If only a camera makers would incorporate something like the tiny Toshiba drives (smaller than a credit card in width and length, and only somewhat thicker) in their cameras, we'd have 40Gig storage for pictures (instead of the measly and expensive storage that comes with cameras today).
Ah - it turns out Samsung is doing it.
A while ago me (from Belgium), Livia Labate (from Brazil) and Rashmi Sinha (from India) were nagging Asilomar to implement different prices for different countries.
The basic price of $40 is a pretty good deal - that is - if you live in the US. If you live in, say, India, and are a student, it is prohibitive. So we wrote a proposal, which has now been implemented by the excellent folk at Asilomar.
Indian students fall in the Group A - students category and get free memberships (I'm so happy we got this through). See how little you could be paying at AIfIA Membership Signup. I hope more organizations adopt this approach.
The Review (RVW) Module for RSS 2.0 (via Catalogablog): "provides a metadata structure for reviews (movie, restaurant, etc.) within 'blogs." - "Many people publish reviews on their own websites, but it is currently difficult to take all these opinions into account when making a decision. Individual reviews may have their own rating scheme, may lack a definite description of the subject of the review, and may be of books, music, films, restaurants, beaches, politicians, or any other subject."
It is a simple scheme to embed rating metadata in RSS feeds, with a field that describes rating range (from 1 to 10 for example) and a rating number. Nice.
I started a Guide to the USA blog (still in beta). All tips welcome!
A while back, I asked a question on a mailing list and forgot about it. Today I came accross the answer in the online archive. (I don't check my mailing lists often enough). [topicmapmail] Topicmaps vs objects: "If the object oriented way of looking at the world has many tools already, and is well understood and supported, what is the advantage of trying to model something as a topicmaps."
Heidi Adkisson has updated her research based Web Design Practices website with information on Faceted Classification, with practices such as "77% of sites using faceted classification provided faceted navigation, but no facet-based advanced search". The data comes from 75 leading e-commerce sites, collected in October, 2003.
After two months of inactivity, I started posting again and Google picked me up within days (the link goes to the Google cache of this page).
More and more, life resembles cutting edge CGI. Amazing image of the sun as a boiling mass of fire. More here.
Blog advertising: No riches so far: "I just started running the things two months ago. All told it's about $100 a month."
SilverOrange lets you browse their Demo Intranet without any barriers like providing an email address. I wish more companies would do this - it would make it a lot easier to compare products.
Keeping tabs on Google, Yahoo modifies home page | CNET News.com: "Yahoo altered its home page this weekend to showcase specialized search features."
The leaner version is of course available search.yahoo.com. Silicon.com has good coverage and asks "does the homepage look strangely familiar?": "Ali Diab, director of product management: This is one thing among many that you will see in the next month, in terms of improvements in helping our users find what they're looking for." Also: "The design changes reflect an internal mandate at the company to make search a prominent feature across the entire network."
As search becomes a more pervasive mode of information retrieval, it is easy to imagine a future somewhat like this:
What would you like to search today?
Google Crawling IRC? If Google indexes chat, it could recommend me chatting rooms for my keywords - without showing the actual indexed chat text (that would violate my sense of privacy). That'd be sweet.
I'm looking for a small digital camera. I don't need huge amounts of pixels (2-3 megapixels will do just fine), but I do want something with a nice lens, easy to use, quick shutter release (digital cameras tend to suck in that area, shooting a picture upto a full second after you've clicked the button) and solid construction (most digital cameras are made of cheap plastic).
Any recommendations?
The Canon Powershot S200 also gets good reviews, and has a stainless steel body, which should mean it's not too flimsy.
Misspelled URL's now go to real websites: Epionions "Welcome to epionions.com we have helpful information about chat and dating, business and finance and transportation." I'd be laughing out loud (if I wasn't at work).
HostRocket.com looks very affordable: 50 Gigs of bandwidth (with rollover plan), 12$ a month. Is there a catch?
EContentMag.com: "If you google "XML," you do get a stunning 20.5 million hits, which is about four times as many as "Britney," but - sensibly - half as many as "God." So I guess XML falls short of omniscience. Still, the prevalence of XML has led to its being a too-ready answer to seemingly every question about information technology in general and content management in particular. The assumption seems to be that, no matter the requirement or problem, XML is the answer."
I have my own domain name, and anything at my domain name gets forwarded to me, so here's gonna be my new approach to spam:
1. peter_year will be the email address I put on my websites (contact me at peter_2003 at mydomain dot com). I'll block any email from more than 2 years ago. This should start reducing my spam immediately, as I adopt peter_2004.
2. Separate addresses for each mailing list: X_year (where x is the name of the mailing list, for example: sigia_2002). This way, I can always close an email that starts getting spam. I will not update the year until it gets compromised - this gives an easy way to see which mailing lists don't attrackt spam.
3. Each time I need to give my email to a company, I use companyname_year at domain dot com: microsoft_2002. Same thing: I will only change this when it starts getting spam.
4. I will retire my current email address over the next 6 months.
5. I will continue to use spam filters.
6. I will have a private email address that I will give to my friends/family.
I'm not sure this will work... Comments?
Crooked Timber: Gambling with the devil: "You are in hell and facing an eternity of torment, but the devil offers you a way out, which you can take once and only once at any time from now on. Today, if you ask him to, the devil will toss a fair coin once and if it comes up heads you are free (but if tails then you face eternal torment with no possibility of reprieve). You don't have to play today, though, because tomorrow the devil will make the deal slightly more favourable to you (and you know this): he'll toss the coin twice but just one head will free you. The day after, the offer will improve further: 3 tosses with just one head needed. And so on (4 tosses, 5 tosses, etc) for the rest of time if needed. So, given that the devil will give you better odds on every day after this one, but that you want to escape from hell some time, when should accept his offer?"
Blogarithms: iPod dies at altitude: "I've been using my 15gb iPod to supply music in my unpressurized airplane. Today I decided to fly high, returning to the S.F. Bay Area from Las Vegas. At FL190 (~19,000'), my iPod got weird. I could feel the disk seeking, and the display kept resetting. Upon landing, it started up and worked fine. I checked the iPosd web site and saw that the unit's max altitude is 10,000' (3,000 meters). I wonder what's pressure sensitive. Sealed disk drive?"
Where are the good sites about documentary filmmaking?
I got a second monitor ($25 secondhand + $7 for a new cable), got 2 video cards from ebay ($10 each), and now I have a dual monitor setup (Win XP). Sweet.
What I learned:
- dual monitor brings out the geek in me.
- I needed 2 new graphics cards. My Dell desktop has a video card ON the motherboard, and that stops working when you add a new video card.
- The two monitors can run different resolutions.
- However, the max resolution of my main monitor went down after plugging it in the new video card.
- Pretty much any cheap video card will do (I got 2 $10 matrox cards).
- WinDVD stopped working for some reason - sound works, video doesn't when I play a DVD. Same sympton when trying to play the DVD with other software.
Drupal 4.3.0 is out. I am installing and customizing Drupal for the first time, and I like it. Two gripes: no multilingual content (only multilingual in the sense that you can translate interface snippets, there is no easy way to have multiple language versions of an article), and a templating system that kinda works but still isn't the easiest to use around.
High ambition for Himalayan internet: "We bring the web to distant places so they can project themselves, benefit from the exposure and maybe young people will stay at home and be proud of being Sherpas, rather than running to Kathmandu or America."
Blogmapper is so cool it makes me want to go travel and use it. (As if I'm not dying to go travel anyway. What are you gonna do - working in the US means 3 weeks of holiday a year. Arg).
Kudo's: I've been using Bloglines lately as my news aggregator. It's not perfect but it's the best solution I've tried so far.
Work in the enterprise market can be a bit of a shocker.
I learnt most of what I know from communities of programmers and IA's on the web. A lot of information is being shared. So when I started working in the enterprise application market a year ago, I hoped for something similar.
Nope. It is extremely hard to find the kind of down-to-earth information that is available in the open source world for enterprise applications like, say, SAP. Nobody's sharing. No mailing lists on SAP, and I have yet to see a blog that discusses SAP. A search for blog+SAP yields almost nothing of relevance, except for SAP's own blogs (not very good).
SAP itself does make an effort to make information available, but obviously, there's always an angle there.
My SAP link of the day: iViewstudio.com. In the SAP Portals world, a portal consists of little iViews (like iframes) that contain functionality (things like change your address, search a database, view reports, ...) iViewstudio lists the various iviews available from SAP and from other vendors. Look at the screenshots to get an idea - below is a small example of an iView.
Open Source Business Conference 2004: how to make dough with open source. Nice.
kuro5hin.org || Notes Toward a Moderation Economy: "Whether you call it Mojo, Karma, "Standing," or something else, all content rating feedback systems have some sort of currency. While there are many different ways of acquiring and spending such capital, nobody seems to have implemented an economy varied enough to be robust. And this is the key to building a system which can be stable in the long term." (via EiM)
Taxonomy is a boundary object
In short: designers talking about taxonomies, or business people talking about objects is a good thing, even though they may seem rather uninformed about it to us (you) experts.
(You social science folk, please correct me if I strayed too far from common wisdom here)
Boundary Object: "Artifacts, Documents and perhaps even vocabulary that can help people from different communities build a shared understanding. Boundary objects will be interpreted differently by the different communinities, and it is an acknowledgement and discussion of these differences that enables a shared understanding to be formed." (from the enTWIne project)
In 1988, Susan Leigh Star [1] introduced the term boundary object to describe information that is used in different ways by different communities of practice [2].
Boundary objects have interesting properties (from Brian Marick):
- If x is a boundary object, people from different communities of practice can use it as a common point of reference for conversations. They can all agree they're talking about x.
- But the different people are not actually talking about the same thing. They attach different meanings to x.
- Despite different interpretations, boundary objects serve as a means of translation.
- Boundary objects are plastic enough to adapt to changing needs. And change theydo, as communities of practice cooperate. Boundary objects are working arrangements, adjusted as needed. They are not imposed by one community, norby appeal to outside standards.
A goal is often used as a boundary object. "Finish this project successfully" is a boundary project in software development. It means different things to different communities of practice, but it is plastic enough to get everyone working together.
The term "taxonomy" is another boundary object. It is used differently by different communities of practice (designers, project managers, librarians, IA's).
What Star teaches us is that the fact that we all understand this term differently is not a problem. The boundary object serves to bring different communities of practice together.
So next time someone from a separate community of practice uses a term or talks about something in a rather naive or uninformed way (from your perspective), don't roll your eyes. Realize that this may be a boundary object, and boundary objects make it possible for you two to communicate at all. They also make it possible for different communities of practice to effectively work together.
Notes:
[1] Susan Leigh Star introduced the term "boundary object" in "The structure of ill-structured solutions: heterogeneous problemsolving, boundary objects and distributed artificial intelligence." She also wrote Sorting Things Out - Classification and Its Consequences, a thrilling classic in classification literature (sample chapters). I never realized she was the same person - she's now my official hero.
[2] A community of practice is a group of people who do a certain type of work, talk to each other about their work, and derive some measure of their identity from that work. Programmers are a community of practice. IA's are another. (Brian Marick wrote a great paper, boundary objects (PDF)).
Finally: Info-Eyes: An Online Information Community for the Visually Impaired (via Handheld Librarian).
Papers and Technical Reports from HCIL - yummie reading lists for when work is slow via Tanya.
I'm still number 1 in Google for "amazon marketing", but the link is broken. Curious how Google will deal with this: the post exists now under a different URL. Will they find it?
The faceted classification mailing list is rocking lately. A lot of the stuff on there is way over my head, but you may be interested in it.
Faceted Classification bibliography
William Denton created Putting Facets on the Web: An Annotated Bibliography: a classified, annotated bibliography about how to design faceted classification systems and make them usable on the World Wide Web.
(Yes, the facet goodness is back on!)
Comment spammers
I have been spared the invasion of the comment spammers because my weblog was offline this summer.
But to pre-empt them, now that comments are back, I installed Blacklist. I then did a Google query on blacklist.txt, and pasted the first few results in my blacklist, thereby updating my list before the spammers even hit me.
Here's my list, compiled out of various sources (I don't think sharing these would help the spammers, would it?) It certainly feels goood. I'd be up for an option in blacklist that automatically gets other people's lists.
Blogging again
I'm blogging again. If you ever need to move MT to a new server and accidentally lock yourself out of your old installation, check out MT Medic. It's a cgi script you FTP into your MT directory, and it lets you recover your password and do more stuff. Nice.
I have probably broken all my old URL's doing this. Too bad. I hope next time I'm moving server most CMS's will automatically generate mod_rewrite files to catch changed URL's, or do something similar. I can't be bothered to spend the day it would take me to figure it out.
I'm stopping the blogging thing for a while
And I'll miss it.
I am moving poorbuthappy.com to a new server. I have managed to make the colombia section work, with all its functionality and mod_rewrite crazyness. I haven't been able to install MT. I also haven't been able to figure out a good way to port my data. So what you're looking at now is a static site (that's why the comments are gone). If anyone tells you installing MT is easy, please politely kick them in the balls for me.
Help: I am moving my
Help: I am moving my MT blog to a different server. I uploaded all the files to the new server, including the DB files (I wasn't using mysql).
Turns out my new server doesn't have DB_File installed, so I'll have to use mysql. How can I get the data from my old MT installation (which is in a DB database) into a mysql database? All tips are welcome!
I'm looking for articles and
I'm looking for articles and tips about how to run an open source software project.
I put Google Adsense on
I put Google Adsense on Easy Topic Maps two weeks ago. There have been 1,324 impressions and 40 clickthroughs (about 3 by myself), which gives an impressive average clickthrough rate of 3.0% (I'm not supposed to say that) and made me $11.59. Not bad at all. Other people have reported clickthrough rates of 4%, revenues of $100 in a day for a popular blog. Of course, not everybody thinks it's cool.
I'm not sure I'll leave it on there, but if you have some very focused and clean (Google declines 'offensive' sites, probably based on a crawl) sites, why not?
So I'm nr. 1 for
So I'm nr. 1 for Google Search: amazon marketing. And I got the day off tomorrow!
Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent: Echo...echo...alright
Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent: Echo...echo...alright enough already: "given a complete Echo spec, the launch of a new product could gut a lesser rival's customer base in a matter of hours."
Scott Mcloud has a new
Scott Mcloud has a new online comic featuring micropayments (it's .25c).
Expressions - a visual blogging
Expressions - a visual blogging system: "Expressions is a hosted visual blogging system that makes it easy for anyone to create and maintain their very own photo or visual blog." Cool.