Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Monday, November 24, 2003
Friday, November 21, 2003
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Monday, November 17, 2003
Saturday, November 15, 2003
How about a
WYSIWYG slide-show presentation creator who's native form is HTML with CSS. Something that could be read in a browser, that is accessible, and can be printed off on paper or overheads as slides. Hmn, I'll add that to my infinitely long list of projects. This idea would be added to
LazyWeb, if it hadn't temporarily suspended submissions.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
10 Things I Bet You Didn't Know about Google - I knew all these of course, but probably most people don't know any of them. I will only mention two things. Firstly, Yahoo! is now shifting in some places to being powered entirely by Inktomi (which they've owned since December). Secondly, Google's translations are powered by
Systran, as are those of AltaVista's BabelFish, AOL, Lycos, Dictionary.com, and many others. I would recommend my own
Translation Wizard, which integrates multiple translators, for greater language coverage. Via
Scripting News.
Yesterday I rollerbladed to class wearing a t-shirt. This morning I woke to rather a little surprise. A couple of inches of snow, and quite a blizzard, with very strong wind.
Monday, November 10, 2003
Friday, November 07, 2003
Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview - I read Clay's anti-Semantic Web piece. I would say that I agree with everything and I disagree with everything. Maybe what I think is the Semantic Web isn't actually the Semantic Web, so we're talking about different things. My view of the future of the internet probably has the semantic web mixed with webservices and other things.
About a half year ago, I gave my mom this example. She was at a dentist's office, making her next appointment. The clerk looked through the dentist's calendar, suggesting possible times. My mom would then try to remember if that was a good time. Once they found a time that was probably okay, it would get written down on paper, brought home, and added to her calendar. If the time wasn't good, they'd make changes over the phone. At appointment time, she'd look at the calendar and remember to go to the dentist.
Suppose this was done a different way. Go back to the dentist's office. My mom leaves, without making an appointment. When she gets home, her PIM (personal information manager) has an alert asking for a dentist appointment. It has already integrated the dentist's and her own calendar, and has listed a number of times. She selects one, which is automatically added to her calender, with the data also sent back to the dentist. Come appointment time, her PIM alerts her of the appointment.
Is this not the semantic web? Or at least the future of the web, whatever you call it? I could think of many more examples. Hmn, maybe this example is more like web services...
I came across a group of people of various Indian descent (at university), who were arguing about whether there were any Tamils in India. I enlighted them a little as to the situation (there are), which I think surprised them :-). Coming back home, I checked my facts and found that I had been somewhat incorrect. Many of the Tamils (one third) in Sri Lanka did come from India, however they were brought by the British to work on plantations. I had thought that they left (somewhat voluntarily) because they didn't like the British. That one third figure came from
The Conflict in Sri Lanka: History (PDF), a brief but informative document.
The Conflict in Sri Lanka: History (which I haven't read) looks like it has a lot more information. Of course, I should be studying chemistry right now :-). Perhaps
Abbe has some thoughts.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
I watched with a fair amount of interest, as the rest of the blogosphere dealt with the first serious blog comment spam. Well, today I was the victim. Both comments deleted manually.
Free Range Graphics - my last post about The Meatrix led me to check out these guys, who created the animation. They have done a lot of absolutely amazing work for causes that (of the six movies I've seen so far) I completely agree with. These story lines really get the message across, they must have great writers.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
59,49,57,57,57,57 is the number of megabytes I've used (sent and received) in the past six days. Now that's consistent. Hard to believe, actually. I do different things different times different days. I guess it all evens out :-)
ReUSEIT! Contest Entries - many of the entries to redesign
UseIt.com are excellent. So much talent and effort went into these. Much of the design is what you don't see, such as how it would look in old web browsers, how blind people would be able to use it, etc. Via
Blogdex.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Whoops. My last two posts I posted on the wrong blog, and have just moved over to here. The second last one was from yesterday.
YellowPen, Inc. - this looks interesting. Essentially a program that you drag information off the web into, and it is stored in the hierarchy you define. Via
Marcus Zillman.
Reminds me of something I was trying to build a few years ago. It was a framed web page, where the main frame was whatever you were reading, and there was another frame to copy text into. There was also a frame with a search box. I was trying to make it easier to do research essays and such, and I was going to have it automatically generate bibliographies. I think now there are a fair number of solutions that do something similar to this.
Saturday, November 01, 2003
The End of the World - I saw this on
Blogdex a few days ago, and thought it was pretty funny. I showed it to a couple of friends. Yesterday I was sitting in my room and heard someone else listening to it. I doubt he heard about it from one of my friends, so he must've found it some other way. Today I was walking down the hall and heard it. Entering the room, I saw that there were ten people watching it together. How's that for a meme?
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