we didn't get many trick-or-treaters this year. i wonder what, if anything, that means. probably nothing, since kris and i hid most of the time. neither one of us is in the mood. why's that? well, can you guess one of the side effects of giving phenobarbitol for canine epilepsy? that's right. polyurea, or - more colloquially - "excessive urination". and when you're inside all day that excessive urination has to go somewhere. with everything else going on, i don't think it has fully set in just how much harper's epilepsy is going to affect our lives, if it's not brought under control.

hmmm. google indexes more filetypes:

"Google has quietly extended the scope of its web index, for the first time including a number of file formats that are all but ignored by other search engines. These file formats make up a small but important part of the Invisible web, and Google's effort to make them searchable is a noteworthy advance in search engine technology.

The new file types indexed by Google include Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats, as well as Rich Text Format and PostScript files, according to Google spokesperson Cindy McCaffrey."

certainly a necessary as google tries to generate revenue from hosted search capabilities for "enteprise" customers.

well, harper has been having more seizures. there's no better way to completely screw with your sleep patterns than to be jolted awake by a 60 pound german short-haired pointer that is in the middle of a grand mal seizure, while sleeping on your bed. he just had another one about an hour ago. can't say that i'm getting used to seeing them.

evan links to an interesting project the blogger team did awhile ago that's now described in rich clients for web services.

i really, really appreciate the fact that people like dan bricklin take the time to write things like web services, business models, and storage:

"There is much talk and excitement about Web Services. The technologies seem to finally be in place to allow us to replace "applications" running on individuals' computers with services provided on the Internet. Evolving from simple browser/server architectures known as ASPs, we are adding a more multitiered architecture with servers talking to servers using XML and other Internet protocols.

One of the things I've been trying to do is examine this area and try to see which factors may lead to success or failure. This essay looks at one aspect: Storage."

ahhh, but if it were only that easy. nonetheless, A Business Case for Usability does contain some nice bits o' ammo:

"This is a business case for usability in an organization. It is based on academic research, industrial research, case studies, consulting experience, and common knowledge found in the usability community."

iPod? They plod.:

"The Rio Volt, a unit that can now be had for as little as 90$, is a CD based unit which shows the reasons why the Ipod is probably going to be the Newton of MP3 Players. iPod is more like iPlod, as Apple plods along behind the curve."

Simple Web Services API:

"Web Services are poised to be a central tool in distributed software construction. In order to work with Web Services from a programming language, a programmer needs some form of Application Programer Interface. Although there exist several of these APIs for scripting languages, the quality of their implementation and programmer interface varies widely. Web Services implementations in scripting languages share many common issues around dynamicity, type checking, complex types and introspection. It is difficult and yet important to address these issues without making the usage model complex.

This specification describes a model API that addresses many of these issues."

[ via aaron ]

jason comes up with a super-useful idea for the wayback machine archive:

"a Perl script that crawls through old weblog postings, finds all the broken links, and replaces those with links to the archived versions in the Wayback Machine archive (from the correct time period, of course)."

so, hypothetically speaking, just say i needed to strip html from content and wanted to replace the stripped tags with a space. why, oh why doesn't this regex work:

$content =~ s/<[^<>]*>/ /g;

it finds and removes the tags, but it doesn't insert the space. i need the space. it's probably one of those dopey, smack-your-forehead errors...

Rx Cookbook:

"This is a new collaborative website, built by ActiveState, which will host your techniques for building, finding, verifying, and doing pretty much anything else with patterns of text. We invite you to contribute regular expressions, snippets of code, comments, and ratings for recipes from the entire Perl community. This living collection will allow programmers to be more productive with one of the most difficult areas of scripting. "

[ via jy ]

A Smarter Web:

"The fact that metadata wasn't implemented right from the Web's start could also make it harder for the Semantic Web to gain acceptance. One particularly tough skeptic is Peter Merholz, cofounder of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based user experience consultancy. "This stuff has to be baked in from the beginning," says Merholz, who calls the Semantic Web "an interesting academic pursuit" with little bearing on society. "The Semantic Web is getting a lot of hype simply because Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the World Wide Web - is so interested in it," he says. "If it were just some schmuck at some university in Indiana, nobody would care.""

pixie now will get the latest blogdex links for you by crunching the new blogdex rss feed. if you want to test it out and you have a jabber acount, just add pixie@snowdeal.org to your roster and type 'hello' or just 'blogdex'.

oh, and pixie will now try to find definitions for you. just type 'definition' after she's on your roster.

well, if it's not one thing it's another. harper, our loveable, if not just a weee bit high-strung, german short-haired pointer has epilepsy. he's had at least three grand mal seizures in the past 24 hours and hindsight leads us to believe that he's has a few more during the previous week.

we went to the vet this morning and he said, unfortunately, that there's not much we can do in the short-term other than keep a detailed diary of the incidents. he had blood taken and will get a panel to rule out any severe metabolic disorders, but in all other respects he appears to be a happy, healthy and vigorous 2 year-old pointer, so i doubt it will point to anything obvious. it's impossible to determine how frequent the seizures will be in the future. some dogs have clusters of seizures over a few days and won't have another one for years. other dogs could have them every day. at this point it's watch and wait. if they are frequent, we'll have to consider medication.

mauja really doesn't know what to make of the situation. he wants out of the house - fast - during the seizures, but doesn't seem overly threatened or aggressive with the situation. the dogs are best friends and i'd be surprised if either would get aggressive, but you never know. the vet said that some dogs will get aggressive in the post-seizure phase, but harper hasn't shown any signs of abnormal behavior in that respect.

given the fact that we've already had to deal with a severe case of early onset hip dysplasia with our malmute, mauja, you have to wonder how we got such bad canine mojo. harper came from a reputable, local breeder and we go to the same vet. we called the breeder this morning and there haven't been any other epileptics from the litter.

i haven't witnessed an actual seizure yet. and i'm not looking forward to it. kris witnessed one this morning and was disturbed to say the least.

cam posted some great information on personal knowledge management which i'm going to pitch into my personal knowledge manager.

Personal Knowledge Management : Who, What, Why, When, Where, How?

"Our students, who will spend most of their working lives in the 21st century, will need to see the computer and related technologies as an extension of themselves, as a tool as important as the pencil or quill pen was for the last several hundred years. Fifteen years ago, few people knew what a personal computer was. Now personal computers are ubiquitous. With the proliferation of personal computers and linked computer networks, there has been an increase in the amount of information produced, as well as new avenues of finding the information. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) attempts to utilize the computer to help the individual manage the information explosion in a meaningful way."

What is PKM?

"Personal Knowledge Management should be viewed as a set a problem-solving skills that have both a logical or conceptual as well as physical or hands-on component. These are skills that will be required for successful knowledge work in the twenty-first century. These skills should be interwoven into programs of university general education and into academic major programs; both general purpose (such as MS Office) and more specialized (such as disciplinary) tools can facilitate the practice of Personal Knowledge Management. Teaching PKM entails teaching both intelligent practices that guide the use of tools as well as intelligent and efficient use of the tools themselves.

The seven PKM skills are: (1) retrieving information; (2) evaluating/assessing information; (3) organizing information; (4) analyzing information; (5) presenting information; (6) securing information; and (7) collaborating around information."

What is MindModel?

"MindModel is PC software that lets you collect and view any information in new and powerful ways.

Not only can you see the facts, you can also discover relationships among them.

Friends, co-workers, skills, likes and dislikes, work history, sports, activities, web sites...

MindModel brings it all together."

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

"The personal knowledge management process must be seen as part and parcel of the research process, for example academic research (for an example see the "Research Methods Knowledge Base ") or intelligence research. Information in all of its formats (data, facts, information, knowledge etc) can be seen as both the raw material and main product of research."

you smell that? that's the smell of a growing web services backlash:

"A new magazine practically jumped out at me the other day when I went into a Borders bookstore: Web Services Journal. Since when do Web services rate their own magazine? I thought they were still just a dream being chased by software vendors."

Taxonomy Software to the Rescue:

"Frappino observes, "While not usually thought of as a 'search' tool, categorization practice and technology is the foundation for an effective information retrieval experience in a data-rich environment, [the] basis for transforming searching into finding because it helps users navigate within collections of documents that are related through hierarchical categories to the specific destination they seek. Once located, users must understand how the information is differentiated and contextualized -- they must find what they need.""

dean lets loose some good-old-fashioned criticism:

"I swear to god if I see one more self-styled bolshevik of the user experience whose grasp of the arrangement of matter in space, of elegance, structure, the curiosity of the eye, focused meaning in wide context, narrative, vital writing, potent imagery, the vast expanse of quietude, the rush of chaos, all that is brought about through compression, speed, clarity, neurosis, grace and the sounds humans make in and out of love is clouded, so clouded; if I see one more would-be guru..."

finally. something to replace my npr mug.

The Value-Complexity Matrix:

"I like to think of projects as a journey from the abstract to the concrete. Here's a simple path: Do business strategy / user research | Make a list of features | Create features | Code features. Somewhere in that 'list of features' step is a big transition from mushy research to getting down to work. Once I know what the features are, the list is prioritized. The feature prioritization is based on the user research and the business strategy, along with the initial technology estimates. I like doing this prioritization exercise in person with all the stakeholders so all viewpoints can be factored in. It's a seminal meeting and the results guide the rest of the project."

[ via noisebetweenthestations ]

from the unsolicited-plug-of-the-day-dept. it's nice to see that kumo is back from a break. i began to fear that i was going to lose one of my favorite sources of information.

nice. a.l.i.c.e won the loebner prize for the second year in a row:

"In another unusual aspect of the contest, Hugh Loebner himself served as one of the judges. The programs and confederates were ranked on a scale of 0-25. Each judge could assign five points to each person or robot. One judge, in fact, ranked A.L.I.C.E. higher than one of the humans."

there's lots to like with a.l.i.c.e, including aiml and its utility in voice and chat interfaces.

so. how much do you think you're worth? the personal salary report thinks it knows.

i think i may have knocked a screw loose last night. i'm far too excited that the mozilla 0.95 release is official. i love the smell of testing in the morning. smells like victory.

the latest browser stats mighty interesting indeed. while mozilla and its related ilk still have a paltry overall percentage (0.5%) it "...has grown significantly since the release of Netscape 6.1." and i'm continually amazed at the browser resolution stats - 51% of people are still stuck on 800x600 and 42% are at 1024x768.

i spent my formative years on the craggy coast of maine and it just warms my heart to see glennf write about an 802.11 isp on maine's rocky coast. maybe there's a reason for me to move back downeast afterall.

i was trying to formulate my thoughts about clay's recent web services: it's so crazy, it just might not work. on the one hand, it's a great hype-deflating piece, with quotes like:

"Web Services can't create a framework in which any two arbitrary applications can interact because XML doesn't provide shared languages, merely shared alphabets. The Web Services stack pushes this shared semantics problem into higher and higher layers without solving it. Humans often cannot create perfectly transparent descriptions even when they are trying to, and they simply won't try when there's an economic incentive to stretch the truth."

on the other hand, the piece can also be viewed as an overblown version of that oldie, but goodie - xml and semantic transparency:

"We may rehearse this fundamental axiom of descriptive markup in terms of a classical SGML polemic: the doubly-delimited information objects in an SGML/XML document are described by markup in a meaningful, self-documenting way through the use of names which are carefully selected by domain experts for element type names, attribute names, and attribute values. This is true of XML in 1998, was true of SGML in 1986, and was true of Brian Reid's Scribe system in 1976. However, of itself, descriptive markup proves to be of limited relevance as a mechanism to enable information interchange at the level of the machine.
As enchanting as it is to contemplate the apparent 'semantic' clarity, flexibility, and extensibility of XML vis-à-vis HTML (e.g., how wonderfully perspicuous XML <bookTitle> seems when compared to HTML <i>), we must reckon with the cold fact that XML does not of itself enable blind interchange or information reuse. XML may help humans predict what information might lie "between the tags" in the case of <trunk> </trunk>, but XML can only help. For an XML processor, <trunk> and <i> and <booktitle> are all equally (and totally) meaningless. Yes, meaningless.

Just like its parent metalanguage (SGML), XML has no formal mechanism to support the declaration of semantic integrity constraints, and XML processors have no means of validating object semantics even if these are declared informally in an XML DTD. XML processors will have no inherent understanding of document object semantics because XML (meta-)markup languages have no predefined application-level processing semantics. XML thus formally governs syntax only - not semantics."

ahhh. but how to complain and yet not appear to be approving of the hype? well, julian bond does a fine job:

"I think the commentators and practitioners in the web services space are in danger of promoting the same sort of muddy thinking. We're setting up a straw man by focussing on one aspect of the problem in order to provide an excuse to pull down the whole edifice."

so the business process semantics of arbitrary application to application communication isn't really on the event horizon. point taken - even by the analysts:

"According to Gartner, more than 40 percent of enterprises' first experience with the technology will be an internal deployment of a Web services-enabled architecture. Almost without anyone recognizing it, Gartner says, applications will move from a code-and-recode model to one of connect, disconnect and reconnect dynamically.

"Setbacks should be presumed, particularly in vendor interoperability conflicts, but ensuing layers of metadata and ad-hoc collaboration at low levels should ensure 'good enough' solutions," said Daryl Plummer, group vice president and research group director for Gartner."

[update] hmmm. coincidence or not. clay just posted a message to decentralization that clarifies the point that i was trying to make:

"This is one of the points I was trying to make -- this stuff is a tool for developers to work out the details of application interop. It is not a tool to create interop out of thin air."