On some pages, in IE6+ on Windows, if you right-click properties, it doesn't show pagesize, it just says "unavailable". Why is that?
Robert Paterson's Weblog: Unjobbing?: "What is "bad" about schools is that their priority is control. What is bad about most work places that are conventionally structured is that they too are about control ..."
I'm reading Phil Murray's first http://www.kmconnection.com/ (free download), and it's excellent. I'm not saying that because it mentions me, or because I host the The Faceted Classification Discussion (FCD) mailing list together with Phil. (Disclosure always.)
Anyways, it's the magazine every IA should read (especially for enterprise work) and I hope it takes off and Phil makes enough money with it (yearly subscriptions are US$ 170) to be able to keep it going for years to come. IA needs magazines like this.
How to Share a Taxonomy with Other Photoshop Album Users?: "Photoshop Album is one of those rare applications that make meta tagging so easy that even "normal people" can use it."
Jared Spool: "We don't have to worry about who hires us because we charge a lot of money. It pretty much self selects. People only hire us as a last resort, for
something absolutely critical, that they can't get anywhere else. (That's what makes it fun.)"
Damn! Then I find a nice and clean PHP photoalbum script, but it lacks a good web interface (assumes you can FTP).
Most photo gallery scripts are typical open source messes with lots of useless features. Any tips for a PHP script that makes it easy to upload (unoptimized) pictures from your digital camera and presents them cleanly.
And another travel (Sout-east Asia) question. If you want to post digital pictures to your blog, how do you optimize/crop/adjust them? Do the internet cafe's have photo software? Do you carry your own software (I won't carry my own computer!) and install it on every internet cafe somehow? Does it happen server-side?
A travel question. If you travel for a long time and you take a lot of pictures with your digital camera, how do you store them? (Especially in South-east Asia.)
- Do internet cafes burn CD's you can then send home? Pros or cons?
- Do you take an iPod and store everything on that (20 Gigs is a lot of pictures)? But then what?
- Another solution?
Black Coffee: Travel Blogging Technology
MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.360 Ethnography, Spring 2003 | Home: The politics of independence and technological objects.
I updated my Examples Of Web Ethnography page.
Talk on the Drupal dev list is about an upcoming MT-import module that might even support old MT URL's. That's huge: breaking URL's is for me a major lock-in factor in any software. I even broke URL's when I upgraded MT last time (somehow), and it pissed me off. So way to go Drupal team!
OK/Cancel: Diary Studies: Too Much Information?: (in the comments) "I have not had a chance to use the smart phone with a video cam but one of my colleagues in Asia told me it works "fantastic."
findability.org | frequently asked questions about findability: "Peter Morville is currently working on a new O'Reilly book on the subject of Ambient Findability."
What is the algebra rule for x exponent (m/n)? Equals x exponent m divided by x exponent n?
"Brutal" Architecture: blog entry on "parallels between physical architecture and software architecture" by Microsoft researcher.
I just discovered Bret's excellent blog. In this post, he talks about offshoring effectiveness. In my experience, communication is the biggest factor. There is a LOT of informal communication going on in any team, and if you put part of the team offshore, the amount of documentation needed skyrockets (depending on your existing development process).
The Planet: Total Control P2800: 2000GB Bandwidth. Question: so that's 2000 Gigs a month? Is that good? I'm investigating hosting video for a bunch of starting videobloggers.
The Center for Social Technology
lojjic.net – "Water Lilies" Flame Fractal. Think you know what fractal images look like? Think again. Also check the Mac-style menu at the left.
ALL LOOK SAME. Interesting.
WITNESS: an organization backed by Peter Gabriel that hands out video cameras to folks whose human rights are often brutally violated. The victims use these cameras to expose the abuse.
First commercial Video Blog?: "The most exciting part of this new opportunity from the AO prospective, is that we can now begin offering our members what is fashionably called âvideo blogs.â? Our editors and members can start producing their own video editorials and interviews and post them for AO members to view and comment on and rate, just as they have been doing with our text posts."
Technology > Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/technology/19google.html?ex=1400385600&en=a3f8b839e1a867f8&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">The New York Times > Technology > Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft: "Edging closer to a direct confrontation with Microsoft, Google, the Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers."
Not only that, but apparently they're moving GMail from 1 Gig to 1 Ter (1,000 Gigs) of storage. Let's see someone test that!
Interesting discussion about PHP in an M$ environment.
jibbajabba's Wiki - Drupal.Usability Michael's excellent list of Drupal usability recommendations.
The first amateur rocket fired into space: "A 14-second burn allowed the rocket to reach an altitude of more than 100km - the official boundary of space - in about three minutes.".
Alan's Ramblings: MovableTripe: "The people trying to defend SixApart have made much of the fact that nobody has been forced to upgrade to MT3.0, and that it's a 'Developer only' version. Well, excuse me, but have any of you actually tried to find 2.661 on the MovableType website? No? I thought not, because it's not actually there any more, as far as I can tell."
Joho the Blog: A terabyte for $500 and change
Language Log: Modification as social anxiety: "Here's a thought: the impulse to pile up fancy words and extra modifiers, and the admonition to write simply and avoid adjectives, are both expressions of the same social anxieties, seen from slightly different places on the social scale.
As an illustration, consider the language of menus."
User Interface" href="http://kaste.lv/~captsolo/info/blog_a.php/2004/05/17/p520">captsolo weblog - Ontologies => User Interface: "I have been wondering how to generate a user interface for entering / editing metadata, given the ontology(-ies) to be used. An automatical way to generate the UI should be possible."
Sure it's possible but it will be ugly. An ontology generally doesn't carry enough information in it to construct an elegant UI - far from it. All you'll end up with is a generic interface (like the Omnigator for browsing Topicmaps).
The problem is that an ontology is just a description of a domain. What you do with that information (including how you best edit it) can vary extremely. And what you do with it determines the UI, not the inherent structure of the ontology.
Sure, you could build a generic ontology editor. But it's like a generic database editor. It lets you edit any database, but it's not the most effective editing interface in 99.9% of the cases.
Mathematical proof that girls are evil.
I just noticed my Pagerank (as reported by the unreliable Google Toolbar) went up to 7/10. Maybe because I'm posting a lot lately?
Le «blog personnel» de Joe Clark: "So please stop being holier-than-thou and please get off our cases. If smart, informed people are using b or i, itâs because they have made smart, informed decisions to do so."
I was having preformance problems with Drupal (my cheap host complained about resource usage), so after a bunch of questions to the ever helpful Drupal list, I found what I hope is a solution: turn on Drupal's bult-in cache, which caches entire pages so they are 1 database call instead of x. Congestion control: tuning the auto-throttle | drupal.org has more info on Drupal tuning. Aside from all my complaining about Drupal's lacking "remember me" feature, it is a great product and a great community.
Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object: "As deployment of XML data and web services becomes more widespread, you may occasionally find it convenient to connect an HTML presentation directly to XML data for interim updates without reloading the page. Thanks to the little-known XMLHttpRequest object, an increasing range of web clients can retrieve and submit XML data directly, all in the background. To convert retrieved XML data into renderable HTML content, rely on the client-side Document Object Model (DOM) to read the XML document node tree and compose HTML elements that the user sees."
Seems to work on IE, Mozilla and Safari, with varying syntaxes. The article concludes: "In lieu of a W3C standard still under development, the Microsoft-born XMLHttpRequest object fills an important gap ..."
cacheop: Skype planning paid integration with telephony networks: "Skype, the P2P VoIP app from the original Kazaa creators announced today intentions to compete with other VoIP telephony providers such as Vonage, Packet8 and VoicePulse and provide paid access to standard telephony."
It just occurred to me that, even though it's almost impossible to track how many people view your posts because of all the RSS aggregators and such, the old tracking 1-pixel image trick should work fine there.
It could be acceptable to use that trick to track your readership.
Mena's Corner: It's About Time. The trackback section doesn't show the negative comments anymore, now it just says: "[an error occurred while processing this directive]".
Google AdWords is starting to allow advertisers to use image ads. News.com story.
From their faq: "You can choose to run image ads in addition to text ads, or you can show text ads alone.", and you can change settings per page.
Images can be up to 50K in size.
$10 a month for 15 petabytes (15,000,000 Gigs) of storage.
Storage space is getting cheaper. For investing US$10 a month, you'll have accumulated 15 petabytes of storage space by 2020.
Assuming you invest $10 a month in storage and start buying this year, buying additional space every year, you'll accumulate 120 Gigs of storage space this year (2004). Enough for about 10 hours of quality video uncompressed from my camera. Not much, really.
By 2010, you'll have accumulated 15 terabytes (15,000 Gigs) of storage space. Enough for 1250 hours (52 days) of video.
By 2020, you'll have reached 15 petabytes of storage space - 15,000,000 Gigs. Enough for 142 years of 24 hour video.
Historical Notes about the Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space:
Year---price per 1 Gig
1980---500000
1985---80000
1990---9000
1995---1000
2000---15
2001---6
2002---3
2003---2
2004---1
As you can see, the price per Gig about halves every year. LaCie's BigDisk (500 Gigs) currently costs $579.
This means that, if you keep paying $10.00 a month for storage ($120 a year), and only buy storage as you need it, you will get more or less the following storage available to you:
Year - Price per peta - $$ - Storage bought (in gig) - Storage accumulated (in gig)
2004----1000----120--120------120 (120 gig)
2005----500-----120--240------360
2006----250-----120--480------840
2007----125-----120--960------1800 (1.8 tera)
2008----60------120--2000-----3800
2009----30------120--4000-----7800
2010----15------120--8000-----15800 (15 tera)
2011----7-------120--17000----32800
2012----3-------120--40000----72800
2013----2-------120--60000----132800
2014----1-------120--120000---252800
2015----0.5-----120--240000---492800
2016----0.25----120--480000---972800
2017----0.125---120--960000---1932800 (1.9 peta)
2018----0.0625--120--1920000--3852800
2019----0.0312--120--3846153--7698953
2020----0.0156--120--7692307--15391261 (15 peta)
Dem Swingers | Which way do you swing?: "Colleges in every state have students who are originally from swing states. We need your help to make sure that those students vote, and vote for John Kerry."
Macromedia Flash - Using video in Macromedia Flash MX: "Embedded video is compressed with the Sorenson Spark video codec, which produces high quality video at small file sizes." The Sorenson encoders are very expensive, so it may be cheaper to encode through Flash. The more I think about it, the more Flash seems like a viable alternative for video, mostly because it's more standard and reliable than any of the media players. You can't really import by *linking* to videofiles though. You have to embed them.
Internet Archive: Petabox: "The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes)."
Jon Udell: Link-addressable streams, revisited: "Peter van Dijck wrote to tell me about his tool for converting the URL of a Real stream, plus start/stop times, into a link to the specified segment. A while ago, I mentioned Rich Persaud's version of the same idea, which works with Windows Media and QuickTime as well as Real. Using either of these, you can do what I did the other day -- namely, link to a segment within a video stream -- without hacking URLs and wrapper files.
As helpful as these tools are, I've come to see that the hassles they alleviate are only part of the reason why we're as yet unable to weave video effectively into blog conversations.
[...]
Despite these issues, the overriding consideration may be that streams require specialized servers, whereas downloadable clips (which nowadays play progressively) do not.
What we're left with, though, is an asymmetry. Big media organizations, for now, still have the advantage over small independents, because the big organizations are more able to deploy and manage streaming infrastructure. Bloggers can link into those streams, and/or capture and post quotes from them, but can't yet easily produce streams. What we can do easily is produce short downloadable clips. "
The new free license for Movable Type 3.0 lets you have no more than one author and three weblogs. If you want more you have to pay up. Mena explains the new pricing structure. The trackbacks and comments sound pretty sour though, the 1 author/5 weblogs limit for the free version seems to annoy people much. Oh well.
Simon Willison: Simple mini-languages with PHP: "As Dumky points out, this can be used to implement mini-languages for pretty much anything - and PHP 5's excellent XML support means most of the parser work is handled for you."
I can see this taking off. It sounds hugely satisfying to create a little mini-language like that. And fairly easy.
Reference: Adding Windows Media to Web Pages