Enter a topic, and Chirpmap will highlight the locations that are tweeting about it. In real time.

Keep in mind that the app is still a prototype, and hasn’t been tested in an environment with many simultaneous users.

Available as a download as well as a web app. Absolutely fantastic stuff.

This project comes from one of my favorite Simpsons episodes which has a scene where Mr. Burns brings Homer to his mansion. One of his rooms has a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. One of the monkeys writes a slightly incorrect line from Charles Dickens “It was the best of times, it was blurst of times.”  The joke is a play on the theory that a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare.  And that is what I did.  I created millions of monkeys on Amazon EC2 (then my home computer) and put them at virtual typewriters (aka Infinite Monkey Theorem).

So far, Jesse’s virtual monkeys and typewriters have randomly created The Tempest, The Winters Tale, The Merchant of Venice and many more. I  recommend bookmarking his post so you can follow the progress. (via Ars Technica)

But even in this early state, Windows 8 is unambiguously a first-class tablet operating system.

Update: you can read the press release from the Build Windows event on Microsoft’s website.

Hewlett Packard has confirmed plans to exit PCs, tablets and phones, in order to refocus on software.

HP also said it was considering a sale of its personal systems group, which includes the world’s biggest PC-making business.

Aside from the potential purchase of Autonomous, what software of major significance does HP have?

[Update] The Financial Times has the details on how large a role software plays in HP now:

Former SAP chief executive Léo Apotheker, who took the top job at HP last year, has said that the company wants to expand in software, an area that accounted for only 2.4 per cent of HP’s $32.4bn revenues in its latest quarter, and 4 per cent of its operating profit, or $154m.

If it decides to sell its PC business, the company is in for a major change in how it operates.

Nyan Cat Progress Bar is an app that displays the Nyan Cat over the top of progress bars in Windows.

Pointless, but charming nonetheless. It was developed after a thread on Reddit demanded it.

Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site’s code to make pages load more quickly.

Mainstream adoption may prove difficult for Google; the protocol requires changes to both browsers and server software. Currently, the only browser to support SPDY is Google Chrome.

In a message posted on its corporate blog earlier this morning, blogging software maker Six Apart essentially admitted that security holes in its Movable Type product(s) are to be blamed for the recent, prominent hacking and defacement of the PBS.org website, which occurred at the end of last month.

This reminds me of a post on Daring Fireball:

I don’t religiously keep my installation of Movable Type up to date, and I know many other MT users don’t either, and yet our sites don’t get hacked. I’m not arguing that Movable Type is perfect. Clearly, it is not. No software is. I’m just saying the situation with WordPress is different, and clearly more dangerous, than it is on other platforms.

“Clearly more dangerous?” Obviously.

WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.

Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.

Weather nerds will go nuts over this.

GreenGoose is a real-world game platform with wireless sensors that automatically measure things you actually do!

This may actually work, because the exercise sensor is the size of a credit card and the other ones are simple stickers that have year-long batteries built-in. Not having to do anything extra after the initial setup is absolutely key.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.