snowdeal.org > ex machina

4.26.2002

is it just me or is two thirds of the web timing out today? wierd.

posted by e3 11:47:36 PM

4.25.2002

mike's wondering how i got my rss feed. well, it's very much homegrown, but, inspired by blogify. basically, i'm using dublin core metadata in the pages for the channel description and marking up the text with divs and spans. xpath and a little perl do the rest. "conflux style" posts are marked-up differently than "machina style" posts and, as jon udell noticed, i rather unelegantly truncate the descriptions for scannability. when i wrote the script, i think i remember trying to get Lingua::EN::Sentence to elegantly pick off sentences, but my horrid punctuation and general disregard for capitalization made it, um, less than reliable. i should probably look back into it, since i agree that's it's a bit jarring the way it currently is implemented.

so, here's xhtml2rss with the usual, "you break it you get to keep the pieces" caveat. and i know it ain't exactly the purtiest thing in the world [ why exactly do i clean the text twice? ], but i don't want to hear from some snot-nosed kid who can compact the whole thing into a one-liner.

posted by e3 11:06:13 PM

4.24.2002

awhile ago i contemplated exploring topicmaps and weblogs using touchgraph . while i never really got past installing touchgraph, chris langreiter mocked my procrastination with his excellent vanilla vista .

as with most things i did my best to forget about the whole thing, but chris has done gone and linked to not one but two recent developments. first is the Google-API related pages Graph-Browser :

"after playing around with the SOAP Google-API and Chris Langreiters Vanilla-Vista use of the the TouchGraph Java-Applet, I came up with this alternate 'related-pages' browser."

and there's also a new wiki browser :

"A new type of node has been added to represent pages external to the wiki. Thus, if an external URL has been mentioned repeatedly on several wiki pages, one will see multiple incoming edges for the corresponding node. A Show BackLinks checkbox allows back links to be shown or hidden. A Stop button has been added for stopping the graph motion. ...and more... All these features really give one the ability to explore the structure of the Wiki."

posted by e3 11:34:33 PM

4.23.2002

wired is runnning some pushback on the new oqo devices:

"But by the time the device hits the market later this year, it will be competing against other miniature-sized computers such as beefed-up personal digital assistants. Unless OQO heavily markets the computer, consumers may mistake it for a very expensive Palm handheld, Elsasser said."

while i think the point is valid, i do think that thanks to the ability to store 10 gigs in your pocket, there is an emerging demand for a variety of devices that sit between pdas and laptops, as the popularity of ipod hacking demonstrates.

given its built in networking capabilities and already reasonable pricepoint, it's intriguing to think of what could happen by taking away the m$ , which looks plausible:

"And that's not all. LinuxDevices.com learned from an undisclosed source that OQO is also developing a low-powered FM radio transmitter that will allow users of the device to wirelessly broadcast music from MP3s stored on its hard disk to their home or car stereos.

What about Linux support for the device? "We're primarily a hardware company," says Hunter. "What we've developed is a fully compatible PC, that will run whatever OS would run on a PC, so yeah, Linux should run just fine -- I'm sure it'll happen," he adds."

hmmm. what could you do a cheap portable device that streams mp3s, runs linux and knows 802.11b? well, install sputnik with mesh networking and turn your portable broadcast unit into a node in a mobile mesh network .

posted by e3 8:00:27 AM

4.22.2002

douglas rushkoff has a new blog and he's, um, not holding anything back:

"Everyone knows that Israel has to go back to 1967 borders. And everyone knows that the insane (Israeli) settlers of the West Bank would rather die than leave. For Israel to get them out of the settlements, the Israeli army will have to kill a few Israeli Jews. There's just no other way. These people demonstrated their intentions by killing Rabin when he tried to make peace offerings.

But before Israel is going to go ahead and kill Israelis, they want Palestine to go ahead and kill a few Palestinians, first. It sounds a bit mad, at first, but follow the logic. Israel needs to know that Palestine will take care of their crazies - the suicide bombers and angry terrorists who will never ever agree to an Israeli state. And, in return, Israel will remove and, in the process, kill a few of its own crazies. "

whoa.

posted by e3 7:56:03 PM

whoohoo! blogger pro now sports a mozilla interface. and it's not some ugly red-headed stepchild interface. it works with the Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1.

posted by e3 7:51:00 PM

tara created a nice little script for date-based searching using the google api:

""What if you gave Google a query and a certain number of days back you wanted to go, and Google just pulled the number of results for each day and then wrote them to a file, so you'd have an idea of how often a query word set appeared in indexed results over time.""

if you did a little deviation detection and multiple correlation analysis with thresholding, filtering and notification, you could have a nice little "business intelligence" application.

for example, it'd be pretty handy to easily look at correlated deviations in frequency, "notify me when "wlan" and "nokia partnerships" occur more often than normal in a single month."

posted by e3 7:40:21 AM