Archive of April 2008
Twine Update
I bookmarked a book on Amazon and it knew it was a book and scraped all the metadata (author, title, publisher, etc). Pretty snazzy. I still can’t find a del.icio.us or RSS importer, though, which is disappointing.
05:27 PM | 0 CommentsNodeBox Library
wow, these python libraries for nodebox kick ass. alex, I’m becoming a python convert.
04:07 PM | 1 CommentGoogle Mashup Editor
I just signed up for this. The idea is to provide you with a framework/API for easily creating mashups of web data, (sort of like exhibit plus easy editing, and hosting. I haven’t gotten a chance to try it out yet, but it looks pretty cool.
09:13 PM | 0 CommentsBraindump Status Update
development on braindump is currently at a standstill because I’m rewriting the object-relational mapper (follow me!) to take advantage of PHP’s awesome magic methods, which allow functions to be called on accessing object attributes and calling object methods, which leads to awesome hacks. Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much about programming elegance so I could actually implement features…
08:56 PM | 0 CommentsCakePHP Inflector
Things get messy here at the intersection of human and machine language…
03:08 PM | 0 CommentsSeed: The Seed Salon
some time I’ll have to get some popcorn, curl up, and watch all of these.
09:18 PM | 0 CommentsI saw this at a film festival when I was like 6 and just rediscovered it. The “my spoon is too big” part is just as I remembered it, but the rest is creepy…
04:07 PM | 2 CommentsNeuromancer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In this book, William Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions”.
02:15 PM | 0 Comments02:00 PM | 0 CommentsHierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.
12:27 PM | 0 Comments“So” is here a verbal teleporter; it facilitates a leap from A to B that spares the listener the complexity in between without simultaneously dishonoring it. It abbreviates all the data, logic, information, or research experience that one might need to understand what follows. “So” is a transition between the “there” of specialized knowledge and the “here” of explanation.
Jruby + Processing.org = HOWTO - Hipsters Inc.
processing in ruby through jRuby! yesss!
09:38 AM | 0 CommentsWikipedia has Autocomplete!
In the little search box! I just noticed it! Ok, I’m calming down.
08:42 PM | 0 CommentsTwine
I signed up for the public beta of Twine a while ago, and it finally started letting me use it yesterday. Twine’s an emerging semantic web service that’s getting some press lately. It’s supposed to “pull together” your stuff from all over the web (hence the name), and what’s cool about it is that while previous services for this task like del.icio.us made up innovative data structures for keeping track of things (tags in del.icio.us’s case), Twine goes a step further—you just give it stuff and it tries to find the patterns for you. It’s smart.
To test it out I bookmarked some pages related to braindump: the Google Code homepage, the Google Code issues list, the Google Code wiki, the description on this blog, etc… When I looked at what I had bookmarked, it had taken screenshots of the pages and also crawled them, extracting tags for the most frequent words on the page and displaying a tag cloud—“Apache”, “PHP”, “Triples”, and “Google”. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, “Google” was the biggest.
Twine also allows you to upload documents, videos, write text notes, et cetera; but I think it would be really powerful if it just imported your del.icio.us bookmarks, blog, etc, and found patterns and tags in that—It’s power is in its automation. It did ask me for my del.icio.us username and my website, but it hasn’t imported anything yet…
I’ll keep writing about Twine as I get more used to it. In the mean time, check out this article from wired.
07:54 AM | 0 CommentsPDO
PDO is a PHP extension defines a generalized framework for manipulating relational databases that is then implemented by drivers for specific database systems. Meaning you can write database-system-agnostic apps. I think I’ll implement this.
10:50 AM | 0 CommentsBraindump 0.2
Now it solidly works, and you can double click page descriptions to edit them right in the page, which is nice. I dropped revisioning—the extra complexity was weighing me down. Anyway, now I have a solid base to build on. So check out the working demo and stay tuned.
07:20 PM | 6 CommentsFacebook Lexicon
Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls.
04:56 AM | 0 Comments