Alan’s Ramblings: MovableTripe: “The people trying to defend SixApart have made much of the fact that nobody has been forced to upgrade to MT3.0, and that it’s a ‘Developer only’ version. Well, excuse me, but have any of you actually tried to find 2.661 on the MovableType website? No? I thought not, because it’s not actually there any more, as far as I can tell.”
Language Log: Modification as social anxiety: “Here’s a thought: the impulse to pile up fancy words and extra modifiers, and the admonition to write simply and avoid adjectives, are both expressions of the same social anxieties, seen from slightly different places on the social scale.
As an illustration, consider the language of menus.”
Omnigator for browsing Topicmaps).
The problem is that an ontology is just a description of a domain. What you do with that information (including how you best edit it) can vary extremely. And what you do with it determines the UI, not the inherent structure of the ontology.
Sure, you could build a generic ontology editor. But it’s like a generic database editor. It lets you edit any database, but it’s not the most effective editing interface in 99.9% of the cases.
I just noticed my Pagerank (as reported by the unreliable Google Toolbar) went up to 7/10. Maybe because I’m posting a lot lately?
Le «blog personnel» de Joe Clark: “So please stop being holier-than-thou and please get off our cases. If smart, informed people are using b or i, it’s because they have made smart, informed decisions to do so.”
I was having preformance problems with Drupal (my cheap host complained about resource usage), so after a bunch of questions to the ever helpful Drupal list, I found what I hope is a solution: turn on Drupal’s bult-in cache, which caches entire pages so they are 1 database call instead of x. Congestion control: tuning the auto-throttle | drupal.org has more info on Drupal tuning. Aside from all my complaining about Drupal’s lacking “remember me” feature, it is a great product and a great community.
Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object: “As deployment of XML data and web services becomes more widespread, you may occasionally find it convenient to connect an HTML presentation directly to XML data for interim updates without reloading the page. Thanks to the little-known XMLHttpRequest object, an increasing range of web clients can retrieve and submit XML data directly, all in the background. To convert retrieved XML data into renderable HTML content, rely on the client-side Document Object Model (DOM) to read the XML document node tree and compose HTML elements that the user sees.”
Seems to work on IE, Mozilla and Safari, with varying syntaxes. The article concludes: “In lieu of a W3C standard still under development, the Microsoft-born XMLHttpRequest object fills an important gap …”
cacheop: Skype planning paid integration with telephony networks: “Skype, the P2P VoIP app from the original Kazaa creators announced today intentions to compete with other VoIP telephony providers such as Vonage, Packet8 and VoicePulse and provide paid access to standard telephony.”
It just occurred to me that, even though it’s almost impossible to track how many people view your posts because of all the RSS aggregators and such, the old tracking 1-pixel image trick should work fine there.
It could be acceptable to use that trick to track your readership.
Mena’s Corner: It’s About Time. The trackback section doesn’t show the negative comments anymore, now it just says: “[an error occurred while processing this directive]“.
Google AdWords is starting to allow advertisers to use image ads. News.com story.
From their faq: “You can choose to run image ads in addition to text ads, or you can show text ads alone.”, and you can change settings per page.
Images can be up to 50K in size.
Storage space is getting cheaper. For investing US$10 a month, you’ll have accumulated 15 petabytes of storage space by 2020.
Assuming you invest $10 a month in storage and start buying this year, buying additional space every year, you’ll accumulate 120 Gigs of storage space this year (2004). Enough for about 10 hours of quality video uncompressed from my camera. Not much, really.
By 2010, you’ll have accumulated 15 terabytes (15,000 Gigs) of storage space. Enough for 1250 hours (52 days) of video.
By 2020, you’ll have reached 15 petabytes of storage space - 15,000,000 Gigs. Enough for 142 years of 24 hour video.
Historical Notes about the Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space:
Year—price per 1 Gig
1980—500000
1985—80000
1990—9000
1995—1000
2000—15
2001—6
2002—3
2003—2
2004—1
As you can see, the price per Gig about halves every year. LaCie’s BigDisk (500 Gigs) currently costs $579.
This means that, if you keep paying $10.00 a month for storage ($120 a year), and only buy storage as you need it, you will get more or less the following storage available to you:
Year - Price per peta - $$ - Storage bought (in gig) - Storage accumulated (in gig)
2004—-1000—-120–120——120 (120 gig)
2005—-500—–120–240——360
2006—-250—–120–480——840
2007—-125—–120–960——1800 (1.8 tera)
2008—-60——120–2000—–3800
2009—-30——120–4000—–7800
2010—-15——120–8000—–15800 (15 tera)
2011—-7——-120–17000—-32800
2012—-3——-120–40000—-72800
2013—-2——-120–60000—-132800
2014—-1——-120–120000—252800
2015—-0.5—–120–240000—492800
2016—-0.25—-120–480000—972800
2017—-0.125—120–960000—1932800 (1.9 peta)
2018—-0.0625–120–1920000–3852800
2019—-0.0312–120–3846153–7698953
2020—-0.0156–120–7692307–15391261 (15 peta)
Dem Swingers | Which way do you swing?: “Colleges in every state have students who are originally from swing states. We need your help to make sure that those students vote, and vote for John Kerry.”
Macromedia Flash - Using video in Macromedia Flash MX: “Embedded video is compressed with the Sorenson Spark video codec, which produces high quality video at small file sizes.” The Sorenson encoders are very expensive, so it may be cheaper to encode through Flash. The more I think about it, the more Flash seems like a viable alternative for video, mostly because it’s more standard and reliable than any of the media players. You can’t really import by *linking* to videofiles though. You have to embed them.
Internet Archive: Petabox: “The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).”
Jon Udell: Link-addressable streams, revisited: “Peter van Dijck wrote to tell me about his tool for converting the URL of a Real stream, plus start/stop times, into a link to the specified segment. A while ago, I mentioned Rich Persaud’s version of the same idea, which works with Windows Media and QuickTime as well as Real. Using either of these, you can do what I did the other day — namely, link to a segment within a video stream — without hacking URLs and wrapper files.
As helpful as these tools are, I’ve come to see that the hassles they alleviate are only part of the reason why we’re as yet unable to weave video effectively into blog conversations.
[...]
Despite these issues, the overriding consideration may be that streams require specialized servers, whereas downloadable clips (which nowadays play progressively) do not.
What we’re left with, though, is an asymmetry. Big media organizations, for now, still have the advantage over small independents, because the big organizations are more able to deploy and manage streaming infrastructure. Bloggers can link into those streams, and/or capture and post quotes from them, but can’t yet easily produce streams. What we can do easily is produce short downloadable clips. “
The new free license for Movable Type 3.0 lets you have no more than one author and three weblogs. If you want more you have to pay up. Mena explains the new pricing structure. The trackbacks and comments sound pretty sour though, the 1 author/5 weblogs limit for the free version seems to annoy people much. Oh well.
Simon Willison: Simple mini-languages with PHP: “As Dumky points out, this can be used to implement mini-languages for pretty much anything - and PHP 5’s excellent XML support means most of the parser work is handled for you.”
I can see this taking off. It sounds hugely satisfying to create a little mini-language like that. And fairly easy.
Reference: Adding Windows Media to Web Pages
Since it seems to help if you embed a link to a point in a RealPlayer video stream in a .ram file, I added that capability to my Link to a point within a RealPlayer video stream tool. It now provides a ready-to-go downloadable .ram file. Just save it and upload it to your blog and link to it. Should be pretty browser-proof.
I am creating a list of Video Sources: sources of video with information on if you can link to it. Feel free to add to the list!
Reuters Television provides raw, unedited video from their reporters. It would be great if we could link to (part of) a video and provide our own commentary, thus creating personal TV networks. Maybe embedding it in SMIL.
The problem is: I can’t seem to figure out how to find the URL of one of those videos. It looks like they’re embedding Windows Media Player or Realplayer in a custom Flash wrapper player. Ideas welcome!
Bloglines | News: “Today we added support for RSS enclosures. If an entry has specified an enclosure, a link to the enclosure will be displayed when you view the entry. Enclosures are typically used to distribute large files, like video and audio clips.”
An excerpt from a BBC news video (interview with Seymour Hersh) talking about how the torture was institutional: Seymour Hersh 0:22 to 0:44 (Link created by the Link2Real Tool).
I wrote a tool (still quite beta!) to make creating links to certain parts within a video news item easier. I think we need to take back the discussion of news events, and linking to certain parts within video is a part of that that has been missing. Hopefully tools like this will help.
Feedback welcome. I hacked the code together (it’s been years since I did any PHP), will refine later. The biggest thing it does is look at the source of a .ram file. I couldn’t figure out how to do that manually.
Follow up: there seems to be a strange bug. Will fix tomorrow.
(more…)
Following up Jon Udell’s experiments, I’m experimenting with linking to a place within some video. Btw, I’ve started to put actual video inside the post itself (it doesn’t show on my main page or monthly archive pages), so click more and read on.
(more…)
BBC NEWS | Technology | File-sharing to bypass censorship: “In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.
They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.
“Currently, only news that’s reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that’s where the money is,” he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.
“But if something happens in Peru that’s of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won’t get anything like the priority for syndication.”
Not even that’s of interest to Americans is shown. Watch the news. It’s really bad!
BBC NEWS | X-Prize ‘will be won this year’: “The X-Prize, a $10m race to be the first private company to put a craft into space twice in two weeks, will be won soon, believe its organisers.”
Harry Fuecks’ recent Hello world in Patterns post describes how you can complicate things way beyond the necessary and get satisfaction out of it, thinking you’re doing a good job.
Yesterday on the train, I started thinking about information architectures that are too complex. Harry’s example reminded me of how information architectures of websites are often created: way too complex, but enchanted with your cleverness, thinking you’re doing a great job.
Usability News - 5.2 2003 — Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage: “Of the participants that were exposed to a site with a breadcrumb trail (n=30), 40% used the breadcrumb five or more times to navigate on the site (Range = 5 - 31, n=14). However, this accounted for only 6% of the navigation overall (see Figure 6).”
They also tried to measure the strenght of the “mental model” the users have of the site structure. I didn’t like their methodology there, which brings up the question: what methods have you used to measure the mental model of a site structure? (PS: The concept “mental model” in information architecture is imo misunderstood and misapplied, but I’ll write more on that at some later date.)
It’s an official Google Blog.
Simon Willison: Google approved PageRank stripping: Simon implemented a Google-hosted redirect. I wonder how long that Google script will accept random redirects. Not long, me thinks, with the potential for abuse.
It’s gone now, but there was spam on the homepage of my GuideToEthnography wiki pointing to this company: thuriam dot com.
I wrote them an email: “I recently found a set of links to your website on a wiki of mine at http://poorbuthappy.com/ethnography. I would really appreciate an explanation. If you are putting links on random websites to increase your Google rank, please stop doing that. It will only put your company in a bad light. Looking forward to hearing from you.”
What can I do to stop this? Spammers are starting to write scripts to spam wikis. Damn.
Google Isn’t Just for the Web: the Google search appliance calls best bets “Key matches”.
:: phpPatterns() - Hello world in Patterns: “Some things I noticed as I was writing it:
- How impressive it seemed, considering its worthlessness.
- How satisfying it was to get the mechanics to work, futile though they may be.
- How, as the program’s complexity grows, more opportunities present themselves for adding still more useless design patterns.”
A warning word against going crazy with patterns from the PHP pattern-meister himself.
Reuters Television: Reuters offers a lot of video channels. I’d like bloggers to be able to start linking to parts within a video and start commenting on those.
Browsing ThinkCycle, I got another idea. A website that helps teachers to teach a certain class: one where kids get to identify a problem someone in their social circle, learn how to navigate online resources and think up a project that would address that problem. I think giving people (kids) that engineering “I can fix things” attitude is really important, together with the experience of looking closely at their environment and seeing what’s wrong with it. Too many people just accept the world as it is.
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Can Poor People in the Developed World “Leapfrog”?: “One of the surprising things about poverty, to those who’ve never experienced it, is how damn expensive it is.”
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Blogging Against Genocide: “Edmund Burke was right when he wrote that we can make no greater mistake than to do nothing because we can do only a little.” If you have a blog, why not go to passionofthepresent.com give them a link if you think it’s a worthwhile cause.
