CogBlogged from ‘December, 2004’

How refreshing it is to catch some comment feedback that is not spam. Package #1463 Areal Weighting with Thiessen Polygons was created by Water Resources technology faculty member Lisa Young: a brief tutorial that demonstrates the procedures for determining areal weighting from point precipitation gages using the Thiessen Polygon Method. While I have no clue what this is, apparently a colleague in Indonesia found it useful, and left this comment: I am a lecturer of principles of Meteorology at DIploma Program RS&GIS, Geography Faculty, GMU, Indonesia. Your flash file of Poly.Thies. has shown clearly about the method. I have used it in class. It iwll be good if the layout is made better and clear/more interesting. Thank you before That pretty much balances out cleaning 1000 spams of phentermine flaff.

I feel pretty much late to the dance with podcasting. It is a technology phenomnma that seems like it happened more or less while I was out of the country 3 weeks in November. My colleagues D’Arcy and Brian are all over it, and I have give high credence to things my trusted colleagues get excited about. But I’m not quite ready to join in yet– maybe it’s because I do not have an iPod ;-) Before I gripe, let me say what I like about the podcasting and its buzz: * It’s a wild spreading net meme- it is grass roots. It did not originate from Microsoft or some MIT lab, it happened in the user space of the web. * It rolls together small pieces of existing and available technology, is enabled by ever evolving open source software, distributes with RSS. * It offers ordinary folks a creative [...]

Imitation and flattery aside, just curious if anyone thinks RSS-to-Javascript bears any resemblance at all to our Feed2JS? I do not really care all that much since Feed2JS code is open source but some credit would be nice, egos can always use some stroking now and then… Ours was pretty much inspired by David Carter-Tod’s Wytheville Community College News Service first appearing as a concept in May 2003, with the first version of RSS2JS (using the now dormant OnyxPHP RSS Parser) to the current Feed2JS (using MagpieRSS).

On this post, I have almost little to say as Jon Udell’s “The Network is the Blog” is so on spot and astute, and, well poetic. He hits some things which sound obvious in reading but easily to forget- the electricity of the blog-o-verse has everything to do with the human network it travels upon. The dictionary definition of “blog” is correct, but it says nothing about the network in which the blog participates. By way of analogy, consider a dictionary definition of a telephone: “an instrument that converts voice and other sound signals into a form that can be transmitted to remote locations and that receives and reconverts waves into sound signals.” That’s fine if you already know what a telephone network is, but the definition doesn’t work on its own. Just as telephones are meaningful only when connected to the telephone network, so blogs are meaningful only when [...]

We’ve just put online our Fall 2004 issue of our office’s publication, the mcli Forum, and am finally glad I can share with you the featured technology interview I did with Brian Lamb, perhaps not so cleverly titled as “Where the Wiki Things Are”. How do you help people make the “Aha” step from that first look of puzzlement when you describe a web site that anyone can edit or destroy? I think when they begin to understand that the users are in control; that though they may sacrifice some functions such as security and organization, they gain a great deal of speed and autonomy. It really requires doing to become a believer. I do have one gimmick, where I invite people in the audience to erase or deface all of my materials. Then I restore my stuff with a few clicks of the mouse. That really is the key [...]

We at CDB support the advancement of other dog blogs, esepcially as the number of Google-able cat blogs (6,040,000) appear to be ahead of the dog blogs (5,710,000). Therefore we share with your “Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales”. The Dog New folks have gone ahead and applied Creative Commons licensing to their content, so they are some savvy pooches. I like the disclaimer: Dogs don’t lie: Reliance on the information this site contains is at your own risk. COPYRIGHTS ©2004 Dog News – Other contributors retain their own copyright. Material on this Dog News site may not be published or broadcast without express permission, except as authorized by the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License: in a nutshell, For Profit companies or websites do NOT have any authorization or permission to republish any of this site or its newsfeed. All rights reserved. Dog News is not affiliated with linked stories [...]

I’ve been collecting worthy and interesting web sites for almost as long as I can remember, heaping them up in piles on the floor. Actually, we have a site called the Bag of URLs where I post and share them– this started back in 1996 primarily as a selfish tool for my own use to have web sites I found to be searchable and annotated– something almost 9 years later that web browser bookmarks lack. The most current bag is always freshly available. (Bonus points to anyone that identify the 1990s CD clip art collection that the graphic came from – I still see clips in print and web sites from this classic set of the piggy bank, the mail box, etc.) The site uses a rather archaic unix search program that indexes a monstrous text file each night and then is called to do word searches on demand. More [...]

There’s a heated web browser debate going on over at “Redemption in a Blog” as techies try to sort our what web browser Homer Simpson uses, see “Homer Simpson Uses Tabbed Browsing”. Top theories bounce between FireFox and Safari, with no clear winner. I would bet Homer wants his pop-up ads not to be blocked (“mmmmm… pretty pictures”) Mo has no comment. And they say the Internet is a waste of time? Hah!

Well it has been 3 days since I yelled out “Hey Phentermine Pusher: You Left Your Roach Prints in Our Spam Honey Pot” seeking this person to reach out by email, say hello, and claim their prowess. I even offered 100 clams to them just for taking credit. No response. I would think someone capable of generating anonymous, trail-less spam could manage to hook up a Hotmail account and take credit for their handiwork. I am compelled to come clean in that I was bluffing a bit about getting help from a so-called “International Spam Counter Attack Force (SCAF)”– that was a total fabrication, but if someone wants to create on, I am in full support. So Mr Phentermine Pusher, I really have no influence, I cannot hack your bank accounts or have your phone service cancelled, and am not even smart enough to figure out how that is done. [...]

Every day’s glance at the not so old RSS reader brings new gems. Today the far seeing Stephen Downes shared a link to Connotea, very much a nice knock off of del.icio.us for bookmarking sites as well as papers. Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user’s bookmarks are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users’ libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks. [...]