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.
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…
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.)
I’m thankful for… catalogs of beautiful natural things: Lichens of North America.
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.
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.
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.
On the subject of time, The Long Now Foundation is an interesting concept. They’re trying to get people to think about 10000ish year timeframes, for all the benefits that incurs. Or, as they put it:
The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to todays “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking.
I can dig it.
I came across this page from some interview of m’man Brian Eno, but the board also includes an intellectual ton of other visionary-types.
I can’t believe Kurzweil isn’t involved. Doesn’t he expect to live into/beyond the 10000ish range?
If you like time-lapse and/or slow-mo stuff, check out Playing With Time. It’s a neat project with videos of ordinary stuff at unordinary timescales.
Hmm, very interesting.
Matt reminded me about WikiBooks, which I hadn’t peeked at in a while.
The last time I looked there was when I was reading “The Science of Getting Rich”, by Wallace D. Wattles. Despite the assumptions you might make from the title, it’s a pretty neat book. Whether you want to swallow it whole I don’t know, but there are a number of great little nuggets in there.
So when I went to look at WikiBooks again, I saw that the book had been marked for “speedy deletion”. Huh. There was no explanation given by the person who marked it such, but other commenters on the site provided a plausible reason: some scammer was trying to keep the book from free circulation (it’s in the public domain), because they wanted to sell “their” program for getting rich based on the book.
Oh, yeah, now I remembered. When I first noticed the book I did some searching around the web, and indeed, there are like a bazillion people trying to make money off the book with little additional work of their own in the package.
That’s probably a big problem with a Wiki-type system for collaborative knowledge gathering. Gotta have a mechanism for allowing people to remove unauthorized material, but discerning whether a given person really has the associated copyright/etc. is not easy to do through an automatic interface. So jerks can go around deleting (or modifying) things they don’t like to hear, regardless of whether they really have any say in the matter.
Weird situation… OK, now I have to try to find a good copy of the book and mirror it on my site to save it from the world.
Oh, looks like WikiSource has a copy, still.