We have had a good deal of luck using ElasticSearch to index and query our couchdb databases on some projects. Couch publishes a _changes feed that allows ES to subscribe to updates and index them as soon as they hit the database. It has a very powerful JSON based query language that eased a lot of the pain points related to couchdb views for us.

I wrote an article about my experiences with it : http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/may/31/flexible-facetin...

stay classy australia. i'm surprised at the lewdness of images used in the keynote.

There's a lot of things besides nudity that can render an image inappropriate for use in a conference presentation, and judging from the description in the linked article (There was one image of a pig indulging in sexual activity with a goose...), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to be offended.

Guess I just have a very high 'offended' threshold then.

Sure; but if you are presenting in public, it isn't your own 'offended' threshold that should be operative, it is that of your audience. And, even there, you probably don't want to shoot for the middle of the pack there-- offending, say, half of your audience wouldn't be much of a success in most contexts. So, while you might not want to scrub down your presentation to a point where no one is offended, you still probably want to stay away from sexual images involving farm animals. Just sayin'.

Guess so... most funny birthday cards etc feature "worse" images.

It depends what context the images were used in the talk, and if they made sense being there IMHO.

Built with node.js, backbone.js, mapbox, d3.js, modestmaps.js and more.

I have been using the bookmarklets provided by squarefree.com (https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html) for about 8 or 9 years now. Cross browser, works on the current page, dead easy.

you mean like this gpl app that does the same thing? http://code.google.com/p/shiftit/

Unfortunately shiftit is no longer in active development. The last release was in May 2010 and I have heard reports that it does not play well with lion.

Developmentseed.org used to be a Drupal site, fwiw.

DevSeed used to be one of the bigger name Drupal consultancies. They've been moving into other stuff over the last year and a half, for what that's worth.

edit: I just figured out that you probably already knew that. Cheers.

Wow, perfect case in point, then.

the maps on the site are designed in [tilemill](http://tilemill.com/pages/index.html), and served by [tilestream](http://mapbox.com/#/tilestream), btw.