I was just reading the newspaper while eating lunch. I never read the newspaper. Perhaps this is why…
On page 8 of the first section, was an article titled “US warns allies over arms sales to China” (several articles in today’s paper start with X Warns Y over Z). Normally not a big thing. Didn’t even plan on reading the article. But, a huge photo above the article piqued my interest. It had been obviously manipulated to remove information that was part of the context of the photograph. It is a photo of some protesters, who are showing signs/placards/banners denouncing Condi’s visit to Seoul.
BoingBoing.net just posted a link to gnomz - a web-based comic authoring tool. Just fill in a web form that lets you pick the backdrop, characters and enter some dialog, and it generates a comic. Sounds lame, but it could actually be a handy way to create graphic representations of narratives or dialogues.
For example, I created a quick (and lame) comic about a professor who is concerned about using a wiki.
Sorry for the delay, folks. I finally got the Education Directory for iPodder.org updated. There were several new podcasts to be added in both K-12 and Higher Ed categories. Be sure to check them out!
According to Adam, there are now 4213 podcasts in the directory (not counting the ones I just added). And I’m pretty sure there are podcasts out there that aren’t in the directory. That’s a pretty vocal long tail…
I keep noticing Drupal-powered websites all over the place. A month ago, I thought Drupal was some quirky, esoteric content management system. Now, I see that it’s a quirky, esoteric content management system that is used by a whole lotta people. And it scales from 1 user to 150,000 users. The SpreadFirefox project added 20,000 new users to its Drupal site in one month. There’s apparently a telecom somewhere with 150,000 users. It’s being used on several university campuses for campus- and department-blogging initiatives. It powers the new OurMedia.org content archiving/publishing project, which will likely/hopefully have about 3 bajillion users after it takes off.
Marc was pimping the project back at Northern Voice - but it was undergoing last minute tweaks so wasn’t officially released then.
It offers free hosting for content (audio, video, images, etc…) for eternity, as part of the Internet Archive project. Very cool.
The OurMedia.org website is a Drupal site (put together by Bryght, it looks like) - it’s quite nice. I may have to will borrow some ideas from it for weblogs.ucalgary.ca.
I’ve been using maps.google.com since it was first released. Absolutely love it.
But… Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could toggle between street map view and satellite image view? Or, perhaps overlay the street maps on top of the satellite images?
If only Google had access to a catalog of satellite images like Keyhole. Oh, wait! Look at the bottom right corner of the Keyhole home page… “Powered by Google”
Here’s hoping the Keyhole team is talking to the Maps team…
Buddy List (buddylist.module) gives an instant-messenger-like buddy list, where you can identify users in that Drupal server as “buddies” - friends or acquaintances. It then provides you with a list of your buddies, and a page with recent blog posts from all of your buddies. It also provides an RSS feed of your buddies’ blog posts, so you can just subscribe to the users you care to listen to, rather than subscribing to the whole site, or subscribing to a bunch of individual RSS feeds (one per buddy). Very cool. This was the biggest draw for Elgg in my mind, and it’s now mostly available in Drupal. You can’t currently define the type relationship with a buddy (co-worker, classmate, friend, instructor, etc…) but it’s a start.
This has been demoed publicly before, so shouldn’t be a big NDA risk. I just held a 4-way video conference using iChat on Tiger. It was pretty darned slick, and I think was only limited by bandwidth.
Note the cool reflections on the “desktop”, and the viewing angles of the participants. Seems much more natural than just tiling a bunch of video views into a window… And you can add people to an open video conference just by dragging them from your buddy list into the video window. Slick.
I’m a big fan of the concept of “code smells” - the notion that you can subconsciously evaluate the elegance/correctness of a code by how it “smells” to you. Similar to “beauty” in mathematics or physics, I suppose.
A code smell is when you sense something is not really right and the code can be improved by refactoring. He defined “super” code as having the following 4 S’s: “Safe, Succinct, Straightforward, Simple”. Code smells when it violates one or more of those principles. He noted that sometimes comments can be considered deodorant for “smelly code” - better to refactor (and fix the problem) than simply add comments (to document the problem)!
Have you ever been on the hunt for a particular song? Some obscure indie rock tune or rare jazz performance you heard on the radio? You might have to shop at more than one store before you find the song you’re looking for. Having the flexibility to choose from over 1 million tracks of music from multiple online music stores such as MSN Music, Napster, MusicMatch, and Wal-Mart can be the key to getting the music you want. Several stores even offer subscription services so you can download all the songs you want for about the cost of a CD each month.
Part of the functionality of the Pachyderm authoring application is the dynamic and on-the-fly resizing of images to whatever dimensions are required by the flash templates that are used to display a screen in a presentation.
I wrote the first version of the image resizing code using Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), and it worked quite well. But, during the authoring of the Mavericks prototype, it became apparent that the quality of the resized images wasn’t quite up to snuff. I tried setting JAI to use bicubic interpolation (InterpolationBicubic and InterpolationBicubic2) instead of the default nearest-neighbour (InterpolationNearest) method. Still produced inconsistent results.
I just received word that our proposed session for NMC 2005 was accepted! The official title is: “Creative Action at a Distance: Practical Tools for Effective Online Collaboration”, and we’re planning on describing and demonstrating the techniques that we used to develop the Pachyderm software with people scattered across North America.
Fun stuff like pair programming with VNC, iChatAV, wikis, weblogs, Breeze Live, SubEthaEdit, etc…
My co-conspirators in this are Joshua Archer and King Chung Huang. If you’re going to be at NMC2005, I look forward to seeing you at the session!
