03.31.05
Biodiversity
I’m thankful for… biodiversity, the vast web of intricate interrelated behaviors in the world. Like octopuses who walk on two arms, for one of the bizillion exizamples.
03.30.05
CAVEs and disability
I’ll have to talk to Carolina about this: Projection-Based Virtual Environments and Disability.
Flexible communication aids
I’ll have to dig into this: A new generation of communication aids under the ULYSSES component-based framework. I’m slowly forming some ideas about the ways in which computers can assist in communication by transcoding between different world-models for transmission over different channels. To which this paper is clearly relevant.
Robotic mobility aid
Good stuff: Eldercare Robotics: A Personal Mobility Aid, a project that attempts to strike a dynamic balance between assisting the user and letting them be in control. Which, when you think about it, is what all technologies should be trying to do… Anyway, this one adds a robotic element to a ‘walker’ with an agent-based control architecture to allow the user and the robot to complement one another.
A conference paper is available at the site or in the ACM archives.
03.29.05
Inspiring effort, maybe
Reading about a project like this is inspiring, in a weird sort of way. That someone would bankrupt themselves creating it in the first place, then someone would spend 12 years and who knows how much money restoring it 50 years later, well, it just shows you… ummm, it shows you… something.
03.27.05
‘If just x percent…’
I don’t know if this tends to get cataloged along with the rest of the common argument fallacies, but it should. It’s annoying :-).
You probably can think of a number of times you’ve heard an argument that starts like “If just one percent of these people…”, and ends with some spectacular outcome.
Well, guess what? There are lots of numbers smaller than one percent! For example, in case you don’t believe me, 0.0001% is smaller than 1%. Zero itself is. There is even, some speculate, meaning in what are called ‘negative numbers’. Just because 1% seems ’small’ when we ponder it disconnected from any real quantity, it doesn’t follow that there’s always 1% of something to be had to realize some particular goal you dream up.
End rant.
03.26.05
Slugs
I’m thankful for… catalogs of other beautiful natural things: The Slug Site. If you were surprised (as m’bud Allan was) that lichens are beautiful, you may also be surprised about slugs. I know I was; I mean, the only slugs I ever see in my daily life is space slugs on Futurama or something. I should try to spend more time under the sea…
The site organization is a bit difficult on that site, so make sure not to miss their Opistobranch of the week page.
03.25.05
“Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail”
Besides having a clever title, this article (and associated comments) has some nice insights into the distinction between controlled vocabularies and folksonomies (hey, they’re not my terms, so don’t blame me). It’s very interesting to see what is emerging due to the popularity of folksonomy-based services right now.
I’m sure there’s lots of academic work in this area, too, although I haven’t looked at much of it. Hmm, it’s interesting, the difference between academic research and the emerging understanding from popular services is quite analogous to the difference between controlled vocabularies and folksonomies…
03.23.05
Computer-telephony integration
It’s interesting to see that there are some cheap options opening up in the area of computer-telephony integration, thanks to the growing popularity of VoIP and associated equipment.
I spent a few months researching and playing with CTI a while back, in support of a client’s project that would have integrated real-time telephony into a web-based application. I found CTI pretty fascinating. Now that these cards are getting cheap, I might look at learning some more about the topic. Couldn’t hurt to have that and VoIP in my consultant’s bag-of-tricks…
(I saw the above product link in an article on building a personal PBX that looks pretty good.)
03.22.05
Lichens of North America
I’m thankful for… catalogs of beautiful natural things: Lichens of North America.
03.20.05
TaskInfo
TaskInfo is totally worth the shareware fee for any power user of Windows. It provides vast information about processes and the system, is completely stable (I’ve been using it on three systems for 3 or 4 years with no problems), and doesn’t seem to be too hard on system resources itself.
I just used it to check progress on a download. I visited a page that embeds a QuickTime plugin, which was not providing any indication of the download progress. However, I could pop up TaskInfo and see the files Firefox was accessing, and where in the file the file pointer was. It was easy enough to see which file was being used to cache the download, and how many bytes had been written so far.
Semi-freeform database
I admit to not knowing much about ontologies (in the knowledge-management sense), but I am interested in them.
However, what I did discover is that Stanford’s Protégé project works well as a semi-freeform personal database.
For example, a while back I was writing a paper for a psych class, and of course had to have a bibliography. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the bibliographic database software I found out there, so I started to look around for some easy way to build some. I found Protégé because I was exposed to it via another class. I found that despite the fact that I don’t really know what it’s for :-), I was able to use Protégé to get the job done easily.
The nice thing about it, from my perspective, is that it allows for the formality and precision of a database schema, while also allowing for some of the sloppiness and incremental evolution of, say, a plain text file. As I add entries to a database, I sometimes discover that I want new fields in the records, or that I want to formalize something that was informal before. Protégé allows me to do that with a few clicks, without disturbing any existing data or causing any referential-integrity headaches, and it automatically populates the data-entry form to match.
If a new field is marked as required, then I get a visual indication in the form that the field is required, but I’m not forced to add it. For example, if I was building a “people I know” database (which is my current Protégé project), I could add a required birthdate field. I may not know all the birthdates of people I know yet, but I want the schema and form to reflect the fact that its important information that I should eventually fill in.
It doesn’t have the best GUI, because it’s very general, and therefore not the best possible interface for any specific application. However, forms can be customized to make them prettier, or one can embed the database and/or form components in some other program for total control. (I do have to say that the default GUI is much nicer in version 3 than in version 2.) In any case, it’s definitely smoother than any GUI I’ve tried as a front end to a relational database.
I mentioned embedding; the API is easy to work with if you need to get some functionality that’s not natively supported. I wanted an HTML version of my entire bibliography, so I wrote a Jython script in about half an hour to pull the data out of the store and format it appropriately.
And finally, because it’s open-source, it’s free and easy to modify beyond even the API level. Woot again for open-source.
03.19.05
Pet Pillows
OK, I will go on record as saying that taxidermy in general, and this in particular, is weird: Pet Pillows. They’re gonna get so much publicity from the fact that everyone who sees it and thinks it’s weird will link to it :-). Good luck, I guess.