January 20, 2005 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
An interesting idea… Web technologies: a first step towards biomimetism? The idea that enterprise-class, “hardened” applications are flawed by nature, and that web technologies that mimic biology in the ability to adapt and respond are more successful and appropriate.
It’s another telling of the small pieces loosely joined story. One that’s been going through my head very loudly lately (as it has before).
Things like the new Technorati Tags system really showcase what can be done with the loosely bound small pieces, rather than trying to build the entire widget (or series of widgets, or framework of widgets) yourself.
Over the next year, I plan on investigating this much more closely as it pertains to blended learning. What are the small pieces? How can they be tied together? What is the larger ecology that forms as the pieces learn about each other? Where are the gaps and opportunities?
I’m definitely not alone in my interest in this model. James Farmer is thinking about it too… (as are Alan, Brian, and many others…)
I listened to Doug Rushkoff – Renaissance Prospects (via ITConversations) this morning on the commute. It was an eye-opening presentation, framing a bunch of concepts that have been bubbling beneath the surface, in the context of a “new renaissance”.
He describes a renaissance as an era where we learn to deal with additional dimensions. In the Renaissance, artists learned to create perspective to provide the appearance of a third dimension. Explorers circumnavigated the globe, showing it was round and not flat. Contrast this with VR and navigable creations, and placing objects into orbit around the Earth (and sending people and probes away from it).
Interesting contrasts which Doug suggests are indicating this new renaissance:
- Economy (consume/acquire) vs. Ecology (connect and relate)
- Receive (“priests” broadcast the Word) vs. Interpret (everyone can read and form their own opinion) vs. Publish (internet as accelerator)
- Freud (self) vs. Jung (collective)
- Individual vs. Connected
I’ve been thinking about that whole “internet permanence” thing, and decided to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve moved a copy of this weblog to my new online home at darcynorman.net.
This new home should be as close to a permanent spot on the internet as I’ll have.
No, I’m not leaving the Learning Commons. No, I don’t have any plans to do so. It just makes sense for me to take responsibility for the resource that basically makes up my online identity, rather than tying it to any particular institution or organization.
If you’re seeing this, then all has gone well and smoothly. It happens occasionally… Everything should just redirect automagically, without having to do anything, but you might want to eventually update links (sometime before Heat Death of the Universe)…
Thanks to Rosemary Sanchez for giving me the kick in the butt to actually do this.
UPDATE: There’s a bugfeature in the WordPress wp-login.php file that attempts to “fix” things if it detects a move of the site (like, say, when moving from one server to another), that basically borked “siteurl” setting to “http:” rather than “http://www.darcynorman.net” whenever I logged into the admin interface. The fix is here.
I just found an awesome plugin for iPhoto: Keyword Assistant makes using keywords as easy as del.icio.us, so you’re more likely to enter useful metadata about your most valuable digital resources – the stuff that comes from your camera.
I found it odd when I spent more time tagging web pages that I might look at possibly once or twice in the future, than on the photos I take of my family that I hope will remain valuable forever. It sounds odd, but Keyword Assistant actually made me go in and add keywords to the hundreds of photos I’d taken in the last few months. These were photos that I’d been neglectful in tagging, so there was a high risk that I’d lose some context over the years.
I had a bad meal on campus on Thursday, and it hit me rather hard. Turns out it was food poisoning. All I ordered was a veggie burger, thinking it was safe and relatively healthy. OK, I ordered fries with it, too, but that was to balance out the healthy side of things…
I was so dizzy that I didn’t even get to enjoy the ambulance ride. And why does ER make it seem so much more exciting than it really is? There weren’t any neurotic one-armed surgeons or anything…
So, now it’s 2 days later and I’ve almost recovered. Not a lot of fun at all, but it sure makes a powerful weight loss program…
Anyway, that’s why I kinda disappeared Thursday afternoon, and haven’t been in the office or online since.
So, the Stevenote for MWSF 2005 just started, and the Apple Store is dutifully displaying this:
This could be expensive… 
UPDATE: Yup. This is going to cost me about a grand… (by the time I pick up Bluetooth module, Airport card, 512MB RAM, 80GB drive, a DVI-Video adaptor so it can talk to my TV, and an EyeTV200 so I can Tivo stuff…)
Figure I’ll pick up one of these eventually and slap it into my entertainment system at home… This is exactly what I was hoping for! DAMNThank you Steve!
UPDATE: Yup… A decently bundled Mac mini (80GB, 512MB, bluetooth, Airport card, bluetooth keyboard + mouse, and DVI-Video adaptor) will set me back $1100CDN. If I spring for the ElGato EyeTV 200 so I can do spooky Tivo things, that’s an additional $469CDN – Grand total for the tricked out Mac media centre: $1592CDN. Maybe I’ll wait just a bit longer…
Stephen Downes posts a link to an article by Simon Waldman on the importance of URL (and email address) permanence to a person’s online identity.
It struck home with me a bit, since, well, my weblog is rather tied into the ucalgary.ca domain. That would make things rather difficult if the situation ever changed (no, Mike – I’m not planning anything I’m just saying…)
Over the years, I’ve changed employers a couple of times (until returning to the U of C, where my old account was reactivated after a couple years of dormancy). I’ve also switched ISPs a few times, so ISP-provided addresses get invalidated rather frequently. I’ve got my .Mac account, but that’s only valid as long as I decide to keep paying the ferryman.
This also triggered something I read/heard in the last week (I forget where/how – isn’t it weird how when you get so darned much information seeping into your skull, you just kinda assimilate it and forget where it came from?) where someone was comparing email addresses and URLs to the new permanent cell phone numbers in the states (cell phone numbers aren’t tied to a specific carrier or vendor any more).
That would be cool for email addresses and website URLs. I suppose you could simulate that by having a personal domain, but that doesn’t leverage your institutional affiliations as they evolve, either…
January 11, 2005 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
I tried an experiment with my iPod running iPodLinux last night. I stopped by Wal*Mart and picked up a Cheap Ass AudioConferencing Headset 3000™ (for a whopping $19.95), came home and rebooted my iPod into iPodLinux. I set the recording sample rate to 33KHz and tried recording a few things to test it out. Worked well enough. But don’t try to playback the files under iPodLinux – it will crash.
Also, while recording, it seems to record the file to disk every 5 seconds, with an audio electronic feedback hum while it’s doing it (it only lasts for about half a second, but it’s quite annoying). I wound up recording about 45 minutes of nothing, just to see if it would crap out on a long recording. Turns out, since it’s recording to disk every 5 seconds, that it isn’t the bestest thing you can do to your iPod’s battery… Although the linux side was showing full battery strength, when I rebooted back into the Apple iPod OS, the battery was showing almost no juice left. I wasn’t too worried, since it often shows little juice, but “warms up” or calibrates or something over a few minutes to show the actual level.
No such luck. On the commute in this morning, with traffic totally backed up and the bus crawling at a breathtaking 5Km/h, I was greeted by the “Hey, your battery is out of juice! Plug it in, dumbass!” warning on my iPod. It was slightly more polite than that, but the effect was the same. An hour of listening to high school cheese babbling on about how much they love the movie “Mean Girls”, and how they burned the latest Sum41 video to DVD so they can watch it every day. OMG! I LOVE Sum41! I KNOW, I DO TOO! OMG! Kill. Me. Now.
OK. So, the Coles™ Notes™ summary of this is: Don’t record directly to your iPod using iPodLinux unless you have it either plugged into juice while recording, or have the AC adaptor handy to top it up afterward. And, only do that if you can live with the electronic feedback hum every 5 seconds.
Oh, and this would have been a podcast, but the Cheap Ass 3000™ headset didn’t want to send microphone signal to my PowerBook. Doh. (turns out the line in port on the back of my PowerBook requires a powered microphone. I’ll be taking the headset/mic back to Wally World ASAP.
Robin Good has put up a great overview of ethnoclassification/folksonomies – including a good list of strengths and limitations.
I think the limitations (primarily regarding ambiguity) would be largely mitigated through the use of two approaches:
- Tag autocompletion at entry time
- Rich and dynamic synonym matching at search/retrieval time
Tag autocompletion could use something like the Google Suggest XMLHTTP request to provide you with suggested keywords for what you are entering.
Synonym matching would help pare down duplicate results, and merge different tag branches at search/retrieval time.
As an example of synonym matching, MacOSX 10.4 has a feature called Spotlight, which is a system-wide metadata searching tool. It’s got synonym handling out of the box, so if, for instance, you’re looking for “wallpaper”, it will also return items related to “desktop picture” – even though you may not have known they are synonyms.
I’m keeping a list of links on ethnoclassification on del.icio.us.
UPDATE: Woah. This was post #500! Keep on bloggin’ …
So, I bit the bullet and migrated my weblog from Wordpress 1.2.2 to Wordpress 1.5 Alpha (the nightly build from January 9, 2005). Woah. That sounds scary! Not really… The nightly alphas are surprisingly stable, and I tested stuff out on my laptop before making the jump on the server.
The main plugins I use work fine, so there should be no issues there. The only thing that should be visibly different is the lack of the second line of the cheesy subtitle in the header of the site. Wordpress 1.5 appears to not like html tags there, so the <br /> tag was being displayed as source… Oh, well. Probably for the better anyway…
So, if it isn’t visibly different than 1.2.2, why change? Well, I wanted to mess around with the implementation of RSS enclosures that’s being baked into WP 1.5, and I wanted to play around with the new concept of Themes (if you’ve followed the development of CAREO, this should sound oddly familiar )
UPDATE: Sorry for polluting your aggregator with all the updated entries! Looks like 1.5 handles character mapping (quotes and apostrophes into entities, etc…) differently.
UPDATE: Enclosures are supported just fine, but you need to add the info about them in a “custom field” with key “enclosure” and value following this pattern:
http://myserver.com/wherever/myfancypodcast.mp3
234293879
audio/mpeg
Where the first line is the URL of the enclosed file, the second line is the size of that file (in bytes) and the third line is the MIME type of the file.
It’d be nice if this was done automagically… It seems to automatically pick up image enclosures OK, but skips audio…
