CaptSolo :: All Blogs

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!!

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

Grouping of related information is a nice thing to have. Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service yet it lacks ability to group your contacts.

Grouping becomes especially important when you:

• follow 100+ people
• follow people from different communities (e.g., speaking different languages)

In case if you follow many people on Twitter you probably can not read all their tweets (unless reading tweets is your daytime job). Yet you may want to follow all the messages from a smaller community.

It would be cool if you could add people to groups and then filter messages to show only tweets from people in the group. You could switch between information from different groups or display a number of groups side-by-side.

Some applications (e.g. TweetDeck) have added group functionality. But it is then limited to just that application. It would be better if you could exchange group information between users and between applications.

Some groups might be private to a user (e.g., friends or family) while other - topic-oriented groups (e.g., web designers) - could be public. For the latter you may want to exchange information about the group with others or publish it on the web.

Once able to push group info to the web and get it back, people can start to “fork” group lists published by others and modify them by adding their favorites. Or maintain centralized group lists in a wiki-like manner.

Then someone could just load a group definition and be able to get an overview of what people in the community are talking about. We can’t complain about a lack of information these days, but filtering of this information is still a problem. Filtering out a smaller group of tweets might help.

For this to work we need a way to describe a group or a community.

… please leave your comments. this topic will be continued in a followup post … – @CaptSolo

VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data.

The next event - VoCamp Galway 2008 will be taking place here in Galway, Ireland the week after next - on 25th-26th of November. You are welcome to participate. Just sign up on the wiki and come to Galway.

This is a photo (made by Fabien Gandon) from VoCamp Oxford 2008. It was the first of this series of events, organised by Tom Heath, Richard Cyganiak, Jun Zhao, David Shotton.

Related:

• VoCamp, Day Zero by Tom Heath

Update: it’s on the week after next (and not the next week as the previous version of this post said).

Liga is posting about social media and marketing on another site now.

These are her recent articles:

• Things that make me go - wow! - with some Pantone geekiness
• Social media & online appearance - nice social media site icons
  (could you help figure out what services are those logos for? two names still missing)
• Thought of the day

These are 3 stunning talks from the TED Conference: Ideas Worth Spreading.
What are your favorite TEDtalks?

Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

---

A bonus: TED Talk: Clifford Stoll - An Agile Mind is also lots of fun.

Comments / suggestions from readers:

• TED: Kevin Kelly on the next 5000 days of the web
• TED talks by Dan Dennett: Philosopher, cognitive scientist

ACTA ir “anti-viltošanas un anti-pirātisma” jeb Internet cenzūras u.c. līgums, kuru gatavojas parakstīt Eiropas Savienība, ASV, Kanādas, un vairāku citu valstu valdības.

Līgums paredz būtiskus privātuma ierobežojumus gan Internetā, gan “reālajā pasaulē". Var jau teikt, ka pareizi vien ir un būs mazāk cilvēku, kas “klausās un nemaksā". Diemžēl šāds līgums tēmē uz policejisku valsti un pārrunas par tā slēgšanu tiek slēptas no publikas. Baidos, ka šāds līgums var nebūt zaudēto brīvību un privātuma vērts.

Idejiski šis līgums ir pret pirātismu un viltošanu. Tiktāl jauki. Lūk dažas lietas, ar ko mums var nākties sadzīvot nākotnē:

• Pārmeklēšana uz robežas - līgums paredz uz robežas “randomā” pārbaudīt ceļotāju portatīvos datorus, telefonus un MP3 playerus lai pārbaudītu vai tajos nav nelegāli lejuplādēta vai “ripota” muzika vai filmas. - Ceļotājus ar “apšaubāmu” muziku vai filmām gaida sods un šo informāciju saturošās iekārtas var tikt konfiscētas.
• Internet pakalpojumu ierobežojumi - dokuments paredz piespiest Internet pakalpotāju sniedzējus bez tiesas lēmuma sniegt informāciju par “nelegālo” failu apmaiņā iespējami iesaistītām personām. Atkārtotiem pārkāpējiem var tikt liegta pieeja Internetam. - ASV muzikas industrijai nemaz tik labi neveicas ar patērētāju iesūdzēšanu tiesā. Vai tas nozīmē, ka tagad bezpeļņas organizācijas organizācijas (AKKA/LAA, MPAA, RIAA, …) strādās par Internet policistiem un ieviesīs savu kārtību? Kā tad paliek ar nevainības prezumpciju?
• Privātuma ierobežojumi - iespējami ierobežojumi Internet privātuma rīku lietošanā. Galu galā, citādi šāda līguma ieviešana panāks tik to, ka cilvēki vienkārši sāks lietot šifrēšanu vai TOR. Interesanti, vai nonāks līdz tam, ka sarakstes šifrēšana būs aizliegta?

Tas notiek tagad

Šodien, 6.novembrī, Eiropas Parlamenta INTA komisija apspriedīs pilnvaru došanu Eiropas Komisijai ACTA līguma noslēgšanai:

With a draft Report from August 26, 2008 the European Commission tries to get a Mandate from the European Parlament for the negotitation of ACTA. The document will be discussed and propably amended within the INTA Comittee of the European Parliament. Eva Lichtenberger prepared a Draft Opinion that heavily criticises this paper within the JURI-committee. The resolution is sheduled for adoption in the committee on November 6, 2008 and on December 12, 2008 for the plenary.

Avots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement#European_Parliament

Slepenība

Pārrunas notiek slepenībā un slēpti no publikas acīm. To dalībnieki ir atteikušies publiskot līguma uzmetumus vai informāciju par tajā iekļautajām normām. Kanādas sabiedrisko interešu aizstāvji iesniedza pieprasījumu atklāt informāciju par šo līgumu, bet saņēma tikai dokumentu ar līguma nosaukumu, kurā viss pārējais saturs bija nodzēsts.

“Sazvērnieki” vēl aizvien cenšas neizpaust informāciju par šo līgumu. Tās plīvuru pavēra ACTA līguma uzmetuma anonīma publikācija Wikileaks lapā 2008.gada 22.maijā.

Kopš tā laika līgums ir saņēmis kritiku par procesa slepenību, bet es nebrīnītos, ja Latvijā par to vēl neviens nav runājis.

Vairāk par ACTA kritiku (Wikipēdijā).

Ko tālāk?

Šis raksts ir tikai ievads ACTA līguma problēmās. Visu informāciju par sabiedrības aktivitātēm ap ACTA šajā rakstā ietilpināt nesanāks, tādēļ zemāk ir dažas norādes uz plašāku informāciju. Var arī oponēt, ka šis līgums ir tēmēts uz plaša apjoma pirātiem un lietu viltotājiem. Bet, ja tajā ir punkti kas var ierobežot cilvēku brīvību, kāds to noteikti izmantos.

Ko mēs varam darīt? Pirmkārt jau prasīt caurspīdīgu procesu (izmantojot likumā paredzētās iespējas pieprasīt informāciju) un iespēju sabiedrībai piedalīties šādu lēmumu apspriešanā. Varbūt var ko paveikt sazinoties ar Latvijas pārstāvjiem EK un EP.

Skat. arī “Speak out against ACTA!” (Free Software Foundation).

Papildus informācija:

• FFI information about ACTA
• ACTA - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement [Wikipedia]

• Concerns about ACTA in EU, Canada [Nov 04, 2008 @ SlashDot]
• Government Keeps ACTA Consultation Results Under Wraps [Nov 03, 2008 by Michael Geist]
• What does the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) really mean for you and I? [Jul 10, 2008 @ Guardian]
• RIAA Suggestions for content of ACTA - including a ban on installation of P2P software in government systems (sounds like criminalizing P2P software which has plenty of legal uses and is built-in into some Internet browsers)

TV3 raidījuma “Nekā Personīga” (02.11.2008.) sižets par autortiesību nodokli, AKKA/LAA un iespējami aizdomīgām darbībām ar autoratlīdzību.

Avots: TV3 par AKKA/LAA (BlackHalt)

Citi raksti:

• Laacz.lv raksti par AKKA/LAA
• AKKA/LAA — Google tīmekļa žurnālu meklēšana
• parodijas par “Man nepatīk, ka cilvēki grib lietot kautko un par to nemaksāt” (avoti: @peteriskrievins un BlackHalt blogs)

Eng: a TV excerpt about a controversy related to the private copying levy in Latvia, plans to extend it to mobile phones and PDAs, and about alleged inconsistencies in how the money is used by a local copyrights agency AKKA/LAA.

The term “Social Media” (where “Media” suggests information publishing and consuming) may be the wrong name according to Doc Searls:

We are all authors of each other

One problem: I avoid using the term “social media". I don’t like it, and I don’t even want to know what it means. I may talk about blogging and podcasting and syndication and tagging and stuff like that. But I never think about any of those things as “media” and rarely visit their “social” nature (though I am sure they have one).

I don’t use the term “Web 2.0″ either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it’s the name we’ll give to the next crash.

…

I don’t think of my what I do here as production of “information” that others “consume". Nor do I think of it as “one-to-many” or “many-to-many". I think of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers.

Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.

The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about.

Is the term “Social Web” a more appropriate name?

Related:

“What is Wrong with Social Media?” - a summary of different points of view on Social Media collected by Brian Solis.

Can you suggest tools or web services for generating RDFa content from RDF?

Extracting RDF statements from (X)HTML+RDFa is a common task and that’s what many RDFa tools do. An example of such service is the W3C RDFa distiller service by Ivan Herman.

What about a “RDFa fusion” tool which gets (X)HTML and RDF content as input and produces (X)HTML+RDFa?

In domain specific situations one can use templating for inserting bits of RDFa in relevant places of (X)HTML markup. An example is the FOAF/RDF to FOAF/RDFa converter by Michael Hausenblas.

But that will not work in a general case when the structure of (X)HTML document is not known in advance.

Related:

• RDFa in XHTML is a W3C Recommendation [W3C Semantic Web Activity news]
• Templating Microformats from RDF by Danny Ayers where I spotted a link to Michael’s FOAF/RDF to RDFa converter

The new behaviour of a location bar in Firefox 3 might have come as a surprise to some users. And not always a pleasant surprise. It may be “smarter” but it can also ruin the user experience.

Here is some advice how to tweak it “back to normal":

9 tweaks for Firefox 3’s location bar

Firefox extensions which can help:

• OldBar extension (recommended)
• Old Location Bar (still experimental)

OldBar has a more solid feel to it and I will probably keep using it. But I would love to have the old URL lookup algorithm back (these extensions change the look-n-feel but not the algorithm). The one where only the URL is matched and not the page title.

Ian Davis wrote a reply on FriendFeed: “Stick with it [the new location bar], it’s changed how I bookmark (or not) completely.”

With the appearance fixed / improved (using OldBar) the location bar feels more useable already.

Currently it leaves me with mixed impressions: I like that you can enter multiple words in the location bar and they will be searched throughout the URL (and title). For example, enter a part of the hostname and refine the search by adding a part of the name of the file or wiki page. That’s nice.

Still do not like that it is searching in page titles. This is mostly garbage to me because page titles (1) do not uniquely identify the page and (2) do not always properly describe content of the page. Users relying on searching in page titles for locating the webpage of their internet bank can also be a tasty target for phishing.

P.S. Also check out user reviews to the OldBar extension.

… in continuation of a topic of rare books (started with Unbelievable price for a Photoshop book):

Daemon must be an amazing science fiction novel if it gets feedback (#1, #2 from reviews of the paperback edition of “Daemon”) like this:

• “DAEMON is better than early Tom Clancy (when he was good) …”
• “As a computer professional I found the technology in this book believeable –which is it’s most compelling feature. … I loved the book and have bought 7 copies (so far) as gifts …
• “I just finished the most thought provoking cyberpunk novel I think I’ve ever read: The Daemon by Leinad Zeraus.” - see a review by Dustin Kirkland

… hmm, how can a book be rare if it was published less than 2 years ago? Turns out it was sold out and the price of a used book on Amazon is “starting from $95.00″.

If this book has captured your attention and you do not have the book yet, there are some good news. A new hardcover edition is to be published in early January 2009 and is available for pre-order now. A sequel called Freedom™ is expected to follow.

For more information: Daemon book’s page [www.thedaemon.com]

P.S. Weird that author names on the two editions are different - it is Leinad Zeraus on the paperback and Daniel Suarez on the hardcover edition.

• 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 ?

Turns out that Fenfire knows how to render TeX markup.

While it is not a feature you might find very useful in an RDF browser, nevertheless this was an interesting discovery. Maybe there are more hidden gems like this?

More info:

• Fenfire project page
  
• “Browsing Linked Data with Fenfire” paper (PDF) at the 1st Linked Data on the Web workshop.
  

42

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

22

… following a meme via James Tauber, Dougal Matthews and Eric Florenzano:

* BASIC
* Turbo Pascal
* C
* C++
* MS Access (Visual Basic?)
* FoxPro
* x86 Assembly
* Java
* PL/SQL
* PHP
* JavaScript
* Python

Languages which I have had a brief encounter with but not enough experience to include them in the list above: Logo, FOCAL, REXX, Perl, Prolog, LISP, Haskell, bash.

Plus markup languages and others: HTML, SQL, XML, RDF/XML, Turtle, SPARQL, XUL, LaTeX.

This list almost tells a story (like looking at a photo gallery) about work and study experience. Almost, but not quite. To make a story complete some languages would need to appear twice or more - when first learned and when used again, in combination with other languages and architecture components.

Update: had forgot to add PHP (I wonder why ). fixed.

AAAI-SSS-09: Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0

Update: Submission deadline was extended to October 10, 2008.

It takes place at the Stanford University on March 23-25, 2009 as a part of the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia

” In this symposium, we are interested in bringing together the semantic web community and the social web community to promote the collaborative development and deployment of semantics in the World Wide Web context. We welcome constructive papers on, for example: (i) how semantic technologies, especially knowledge representation and collective intelligence, can benefit social web content organization and retrieval; (ii) how social web technologies can facilitate massive semantic content production; and (iii) how to address the requirements, e.g., reasoning scalability and semantic convergence issues, which emerge from the combination.

… there is more information (topics, …) on the website …

—

Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop

If looking for events within a shorter timeframe, you are welcome to come to the 1st Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop at ISWC 2008.

It takes place in Karlsruhe, Germany on October 27, 2008.

List of accepted papers:

• “A Hybrid Social Entity Reconciliation Algorithm for Interlinking Online Social Communities” by Chunying Zhou and Huajun Chen
• “A state of the art on Social Network Analysis and its applications on a semantic web” by Guillaume Ereteo, Fabien Gandon, Michel Buffa, Patrick Grohan, Myl?ne Leitzelman and Peter Sander
• “Combining Social Music and Semantic Web for music-related recommender systems” by Alexandre Passant and Yves Raimond
• “Expressing Argumentative Discussions in Social Media Sites” by Christoph Lange, Uldis Bojārs, Tudor Groza, John Breslin and Siegfried Handschuh
• “Getting to Me – Exporting Semantic Social Network from Facebook” by Matthew Rowe and Fabio Ciravegna
• “LODr – A Linking Open Data Tagging System” by Alexandre Passant
• “Modeling Online Presence” by Milan Stankovic
• “RDFohloh, a RDF wrapper of Ohloh” by Sergio Fern?ndez
• “Semantify del.icio.us: automatically turn your tags into senses” by Maurizio Tesconi, Francesco Ronzano, Andrea Marchetti and Salvatore Minutoli
• “Towards Opinion Mining Through Tracing Discussions on the Web” by Selver Softic and Michael Hausenblas
• “Towards Socially Aware Mobile Phones” by Alessandra Toninelli, Deepali Khushraj, Ora Lassila and Rebecca Montanari
• “Wikipedia Mining for Triple Extraction Enhanced by Co-reference Resolution” by Kotaro Nakayama

—

Full disclosure: I am taking part in organizing these events.

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! »

An interesting project: gitshelve - Using Git as a versioned data store in Python

The gitshelve module is a part of the git-issue project, which is an attempt to bring distributed bug tracking to Git.

Useful if you need to store a version history of objects in Python. I am wondering if this can also be useful for keeping version history of files collected by a web crawler (or what is the preferred solution that people use in such case).

Useful GIT links:

• GIT magic [stanford.edu]
• GIT from the bottom up [newartisans.com]
• The thing about GIT [tomayko.com]

Can you suggest places in London with a free WiFi access?

Or maybe a wiki with a list of such “geek friendly” locations? Recommendations for cafes where you can buy coffee and get some time of network access would work too.

We will spend this weekend in London (arriving Friday evening) and one thing that surprised me last time when we were there was that it was hard to find a place with wireless internet access, not even talking about free access. Was expecting something more like SF Bay area (I wonder why) where free wifi is in every other cafe.

There were some places like a cafe in Chapters where you can buy coffee and get wifi access, but even then it was not working properly. We ended up going to one of the “internet farms” as you could call places where many people are crammed in small space full of computers w. internet access. It got the job done that time, but a relaxing cafe would be so much better.

Hopefully you can recommend something. The main area of interest is between Marble Arch and Covent Garden, but any such information can be useful.

Writing this to remind all that the workshop deadline (July 25) is approaching fast.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW 2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

It can be a good opportunity to write about connections between the Social Web and the Semantic Web, about FOAF, SIOC and other cool things. The organizers (I am among them) are looking forward to interesting submissions and to providing a discussion place for people from different areas of interest.

Detailed information can be found at the SDoW 2008 website.

“You abuse the throttle, you should expect a ticket” [SiliconValley.com]

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s recommending that the commission punish Comcast for secretly interfering with BitTorrent file-sharing traffic.

Comcast has defended the throttling of users’ uploads as reasonable network traffic management, meant to benefit the majority of customers. But Martin’s investigation found Comcast was using the surreptitious technique more broadly and more arbitrarily than it claimed. “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” Martin said. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said he won’t seek any financial penalties, but he does want Comcast to stop the blocking, fill the commission in on how it was used, and clearly disclose to customer its network traffic management plans and policies.

BitTorrent is like other Internet data transfer technologies in that the technology itself does not dictate what it is used for. It has plenty of legitimate uses and internet providers can do better than knowingly lowering the quality of service provided, based on false assumptions.

In other news:

Many users in Europe and the U.S. are used to theyr internet providers limiting downloads at 10-40 Gigabytes per month and might consider themselves lucky if their download cap is more than 50 Gb ("that sure must be enough for everyone"). Compare that to Japan where NTT Communications has imposed an upload limit of ~300 Gb per month. Downloads are unlimited.

I recently upgraded my notebook to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

It is quite late compared to many first adopters, but there was no reason to rush. Even so there still are some rough edges to Leopard (e.g., a bug with desktop screen size after the external monitor gets unplugged) that need to be ironed out.

What are your experiences with Leopard, do you enjoy the new look & feel and what is the “must-have” software that you would recommend using with it?

P.S. One reason for waiting with an upgrade was because I did not have a good backup / HDD imaging solution in place (solved using SuperDuper!). The other was too much travel and not wanting to risk upgrading shortly before traveling.

Post-Upgrade Notes:

HP Printer Driver 1.1 was released by Apple on July 15, 2008. Printing stopped working for me after installing this update. This support discussion post suggests how to fix the problem by replacing the following directories with older versions (backup from before printer drive upgrade):

• MacintoshHD/library/printers/hp/filter/hpPostProcessing.bundle
• MacintoshHD/library/printers/hp/PDEs/hpPostScriptPDE.plugin

Recently I am experiencing RSI (repetitive strain injury) related pain in the left hand. I must find some way to fight it and would appreciate your comments.

MacBook Pro is what I am using these days. This both sets the environment in which I am trying to help RSI-related symptoms and is also partially a reason why RSI has become more intense.

Contrary to many other reports I am not experiencing problems with the mouse-holding right hand. Perhaps this is because I am a keyboard user and avoided using mouse for file navigation tasks on Windows thanks to the FAR Manager (an advanced file manager similar to Norton Commander).

What I found out after moving to a Mac is that the left hand gets more stress because of keystroke combos like Cmd-W, Cmd-’, Fn-Bspace, Fn-Shift-Up, etc. These require hand to be moved out of the normal typing position and moving fingers into multi-key combos which make the hand hurt more. Maybe it is also something in ergonomics of the keyboard or something else is different between the way I work with this notebook and the previous one (IBM ThinkPad R40).

Anyhow, need to find some way to fix this. There is software that makes you take regular breaks, which helps with typing tasks. But even more important in this situation would be to offload the left hand from frequent shortcut combos (but unfortunately the left part of the keyboard is where the only set of Fn, Ctrl, Opt keys is located). How would you solve this? What other things might help?

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

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.

Space Shuttle can get very hot during re-entry into atmosphere. So hot (almost 3000 F or 1650 C) that the air around the orbiter is turned into glowing hot plasma.

Here’s how it looks from inside the Space Shuttle during re-entry (see the video). At start it is too bright outside to see any colors - they are washed-out, then at ~1 min into video you start to see orange-yellowish color of the glow:

On Flickr you will find a computer generated image of how an orbiter might look when coated in plasma - see “Shuttle returns” (flickr.com).

It points to some more YouTube videos such as this: “NASA Shuttle Endeavour Re-Entry Video”. Those Shuttle cockpit view videos rock!

Drew McCormack writes in “The Ideal Software Bundle for Scientists?”:

“Software bundles like MacHeist have become a regular feature of the Mac landscape of late. There are plenty of good deals to be had, and plenty of discussion about the ethics of such bundles. But leaving all that aside, what would be your ideal bundle for science?

Here’s the list I came up with: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Bento, TextMate, Papers, DataPlot, GraphClick, Scrivener

That comes to a total price of around $400. Give me that for $50, or even $100, and I would be a very happy — and productive — scientist.”

(see comments to Drew’s blog post for more suggested applications)

I would love to see such a bundle. Currently I am still exploring what software to use on a Mac, and trying to use open-source and cross-platform software, but there are some Mac-only applications that are hard to beat.

My bundle wishes include: OmniGraffle, DEVONthink Pro (plus DEVONagent), reference management software (Bookends or Papers), a text editor (TextMate, also wondering about Mellel), an outlining application (Process³ or OmniOutliner), Scrivener.

Some other interesting software yet to explore: EagleFiler (archive and search mail, web pages, PDFs, chats, and more), Curio (note taking, mind mapping, brainstorming, and project management), CopyWrite (a project manager for writers of all kinds).

It’s nice to see you here. If you have come for the annual “Happy Birthday” post with some sexy anime pictures, please have a bit of patience.

Turns out it is not that fast to find a nice picture. I’ll post one here within next 24 hours.

Why this post? - It has become a tradition now that I post something like this every year on my birthday, March 19. Today I am short of time as 3 things compete for attention: finishing a journal article, writing this blog post and going out to celebrate with friends.

Hence, visit again soon (and post links to hot anime pictures that I could use).

See also: anime and birthday posts from previous years

Kingsley asked me some time ago why I consider the screen resolution of iPhone / iPod Touch too small for normal web browsing. For context see: Tech Today: SemWeb SDForum event and Apple iPod Touch.

While iPhone has got a lot of attention its screen is not that brilliant. It could be enough for many - when making a phone call or looking at a map (zoom in/out works nice in this case) but it pales when compared to screens in, e.g., Nokia N-Series handhelds:

• iPhone: 320×480 pix, 3.5 in, color LCD
• Nokia N770: 800×480 pix, 4.1 in, 65k color LCD

In the image above you can see a snapshot of a NASA TV video of one of this year’s Space Shuttle landings. Now, you can see the crisp details of the Nokia’s user interface, but why does this picture shows a noisy, low resolution video of a Shuttle landing?

The reason: Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-122 is now in the process of landing at the Kennedy Space Center, scheduled for 9:07 a.m EST. Space Shuttle landings are always a fascinating event (it’s also one of the most complex machines ever built by a man) and you can follow it on NASA TV (link above).

Live coverage: NASA’s STS-122 Landing Blog

The Social Network Portability WebCamp “unconference” / workshop will take place in Cork, Ireland in less than a month - on March 2, 2008. It lists an interesting range of presentations on various aspects of social network portability (FOAF, microformats, …), data portability and beyond. See the list of speakers for more information.

Looking forward to see you there. If you have a related presentation topic in mind, feel free to add your name to the list of speakers (or to the list participants if you will be there to listen).

The workshop will be followed by the BlogTalk 2008 Conference on Social Software on March 3-4, 2008. This promises to be an exciting event on its own (see the program for full details) with some cool invited talks:

• “Entrepreneurship and social media” by Salim Ismail, Yahoo!
• “Lessons learned from designing social software” by Rashmi Sinha, Uzanto (SlideShare, MindCanvas)
• “Semantic social software: the Semantic Web for consumers” by Nova Spivack, Radar Networks (Twine)

Related:

• Programme announced for BlogTalk 2008 [2008-01-23]
• WebCamp: Social Networks = success [2007-03-13] - report about the 1st WebCamp “unconference” + slides

Tags: data portability | social network portability | webcamp |

There are cases when you need to use JavaScript closures and there are cases when you accidentally create closures when you don’t need to. Here are some articles to help understand them:

“JavaScript Closures for Dummies” [blog.morrisjohns.com]

“JavaScript Closures” [jibbering.com]

“AJAX in Action: Appendix B - JavaScript for Object-Oriented Programmers” [java.sun.com]

Interesting & related:

“Closures and executing JavaScript on page load” - Simon Willison on chaining multiple onLoad events

“Private members in JavaScript” - Douglas Crockford on implementing private class members

TrimBreakpoint - a tricky use of closures to let you inspect local variables for a function from a popup breakpoint window.

A JavaScript closure preserves references to all the local variables after the function has finished.

If a function is defined within another function, a closure is created. Then the inside function (e.g. when called later, using a reference to it) can still access and modify variables of the outside function, even after the outside function has quit.

Note: this explanation is a very simplified view and you may want to consult articles referenced here for more detailed information.