Bloglines, the website via which I do my blog reading, has recently introduced some web services interfaces.
Nice, simple, RESTful interfaces. Well done Bloglines!
I have one enhancement request so far: let me PUT my blogroll OPML as well as GET it. Or (even better) let me give you the URI of my blogroll OPML and you can poll it (regularly and/or on demand).
by : Created on Sept. 29, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Most of the blogs I read and the bloggers I know are based in the US so it's refreshing to discover blogs and blog-related events based a little closer to home.
I recently found out about the Australian Blogging Conference that SplaTT is trying to organize. Count me in!
I also found out about blognite in my home town of Perth as well as the Perth Blogs Wiki.
by : Created on Sept. 28, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
This evening I finally had a spare moment to do some more editing. Before I knew it, five hours had passed. So I'm now half-way through the second edit of the film. I tightened things up a bit; got rid of a couple of shots and shortened some others that I felt dragged the pace. I also fleshed out a couple of scenes that previously only used the master shot; put in some opening titles just to test out the feel and did some minor colour correction between some adjacent shots that had a jarring difference in the blue cast.
I head back home to Australia on Friday—my goal is to get the second edit done before I go so I can show Tom and James. It's going to be tight, especially with everything else I need to get done before I go.
by : Created on Sept. 27, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I've just registered for SxSW 2005. Any readers of this blog who are planning on attending, let me know.
by : Created on Sept. 27, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Previously on this blog, I've called for a separation of hosting from aggregation. I want to be able to maintain authoritative data on one site and have other sites use it for their aggregation.
When I read Ted Leung's entry Microcontent personality disorder and Steve Mallett's comments on it, my immediate thought was that they could both have what they want if we could separate where we host our data with where it is aggregated and made "social".
Marc Canter (whose work around Digital Lifestyle Aggregators is definitely worth following) responds to Steve Mallett. Marc is spot on that people have their information all over the place. But I still believe that if systems are built to support a separation between hosting and aggregation, they'll support both the distribution of primary data and the kind of "self-hosting" that a certain segment like Steve and myself want.
Bottom line is all combinations of centralized/decentralized hosting/aggregation should be possible.
It's not that hard to do. Sites that aggregate just need to provide a mechanism where users can point to their data hosted somewhere else rather than have to re-enter their data in multiple aggregators. Aggregators then keep customers based on the value of their aggregation, not the lock-in of being the hosts of people's valuable data. People who want hosting for their pictures, blogs, etc can use hosting services to do it. But their choice of hosting service should not impact their participating in aggregation and the social aspects of micro-content that follow.
UPDATE (2004-09-27): see also Jon Udell's post Next-generation infoware
by : Created on Sept. 25, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I'm not sure that I've articulated here before the strong relationship that I believe exists between personal information managers (PIMs) and digital lifestyle aggregators (DLAs). To some extent, it's pretty obvious but I think some interesting things emerge from thinking about it.
Here are some random thoughts:
Numerous object types that were once the domain of PIMs are now being shared and aggregated: address books, calendars, etc. Things like music and photos should be included there too—although we don't tend to call the tools for managing them PIMs, they are.
The address book in my PIM should be seamlessly integrated with my published FOAF which should be seamlessly integrated with sites like LinkedIn. The address book should actually be the hub of a lot of stuff. Why not manage who can see my Flickr photos via my address book?
The merging of PIMs and DLAs means that we are increasingly creating our own personal intranets and extranets.
Communication is moving outside of email—discussions are taking place via blogs, photos are being exchanged via Flickr rather than email attachments, documents are being collaborated on via wikis. Atom/RSS feeds already change what I need email for—that should be taken to a whole other level.
One component of PIMs I'd like to integrate more with my website as well as aggregator sites I use is the whole project/task/todo aspect. I should be able to tie email, blog entries, photos, documents together into projects. "Tags" should span sites. Topics should have URIs.
I should be able to expose the status of certain projects/tasks to interested parties via a website (with a feed of course). Certain people: my boss, the team lead of an open source project I'm working on, a user of software I've written - should be able to submit requests via my website and have them integrated with my PIM.
UPDATE (2004-09-25): On that last point: they should also being able to just blog their request and ping me via a trackback. No reason why I have to own their request.
by : Created on Sept. 25, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Most pure mathematics takes as a starting point a set of objects. If things stopped there, we would be dealing just with set theory; but we branch into other areas of pure mathematics by adding structure to the set.
Defining such a structure may involve calling out particular elements of the set or particular subsets whose element have some particular relationship to one another; or it may involve some mapping from one element in the set to other or an operation that takes two elements of the set and produces a third.
Calling out particular subsets is the basis for the branch known as topology. If the choice of subsets meets certain criteria (which we'll get to shortly), the set (along with the called-out subsets) is called a topological space.
Defining an operation that takes two elements of the set and produces a third that is also in the set (think of adding two numbers or concatenating two strings) is the basis for the branch known as group theory. If the operation meets certain criteria (which we'll also get to shortly), the set and the operation is called a group.
Some structures involve reference to one or more additional sets (such as the set of real numbers). For example, one might define an operation that takes two elements of a set and gives a number that can be thought of as the "distance" between the two elements. As long as that operation follows certain rules (such as the distance between two distinct elements always being positive and the distance between an element and itself always being 0) then the operation is called a metric and the set and the operation is called a metric space.
In the next few entries in this project, we'll take a look at the criteria necessary for a set + operation to be a group and for a set + collection of subsets to be a topological space.
UPDATE: next post
by : Created on Sept. 21, 2004 : Last modified Aug. 10, 2007 : (permalink)
I recently added 43 Folders to my blogroll and it's rapidly becoming one of my favourites.
It's a blog about "life hacks" from an OS-X-using fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done.
As longer-time readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of the GTD approach to personal productivity too. I also recently bought a PowerBook (although I haven't ruled out getting a Tablet PC — take note Scoble!)
by : Created on Sept. 19, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Before we are at a point where we can discuss the Poincare Conjecture itself, we need to learn some general topology and group theory. But before we lay that foundation, I think it is worth taking a moment to establish the mode of thinking we must enter.
Marcus Aurelius exhorts us to ask "what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole?" Now Aurelius is talking about human nature (and see Hannibal Lecter's use of the quotation in Silence of the Lambs) but it encapsulates the fundamental questions asked by pure mathematicians, not of humans, but of abstract objects such as numbers and shapes.
Imagine you're looking at an apple and you notice certain characteristics it posseses. Which of those characteristics are specific to that particular apple? Which are specific to all apples of that particular variety? Of apples in general? Or of all fruit? Of food? Organic objects? Physical objects?
In mathematics in general, and in the early days of this Poincare Project in particular, we will often be asking questions like: what is the most general object that exhibits this characteristic? What is the distinguishing characteristic of this object compared with others we're dealing with?
Get your mind in a mode to ask those kind of questions and we'll be ready to introduce topology.
UPDATE: next post
by : Created on Sept. 19, 2004 : Last modified Aug. 10, 2007 : (permalink)
I'm well aware that readers of this blog can't all be interested in all of filmmaking, blogging technology, XML, pure mathematics, Eclipse, music, productivity software, RDF, Python and software development.
I've been planning on categories in Leonardo for a while and I'm pleased to say they'll come shortly after the current Leonardo rewrite.
I'm still thinking about the best way to approach them. My current thoughts are to merge the notion of a category being a feed that you post to with the notion of a category being a resource that you annotate. In other words, categorization equals feed-posting equals trackback.
by : Created on Sept. 19, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I'm about halfway through a complete rewrite of Leonardo (which I'll soon release as 0.4.0). I mostly wanted to rework the backend to support annotations to entries such as comments and trackbacks (see Blogs, Annotations, Comments and Trackbacks for why I think they are the same thing). I also wanted to allow for alternative backends such as Subversion.
While I was at it, I thought I may as well improve the frontend dispatching to make things more modular.
To avoid "second system syndrome", I'm treating this entirely as a refactoring and not adding any new features until I'm done.
by : Created on Sept. 18, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
A friend recently asked me my 10 favourite pieces of music. The first eight to pop into my head (grouped by period and composer) were:
If I thought about it more, they might not really all be in my top 10 but they'd all be close. In a larger list I'd include some Ligeti, Stravinsky, Copland and Glass.
by : Created on Sept. 17, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I'm going to try something over the next few months (years?) that I hope will be of interest to at least some readers of this blog.
I've taken an interest recently in the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most famous outstanding problems in pure mathematics.
Although I understand the conjecture itself, recent developments in proving it involve some areas of mathematics that are well beyond my current level of understanding.
I plan to change that. I want to brush up on my algebraic topology, work my way up to Thurston's work on classifying 3-manifolds and Hamilton's work on Ricci Flow and eventually end up at a point where I can read, understand and maybe even enjoy Perelman's recent papers which may very well turn out to finally prove Poincare's Conjecture.
My intention is to blog what I learn as I go. It's an opportunity for me to better formulate my own understanding, improve the mathematical capabilities of Leonardo and maybe even help someone else learn a thing or two.
It's a change from my series of film project updates, but hopefully a fruitful one.
UPDATE: next post
by : Created on Sept. 17, 2004 : Last modified Aug. 10, 2007 : (permalink)
"The harder a bug is to track down, the simpler the fix tends to be."
UPDATE (2004-09-18): A couple of people have asked me if this is an original quote. Yes it is. I've never heard it stated before but I have personally observed it many many times.
by : Created on Sept. 16, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
The local paper, the Burlington Union featured us on the front page with a couple of great photos and a nice article all about the film.
If I get permission to distribute the article, it'll be on http://www.alibiphonenetwork.com/ although I'll mention it here.
UPDATE (2004-09-11): The article is now online.
by : Created on Sept. 10, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
This afternoon I transferred our almost four hours of rough footage to disk and this evening I did a rough cut that came in at just over 13 minutes. No major issues—just one scene with boom handling noise in every take and another scene in which the lone take features a clearly visible boom operator in the corner.
But other than that, the final film works well for me. Will be interesting to watch it tomorrow after I'm a little more detached.
Oh, and the film now has a website: http://alibiphonenetwork.com/
Don't look for the film itself online any time soon, though. Most festivals have a rule that makes films made available on the Internet ineligible for entry.
Update (2004/09/05): I actually think there are some continuity problems caused by "crossing the line" in a couple of scenes. Will be interesting to see if I can rescue them in editing to avoid having to reshoot.
by : Created on Sept. 4, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I hooked up a filter to CVS to run the check-in mail through the Jive filter for one particular user.
Definitely recommended!
by : Created on Sept. 3, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I need to extend my stay in the US for a couple more weeks so I called Qantas from work today.
"What's the fare basis printed on your ticket, sir?" "Umm, I don't have my ticket with me at the moment, can you look it up?" "No, it's only on the ticket, sir".
Why is an important piece of information like the fare basis for the ticket only on the printed ticket and not in some Qantas computer?
I recall this isn't the first time that Qantas telepone sales have had no idea what the conditions of my ticket were.
Which reminds me: a couple of years ago I was travelling domestically in the US and they wouldn't let me on the plane because no ticket had been issued for me. "But here's my reservation confirmation", I said and pointed out that I even had a seat allocation. "Yes, you have a reservation on this flight, sir, but not a ticket". Silly me! What was I thinking?
UPDATE (2004-09-03): I now have to physically send my ticket to Arizona so Qantas can physically send me back a new one.
by : Created on Sept. 2, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)