Found this via CPU Magazine this month.  If you don’t have a subscription, it’s worth looking at.  A cool little geek mag.  I look forward to scouring its pages every month.

The 10x10 website (www.tenbyten.org) scours the news services on the internet and creates a visual mapping of the information it finds using pictures.  First, the flash-based site figures out the most important words and then it grabs pictures associated with those words and arranges them on the screen.  An interesting piece of work by Jonathan Harris.  http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html 

While you’re at it, check out http://www.wordcount.org/ (by the same author) which allows you to navigate through the 88,000 most frequently used words in the English language and look at them in relation to how common they are.  In case you were wondering, “TRUTH” barely eeks out a victory over “LIE” at 1246 to 1953.  The most infrequently used word in the list – “CONQUISTADOR”. 

Great post with links to Visio stencils.  I’ll add my $.02:

VMWare Related Stencils from vmguru.com – http://www.vmguru.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=3

http://forevergeek.com/geek_resources/microsoft_visio_templates_and_stencils.php

On occasion, I am called upon to build a network diagram or a flow chart of some sort, and I'm sure many of you have been, too. Most of you probably know that despite Microsoft's reputation for building shoddy software, their Visio software is actually quite nice (though not nearly as cool visually as OmniGraffle for OSX). The only problem I have with it is the stencils. At least in my copy (granted, it's Visio 2000), the stencils are *ancient* -- the computers all have 5 1/4 floppy drives, and I don't think there's a rack-mounted server in the whole collection. So a few weeks ago when I was asked to build a diagram of our new load-balanced intranet system, I was a little stuck. Until I did a bit of searching.

Turns out there are lots of free Visio stencils out there, including official ones from Dell and Cisco, which made my diagram far, far easier to understand for everyone involved. So I thought I'd share. Some others we've found of interest have been for Citrix Metaframe (If you're not familiar with that, Metaframe is basically a sort of software thin client... you can use the metaframe app or a browser and remotely access a desktop instance on a server. I've never been entirely sure what the real benefit of it is, I think it's mostly used so remote users can have a single workspace no matter where they access from, and so sensitive data stays on a single secured server cluster) and for the Sarbanes-Oxley Audit, provided on Visio Cafe, which also has stencils for HP and IBM as well as a number of unofficial stencils from a variety of places.

I was unable to find a good source for Mac stencils, sadly. How about you guys? Are there any places you go for visio stencils that I left out? What sorts of things do you use Visio for?