Puzzlepieces – tag ‘ie’

geoupdater - does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

Page 17 features an article about Cook, Eat, and Run. Basically, during your lunch break, you visit their kitchen, learn how to cook a meal, and eat it, all in around an hour. I believe we can design solutions that are parsimonous, win-win-win, etc., and I think this is a great one. It accomplishes:

• people get out and have a real break for lunch
• people are eating fresh food
• people learn how to cook new things. nobody knows how to cook anything any more, and this is a big problem.
• the hosting company makes money
• you get to meet new people, and shared participation is the best way to really meet people properly, in my opinion.

In other words, brilliant. I believe there is room for a whole host of other similar ideas, such as perhaps workplaces hiring a chef once a week to organize everyone into making lunch in the company’s kitchen, for instance.

And people call me crazy when they see me slicing meat and vegetables at my desk. But nobody questions how great my sandwiches are

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - couple of things here I agree with, couple that I disagree with.

To start with, I thought “journalists” calling non-fad web things fads was going to die years ago. The internet is not a fad. Blogging is not a fad. Sharing stuff on the web, clearly not a fad. Lolcats are a fad. Sharing pictures of your cat is not a fad. This is hardly an opinion. Were people still calling radio a fad when it had as much penetration as blogs do today?

Once upon a time in the ancient 1940s, people wondered what humans would do with all the free time afforded by machines doing most of their work, like cleaning, cooking, etc. Try to find someone today who says they have enough free time.

So what happened? Why didn’t we get our free time? Well we did. But the available options with which to occupy our time has increased much faster than our free time has. People no longer need to invent things to do with their free time, they have to spend extra time deciding which things to try to do in their free time, as they can only do a small subset of what they want to do. The difficulty today is to look at the millions of options out there, and eliminate virtually all of them from your life. Realizing that removing things from your life will make it more full; that is tricky.

Saying that you do not have time for something is always a lie. You have time for whatever it is you decide to have time for.

Oh, and to tie that back in, it is nice that an increasing amout of what people are spending their time on is contributing to the public good, such as Wikipedia, as discussed in the article.

Casulo - Your Apartment in a Box « Gaya, Ruang dan Kepelbagaian - this is great. although more furniture than I use

mySociety » Blog Archive » Please Donate to help us expand TheyWorkForYou - mySociety does fantastic work. Unfortunately for me, it is mostly UK- and Eurocentric, but hopefully they’ll get some volunteers from elsewhere over time.

so I think I have semi-solved my question of where to post things. now everything I tag with “forfb” on this blog will also show up as a note on Facebook. That way I can post things on one, the other, or both, without having to write them twice. Of course, there will still be comment splitting…

You Are What You Grow - this is a very true and depressing story of the massive implications of the US’s farm bill, which everyone should read. Via del.icio.us.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll — New York Magazine - a much-needed article, although I’m still reading it. One the one side, privacy is now in crisis mode, with everything publicly available; on the other hand, the younger generation is paradigm shifting, and embrases the privacylessness wholeheartedly.

If a tree falls, and it is doesn’t have a permalink, did it really happen? How would we know if it did, there’s not even a video of it…

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog.

argh. I noticed today that my blog appeared to be completely down, in the sense that all the pages were blank.. hmn… the Wordpress admin interface still worked…

Took me about a half our to track down the problem, which was solved by disabling a plugin that I don’t use anyway. I have no idea why, but can hardly be bothered to figure that out now.

Puzzlepieces - so I think I’ve successfully moved this blog over to it’s new home… everything should look the same. I believe the post IDs have not changed, which is what should happen… except that it’s not because I’ve done it on purpose, it’s because for some reason I seem to have previously hardcoded them, before I learned the best way to make unique IDs for items in Atom feeds. ah well

So for all of you (~2 people) who complained that Puzzlepieces was dead, I’m happy to say it is back and doing well.

During this between-semesters holiday I’ve finally gotten myself a new host, and have (almost) successfully moved all of my websites over. My University of Waterloo search engine (UWhub) doesn’t work, but that will be fixed once I change all my file request function calls to use CURL instead. There is also a minor problem with Fagan Finder’s older .shtml pages, but I’ll worry about that later.

So, congratulations to me. Also, I’ve finally gotten myself a website, faganm.com, and so I intend to move this blog over to somewhere there instead of hijacking my old website’s domain.

IEBlog : Search in IE7 RC1 - they support the newish “referrer” extension - yay. let’s hope everybody else starts supporting this too

I’ve been fairly busy at Microsoft, working, and hanging out with other interns and so I’m way behind on blogging about OpenSearch.

Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and Firefox Bon Echo are out, both with some degree of OpenSearch support. Both support autodiscovery of Description files. IE7 (not sure about Firefox) supports search results in OpenSearch Response (RSS/Atom) as well as HTML. IE7 (and I suspect Firefox) do not support extended search parameters (those beyond searchTerms, startPage, etc.), but that’s to be expected at this stage.

Firefox support is a little odd, in that they also support some odd pseudoOpenSearch format. So please, developers, use real OpenSearch, it’ll work equally well in all readers, not just Firefox.

Firefox’s beta also has support for “search suggestions” when using Google or Yahoo. DeWitt has shown how (see draft document) these suggestions can be implemented in a way that is completely compatible with OpenSearch, without changing the existing format (JSON) at all. And it also opens the door to allowing suggestions themselves in OpenSearch; the Query element is ideal for this purpose.

From a webmaster perspective, the OpenSearch referrer extension (draft) is really great, allowing search sites to see where their searches are coming from. I’ve wanted this for a while, and it’s great to see it happening.

Perhaps more interesting than any of this is moving forward on adding structured data into OpenSearch, and DeWitt’s draft OpenSearch and Microformats is a great step in that direction. Personally I like data to be in XML more directly (rather than embedding it within atom:content, for example), but hopefully that approach can work in tandem, still using microformats. I’ll be looking into it, as I unofficially advise my university on how to create an API for their people search. Others have been looking at this too.

These are just some of the major happenings in OpenSearch. There are a variety of new software libraries, such as in Java and Ruby. An increasing number of organizations are basing their APIs and other things on OpenSearch. A9.com’s listing of OpenSearch providers is now well over 300. It’s hard to believe how far OpenSearch has come and how far it looks like it may go.

Puzzlepieces � tree-climbing vines (April 17, 2005) - yes, I’m linking to a blog post of mine from last year. Most of my posts generate about zero comments, so this one, at 5, is a lot, the last one just added today.

All from people I don’t know, it seems that people are searching for “tree climbing vine” and variations, and I’m ranking quite well for those. So if you have vines like those and want to get rid of them, check that post for comments

iSpecies.org is a mashup for a specific discipline, which is where it’s at . Not too much to speak of yet, but it’s a good start. How about adding Wikipedia data? Via Tara.

IEBlog : Hello from LA! - placeholder until tomorrow when I comment on this

quadspot � waterloo - looks like there’s now a craigslist clone for my university. finally, this is basically what I’ve been wanting and hoping someone would do.

the website seems to have a ton of school sites, but it all appears to be new. no about page, and I don’t immediately see other websites mentioning it. interesting. via uw.forsale, presumably posted by someone associated with it

all categories have rss feeds, but not search results

Update June 13: SLC comments on this too. And wonderfully, the creator comments on this post and adds feeds for search results

I did see a number of butterflies (not to mention birds) at Twin Peaks, but I didn’t read the description, so I’m not sure if they were ‘mission blue’ butterflies. Considering how incredibly windy it was, I’m surprised that butterflies could stay up there. If I was a little lighter I might have just been blown far away.

9-Apr-05 15:19:36