I’ve been making some time to think seriously about some of the assumptions and preconceptions I have regarding metadata, in light of my quick and dirty asset management tool.
I had committed 100% to the “rich, deep metadata is beautiful” mantra, drinking the IMS/IEEE LOM Kool-Aid™. I’ve built Large Applications that have been designed entirely around handling the complexity of this rich/deep metadata, and trying to abstract that enough to let me build actual functionality on top of it.
The folks at EDUCAUSE are doing something interesting this year at NLII - they are releasing the audio from many sessions via audio attachments to their EDUCAUSE Community Blogs. Podcasting the conference. That’s freaking awesome! I’d expect that from something like BloggerCon, but for a “mainstream educational conference” to be doing this… I’m impressed.
I’ve downloaded every session they’ve released thus far. The audio quality ain’t great (levels waaay too low, so I risk blowing an eardrum at the end of the track when my iPod switches to the next one… ouch), and the bandwidth doesn’t seem to be quite there, but they are doing some cool stuff. And the production value of the intro bodes well (if they can get a microphone closer to the presenter… :-) )
I’ve just worked up a drop-dead simple asset metadata database for the Pachyderm project. It’s just a MySQL database, with a single table that has 10 fields (including primary key). This simple database will serve basic metadata needs for the Pachyderm beta.
I also built a simple asset management system to test out the database. I decided to do a lightweight PHP “application” to stretch my legs in a non-WebObjects non-Java environment. This is about as far from the elegant Model View Controller design pattern as it gets. Raw SQL is littered throughout the PHP code. But, you know what? It works. And is unbelievably simple to debug.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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…
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!
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.
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.
