Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Sakai 2.0, Shirky on overrated ontology; make your audio musuem tour #

With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour - New York Times. I wonder how hard it would be for me to create a personalized tour of the SF Asian Art Museum for my friends. Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags: Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. Sakai Project: Sakai 2.0 includes support for web-services to allow the development of tools on languages other than Java. I'm looking forward to seeing whether I can write a Python app to push digital resources into and take resources out of Sakai.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 6:07:21 PM from the Notelets dept. Discuss

What is Reblg? #
I want to figure out Reblg: user-powered site connector. Alf Eaton points to it, but I really don't quite understand Reblg yet. Who is behind Reblg? Will it stay in business? Why should I let it be an intermediary?   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 6:05:13 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Time to look at Laszlo? #

I've long been interested in using Flash for developing so-called "rich internet applications". Laszlo seemed very interesting when I first saw it because it promised the ability to deploy Flash apps by writing in some XUL-like language. But it required the purchase of some server-side software. Now it looks likes things have changed: Laszlo has gone open source apparently, according to ONJava.com: Exploring Laszlo Classes, Attributes, and Events. Now Laszlo goes on to my list of possible things to learn how to use.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 5:53:40 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Housing bubble? #

TechnologyReview.com - Housing Bubble: Didier Sornette's and Wei-Xing Zhou's analysis differs from just two years ago, when there was no sign of the faster-than-exponential growth characteristic of a bubble. Their conclusions are strengthened by their successful prediction of a housing bubble in the United Kingdom in 2003, where housing prices began dropping in July 2004. Their analysis is nifty, and the mathematics are simple and straightforward. "Soon" might be a good time to sell. I'm planning to read Zhou's and Sornette's Is There a Real-Estate Bubble in the US?. I'm really scared to buy a house right now -- but it's also scary not to! (As part of my work on bibliographic systems, I've posted the article to CiteULike, Connotea, del.icio.us, and unalog)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 1:51:07 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Wanted: easy synch between images and sound #

I recently started using the sound annotation feature of my new camera. I wish that Flickr would allow for the uploading of audio clips. In the meantime, I should be able to upload the audio file elsewhere and generate the appropriate linkages between my picture and the audio. An article from last year by Jon Udell might be a handy reference to enable to me to generate SMIL to sequence the audio annotation from my camera with the correponding picture: O'Reilly Network: Marrying Hypertext and Hypermedia. I also note that techniques Jon Udell is using might be of use in the Scholar's Box when we start mixing video and other media.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 1:49:06 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

big pictures and less wifi #

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Digital Décor: Blow-Up: Snapshot to Poster. I myself have been tempted to create large (20x30 inch) prints of my nephew regardless of the artistic merit of such prints. I like free WiFi at cafes, so I was sad to read how some cafe owners have decided to limit their free wifi to improve business: Some Cafe Owners Pull the Plug on Lingering Wi-Fi Users   Posted by Raymond Yee on 6/21/05; 1:47:55 PM from the Notelets dept. Discuss