captsolo weblog

Merry Christmas to you all!
Wish you a wonderful and peaceful celebration.

Here are a couple of nice things:

• Līga's blog has a nice picture of Pink Elephant sending us best season's greetings. Would be nice to let it (elephant) live in my sidebar. And then there's a nice idea about "Can I Crash?" initiative for bloggers.

• Pēteris shows how you can make festive fireworks right in your office (and don't do this at home!). Check it out what you can do with an ashtray: video and an explosion.

How was your Christmas?

UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux

In-depth explanation of Unicode and UTF-8. Might be handy when I try to fix the encoding of comments which got broken when recovering from a backup. Apparently something went wrong with the encoding of special characters (Latvian, Russian, ...) when the backup was created.

Welcome to the new blogs - both in the field of the Web and Semantic Web and those writing on more general topics.

Semantic Web:

TimBL's blog

Tim Berners-Lee now has a blog on DIG blogs site. His first entry ends with words "So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog". This is a blog you might want to bookmark.

Stefan Decker

Stefan Decker now has a new blog described as a weblog covering semantics in computer science. It was interesting to read an article "The Database Community and the Semantic Web" and see that different areas of computer science have almost no knowledge of each other. Good to see at least some awareness about the Semantic Web now building up within the database community.

Dan Connolly

Dan's blog provides an intense flow of information and first grasped my attention when he mentioned SIOC in the "SKOS, SIOC, and drupal taxonomy" article. Nice to see that DIG blogs now have comments enabled - I wanted to respond to the blog entry mentioned above, but at that time it was not possible.

General:

Pink Elephant

She starts the blog with a simple, yet fundamental question - "why to write a blog?". It is followed by posts on diverse topics, the last one featuring one of the most amazing Swedish architectural creations.

Information

Hyper-focused attention is good when you explore something - it lets you accumulate and process a huge amount of information. But now when I am looking at those 10+ open Mozilla windows with ~5 tabs each plus some IE windows and thinking - what to do with all this information now?

Reminds me of something Līga said recently - "i wish i could move open tabs between Firefox windows".

This would not solve the question what to do with all this information, but still would help to group and manage them. There was a Mozilla extension Multizilla that lets you do this. Is there something like this for the Firefox?

Attention

Luckily, these windows have appeared during a number of days. If that all was just one night, that'd have been way too much. Which again leads to the question of how do we all cope with the information that is out there?

Joi Ito: Continuous Partial Attention - talking about an idea of continuous partical attention by Linda Stone:

" ... at conferences or the multi-modal distance learning projects where you have a video of the speaker, the power point presentation, the chat, the wiki and the back channel going at the same time. ... It CAN be very overwhelming, but I think it's because we are conditioned to think that we need to understand all of the information that is being transmitted.

I think an interesting metaphor might be the difference between loss-less and lossy compression technology. There is so much information being transmitted and it doesn't matter if you [get] everything exactly (or if you are getting exactly the same bits as someone else).

... The trick is to get a picture of what is going on from a perspective that makes sense for you in a format that compresses well for you. ... I think that if we stop trying to "catch it all" which we are conditioned to do, and think more in terms of lossy compression and surfing parallel streams and multi-modes, maybe it is easier. "

Related:

• Responsibility, Accountability, and Follow-Through - a discussion on "43 Folders" list.
• Is my obsession a feature or a bug? - a discussion on "attention deficit disorder" - is it a feature or a bug?

It was a great night. Stayed up late, but feeling good.

Sadly, the first part of the night was not for fun, but rather to finish a paper that we were working on.

But when that was completed felt too good to go to sleep.
And nightly conversations with folks on #joiito can really cheer you up.

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