WebTech Category Archive
Well said, Tim
Tim Berners-Lee, in a public mailing-list discussion about a very specific technical thing, elucidates something that so many people forget... Your grandfather would perhaps have suggested that an attempt to define the meaning of common words, as the Académie Française...
I called it
Of totally no interest to anyone, and just of passing to myself, but I so called it. WordPress is inching towards Drupal, and Drupal towards WordPress. They will never meet or overlap of course (or maybe they will one day...
What is code?
A picture is worth a thousand words... The premise of the linked article is to show how one can create a web browser in "one line of code" using a bunch of stuff that more or less comes with Mac...
no openID
Mike's posted an excellent piece on why he thinks openID is a bad idea. The problem with OpenID is that it violates one of the longest-runnings stories we tell ourselves about the Internet, from the famous New Yorker cartoon... I'd...
Alternate use
Not jogging, but a leisurely evening with friends visiting an exhibit and ChinaTown in Yokohama. (Train rides of course not account in distances.) Note: The iPod frequently "paused" the "workout"--sensing prolonged periods of immobility--hence it's shortness. The trip lasted...
Typical weekend dilemma for me...
I had planned to spend some time this weekend hacking out the "featured article" functionality for the GlobalVoices redesign. It's the last big piece that needs doing and we have a Thursday EST deadline to show off a final version...
this is the time on sprockets vere ve ... pump yoo ahp
After Jan called me a weakling in that heavy german accent that could only remind me of Hans und Franz ("you are litta giwly maan! we are gonna pump j00 up!"), because I said it was too cold to...
Second World?
Sorry for the link to a machine translation but here's an article in "Web3D-fr" ("3D Web France") about an immersive 3D MMPORG community platform... launched in 1994. Very interesting account of the business model, the politics behind the scenes (browser...
Machine Tags
super quick little PHP function to parse machine tags into an array. Barely useful. What I'd really like to see is code for querying them in a database. Flickr should share that... ;)...
What's that movie?!
Help me out here... Mid 80's, I think the main actor was a WWF wrestler (first guess was Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, but IMDB doesn't list any movies for him). Something about aliens already here, controlling society on earth via...
EcoBlack
How the colour of your website costs the earth Changing the background colour of Google from white (ffffff) to black (000000) would save an estimated 750 Megawatt hours a year globally, thats about half the full output of a dual-nuclear...
The second most dangerous man alive
I'm wondering: - does my Nokia N80 have QR code reading capabilities? - does the Nokia N95 allow Python to access the camera and the GPS "easily" (for hacking a quick prototype) - what is the current trend, if any,...
Sing a tune
Half a bill. Viacom executives are in London negotiating the purchase of LastFM, the London based "online social music network" (read: internet radio station), according to a music business source familiar with the negotiations. The purchase price is said to...
The most dangerous man alive
will carry a black marker....
Laying tiles
Tiles + Contextual masks generated from shapefiles = beautiful....
Remix!
Holymoly. Yahoo! Pipes is like a web-based Max/MSP visual multimedia sampler/remixer/filter for web content. It's a beast. It slices, it dices, it joins and concatenates... it'll even machine translate, extract geo:data, filter by whatever, allow you to input parameters at...
Oh dotster...
An old client of mine is finally taking hold of their domain and transferring their registration to another registrar. I just got the following email from my registrar: If you are unhappy with Dotster's service please let us know your...
Withdrawal
Well shit I guess I'll just have to go outside then. :p...
A bit of humor please
or "Aristotle's lost second book of Poetics: Comedy" Alot of people have been crowing about how Flickr's Machine Tags are pseudo Semantic Web and how they could have been RDF. Well, piddle, and tough luck. I'm quite excited by it...
Talking to machines
or "Flickr introduces tags to the Semantic Web" or "Folksonomies, meet Folktologies" Aaron, one of the flickereenos, just announced what they are calling "Machine Tags" Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a...
Updated string 2 color
I needed to update my string to hexcolor function to also check the luminosity before returning a color cause I was often getting colors too bright to be legible when applied to text on a white background. It now takes...
Buzzfeed
Hello, what's this? "We automatically detect new buzz by crawling 50,000 of the very best web sites, blogs, and news sources. Then our technology crunches the raw data from these sites to identify new buzz that’s just starting to spread....
More IMD aggregation fun
Yesterday's achievement for IMD was a bit more straight forward: put a Flickr badge of the department's group photo pool on the homepage. Can you tell I did it? ;) To be honest the hardest part was the calculations for...
Wakey wakey
The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0 Méfiez-vous du Web 2.0 [fr] *cough* toldyouso *cough* ;) Totally unrelated; having sex on a domestic flight in America will get you 20 years in prison....
IMD group calendar solution using microformats and Technorati
I woke up this morning with, in my head, the first words from an email I had gotten from Scott last night, pleading: "*Desperately* need some kind of shared calendar capability on the [IMD] events page." "How could I do...
IRC logging, revisited
This afternoon I set up a "logger bot" which monitors and logs the GlobalVoices IRC channel. About an hour ago, Karl showed me the log he tweaked for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC channel and mentioned how he structured...
Tumblelogs?
I'm sorry, I don't get it. Or rather, I'm sorta disappointed. As Kottke says in his quote in the Wikipedia definition of Tumblelog (jees never thought I'd quote Kottke!), this just seems to me like what Weblogs were originally anyways:...
Color work
.color { float: left; margin: 0 2px 0 0; font-weight:bold; } .colorblock { width:155px; margin: 1; padding: 0; } .one { height: 60px; } .two { height: 40px; } .three { height: 20px; } dd { font-size: 7pt; font-weight:nomral;...
"Getting to know each other" UI design ideas
Quick thought about complex applications, especially web-apps, which have many features and functionalities and which are, of course, always a challenge, not just for the user but for the designers who need to make them usable. First of all there...
Breaking out of the Document
An email from Julian sent me into a whirl. If I wanted to publish scrapbook-like, and I mean really willy-nilly ad-hoc layouts... is it doable in web-standards today? I can build a CMS that takes care of navigation, blog-style, across...
Use Case Scenarios
It is SO hard for me to write these scenarios without diving into "how I would build this." I keep going over and back over and having to edit out whispered pre-suppositions of "how." This is where "technological determinism" is...
Citizendium
Very interesting: The Citizendium, a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take...
Over mango and chocolate crepes
I coded up a little tiny PHP method that takes any text string and returns 5 usable "html" hexadecimal colors. It's not as artful as I'd have liked it to be, but then again my programming skills are not everything...
Hello, where am I?
locatr DESCRIPTION locatr is a Series 60 Python application to display Flickr photos based on your current location (using a GPS device). HOW IT WORKS locatr will try to connect to a Bluetooth enabled GPS device and ask it for...
Buy movies...
Ok here we go. Amazon just unveiled "Amazon Unbox", their movie and TV show purchasing & download store. Apple is rumored (damn near confirmed) to release their movie download service next week as well, however with fewer studios signed up...
Even better...
"Sumaato" have developed a ridiculously slick bookmarklet that uses the Google Maps API to allow even easier Flickr geotagging. A sweet feature made better by using Google's better maps ('specially for Japan ;) Seriously. Look at this photo of the...
Geotagging citizen media
To keep my mind occupied the last day or so, I have been thinking alot about how Flickr's new Map functionality might affect the whole "citizen journalism" scene. Alot of people around me have been talking geo for years,...
Automate
Flickr: Import EXIF GPS information from your camera Automagically import GPS information as geo data Some cameras can store GPS (location) coordinates in a photo's EXIF header. If you like, Flickr can use that data if it's available to place...
Flickr Maps
"Lots" indeed. Go nuts. Montreal area...
A little SQL help, again, please? ;D
This seems to work usually and I am always super grateful for any help. I need two queries to a standard WordPress 1.5.3 database for 1- list of the IDs and names of categories that have been posted to in...
Open Data Movement talk in Helsinki
For the last two weeks I have been dying for an excuse, any excuse, to be in Helsinki right now. The announcement of Matt Biddulph's Aula talk today comes a full 48 hours too late for me to do up...
An example of the little stuff I love doing
"Recent comments" list in the sidebar of a weblog. Before: After: Yeah, it takes more space, but it is apprehensible. There is more data, but it is better chunked and spooned out, reducing the amount of decoding you need to...
Image editing for Flickr
"Preloadr" is really quite something. It uses the Flickr API to allow you to modify any of your images, via a web interface totally in sync with Flickr's style, as if you were in a "Photoshop-like" application. Awesome job....
Yeah I'm a bit proud...
I stumbled onto Wikipedia's entry for Moblog and damn near fell over. My name's not mentioned of course, but that is my design for Joi's moblog. I did that back in 2003. Custom solution, with a fancy Python-based email-to-xml-rpc script...
Here, try this.
Give this a try, let me know what you get. First, let's search Baidu, one of the major chinese search engines, for "chocolate". Yum yum Ok now let's try... "Tianamen massacre", written in western script. Still works. Ok now try...
Yahoo! porn spam
Warning: links to pages not with photos but hardcore porn terminology... Just got a concerned email from Howard regarding the fact that one of the articles on SmartMobs seems to be a spam magnet according to Yahoo!. The fact was...
Announcing RaSP!
Hah, that sounds so official like. Back when I was a... oh wait I still am a freelancing web specialist... anyways, I built this "rapid site prototyper" in PHP. It's based on an array which one sets up to...
Medieval ballisticism
In a follow-up to my "It's not about you" post a few weeks back, Mike Migurski, lead dev on ReBlog, points me to this complaint on "The Taming of The Band-Aid", a small, local weblog about one person's agricultural efforts...
What is a "podcast"?
UPDATED (to be more precise in the answers I seek) In your mind, is it: "A podcast is like radio" ("radio" the medium, not the hardware/technoogy) or "A podcast is like a radio show" (the usage of the medium) ?...
Smart move: W3C opens China office in Beijing.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announces the launch of its China Office on 27 April 2006. W3C, through its newest Office, invites experts in China to join the international project of developing Web standards at W3C. The Office is...
Web Philo 101
Someone (Hoder) launched a missive in the GlobalVoices public mailing list stating that "[weblog search service X] sucks!" His main point of contention was how it does a poor job of tracking weblogs which aren't in english. Ensued a short...
Blocking Technorati
If you're one of the people who prefers to disallow Technorati's bot, which does not respect the robots.txt convention and it's directives (talk about a good net citizen...), you may have resorted to blocking the bot's IP, 209.237.230.104. As of...
Don't do evil
Oops, seems in their fervor, the community has forgotten to define *what is evil*. Last year Google hired the bipartisan lobbying firm Podesta Mattoon, whose lobbyists include Daniel Mattoon, a Republican and longtime friend of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and...
A little Flash help please?
So um... I have this Flash-based IRC client that we--GlobalVoices-- need tweaked a bit, both aesthetically and there's a strange behavior we would love to see straightened out... I know exactly zip about Flash. It seems the source is Flash...
Summing it up
My post on "it's not about you" the other day sparked a good thread of debate which culminated in Hugh staking some key points, and Karl responding very clearly and directly, and in my opinion, right on the money, so...
Say it like it is, brotha!
Joe Clark drops one hell of a rant about everything from web acessibility, web 2.0 and stooped conferences. And really, the Pied Piper of Ajax, Jason Fried, is principally responsible for this mess. I’m getting a bit tired of having...
It's alive!
Before leaving for Tokyo, I mentioned how I was looking forward to getting back to Montreal for the summer. More specifically, what I told a few people in person was I was particularly looking forward to watching, and perhaps being...
It's not about you
At least not the way you may be led to believe it is. With apologies to Stewart and Caterina, the whole Flickr team and all the folks involved in this "Web 2.0" stuff, who, for the most part, are truly...
Adding missing features
I spent the end of this past summer building the USC Interactive Media Department's website/weblogs/aggregator system. As I said back then, it was a heck of a fun project and I realize now that it gave me many of the...
Virtual Real Estate
From Dav's Flickr stream: Dav laments and sells his Second Life plot of land because of the overdevelopment in his neighborhood over the last year. Amazing! Dav, I'll come visit your new waterfront spot!...
WordPress Loop hack/replacement with logical operands for multicategory listings
I just posted this on the WordPress support forums, see if it gets me anything. If you here have any thoughts please please please get in touch. :) Hi gang, While poking around for this post, I discovered that WP...
Happy 2nd Birthday Flickr!
Mosaic: Happy Birthday Flickr!Originally uploaded by jbum. Wow, I totally missed it this year. Happy birthday gang!! Thanks SO much for this wondrous world of marvels. I moblogged Stewart, Ben and Eric introducing Flickr at ETech 2004, and I was...
On the success of weblogs et al
The success of all these things such as weblogs, websyndication, etc, is directly attributable, I think, to one basic fact: weblogs are basic, rudimentary Content Management Systems. At risk of over-simplifying, I say that human intellect, human intelligence itself, in...
Some cool obscure web politics and geekery
While I was out to dinner, I was alerted via IM to two interesting things. First, the BBC has become a member of the W3C. That is fantastic news. Especially with this past information in mind. And, while already 3...
Comparing
Long story but yesterday over lunch with my new good friends John and Colin, I committed to building this side-by-side comparison of Google China and Google in Chinese for the OpenNet Initiative. The reason for doing this is explained thusly:...
Backchannel
Justin's made his backchannel experiments an official project at the USC IMD, where he is studying. Having experienced several types of backchannel setups myself, though never of the intensely focused and tweaked 14 screens of the ZML, I can say...
Dynapfffffff~~~
Remember I asked about "when was the last time you wrote out an entire webpage" a few weeks back? Good lord that was still in this same month! So much has happened since then... I remember discussing this at Laika...
It slices, it dices...
This is getting kinda absurd... Quitomzilla helps you quit smoking while you surf the web or wait for new emails, showing the cigarettes, money and time you have saved since you quitted. Yes, a webbrowser extension, which aids you in...
Tim Berners-Lee's weblog
TBL created the web. Now Tim Berners-Lee has a weblog. Good first post too! (I'd quote here but you really need to read the whole thing... to give you a little history lesson. ;)...
Dynamo
For some, if not many of you reading this, the answer to the following question is "never." But I pose it anyways, really addressing the rest of you. When was the last time you wrote out an entire webpage, in...
"after building up a fan base on the internet"
Sheffield rock band the Arctic Monkeys have topped the UK singles charts with their debut track, after building up a fan base on the internet. "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" trumped pop trio the Sugababes after...
Look! Up in the sky!
FlightAware. Wow. (ugly but ... hell there's alot of data, and it is blazing fast.) How live is FlightAware's tracking and status data? The data displayed on FlightAware is typically six minutes delayed from real time. How often does the...
Madonna 2.0
It's flash! It uses email for submission! But it's got tags! Ladies and gentlemen, Madonna 2.0! via Karl via Laurent...
,tools
This is very very cool to me and one of those "duh! of course! simple brilliance!" Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite Basically, it allows a visitor to use their browser's Location input as a CLI (Command Line Interface) to any...
LibriVox
Friend Hugh started up a neat "sorta Project Gutenberg for audio books" called LibriVox. The project has gotten some good traction and attention - Hugh was invited to the recent Open Library launch shindig by Brewster Kahle - and he's...
BBC catalogue begins development
Biddulph and Hammersley are on the case. Screenshot 1 (Searching for "John Peel") and screenshot 2 ("John Peel's contributer page") I think I would have dropped everything to play on this project too. Sigh. ;) My favorite line in Biddulph's...
Immersive Web
About a week ago I went for chinese food with Michael. We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks and Mike had just returned from what seemed like a very exciting trip to Europe. He recounted parts of his...
Googoomania
Some people... Walid Elias Kai, who has a doctorate in search engine marketing, and his wife Carol of Kalmar, Sweden, have named their son Oliver Google Kai...
Absurd development
(I'm getting tiiired of this...) I'm looking at SynchroEdit, a development project to allow "synchronous editing for the web". Let us, for one second, forget that the web was conceived to be two-way, synchronously editable, from day one. (Hah! Tim...