API page 8 - Dave's Blog

Marienplatz and the Deutsches Museum

2008 Dec 19, 12:18

On Monday in Germany we went to Marienplatz and wandered around the Christmas Market, some of the stores, had drinks in a little pub, visited the Toy Museum, and checked out an impressive looking church. We accidentally drew in some other tourists as we stood gaping at the Glockenspiel tower waiting for the little show to begin at the wrong hour. That night Megan and Oliver came by our hotel and took us out to a traditional Bavarian restaurant and brewery that had been brewing beer there for hundreds of years. It was fun although we may have kept Megan and Oliver out too late on a weeknight.

The next day we went to the Deutsches Museum the largest science and technology museum in the world. And indeed it is very large, six floors on a large grounds. I needed to better pace myself: I spent too much energy being interested in the engineering sections with steam engines, mining, aerospace etc. I was completely worn out by the time we got to physics, chemistry, etc. etc. and we didn't even look in the natural sciences section. Anyway, its very large. That night we ate with Jon at an Italian restaurant. During the meal two period dressed children came in and began singing then tried to shake down their captive audience in the restaurant asking for money. The man at the table next to us asked one of the children what charity the money was going towards, the child said they kept the money, and the man said never mind then and sent the child away.

germany personal vacation nontechnical

G1 Android Phone

2008 Nov 9, 11:29

I finally replaced my old regular cell-phone which was literally being held together by a rubber band with a fancy new G1, my first Internet accessible phone.

I had to call the T-Mobile support line to get data added to my plan and the person helping me was disconcertingly friendly. She asked about my weekend plans and so I felt compelled to ask her the same. Her plans involved replacing her video card so she could get back to World of Warcraft and do I enjoy computer gaming? I couldn't tell if she was genuine or if she was signing me up for magazines.

I was with Sarah in her new car, trying out the phone's GPS functionality via Google Maps while she drove. I switched to Street View and happened to find my car. It was a weird feeling, kind of like those Google conspiracy videos.

The phone runs Google's open source OS and I really enjoy the application API. Its all in Java and URIs and mime-types are sort of basics. Rather than invoking the builtin item picker control directly you invoke an 'intent' specifying the URI of your list of items, a mime-type describing the type of items in the list, and an action 'PICK' and whatever is registered as the picker on the system pops up and lets the user pick from that list. The same goes if you want to 'EDIT' an image, or 'VIEW' an mp3.

I wanted to replace the Google search box gadget that appears on the home screen with my own search box widget that uses OpenSearch descriptors but apparently in the current API you can't make home screen gadgets without changing parts of the OS. My other desired application is something to replace this GPS photo tracker device by recording my location to a file and an additional program on my computer to apply those locations to photos.

tmobile personal api phone technical g1 android google

Tag Metadata in Feeds

2008 Aug 25, 10:13

As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.

Tag markup from various sources

Source	Feed Type	Tag Markup Scheme	One Tag Per Element	Tag Scheme URI	Human / Machine Names	Example Markup
LiveJournal	Atom	atom:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
LiveJournal	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	technical (soure)
WordPress	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
Delicious	RSS 1.0	dc:subject	no	no	no	photosynth photos 3d tool (source)
Delicious	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	yes	no	domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/"> hulu (source)
Flickr	Atom	atom:category	yes	yes	no	term="seattle" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" /> (source)
Flickr	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	yes	no	scheme="urn:flickr:tags"> seattle washington baseball mariners (source)
YouTube	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	no	no	label="Tags"> bunny rabbit yawn cadbury (source)
LibraryThing	RSS 2.0	No explicit tag metadata.	no	no	no	n/a, (source)

Tag markup scheme

Tag Markup Scheme	Notes	Example
Atom Category atom:category xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"	category/@term Required category name. category/@scheme Optional IRI id'ing the categorization scheme. category/@label Optional human readable category name.	term="catName" scheme="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme" label="category name in human readable format"/>
RSS 2.0 category rss2:category empty namespace	category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme. category/text() Required category name. The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions for the interpretation of categories.	domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme"> MSFT
Yahoo Media RSS Module category media:category xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"	category/text() Required category name. category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.	scheme="http://dmoz.org" label="Ace Ventura - Pet Detective"> Arts/Movies/Titles/A/Ace_Ventura_Series/Ace_Ventura_-_Pet_Detective
Dublin Core subject dc:subject xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"	subject/text() Required category name. Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.	humor

Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.

feed media delicious technical atom youtube yahoo rss tag

Leaking Information Through Delicious

2008 May 18, 6:45

While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes

I've graphed my posts per week and with red lines I've marked IE7 and IE8 releases as stated by Wikipedia. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern so I suppose my concerns we're unfounded. I use it for both work and non-work purposes and my use of Delicious isn't that consistent so I don't think it would be easy to find a pattern like I was thinking about. Perhaps if many people from my project used Delicious and that data could be compared together it might be easier. For fun I looked at my posts per day of week which starts off strong on Mondays and decreases as the week goes on, and my posts per hour of day. It looks like I mostly post around lunch and on the extremes I've only posted very late at night twice at 4am: converting media for the Zune, and Penn's archive of articles. In the morning at 7am I've posted only once: document introducing SGML.manyeyes graph cryptonomicon delicious