CogBlogged from ‘March, 2005’

An email from Steve Cohen resulted in adding the 12th site, de.lirio.us to the Site Submission MultiTool– now you can pick and chose from a dozen different we site bookmarking sites, and build a single browser link bar tool to send sites to any or all of the 12 you like to use. Make your own today… How many more will there be?

The folksonomy – contralled vocabulary debates surge and sputter… Recently David Weinberger went “back and forth” on this: This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you’ll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as “pcforum05,” not “pcf”, “pcf05″ or “Esther’s thang.” Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies. A common assumption in this discussions is that the aim of tagging is the action of many to try and organize the un-organizable (web content). I see many more variations, and the success of flickr points to the important of tags but perhaps smaller groups of people aiming to tag a more discrete set of content. So what if my choice of [...]

I’m mulling over what many other quicker, maybe wiser, colleagues have done, and migrate my blog software from MovableType 2.661 to WordPress 1.5. It’s not critical, not urgent, but I feel it nagging at me. Last week I dumped a chunk of time trying to get all the perl pieces in place to use the captcha plugin for MT (actually mainly for other blogs on my server). Trying to get the perl pieces in place for this plugin was a headache and a half. Tried to cpan the need GD.pm modules. First I was missing some sort of Test.pm modules…. oops, that was a missing piece of CPAN.pm that needed to be downloaded. GD needs the gdlib 2.0.8 or higher… and that was something I failed at via cpan and manually install. I did manage to install gdlib using fink via FinkCommander on this Xserve, but the hard part with [...]

More irrelevant updates on the home landscaping projects… when we bought our house in 1997, landscaping was a process of adding plants (as there was almost nothing growing here except for a few trees)… 8 years later we are in the process of taking out as much of the desert plants we put in… have gotten out of control. Single prickly pear pads stuck in the ground spread in a complex more than 4 feet wide and 3 feet high… other cactus of unknown identification spreads itself laterally where ever its sections fall and hit the ground. Small cute flowering cassia mushroom to debris shedding monsters. Anyhow, Saturday was clearing out a bunch of this as well as cutting down 3 palm trees 4-12 feet high, pulling out overgrown shrubs, a sort of landscape feng shui. Cutting the palm trees is interesting- a new chain on the chain saw slices [...]

More fun with dynamic graphics, of no certain putpose. Spell With Flickr rummages through the vast supply of flickr photos of letters so you can create a dynamic generate spelled out version of any word, e.g here might be my new logo: If you do not like the looks of any letter, just click on it and you get a substitute. And guess what Stephen, this one will work on your Flash-less computer! A generous tip of the blog hat to Tim Lauer, who is always finding cool stuff I follow. Update! As noted in the comment below from Eric the site creator, you can now use his script to generate a logo dynamically in a page via JavaScript: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://metaatem.net/spell.php?picsize=s&string=CogDogBlog"> </script>

Last weekend I discovered the web server that hosts our Ocotillo Blogs+Wikis+boards had been compromised and some nefarious person had been able to change the root password for the server. As I was 90 miles from the machine, I had no way to seize back my root account, no way to shut it down remotely. The only recourse was to contact our security office, admit that I had missed some critical updates, and have them take the server port off the net. So it has been shut down for 5+ days. I am not much of a server admin, and being short staffed (my office is a tech staff of 1.. me, and I lost the part-time programmer who had done our server admin tasks) I’ve been under the thumb of our IT department. On my return to the office Tuesday, after restarting the server and taking back my root [...]

This is just plain cool, perhaps not essentially useful but plainly cool. Amaztype Amaztype is using Amazon web services. Created by Keita Kitamura & Yugo Nakamura for Tha Ltd. Well that does not exactly explain it. You type in a keyword search for Amazon (US, Japan, UK, Canada) for books or music by either title or author. So what’s the big deal? Well the results pop up as the graphics icons of the book/album cover. So what? Well as the icons appear, the are laid out to form the letters of your search. For example, I did a US book title search for “Dog” and get this result: That’s cute, right? But then click on any cover, and you get a zoom in and some meta-data: And the “more info” leads you to one of the more classic works of fiction ;-) Well, it is just plain neat…

My self-imposed sentence of hard labor is not over. The next phase of our backyard landscaping project involved a delivery of 20 tons of 3/8 inch minus coral granite on our driveway. This is everything that passes through the finest sieve at the rock quarry (folks in the know just call it “minus”), so it is pretty much sand. Landscaping in arid Arizona should not involve grass (though many people try to replicate Midwest/ East Coast greens here). In the 7 years we have owned our house, we have had two deliveries of crushed granite and one of rounded “river rock” gravel that has been moved by wheel barrow front and back. Where has it gone? This latest effort is meant to provide a more level look to the back– because of poor drainage we could not extend much of our cement deck, so we needed a more porous surface. [...]

I ought to stop, but this is too much fun.. today I completed my 16th mini “Skyperview” with folks near and far about their use and ideas for digital audio over the net. I’ll be scraping a few more before the end of the week, but I need to get around to actually writing my article this is going to be used for. So added yesterday and today: * Steve Dembo, Director of Technology at a school in Chicago, blogs at Teach42 fame. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/steve_dembo.mp3 * Diana Oblinger, Vice President of EDUCAUSE. We were discussing a summer project over the phone, and I just recorded her with my iRiver 3p3 recorder stuck in front of the telephone speaker. Not the greatest quality, but she has such great ideas and perspective. And EDUCAUSE is going full bore into podcasting. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/diana_oblinger.mp3 * Rachel Smith, Director of Development and Programs with New Media Consortium, [...]

Yes, another nifty social bookmark service– Spurl was brought to our attention by Jamie. So it is now part of the others at the Site Submission MultiTool where it is possible to create one browser tool that does the work of 11 others called: FurlDeliciousFrassleConnoteaBagCiteULikeSimpyLinkrollBlogmarksopenBMSpurl Bookmarklet Tool Spurl looks pretty good at a quick glance– it plays well with del.icio.us in that your tasty del.ici.ous sites can be imported/synched with Spurl, and anything you “Spurl” can be tossed back at del.icio.us. Holy RipMixFeeding! I’m getting dizzy. On another front, it hasn’t been the greatest day back from vacation. Our Ocotillo web server was compromised over the weekend and is offline as we re-assemble it from scratch. I had a great Skyperview with Amy Gahran, and my G4 laptop went into a total freeze (like the first time in 5 months) locking up Skype, WireTap, the whole OS… all was trashed. [...]