captsolo weblog

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!!

This photo features a moment from the “Staro Rīga” - Riga light festival.

• Twitter is down for maintenance. ("It’s Cool, I Can Chill” -> “Hurry Up!” says the ice-cream cone on their custom status image).
• http://news.ycombinator.com/ has met a crawling death. The page is loading forever and never shows a complete list of news.

Where do you write when Twitter is down? A lot of what might become blog posts are expressed as short Twitter messages instead these days. But if it is down? Well, then the blog gets twitter-like messages such as this one.

Maybe you know how to add Offline access to MoinMoin wiki using Google Gears ?

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Update: Thanks to tm who found that there is also a CSS score test:

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The picture above is a word cloud generated from recent content of this blog, created using Wordle.

Wordle is a service for creating “word clouds” from the text or feed provided. Users can then change cloud layouts, fonts and colors in order to a visually attractive representation of word frequency in the source text. Final result can be saved to a gallery.

These “word clouds” are more interesting to me as a blog author compared with tag clouds. In the latter you would not find many surprises because you already know what tags you typically assign to posts. Word clouds can be more interesting because they are created automatically based on the “raw” content of blog posts and they can contain some surprises.

Do you think there are ways to make these word clouds (1) more interactive and (2) useful for machines too?

On the interactive side of things one could make a list of matching posts appear when you select a word from the cloud.

As for making this information reusable by software I do not have a clear answer, but one could adapt SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) ontology to express word clouds. MOAT (Meaning of a Tag) ontology is also nearby but not sure how it would fit into this use case.

See also:

• CaptSolo blog word cloud in Wordle’s gallery. Has the same content as the image above, but it has a different and more colorful layout with black background (update: added a snapshot of it after “read more").
• Wordle concept maps at leobard’s blog: “A quick and fun tool to make nice calligraphically-good-looking tag clouds out of your own tags (works with delicious)”

Read more! »

Dict: Sweding (swē-ding) = To re-make something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on.

Recreating movies from scratch with whatever we can find, we bring the joy and hilarity of movie magic back to life.Born out of the mispronunciation of “sueding” (as in fake leather) by French director Michael Gondry, sweding’s roots lie firmly in the movie industry. …

This is a beautiful Torchwood episode 2x13 “sweded” by a group of geeks during the “Over The Air” conference in London in April 2008.

Film and actor crew consists of people such as Ewan Spence, Matthew Cashmore and Tom Morris (also seen at other cool events, e.g., HackDay London or BlogTalk Cork). Great work! And very entertaining.

The “swede” is very much inspired by the movies “Be Kind, Rewind” and “Son of Rambow” (and also had a Monty Python reference). One of pages on the web mentioned that all this “hack” was created within 1 day (or 24 hours?) but I can not find that web page any more.

There’s more information about sweding and this particular hack on Torchwood Swede blog. A HD version and outtakes from the production process can be found here: http://www.vimeo.com/sweded

Related news:

The next episode of Doctor Who (which Torchwood is a spin-off of) will air on BBC 1 today at 18:45 (a little more than 45 min from now, since time zone of this blog is +2h). One could just wish for it to be available on BBC iPlayer outside the UK too.