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OAI ORE Experiment Video 2007-09-28 00:56:51 The article is broadly similar in its coverage to that of the "white paper" circulated by the OAI ORE project in May - but with an interesting addition/complement in the form of a video in which Herbert reprises the aims of the project and the approaches proposed, and also outlines an experiment conducted by staff from the Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos Laboratory Research Library using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to capture "Resource Maps" (based on using the Atom Syndication format to represent those Resource Maps), and tracing changes in those maps, and the structural relationships between the objects described by them, over time. From:eFoundations ...

If they’re speaking Italian… 2007-09-27 19:54:07 The talk went well, I think, judging from good questions after the session and throughout the day. Ismael Peña-López, who blogs brilliantly on ICT4D at A HREF=”http://ictlogy.ne”>ICTlogy has good notes on the talk, and Tobias from Kabissa has reflections on my suggestion that interactive voice response systems should be a serious priority for international development. You can check out the slides here if you’d like. - Thomas Metz from the International Rice Research Institute, who’s led implementation of two major web2.0 projects for his group, observes that there’s a potential culture clash between the behaviors web 2.0 encourages and the hierarchies that tend to characterize bureacratic organizations and research centers. In organizations where every public utterance needs to be scrutinized by a PR department, it’s really hard to encourage open collaboration via a tool like a wiki - Metz regrets that one of his projects was built in a closed, ...

Sticking With Paint … For Now … 2007-09-27 07:45:21 Alright, let’s get this over with. The best paint schemes ever, in no particular order, are:1) Dale Earnhardt’s 1993 Silver paint job.2) Dale Earnhardt’s 1994 Olympic Car.3) Jeff Gordon’s flame paint scheme. Didn’t think I would include that, did you? Little do you know.4) Dale Earnhardt’s Wrangler car circa 1985 - the one before that was mostly blue with the different number 3 on the side was awful.5) Dale Earnhardt’s black GM car with the white and red 4 on the side, not with the silver 3 - I didn’t like that one too much.6) Kevin Harvick’s Kiss car as well as Ron Hornaday’s.7) OK, Sterling Marlin’s Kiss car too.8) Dale Jr’s black Bud car and beige Bud car.9) Almost any Miller Beer car from the 80’s until now - even though I didn’t like any of the drivers of those cars, except for Bobby Allison, and Doyle Alexander. I also didn’t like the #27 MGD car that Rusty drove for one year. 10) The Texaco ...

The Answer to the Cool Maths Trick 2007-09-27 03:30:28 If you studied hard at school you may remember Algebra well lets do some algebra magic out here to crack the solution for yesterday’s post on how I can figure out your age without you telling me, if you have not read that yet read it first and come back to view the solution. The Answer Assume ‘x’ to be any number that you want it may be a single digit number or a double digit number or a triple digit number. The final outcome would depend on the number of digits you choose so if you choose single digit number the final outcome will be a 3 digit number, for a double digit number the outcome will be a 4 digit number and so on. Of course a 0 will result in an output of 2 digit number. Next Step: Multiply it by 2 Output: 2x Next Step: Add 5 to itOutput: 2x + 5 Let’s Ponder At this stage it is quite certain that you will always get a result of 250 even if you have chosen 0 as the first age, lets keep the 100x aside for a bit and look at the numbers 1756 and 1757. Add ...

Cool Maths Trick, know your age without telling me 2007-09-27 01:09:22 Just follow this cool little trick and I will be able to ascertain your actual age without you telling me How many times do you eat your dinner in a restaurant in a week. Now take this answer and multiply it with 2. Add 5 to it. Multiply the result with 50. If this year your birthday has already passed this year add 1756 to the total, if it has already passed add 1757. Now subtract the year you were born in from the total, so if you were born in 1960, subtract 1960 from the above total. Examples Your birthday hasn’t passed this year yet and you eat dinner 3 times a week outside Your birthday has passed this year and you do not eat dinner outside at all The Surprise Go ahead do it yourself and tell me if it works or not. Awesome isn’t it, well this was forwarded to me as a email but I figured out how this is able to figure out the exact age, well though the suspense will not be revealed today it will be done tomorrow, till then you have time to rack up your brain and thin ...

A brief widget history 2007-09-26 22:27:38 The widget technology we take for granted today has been over 25 years in the making. Small pieces of customized desktop and web content have made their way into our lives whether you call it an accessory, a widget, a web part, or a gadget. Below is a visual timeline of widget history and a brief summary of how some of today’s widget sectors got their start. Widget timeline displaying major events in widget history. Desk ornaments Widget concepts date back to the invention of the graphical user interface for home use. Bud Tribble and Andy Hertzfeld brainstormed a concept named “desk ornaments” in 1981 for the original Macintosh operating system. These ornaments, later renamed accessories, wrapped small computing functions such as a calculator, notepad, or simple games within a single application. Personalized homepage Netscape PowerStart was a personal start page application built-in to the Netscape Navigator web browser in 1996. PowerStart was released just two weeks ... History

Checking in from Picnic 2007-09-26 19:24:50 Greg Trefry from Gamelab, a very cool NYC-based designer of lightweight games, talks about his work on Case of the Coveted Bottle“>”The Case of the Coveted Bottle”. The game was a promotion for Sarah Jessica Parker’s new perfume - Greg freely admits that he’s a corporate whore, and expresses his willingness to promote J.Lo’s fragrance if she’ll just call him. The challenge of a game like this is making it possible for reticent audiences as well as rabid fans to participate. The team set up the project with a puzzle a week, introduced by a new character - these puzzles often appeared on the public web, usually introduced via a character’s MySpace page. Some problems involved finding a series of images on Flickr and making a sentence from the tags on the images; another involved mapping addresses on a Google map and discovering the patern that emerged. The puzzles were designed to be fairly easy to complete, but Greg was surprised that d ...

dctagging revisited 2007-09-26 02:02:20 Ganesh points out that at least some of the metadata that can be expressed using DCMI-owned terms is already captured "natively" in the various flavours of feed XML format, either using "core" components of the format (e.g. using the RSS 2.0 <title>, <description>, <author>, etc. elements or the Atom <atom:title>, <atom:summary>, etc. elements) or using the extension features available (there are RSS 1.0 "modules" for "Dublin Core" and "Qualified Dublin Core" (I’ll leave to one side the debate about what constitutes "Qualified Dublin Core"….)) Yes, this is indeed true, and I didn’t mean to suggest that the "structured tagging" approach should replace that. I should have been clearer about that. Where metadata providers have control over the structure, the markup, of their feed, I agree that the most effective way to expose metadata is to do so explicitly using the &quo ...

How I Manage My Time, Group Writing Project 2007-09-25 14:50:13 This post is a part of group writing project organized by Vivien of Inspiration Bit. I first heard about it from my good friend Shankar. There is another reason why I am taking part in this project which is to let my readers know a little bit more about me and how I manage my time. Well to start with I am a Software Engineer with a full time job working in the US. I also blog along with doing freelance projects and also do some open source work creating WordPress plugins in my spare time, also being away from my family and close ones in India I need to spend part of my day with them. What I do with my time? The Week Days With work I usually break down tasks into sub-tasks thus making work much easier, the best example I can give is the one when I was creating the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin where I divided all the different tasks into sub modules like backup files, backup database, download latest versions, de-activate plugins etc. After I did this I simply worked on creating ...

Fines Handed Out, Coors News, and More Paint Slams 2007-09-25 13:24:09 Fines:In the no surprise category, Carl Edwards was fined 25 driver and owner points for his height infractions. Monetary fines were also issued. Roush/Fenway is expected to appeal, after all the car only became low after the race when fellow Roush/Fenway driver Greg Biffle hit Edwards on the cool-down lap to congratulate him on his victory. Tony Raines was also fined 35 driver/owner points for his helmet toss at Robby Gordon in the Busch race on Saturday. He also has to cough up 15 grand. For that kind of money he should have hit the car better. Coors:Coors Light has become the “Official Beer” of NASCAR, and you know for the amount of money they are paying, which is about the same to sponsor a Cup team, they will get better exposure than sponsoring a car in the Cup Series. NASCAR is still looking to get a sponsor for the Grand National Division though. More Hated Paint Schemes:I just thought I would continue this from yesterday. The new Dale Jr paint schemes for next year ...

A couple of meetings about Second Life 2007-09-25 09:46:17 Three meetings in three days at the end of last week meant that I didn’t get a lot of time to blog about stuff.  I’m trying to catch up now… On Thursday we held our joint JISC CETIS / Eduserv Second Life in Education event at the London Knowledge Lab.  This went very well I think, with interesting presentations from all four of the projects we have funded this year, an overview of some of the issues around using SL by yours truly, a summary of the JISC position on Second Life by Lawrie Phipps and a discussion session at the end led by Paul Hollands. We billed the day as offering a chance to: showcase the projects to the JISC CETIS community explore potential issues with using Second Life in Education such as interoperability and sustainability discuss ways in which funding bodies can best support the community’s activities with virtual worlds. All the talks (slides and audio) are available from the meeting wiki and slidecasts are promised soon ...

A great day for blogger’s, WordPress 2.3 is finally out 2007-09-25 06:14:17 Today is a great day for blogger’s who have been using the WordPress platform, WordPress 2.3 has finally shown its face to the world and with that lots of exciting new features including tagging, automatic notifications for plugins and much more. Matt has proudly announce the release today so head there and check out the latest changes. Here is a brief on the new release. Native tagging system. Update notifications for plugins. Canonical URLs Multi author support for guest authors Advanced WYSIWYG editor features for TincyMCE Technorati tags: WordPress, Blogging, Bloggers, WordPress 2.3 Copyright © 2007 Techie Buzz From:Techie Buzz ...

Dale Earnhardt Junior’s New Car 2007-09-24 20:31:03 I know I’m late about this, but I was away for most of the week. It is no surprise who Dale Jr’s new sponsors are for next year. Mountain Dew Amp and National Guard will do well with Dale Jr as their official NASCAR pitchman. Even Dale Jr’s new number really is no surprise. Number 88 seems fitting enough for him, although I still see it as Dale Jarrett’s number - but whatever, I can live with it. What I have a problem with in all of this is the paint schemes for the two cars. They suck! Really, they do. All these months to prepare and they come out with these?! Ugly! I understand the whole retro look about them, but they are still ugly. If they wanted retro then they should have gone with DW’s Mtn Dew paint scheme from the 80’s - that would have been a lot nicer, that’s for sure! What really gets me is that by the time you have read this they probably have sold out of the two diecast versions of next year’s car at any and all diecast sto ...

HTTP Client Error Codes in Cartoon Form 2007-09-24 19:32:50 Via a post by Stefan Tilkov, a Flickr set of cartoon representations of the HTTP 4xx status codes by Adam Koford, now available in poster form via Jesse Friedman. The poster is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. From:eFoundations ... Error

don’t worry, we’re a bunch of hypocrites [Flickr] 2007-09-24 12:48:09 markhoekstra posted a photo: Geez, I thought, let me read the terms&conditions for this ‘zorgeloos’ mobiel internet (which means something like ‘don’t worry mobile internet dataplan’), which I got on my mobile phone (at EUR 9,50/month), since I started using it connected to my powerbook. It states that you’re not allowed to connect a PC or laptop to your mobile and/or use it with VOIP, SMSoIP and/or for internet usage abroad (but at EUR 0,59 per *20 KB* I wasn’t planning on that…) Well, I will still keep this as my mobile on-the-road setup, as long as I’m not violating the fair-use policy (of 50MB/month) I don’t see what the problem could be… I will use this, don’t worry! ^_^ From:geek technique ...