Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

BBC news: “The designers say the 70-mm-tall device could be used as a “flying camera” to enter earthquake-shattered buildings. ” Plain cool.

The X-Bar: Child Language Acquisition: “In my experience, not only are children not explicitly taught language, but correction is a fruitless task.”

Why is it that on many all-CSS sites, selecting text becomes almost impossible? (See for example the new Sprint site.) I compulsively select some text when browsing the web (don’t ask), and CSS websites often don’t let me. Apart from my obsession, breaking text selection seems like breaking a fundamental UI interaction pattern to me.

Murray Altheim asks the Topicmap community what they mean when they talk about facets in [topicmapmail] Two Models of Facets. Facets in topicmaps are not what you’d think they would be.

I’m OK with Outlook, and adding contacts to my contact list is easy, but the interface to browse/use the contacts is useless. So: am I missing something, or is there some plugin to Outlook I can use to browse my contact info? Export it and use another app? All tips welcome.

(I used to ask this stuff on mailing lists, I don’t know what happened …)

This has happened to me before and seems to be a recurring problem at Apple.com: this page links (the Take a Closer Look link) to Apple - Page Not Found.

Tanya confirms my understanding of boundary objects. I’m happy, because I wasn’t entirely sure I was getting it right. She also points to a study that looks at the wireframe as a boundary object.

For me, it’s been useful to think of many of our deliverables (taxonomies, wireframes and such) as boundary objects that build bridges between different communities of practice. It alleviates much frustration.

I am collecting a list of Companies That Do Ethnograohy.

The Guide To Ethnography wiki is back.

Does anyone have real-life experience with working with a programmer in countries like India through a service like Technical Outsourcing or Coders4rent.com? Tell me your stories. Was it easy to convey requirements? Were you happy with the communication? With the quality of the work?

(via Catalagoblog) Library Juice 6:24: “I’ve made a stab at a typology of the “amusing search,” with
lessons and questions arising from each.”

(via languagelog) Wiktionary: Colours. A wiki dictionary with translations of thousands of words in hundreds of languages.

LANGUAGE = DISEASE? (in the comments): “The fact that for thirty years or more it’s been possible to get certified as a linguist without knowing any languages beyond your native one seems to me a perversion of the order of things that likely presages Armageddon.”

So now you can make a documentary or a movie all by yourself and sell it online.

Welcome to the TEI Website: “Initially launched in 1987, the TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.”

Numbers in Over 4000 Languages

I have a bunch of books I’d give away of someone would want them (if they come and pick them up). Is there something online where I can do that?

I wrote an article called Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion. I tried out a new approach to semantics in blockquotes, but don’t know much about CSS, so let me know how it can be improved…

I’m looking for a political cartoonist who is interested in doing a cartoon or 2 a month for my redesigned website about Colombia. Subject matter will be much about Colombian politics, and how it relates to US politics (so characters include Bush and the Colombian president Uribe). I can work with you to develop the cartoons (ie, you don’t have to know too much about Colombian politics, we can work together).

Anyone know where to look?

(via Simon) PHP.net have implemented a javascript autocomplete for their function search. Note that this is not the browser autocomplete that lists things you typed in before. Instead, this dropdown lists all valid functions starting with “my”. Very, very useful.

Simon notes that the javascript is not being shared (it’s scrambled), and in the comments Sergi points to this autocomplete script (which isn’t half as nice). A quick Google reveals:
- How to make your own.
- You can ask IE to show the dropdown on your form elements.
- How to make your own (another one).

I am very dissapointed that the W3C isn’t putting these controls in the HTML specs (correct me if I’m wrong here). Things like autocomplete, list or table sorting, ordering lists or validation should be taken care of by the browser by specifying a simple html tag or attribute.

All this javascript is nice but it isn’t really going anywhere - if a truly useful and compatible javascript library for this stuff that didn’t require lots of customization was going to happen, it would be here already. (With my respect to the authors of the various libraries out there - they’re doing a great job - but it’s not good enough. Not easy enough to implement. Not standardized enough.)

CMS Feature Directory: a unusual inerface to a faceted classification system where you can order “facet layers”. I’m not too crazy about this interface myself.

Paolo Valdemarin Weblog:
“As an example, in Dave’s taxonomy you can find:
- Politics
— Presidential Election of 2004
— Dean Campaign
— Clark Campaign
— …
If Howard Dean would have his own taxonomy, it might contain something like:
- Howard
— Presidential Election of 2004
— Politics
— Budget
— Ideas
— …
Same topics, different nesting according to the different points of view.”

Wrong. Same terms, different topics (although you could come up with some level of cross mapping that might work for you). Dean’s topic “Presidential Election of 2004″ is not the same as Winer’s topic “Presidential Election of 2004″, although they use the same term. Dean’s “Presidential Election of 2004″ is probably somewhat similar to Winer’s “Dean Campaign” topic.

The Rockridge Institute, with George Lakoff as a founding member, tries to “reframe the terms of political debate to make a progressive moral vision more persuasive and influential.” (via Language Log)

opensourcexperts.com: “Wouldn’t it be great if, as in open source software development, several people could come together to fund the development of a feature?” Sure would. I hope this works out.

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / semanticWeb: “Each of the individual applications using RDF I know of could have been done more easily with plain XML. What’s the payoff for using RDF? Where are the fantastic semantic inference applications?”

languagehat.com: CHINESE NEWSPAPERS IN NYC.: “With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like “early decision” or “the official preppy handbook” into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)”

Language Log: An abortion by any other name…: “There’s a sharp terminological contrast in recent news articles about an abortion bill signed by President Bush. Proponents of the bill call the procedure “partial-birth abortion”; opponents tend to call it by its medical name, “intact dilation and extraction”, or else refer to it by some other non-gruesome-sounding label.” “Pro-life” vs. “Pro-choice” indeed.

(via Ben) WWT Swan Migration Satellite Tracking Project: Live tracking of swans migrating! It actually graphs each swan individually. Nifty.

(Via Matthew Berk, Forrester Analyst) Yahoo is quietly getting better fast. This is been out for a while - they implemented a new way of narrowing the selection of products, called SmartSort. It’s an interesting interaction pattern that uses sliders to let users choose which facets are more important to them. There is also a FacetMap style range facet that lets you choose a price range.

So I saw the Matrix, and I liked it. Not the best movie ever, but alright. I’ve got a few lingering questions though:
(See inside - WARNING: SPOILERS)
(more…)

THIS POST IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

I found a wiki that is easy to install, so I wrote an even easier guide to installing it for absolute beginners. Not only is it easy to install, it also has all the functionality a wiki needs, but nothing more.

The wiki is Wacko Wiki. It uses PHP and MySQL.

To install it, you need to:
- create a database
- upload the files to your webserver, chmod 1 file.
- open your browser, point it to where you uploaded stuff
- follow the easy setp wizard

This is a great example of easy setup - emulate it if you have an open source project. There are no config files to edit - it places the absolute minimum burden on the user.

Inside is a step by step guide to setting this wiki up for absolute beginners.
(more…)

Holy Open Source Frustration Batman!

Installed a supposedly stable version of PHPWiki and get this eror: “Warning: filetype(): Lstat failed for (null) (errno=2 - No such file or directory) in /var/www/html/semantic/lib/setupwiki.php on line 78″

Browse the phpwiki site and can’t find any help or support.. Ag. Still looking for a wiki. Easy to install is important.

Can you recommend a PHP based wiki engine?

Requirements:
- stable and well supported.
- not trying to be many other things (although some extra functionality like uploading images is nice).
- good templating system.

Oh my god! Blogspam about blogspam. I’m sure David is a good guy but you have to wonder…

ZNet | Venezuela | The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - An interview with documentary filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain”

ESA Portal - Focus On - Searching for planets with life: a really cool animation illustrating the search for life.

Guide to Ease: Sovjet Design Process: I stumbled accross this old post of mine that I have completely forgotten about - and I like it.

(via Gizmodo) A real radio that uses open source Peercast technology. The device allows a listener to receive streaming radio without using a computer.

Nice. Do you have to connect this radio to a modem, or does it work with radio waves?

After moving to a new server and exporting/importing my entries, I have this situation:

old url (404 now) to new url | difference
001031.html to archives/002067.html | 1036
000931.html to archives/001968.html | 1037
000973.html to archives/002010.html | 1037
000885.html to archives/001923.html | 1038
000886.htmlto archives/001924.html | 1038
000660.html to archives/001733.html | 1073

I figured this out by Googling content on these test pages and seeing what URL Google returned.

So there is no one calculation that gives the new URL from the old URL.

Would there be a clever way to automate something that would produce an htaccess file with all the correct rewrite commands to fix all this?

With all the content we’re creating with blogging, photoblogging and so on, how can that content become useful? At that scale, categorization won’t cut it. Forgetting comes into play as an interesting concept. How can me make tools that support forgetting?