captsolo weblog

Aaron writes about running filtr on Maemo/Nokia N810 (filtr is software for applying filters to images). Some applications he is using include SVN, Python, GPS bindings, ImageMagick. Just quoting bits of it here, due to my interest in the Maemo platform (I have a Nokia N800 and need to put it to better use):

“For a variety of reasons I’ve been using my N810 again, flashing the operating system and reinstalling stuff from scratch. The N810 does not make the Earth move, especially in a world of jail-broken iPhones. Its wireless chip is not terrifically strong, the GPS chip takes forever to establish a signal and the touch screen — let’s be honest — makes you pine for Apple.

But it is a pretty reliable workhorse of a device if you approach it with a measure of tolerance (compassion?) and — especially in a world of jail-broken iPhones — there is an impressive wealth of software already written and/or ported to run with little hassle.”

“Just for kicks a few months ago I pulled down a copy of
ModestMaps from trunk, no less, using Subversion and wouldn’t you know it ws-compose.py ran out of the box. Just like
that. It blew its brains out trying to do Atkinson filtering but otherwise generating maps
and pinwins Just Worked !

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had
actually gone to the trouble of porting ImageMagick, of all things, to run on the N810. Which got me wondering : Would filtr run
under Maemo?”

DealNews just sent an alert informing that N810 is available for USD 363.-.
Trying to resist temptation to buy yet another gadget.

Mood: traveling to San Jose, CA (in Dublin now, flying to San Francisco tomorrow morning)

Going Solo is a one-day educational conference for freelancers and small business owners of the internet industry and beyond, organised by Stephanie Booth and taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Being a freelancer probably a whole different world. I know people who are successful at their own business and people who are just thinking of going solo but afraid to dive into this [probably] uncertain world. Not done that myself, either.

Conference such as “Going Solo” (which is on this Friday!) should be interesting to anyone thinking of freelancing and looking for others’ experience. XTech 2008 is finished now (it was great!) and this conference is what I would be interested to go to next.

Unfortunately the schedule is too busy and I will be traveling to the Semantic Technology 2008 conference shortly. But all is not lost - Stephanie writes that conference videos will be online - which should give at least some feeling of “virtual presence".

SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble [SlashDot]

“Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope.

From the article: ‘The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 [$732.95] per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.” “Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!"”

Is that surprising?

As heard from a friend working at a mobile phone company shortly after text messages (or SMSs) were introduced: text messages are using the existing signaling infrastructure and had virtually no additional network costs when introduced.

Mobile phone company could have added SMSs at not cost at all but had to set some “symbolic” price to avoid getting overloaded by the tsunami of free text messages. This “symbolic” price is what we are paying now.

P.S. Personally, I do not worry about the cost of SMS messages that much, but would rather encourage mobile phone operators to provide 3G data services at affordable, low price.

Twitter “hashtags” (such as #www2008) have given users an easy way to tag Twitter messages or “tweets".

“Hashtag” convention has emerged from the Twitter user community and is not yet supported by Twitter itself (this was the case with @replies - a way to address other users and engage in conversations with them - which also emerged from users’ behaviour and only later was granted special handling by the microblogging service). This creates an opportunity for external services for using Twitter APIs to create websites for tracking conversations that use “hashtags".

#www2008 is a tag used by many participants of the WWW 2008 conference to tag their short messages. See below for some of these services which will show you twitter conversations and reports from the conference.

Hashtags: www2008 => http://www.hashtags.org/tag/www2008/

This site provides real-time tracking of Twitter #hashtags. It includes a nice “sparkline” showing the history of popularity of the given tag. This is an opt-in service and in order for your messages to be shown on it you must add @hashtags user as your contact on Twitter.

Summize Twitter conversation search => look for keywords www2008 and “www 2008″

Summize lets us perform keyword searches on Twitter conversations, updated almost in real-time. Using it you can find conversation missed by hashtags search. For example, when someone just used a phrase “WWW 2008″ or did not opt-in to hashtags search service.

There must be other services like this. It was interesting to follow conversations on Twitter and occasionally bump into other authors of short messages seen on Twitter. What someone could do now with these conversations (apart from reading them and maybe finding something interesting) is extract and visualize a community of Twitter message authors at WWW 2008.

“Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF” - XTech 2008 - Friday, May 9 at 9:00

XTech 2008 conference will te taking place in Dublin, Ireland next week (May 6-9, 2008). This XTech talk will describe how to combine lightweight Semantic Web vocabularies - SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) - to enable data portability between social media sites.

In order to let users become owners of their own data hosted on multiple sites, portability between social media sites is required in terms of both (1) the personal profiles and friend networks and (2) a user’s content objects expressed on each site.

The Data Portability initiative, which outlines the main priciples behind such portability, lists RDF as one of the open standards that can be used for porting users’ data and social networks. But this is a very general claim since RDF is a flexible, low-level data format that can express almost anything and you still need to choose [a small number of] vocabularies that can describe the domain you are interested in. This is where SIOC and FOAF come into play:

• The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, providing the social network component of data portability. It can be used in a combination with the the OpenID identity system.
• The SIOC vocabulary is an open format for expressing information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. It provides the content object component of data portability. The SIOC Types module can be used to further specify different types of Social Web / Web2.0 objects that we may want to describe.

As an experiment you can try importing data created by one of SIOC export plugins (look at a list of over 45 SIOC-enabled applications to see what tools are available for your social media platform) with the SIOC import plugin for WordPress. In order to make it more interesting use a social media site other than WordPress as a source of SIOC data. See you at XTech!

More information:

• XTech 2008 - Dublin, Ireland - May 6-9, 2008 (registration still open)
• Data Portability initiative
• Great videos: John Breslin on Data Portability and “Get Your Data Out” song by Danny Ayers