CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

For those the care to feed, I have been doing more minor tweaks to Feed2JS, and inside you will find I use the very same to display the latest updates to that site, since it now has its own feed. The main thing to look for (beyond coverups for my typos) was Seb Paquet’s suggestion to populate the hypertext links attached tp the feed item titles with the title= attribute set to a part of the item’s description. This is done, see the example below, so feeds could be generated with title only displays, but mouse overs on the links will reveal the first 150 chars of the item description (if your browser does that for title attributes on href links). I do need some help as I have a request from someone who is asking that the output be able to support UTF-8 character encoding. My first attempt was [...]

Last week it was Tags on Speed. That was then, this is now… Richard S writes “More on Social tags” pointing to “taggregator” an experiment with allows you to provide one “tag” and it generates a side by side view of del.icoi.us and flickr results: Someone built a thing I wanted to but didn’t — the taggregator. It’s ace — lets you compare what del.icio.us and flickr users have recorded under the same tag. Add “?tag=[yourtag]” to the URI to see the most recent posts from both under that tag. I used the data from tenbyten to show what the taggregator thinks about the current most frequently-used word in the news: go here to be redirected. This got me thinking a bit around social tagging and horizontal classification (or “folksonomies”, if your stomach is strong enough). When someone chooses to use a particular tag to describe a resource, that decision [...]

Yup, flickr is the land of maybe more than the land of 10,000 memes, maybe it is the long tail for photographic odd-topics. Today, I got an invite to join the “spread that love” flickr group (which explains why I had to fish it out of the junk mail folder!). So here is the meme for this group: Take your favourite sandwich or toast spread on an excursion outdoors for a day or so. Show the world how much you love it, and take some interesting photos of it as you go, (compile them into a small set of say 5 to 10 images), by which I mean “on location” outside your house, we want to see whacky and weird places you can get away with photographing your favourite spread. This started with some photos of Marmite and “Reggie” the Vegemite on their excursions. Is this silly? It is in [...]

Help! I am in search of someone, some benevolent group, maybe a web design/development class project, willing to do an overhaul of a writing site that very much needs an update. Is this a lot to ask for? I just lack the time and resources to do it myself, and despite some flakiness, some 20,000 people have managed to create content on this site, and more come every day. Here’s the background. The Hero’s Journey was built in 1998 to bring to the web what was already a successful class exercise created by Mythology faculty Liz Warren, at South Mountain Community College. It is a creative writing activity based on the workThe Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In a nutshell, on our site, people create their own accounts, being a story, answer a series of questions about their character, and then build a story by responding to [...]

Who reads the fine print any more? From the Stamp Out And Abolish Redundancy Department (apologies to Mad Magazine) comes the fine print on the back on an audio CD: Like the famous multiblade razors, the first warning (1) gets your attention. FBI Anti Piracy Warning: unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law. Then, in case you managed to skip number 1, warning number 2 reinforces the peril: FBI Anti Piracy Warning: Unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law. And just in case, the FBI shield (3) tells you they mean business. Pretty effective, eh? Just one question… Can I make an authorized copy? :-)

Here is a CDB “web good dog” nod to “Home of the Underdogs” a site devoted to preserving “underrated” computer games many, but not all of the being “ambandonware” or titles no longer available: Home of the Underdogs is a non-profit site dedicated to the preservation and promotion of underrated PC games (and a few non-PC games) of all ages: good games that deserve a second chance after dismal sales or critical reviews that we feel are unwarranted. By nature, our criteria for choosing games to be honored here are subjective. Home of the Underdogs, while not an abandonware site per se (since our aim is to pay tribute to all underdogs, both new and old), supports the abandonware idea. We believe that providing games that have been abandoned by their publishers, while technically illegal, is a valuable service to the gaming community because these games are in danger of [...]

I had planned this afternoon to be a good quiet time to do a clean install on our office’s in house server. I cannot complain about the sorts of problems Brian wrote about as mine seem a bit, well self inflicted. The server in question is a G4 OS X server that is mainly for keeping copies of office project files and databases (which are fiendlishly backed up), and some quiet QuickTime Streaming and web server alternative sites for our main web. A bunch of voodoo things happened last Spring with the 10.2 — 10.3 update (I was lazy and did not do it cleanly), as I have been unable to run any update past 10.3.2, Safari barfs on its own bookmarks, new folders are created with funny permissions…. just annoying stuff but not something that was doom-like. So today, the office was empty because of a major event, perfect [...]

Lurking at the bottom of another email message today: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it is too dark to read.” —Groucho Marx Now where is my flashlight? I cannot read that that mysql manual….

I got a cryptic e-mail message recently, that barely made a ripple among the daily spam flood: How come you pop up on my computre without invitation. Get lost you MF As you can see there is not much we need to do to educate written communications skills these days… So being curious about the accusation I replied: I have no idea what you are talking about nor have I in any way broached your computer. It is more respectful to be more clear and specific before making allegations. To which comes the pseudo explanation: Let us know if you are part of Macromedia. If you are not we apologize. Our complaint is that we keep getting a pop up message from macromedia inc. asking us to download their flash player. In attempting to reach them with our complaint “and to have them cease and desist”, we linked to your [...]

Thanks to a tip from Alex I tuned into the now released version of 43 Things, which is addictive, intensive connected, and tagged inside out. I had peeked at the beta a few weeks back, but the released version is wild, social, and amazing. It is tags, tags, and tags on speed. The premise is that you build goals for yourself, 43 Things to do in your life, and it connects you to people who have the same goal, or who have accomplished it (these are things done, that the accomplished can rate as well as write a blog like entry to describe). You can add them as free form entry, by browsing other people’s goals by category and saying, “this is my goal too”, and by keyword searching. You can invite people to do the goal with you. Okay, mine are not earth shattering and was more or less [...]