Skip to main content

Mind maps and Concept maps

Alright y'all.  I am starting to fall in love with the idea of "Concept maps."  Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map.  Note how concept maps are better than mind maps: "Concept mapping can be contrasted with the similar idea of mind mapping, which is often restricted to radial hierarchies and tree structures."  Humans simply don't think hierarchically most of the time.  In fact, it's often frustrating to limit thought in such a way.  I've finally found a concept map program that I like: http://cayra.net/.  My sales pitch follows... keep in mind that this took a lot of time (30 secs) copying and pasting to compile this... so take the time to read it!

Cayra is a free desktop application that lets you represent tasks, ideas, concepts and other items in a graphic, well-structured way. Cayra is based on such visualization techniques, as Mind Mapping and Concept Mapping and allows you to conveniently work with big maps.

Cayra's main features: Why should I try it?

You can use Cayra for:

  • Studies
  • Brainstorming
  • Project and people management
  • Planning and organizing
  • Creativity
  • Decision making
  • Problem solving
  • Time management
  • and in many other ways!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wedding Prediction - October, 2013

Carla and I are planning on getting married sometime in October next year.  We need to pick a date, and that decision may  involve some science and mathematics.  :) For example, we want the weather to be nice.  To be more precise, we'd like the high temperature for the wedding day to be between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Obviously, we have both lived in Ohio our entire lives, and we have a pretty good idea of what the weather will be like.  We both hypothesised that October was a "hit or miss" sort of month; it could be cold, or it could be nice. But, for me, a simple hypothesis was not enough; I really wanted to know the probabilities of decent weather based on historical weather data.  Many websites on the Internet (i.e. almanac.com) charge you to review historical weather data, but Carla and I discovered a cool page on cleveland.com that provided exactly what we wanted.  I loaded the historical temperature data from 1903 to 2011 f...

Web Browsers You Should Support

As a web developer, generally speaking, you should consider supporting the following browsers (at the time of this writing): Chrome (latest) - the browser that sets the bar for the others; you should be using it and supporting it Internet Explorer 9+ - the browser that finally caught up with the times a bit; basically, a Chrome wannabe.  I still say that IE sucks... even if it really doesn't anymore.  Yes... I'm sour about IE8 and below. Internet Explorer 8 - the old, sad browser that we sadly still have to support for a while.  CSS 3 is not well-supported here, so we use projects like CSS3 PIE or whatever.  By the way... IE8 sucks.  I can't wait until this comes off of the list. Firefox (latest) - the browser that was once awesome and has sadly suffered recently because it's slower than Chrome... but hey, lots of people still use it. Safari (latest) - Watch out for Safari as more iPhones, iPads, Macs, and more overly-priced Apple products flood the ...

Data Persistence in Various Databases

This blog post will cover the varying levels of data caching and data persistence provided by various operating systems and database systems. Cache  - A device placed in front of another storage device that is used for temporary storage of data.  The use of a hardware cache is often transparent to the end user and is generally smaller, faster, and less persistent than the backed storage device.  Rather than reading/writing from/to a slower storage device (i.e. a hard disk), we read/write from/to the cache (i.e. RAM, NVRAM, etc.). Reading from a cache is simple.  If the datum we requested is in the cache, we simply read it from the cache.  If not, we need to retrieve the datum from the storage device and place it into the cache (often a much slower operation). There are different policies when we write to the cache, though... Write-Through Cache Policy  - When using this policy, writing over the cache also writes over the data on the backed storage d...