New Media Hack

My third blogiversary came and went on Jan 18th. This post is post 1500. Not bad for four year’s worth of work. While I’m not huge into analysis, I’m pretty confident I’ve avoided padding this blog with a lot of personal fluff, status updates, and echo chambering. Despite that (and no comments), I’m still pretty [...]

Obviously I have a great deal of admiration for Many Eyes, both the project and the folks behind it, many of whom I’ve met. Herewith, some minor suggestions and thoughts: Echoing my same complaint about swivel, data without task is a hard sell job. Maybe they need a curator who authors interesting data exploration contests. [...]

PyLucene is the Rube Goldbergian combination of Python and Java Lucene. It gives you the core guts of a flexible, high performance, full text indexing engine in Python, but isn’t very friendly to work with on an exploratory basis. Benoit Delbosc’s plush is an initial crack at providing a nice interactive command line for PyLucene.

Link parkin’: WikidPad, a notebook/outliner for Windows. Open source with Python inside! [Via Brian Carnell]

In my second or third year at Cal, I took the grad database class with Michael Stonebraker. Adam Sah pulled a little stunt for our final exam and invited Jim Gray to show up and sit in the front row. Stonebraker’s reaction was mildly entertaining. Whoever you are, Jim Gray has probably forgotten more about [...]

Link parkin’: Mosquito Lisp Mosquito Lisp is a network-oriented and compact Lisp with strong influence from Scheme. It is available as part of the Mosquito Remote Execution Framework distribution, and there is a Reference Manual. A quick scan leaves a distinctly Erlangish flavor. Distributed security hacking in Scheme sounds entertaining.

No matter what you think of Wikipedia’s quality, it’s sort of cool that you can download the entire contents of Wikipedia. That’s a whole lot of human generated text, mostly structured, mostly vetted, that motivated hackers can grovel over. Enterprising German hackers Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, Jens Lehmann, and Georgi Kobilarov have put [...]

Shan Carter, Aron Pilhofer, Andy Lehren, and Jeff Damens of The New York Times put together an impressive multimedia interactive on fallen US soldiers in Iraq. This is a nice example of combining interactive visualizations and infographics so that a user can “drill down” into data without having to lose a bunch of context. A [...]

JSON is a format increasingly emitted by web services, being fairly lightweight, flexible, and cross-language. Bob Ippolito’s simplejson is a pure Python JSON toolkit: simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON encoder/decoder for Python 2.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies. simplejson 1.5 is a major update that provides better [...]

It’s 2007 and Apress is scheduled to ship a book on Django. But if you can’t wait, you can read beta chapters of the Django Book online.

Not a whole lot of meat, but Kate Greene’s article on Digg’s use of visualization to combat gaming indicates that their tools could have some upside. However, the article doesn’t clearly portray anyone from Digg as signing on to this notion. It’s mostly Stamen Design talking about stuff they developed. Interesting numbers on story submissions [...]

LInk parkin’: I was doing my bimonthly search for pieces of the Emacs of Aggregators (TM) and ran across: rawdog: rawdog is an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur. Written in Python, it uses Mark Pilgrim’s feed parser to read RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, CDF and Atom feeds. It runs from cron, collects articles from [...]

Link parkin’: Two text mining toolkits: Lemur: The Lemur Toolkit is a open-source toolkit designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval. Lemur supports a wide range of industrial and research language applications such as ad-hoc retrieval, site-search, and text mining. LingPipe: LingPipe is a suite of Java libraries for the linguistic analysis [...]

Rafe Colburn, also on the “-1 Snap Previews” bandwagon, got some interesting commentary on a blog post regarding the issue, including how end users can opt out of the previews and a couple of other strategies for defeating the pesky popups. Apparently, it’s a bit trickier for publishers though. Also serves to remind me to [...]

Aggregator++: Feed’N Read is an open source, Java/Eclipse based RSS aggregator. Yet another option for potential aggregator hacks. Plus there’s always BlogBridge

Along with quite a few other folks, I can’t stand the usage of Snap previews. I have yet to hit one of these where I can actually read the little preview, in essence obfuscating the destination!! -1 on usability.

According to Ben Hammersley et. al.’s book, Hacking Movable Type, MT already supports the Atom publishing protocol. Hold the train on moving to WordPress.

Digging around for information on Google Earth, I ran across the EarthSLOT project: EarthSLOT is a collection of 3D GIS and terrain visualization applications designed to allow scientists, resource managers, educators, and the public better understand our planet and the earth science that goes on here. … Our mission at EarthSLOT is to advance earth [...]

Link parkin: minor emacs wizardry, a well written blog of emacs and elisp hacking.

Flickr has a new extension to their tagging mechanism: machine tags. As far as I can see, it’s a minor extension to the tagging syntax, allowing for a colon separated prefix and then keyword/value pair separated by an =, e.g bmd:some=value. All the real action though is in the fact that Flickr’s search API actually [...]

Tantalizingly, Matt Mullenweg teases Atom API support in WordPress 2.2. Now that might get me to reconsider WordPress for my next blogging platform.

Link parkin’: A Macintosh filesystem where accessing folders generates queries to Spotlight, Apple’s desktop search service. Written completely at user level using MacFUSE. As predicted, there are all sorts of fun tricks that can be pulled with user level file systems and builtin Mac OS X services.

Following up on my admiration for their Communication-Minded Visualization manifesto, Martin Wattenberg , Fernanda Viégas, and the rest of their compatriots at IBM’s Visual Communication Lab have launched Many Eyes. Many Eyes is the concrete manifestation of the themes in their manifesto: Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to [...]

A few years ago, I pondered the possibility of pluggable web applications, invoking St. Graham to solve the problem. As described by Chad Fowler, looks like Dabble, the Web DB, has taken a good stab at a web app plug-in mechanism. The gist is to plug-out, shipping off plain old CSV text to a URL, [...]

From Paul Lamere: Streampad is a web music player. Its not just a music player that plays in your browser. Its a music player that plays the web. … Streampad can also be used to give you access to your own music collection when you are on the road. Streampad has a little server that [...]

Alain Frisch’s Nostalgy plug-in makes filing e-mail messages in Thunderbird a snap from the keyboard.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been following NU alum Rich Skrenta’s company, Topix.Net, but it just seems to me like he’s been blogging forever. However, he launched another blog in mid December so he could stretch out on some topics, and he’s doing a great job. Well worth the addition to your aggregator.

An interesting menu of workshops is being offered as part of this year’s International World Wide Web Conference. Weblogs have moved off onto their own conference, but there’s a second edition of the tagging workshop, along with others on socially constructed knowledge, query log analysis, and IPTV. Also, the conference location is Banff, Canada which [...]

The abstract from Margaret Kipp and Grant Campbell’s, “Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems:An Examination of Tagging Practices (PDF)” This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by [...]

Nice comparison by Scott Yang of two lighweight http servers, nginx and lighttpd, for when Apache is a bit on the heavy side.

Link parkin’: Google hacker Amit Singh releases MacFUSE, allowing you to write file system hacks in user level code on the Macintosh. Combine with the Mac’s powerful, uniform application scripting and other automation tools for powerful effect, e.g. make blog posting as easy as dropping a file in a folder.

Foo. Looks like Findory will be riding off into the sunset. I originally pooh poohed Findory’s core concept but over time came to appreciate its utility, not to mention Greg Linden’s wonderfully blogging about the whole process. Hopefully one day Greg will write up and publish some of his experience and techniques. Hmmmm, maybe he [...]

Neato. Solr is an Apache incubator project that turns Lucene into an enterprise search server. The cool thing about Solr is that it has an exceedingly pleasant RESTful web services api. To quote the FAQ: Solr itself is a Java Application, but all interaction with Solr is done by POSTing XML messages over HTTP (to [...]

Link parkin’: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s varied visualization technologies.

A talented team of German researchers is developing OverSim, a framework for doing simulations of overlay networks. Overlay network techniques, as canonically exhibited by Gnutella, are a foundation of academic P2P research. Of course you’d like to try out your protocols and applications before you cut something loose on the real Internet.

Chirag Mehta’s PHP based Tagline Generator is a handy little tool. This should remind folks that you can have tag clouds without necessarily having tagging. Probably a pretty straightforward Python port.

Not just the Jabber messaging protocol embedded in your web browser, but a whole philosophy and suite of applications built on top. Sort of like a radically open source KnowNow before they went all enterprisey on us. [Via the l. m. orchard del.icio.us feed]

Link parkin’: Paul James takes the del.icio.us API and makes it truly RESTful.

Since I’ve revealed that I’m a lapsed DJ, some of my noodlings about music and tech might start to make more sense. Looks like I’ll have to pick up Michael Faulkner’s “Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture” eloquently reviewd by Régine Debatty. I’m particularly interested in the hw/sw combos these folks use, which the book covers, [...]

Peter Merholz, aka peterme, demonstrates some of the interesting features of AskCity. AskCity is Ask.com’s local search tool said tool making heavy usage of maps for information presentation. AskCity takes online maps as media artifacts to a new level, presenting an interesting challenge to Google and Yahoo!.