Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I am starting a mailing list for videoblogging.

1&1 Root Server. Looks good. 500Gigs/month bandwidth for US$ 49.

Steves Digicams - Apacer Disc Steno: “The Apacer Disc Steno CP-100 is a portable, battery-operated, multi-session CompactDisc recorder. Its main use is to transfer image files or other data from flash memory cards to CD-R or CD-R/W discs without a computer. This eliminates the need to buy multiple flash memory cards when vacationing or working out in the field and allows you to leave your laptop at home.”

The Inevitable “Day After Tomorrow” Review. I went to see it yesterday. Bad, yes, but entertaining. When you live in New York, a lot of movies featuring the city become much more entertaining. You recognize the buildings, the people. It’s kinda fun.

(Spoilers ahead)

I think many people will especially appreciate the part where millions of Americans try to enter Mexico, only to be stopped at the border. Only after the president forgives all Latin-American dept do they let them in.

LLRX.com - Trends in Blog Searching: “Recently, most major search engines have altered their algorithms to push blogs down in the search results. Engines that only return two results from any one site use this feature to limit the impact of blogs on the search results.”

Textdrive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “TextDrive is a managed webhosting company created by Dean Allen (creator of Textpattern, a weblog/content management system) and Jason Hoffman, designed primarily (but not exclusively) as a hosting service for Textpattern-managed sites, similar to Six Apart’s Movable Type-based TypePad service. Allen was able to raise just under $40,000 in startup funding in just over three days. The investors, also known as the “VC 200,” were an assortment of web developers, designers, and bloggers. Allen chose this means of raising capital as a community-funded alternative to traditional venture capital.” A competitor for Typepad :) Differentiation: you get hosting as well (meaning you can do more things than just host your blog).

I hadn’t noticed this page before: IAwiki: WhereInTheWorld: IA practicioners organized per country.

Peter Morville now owns every single link on the search results page for findability on Google.

If you’re considering moving away from MT, the Drupal MT import code is being worked on actively. Wait a few weeks, and your wait should be well worth it!

LanguaL Food Description Home Page: a multilingual thesaural system using faceted classification for the food industry.

Help pay B&A’s hosting fees: “Because you’re donating directly through DreamHost, rest assured that your donation will only be used to pay for this site’s hosting fees. The site owner won’t be able to run off and spend your donation on DVDs, fine steak dinners, or anything else completely unrelated to their web hosting bill!”

On some pages, in IE6+ on Windows, if you right-click properties, it doesn’t show pagesize, it just says “unavailable”. Why is that?

Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Unjobbing?: “What is “bad” about schools is that their priority is control. What is bad about most work places that are conventionally structured is that they too are about control …”

The Day After Tomorrow: Could Abrupt Global Warming Really Happen?

I’m reading Phil Murray’s first http://www.kmconnection.com/ (free download), and it’s excellent. I’m not saying that because it mentions me, or because I host the The Faceted Classification Discussion (FCD) mailing list together with Phil. (Disclosure always.)

Anyways, it’s the magazine every IA should read (especially for enterprise work) and I hope it takes off and Phil makes enough money with it (yearly subscriptions are US$ 170) to be able to keep it going for years to come. IA needs magazines like this.

How to Share a Taxonomy with Other Photoshop Album Users?: “Photoshop Album is one of those rare applications that make meta tagging so easy that even “normal people” can use it.”

Jared Spool: “We don’t have to worry about who hires us because we charge a lot of money. It pretty much self selects. People only hire us as a last resort, for
something absolutely critical, that they can’t get anywhere else. (That’s what makes it fun.)”

Damn! Then I find a nice and clean PHP photoalbum script, but it lacks a good web interface (assumes you can FTP).

Most photo gallery scripts are typical open source messes with lots of useless features. Any tips for a PHP script that makes it easy to upload (unoptimized) pictures from your digital camera and presents them cleanly.

And another travel (Sout-east Asia) question. If you want to post digital pictures to your blog, how do you optimize/crop/adjust them? Do the internet cafe’s have photo software? Do you carry your own software (I won’t carry my own computer!) and install it on every internet cafe somehow? Does it happen server-side?

A travel question. If you travel for a long time and you take a lot of pictures with your digital camera, how do you store them? (Especially in South-east Asia.)

- Do internet cafes burn CD’s you can then send home? Pros or cons?
- Do you take an iPod and store everything on that (20 Gigs is a lot of pictures)? But then what?
- Another solution?

Black Coffee: Travel Blogging Technology

MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.360 Ethnography, Spring 2003 | Home: The politics of independence and technological objects.

I updated my Examples Of Web Ethnography page.

urlgreyhot : Designing cross-database search for libraries

Talk on the Drupal dev list is about an upcoming MT-import module that might even support old MT URL’s. That’s huge: breaking URL’s is for me a major lock-in factor in any software. I even broke URL’s when I upgraded MT last time (somehow), and it pissed me off. So way to go Drupal team!

OK/Cancel: Diary Studies: Too Much Information?: (in the comments) “I have not had a chance to use the smart phone with a video cam but one of my colleagues in Asia told me it works “fantastic.”

findability.org | frequently asked questions about findability: “Peter Morville is currently working on a new O’Reilly book on the subject of Ambient Findability.”

What is the algebra rule for x exponent (m/n)? Equals x exponent m divided by x exponent n?

“Brutal” Architecture: blog entry on “parallels between physical architecture and software architecture” by Microsoft researcher.

I just discovered Bret’s excellent blog. In this post, he talks about offshoring effectiveness. In my experience, communication is the biggest factor. There is a LOT of informal communication going on in any team, and if you put part of the team offshore, the amount of documentation needed skyrockets (depending on your existing development process).

The Planet: Total Control P2800: 2000GB Bandwidth. Question: so that’s 2000 Gigs a month? Is that good? I’m investigating hosting video for a bunch of starting videobloggers.

The Center for Social Technology

lojjic.net – “Water Lilies” Flame Fractal. Think you know what fractal images look like? Think again. Also check the Mac-style menu at the left.

ALL LOOK SAME. Interesting.

WITNESS: an organization backed by Peter Gabriel that hands out video cameras to folks whose human rights are often brutally violated. The victims use these cameras to expose the abuse.

First commercial Video Blog?: “The most exciting part of this new opportunity from the AO prospective, is that we can now begin offering our members what is fashionably called “video blogs.â€? Our editors and members can start producing their own video editorials and interviews and post them for AO members to view and comment on and rate, just as they have been doing with our text posts.”

apparently they’re moving GMail from 1 Gig to 1 Ter (1,000 Gigs) of storage. Let’s see someone test that!

Interesting discussion about PHP in an M$ environment.

jibbajabba’s Wiki - Drupal.Usability Michael’s excellent list of Drupal usability recommendations.

The first amateur rocket fired into space: “A 14-second burn allowed the rocket to reach an altitude of more than 100km - the official boundary of space - in about three minutes.”.