2008 Feb 18, 6:02FTA: "PicoCool is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people."
blog design culture art emily-chang monthly 2008 Feb 18, 1:34
I got a FlickrMail from Emma J. Williams a bit ago saying that they wanted to
use two of my photos in their Schmap San Francisco Guide online travel guide. So now you can see two of my vacation photos on the Westfield San Francisco Shopping Center Schmap page and the Hotel Diva Schmap page.
I think its wonderful that digital cameras are at
the point where I really don't have to know much about their workings to produce a photo that's reasonable looking. And its thanks to Flickr and searchable tags that Schmap could find my photos.
Since my photos on Flickr are all licensed under a Creative Commons license named Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
2.0 Generic which only applies to non-commercial uses, Schmap, which is advertisement supported, kindly asked me if they could use my photos. I agreed to their license which was human readable
and included wonderful stuff like I get in place attribution and the license is only applicable while Schmap makes their guide freely available online.
Previously I've only heard of folks having their flickr photos used without their permission so I'm glad to know that's not always the case. Or
perhaps this is just Schmap's clever method of getting me to blog about them.
me photos creative-commons shcmap flickr 2008 Feb 11, 7:49Thanks Itrasbiel! FTA: "The site must be marked. Aside from the legal requirement, the site will be indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal. We must complete the
process by explaining what has been done and why. "
via:Itrasbiel future science time art nuclear government nuclear-waste 2008 Feb 9, 12:57The Calais API documentation. Looks like its geared towards discovering companies, people associated with companies, mergers between companies, etc etc
api reference calais reuters web semantic 2008 Feb 8, 3:26Google's Social Graph API's normalization method. This is no way to treat a URI...
uri google api normalize social social-graph graph reference 2008 Feb 6, 11:15A flash animated advertisement that starts as a regular website but turns into a kind of Rube Goldberg. I especially appreciate the automated scrolling.
advertising animation art flash browser 2008 Feb 2, 5:49A story of a program to bury nuclear waste that remains dangerous for 24k years and the associated challenges.
future science time art nuclear government nuclear-waste 2008 Jan 25, 1:49Article on consumer electronics waste, recycling, and associated companies.
via:ethan_t_hein article electronics recycle nytimes cellphone phone 2008 Jan 21, 12:25The line 'pick it up' finally making some sense. FTA: "...We recently saw an episode featuring this terrific ska cartoon about picking up after yourself.... the catchy tune is performed by ska
musicians GOGO13 and Hepcat's Alex Desert."
humor video ska music yo-gabba-gabba pick-it-up 2008 Jan 16, 3:55FTA: "A bunch of men launched a whopping half million balls down the stairs of Holy Trinit on Pincio Hill in Rome."
art video culture cultural-disobediance humor via:boingboing 2008 Jan 12, 2:26If you're like me you need to serialize an object that contains an
HIMAGELIST via IMarshal for COM's marshalling. I could
use
ImageList_Write to actually write the HIMAGELIST to a stream for IMarshal::MarshalInterface, but I needed to know the
size of the data that I was going to write for IMarshal::GetMarshalSizeMax. I thought I'd use
HIMAGELIST_QueryInterface to
get an IPersistStream pointer which works, but alas its implementation of IPersistStream::GetMaxSize just returns E_NOTIMPL. Ultimately I called ImageList_Write on a special stream that ignores the
data passed to it and just records how much data is written to it. In this fashion I could get the size the HIMAGELIST would require when written to a stream.
technical himagelist boring serialize imarshal com 2008 Jan 3, 12:29This is me on Swivel a site like Many Eyes that does social data table and data table visualization sharing.
proldfile me data database visualization social 2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general
changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Dec 19, 11:06Article about striking similarities between COLOURlovers and Adobe's Kuler.
article blog color design web social kuler colourlovers 2007 Dec 19, 10:37Social website for sharing color schemes... Useful?
via:swannman design color webdesign web generator gallery social 2007 Dec 7, 9:45FTA: "OpenAerialMap is a site for collecting, hosting, and mapping freely available aerial imagery. "
aerial geo map opensource photography social data via:felix42 2007 Nov 19, 4:15Replace the zunetag parameter in the URI with the desired Zune username to find the user's Zune social data such as Favorites, Recent Tracks, etc.
zune microsoft xml 2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that
the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a
Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates
the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the
User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.
microsoft technical music zune social 2007 Nov 15, 4:12Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing gives a talk to the Library of Congress folks about his website LibraryThing. Focus on tagging vs taxonomy. Some humorous things in the talk as well.
library-of-congress library librarything books tagging video ontology tim-spalding taxonomy
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