting you flexibly configure multiple random settings.



Click here to download the Official Maya Paint Effects ScreenSaver
Click here to download TweakMPE

(requires .net 2.0 framework)

I absolutely love jeff atwood's Coding Horror blog, but found myself in rare disagreement with him this morning..

He posted some reflections on another blog entry by Scott Hanselman on the death of the open source project NDoc.

• View Scott Hanselman's Original Entry
• View Jeff Atwood's Blog Entry About It
• View My article "When Do Users Donate?"

...
Open source software is at its best when you aren't obligated to do anything at all other than use it.
..
You definitely shouldn't have to pay for it.
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If contributing money is foolish and contributing code is an extravagance, what's a poor user to do? Nothing. Nothing at all, that is, other than use the software.
...

-Jeff Atwood