2008 Feb 3, 11:04On the Internet perfect copies may be made forever so what's left to pay for? Kevin Kelly describes eight such things.
internet article blog ip technology copyright economics information kevin-kelly 2008 Jan 31, 11:29A lovely infographic style map of underwater cabling. Actually its a poster. And it costs $250. Argh!
via:newscientist graph visualization map network technology underwater cable internet purchase product 2008 Jan 30, 2:01Lots of links to tools to help visualize RDF graphs. Referenced tools aren't necessarily restricted to visualizing RDF graphs -- at least some visualize plain old graphs like GraphViz (Yay for
GraphViz!).
via:ethan_t_hein rdf graph visualization tools 2008 Jan 24, 8:55A software kit for phishers that, unknown to the phisher, messages any stolen info back to the originators of the kit.
fraud article phishing 2008 Jan 24, 9:45Interesting thoughts on using accelerometer info.
via:swannman electronics accelerometer wii wiimote research:wii-remote 2008 Jan 22, 9:56
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
stolen-thoughts windows search mce windows traffic closed captions four-way-stop windows-media-center 2008 Jan 21, 2:13FTA: "This article describes the command-line switches for REGEDIT.EXE."
microsoft reference regedit registry editor windows command 2008 Jan 12, 3:12Info on traffic signals.
traffic signal car 2008 Jan 2, 4:41Cory Doctorow the always entertaining and informative speaker talks on new business models, DRM, etc. FTA: "Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology
person. He speaks about "Digital Rights Management" at LIFT0
video cory-doctorow drm music piracy 2008 Jan 2, 2:13FTA: "Seems that a number of villages in the English countryside are being overrun by errant trans-European trucks which are regularly misdirected by their GPS satnav systems onto roads that were
better suited for horse-drawn carriages than big, long-dist
gps humor article metadata blog england 2007 Dec 7, 9:52General info on US copyright
business copyright howto legal rights ip via:felix42 2007 Nov 28, 4:43How to use FOAF and OpenID together and how DIG used that as a basis for commenting on their blog.
foaf openid authentication identity rdf semanticweb trust web spam 2007 Nov 15, 4:04Coming soon: case law freely available in the public domain.
copyright government information internet law legal 2007 Nov 7, 9:41Algorithm to tell you which blogs to read to be the most up to date. Graphs which blogs aggregate from other blogs.
information graph network news blog 2007 Oct 29, 7:07Two brief updates to previous posts:
- I noted that I had a new entry on the IE blog. Some comments on the IE blog have recently been rude in their request for information
on future versions of IE. For example see the first two comments responding to my post. Feeling bad about that
I looked at my posts entry on delicious and saw the following:
"This is the first blog from the IE team that I have found rigorous and informative. I skipped to the bottom to find it was written by one of the TA's from my first class at Cal
Poly."
That made me feel a bit better and I was able to catch up with someone from college. Thanks Kris!
- I previously had my GPS set with an Australian accent. When it encountered 'WA', as in the abbreviation for Washington in freeway
exits, it pronounced it 'Western Australia'. Now I've got it with a British accent and WA is just 'W.A.' but when I tell it to drive to 'MS', the name of my saved location for work, it pronounces
it 'Manuscript'.
microsoft blog gps personal nontechnical 2007 Oct 21, 5:52From USGS is Earthquake info in RSS form.
data gis earthquake rss science usgs government 2007 Oct 18, 4:54Traffic info for portable devices with small screens.
traffic washington seattle travel 2007 Oct 15, 1:33Info on a plugin for FireFox that gives GMail S/MIME support. This is a similar idea to the last but these folks have executed the idea in a different fashion.
article browser blog cryptography crypto mail mime mozilla pgp privacy security extension firefox gmail google 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Some rights reserved