Posts

AIfIA Translations Project

Was talking with Peter, the organizer of the AIfIA Translations Project and it looks like they are into beta mode. It’s a great project which aims to identify key texts in the IA field and translate them to as many languages as possible.

So far, there’s some;

  • Spanish
  • Dutch
  • Portugese
  • Italian
  • French
  • Japanese, and
  • Danish

which I think is pretty impressive. You can even get a large portion of the actual website in your preferred language once you go to the translations page (selection on the left).

Blogs: What Are They Good For?

NOTE: This post was written in 2003 and in places is now out of date. WordPress is now the dominant self-installed blogging platform, and continues to gain more of the market. Updates have been integrated into this post.

What is a Blog?

In its ‘purest’ form, a blog is something akin to an online, personal journal or diary, taking the form of a series of chronologically-ordered, short, personal posts on a website. It is easy to update and normally works by adding short posts to a template design of some sort.

BLOG is short for weB LOG, and became recognised widely as a web-publishing format in about 1999, when, among others, Evan Williams (via Pyra Labs, now owned by Google) created Blogger.com, a free-to-access blogging tool which published your blog back to your own site by FTP. Blogger.com is currently one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, along with WordPress, LiveJournal and MovableType.

Blogging (the process of posting an update to a blog) took off, as did the community around it. Bloggers proved to be a friendly bunch, and many of them linked to each other and other sites, creating a dense web of links and opinion. The personal nature of most blogs meant that blogs became one of the most accessible personal-opinion formats on the web.

Why Blog?

Why would anyone want to keep an updated record of their personal thoughts and opinions online? There’s a lot more to blogs than just that, but even for that purpose alone, it’s an amazing way to exercise a right to free speech, and to reach potentially millions of people with your thoughts.

There are a growing number of different applications of blog-technology, including:

  • Professional News Sites/Portals
  • Lightweight Content Management for all sorts of websites
  • To-Do Lists (personal or across a group)
  • Review Sites (movies, music, food, you name it!)
  • Corporate Knowledge Management (Knowledge Logs or K-Logs)
  • Project Management (recording work completed at ‘x’ time for ‘y’ project)
  • Podcasting (delivering audio segments periodically)
  • Vlogging (Video-blogging; delivering video snippets/segments periodically)

There will no doubt be more uses for the technology in the future, especially as blogs and related technologies evolve and mature more, and as different kinds of meta-data is stored within blogs.

How Do I Blog?

Most blogging systems have their own interface of some sort for posting blogs, whether it be via the web (like Blogger.com and MovableType), using one of the many desktop clients (like w.bloggar and MarsEdit), or even straight into a text file in a directory (like blosxom uses).

A common thread amongst each of these systems is that each ‘post’ is treated as a separate entity, which allows for a number of cool features (see below).

Today, there are tools of all sorts for posting to blogs, including 2 of my own, AvantBlog, for posting to Blogger.com from a handheld/Palm device, and webpad, a more powerful editor with access to a number of different blogging systems and number of HTML tools for managing post content.

Bells & Whistles

With blogs becoming more popular, a number of related technologies and extras have developed in the last few years. Some of the more popular features/extras are:

Comments
Allowing readers to contribute comments to a blog post creates a feedback loop and in many cases provides a simple discussion forum/community feel.
Categorization/Topics
Most blogging tools allow for some sort of categorisation of posts so that they can be organised according to topics. Different systems handle this in different ways, for example MovableType allows you to store a post against multiple categories, while blosxom stores a post in a single directory, representing a topic/category.
RSS/Atom
RSS allows other users to easily syndicate the content of your blog into their own, or into a news reader/aggregator of some sort (web-based like BlogLines, or desktop-based like NetNewsWire). In addition to content syndication, Atom also provides a programming interface for modifying posts made in a blog using other tools.
Calendar Navigation
Many blog tools offer the option of including a calendar on your blog, so that people can navigate your posts by jumping straight to a particular date and seeing all posts on that day/month/year.
Permalinks
Upholding the spirit of a ‘permanent location’ for everything on the Internet, so-called permalinks are automatically-created URLs which are intended to be the permanent location of a post, even after it ‘scrolls off’ the homepage of a blog (since only a certain number of posts will be displayed on the homepage normally).
Blog-roll
Since bloggers are such a friendly bunch, they often maintain a list of the blogs which they read regularly. This list is normally presented along the side of their own blog, so that you might also find other sites which interest you. This list is called a blog-roll (see blogrolling.com for more about blog-rolls).

Hopefully this has provided you with a bit of an introduction to blogging and blogs, and you can see that they are a great way to get information online quickly. Their personal and business uses are only going to grow, and it will be interesting to see where they go in the future. Sites like Technorati and BlogDex are probably good places to keep an eye on if you’re interested in the future of blogging.

So now, if all you want is to see a blog in action – jump over to the blog section of this site and knock yourself out!

Domain Offline… Again

Up until recently, I would have recommended phpwebhosting.com with flying colours for their fantastic, very cheap web hosting service. Unfortunately, over the last couple weeks, I have had a few days where pretty much for an entire day my site has been unreachable. I haven’t really had any feedback from the staff there as to what’s going on, except to say (after the fact) “we had to do some upgrades, but they are finished now”… only to have another day’s outage soon after.

I still think they are a great provider, but they are going to have to be very stable for a pretty long time to get me back to my very happy status of yester-week…

Karma 0.3 Already

Well, Fletcher has been flying away at the karma plugin we discussed and has got a version 0.3 going already. This one
has the following features;

  1. Show number of visits/votes
  2. Show positive and negative votes
  3. Show Controversy Index
  4. Show Karma Index
  5. Show Visits Index
  6. Only show posts with minimum of ‘x’ for;
    1. Karma
    2. Controvery
    3. Interest

You can download karma 0.3 and drop it in as a plugin immediately. It’s pretty self-explanatory if you understand the concept. To figure out the way that controvery and interest are calculated – have a look in the code for now, I’ll post the formulae when I get a chance 🙂

New Plugin Coming

I emailed the blosxom mailing list and suggested a new plugin, which I am just calling “karma”. The idea was to allow people to click a + or – and indicate if they thought a post was good or not. This is similar to the system used on some other sites.

I got an email back from Fletcher Penney, who said that he’d develop it, and half an hour later we were chatting on MSN about the details. He’s already knocked out 2 draft versions and we are sorting out some great stats and uses for the information!

blosxom and its developer-community rules!

Bugger – Again

Click for an enlarged photo (new window)

As Brendan Fraser says in The Mummy; “This keeps getting better and better”, and as Homer says in The Simpsons; “in case you didn’t notice, I was being sarcastic!”

This evening I was attempting to mount my laptop hard drive into my old desktop machine (a PII, 300) to see if I could get any data off it. When I plugged the machine in and tried booting it up – I heard 2 loud pops, followed by a small cloud of smoke, so I knew something was wrong :). I checked it out, and sure enough, my power supply was blown. You can see to the right (click for enlargement) and also in this picture that the middle of the power supply was covered with the remnants of one of the diodes (?transistors?) that exploded. Messy.

So now on to plan 2 – I’ll take the drive to work tomorrow and see if I can get a chance to try mounting it on my machine at work instead, which I know is stable and operational at least, and which has network access to plenty of storage and a CD burner if I need it 🙂

More later.

Hard Drive Recovery…

Well things are actually looking good with the recovery of data from my failed hard drive!

I went ahead and downloaded a demo version of a program called “R-Studio”, which is distributed by HDDRecovery in Australia. I had talked to the manager of HDDR and he suggested that I give it a go.

So here’s roughly the process that ensued:

  1. Plugged my 2.5″ -> 3.5″ adaptor into the drive
  2. Put on a small jumper so that the drive was marked as the secondary device (to avoid conflicts with main drive on PC)
  3. Went and located an odler-style IDE cable that would match up with the adaptor (panic here for a minute when I couldn’t find one!)
  4. Unplug my DVD drive at work and plug in the new drive, on it’s special cable
  5. Boot up my PC and it couldn’t locate the drive at all, although BIOS appeared to have found it there
  6. Load up R-Studio and get it to detect the drive, which it did successfully
  7. Create an image file which contained the contents of the drive (12GB) and save to happy hard drive on my desktop

At this point I was pretty happy – in the process of creating the image, my files had been recompiled into a meaningful structure, and it appeared that most of my data was there. But wait, there’s more;

  1. Purchase the full copy of R-Studio!
  2. Install and configure it on my desktop at work, then load up the image file
  3. Go through and easily (although slowly) recover all the files that I wanted into a secured location on my happy hard drive
  4. Copy those files, via our network to another machine that had a CD burner
  5. On that machine, burn 5 CDs worth of recovered data (bunch of music, data, images, video etc!) and take home
  6. Transfer required data back onto the new hard drive installed on my laptop!

So there you go – there’s the basics of my drama, and how things have turned out. Personally, I think the $AUD 176.00 was a small price to pay – compared to the prospect of having the drive dismantled in a clean room environment, which would have cost thousands :). The fact that the drive was accessible through software saved my skin, and now I have all my photos, data files and music back and happy 🙂 As it turns out, the only files that appear to have been irreparibly damaged are from within the C:\WINNT directory – and who’s going to miss them? (except the boot sequence!)

Got Some Flavour For You

Here’s the flavour files and style sheets that I use for this blog. Please note that they have been modified slightly (story.dr especially) since I am using a “custom” version of blosxom, with some Apache Rewrites to handle my URLs in a prettier way than normal 🙂 This may or may not have worked, so you might need to play around a little with that one file. Also, you will probably want to modify the paths to the style sheets in head.dr so that they are full paths, or at least root-relative (which is what I use, if you are interested).

Also please note that I am using these plugins, so there are references to their output in the flavour files;

  1. writebacks
  2. calendar
  3. breadcrumbs

That’s it – unzip and enjoy! I’ve named the flavour files *.dr to avoid overwriting any of your existing flavours, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you either 😉

That Feeling of Loss

City of Golden Shadow River of Blue Fire Mountain of Black Glass Sea of Silver Light

Am I the only one that has that feeling of loss or loneliness when I finish a good book? (or in this case, four good books?)

I’ve been reading the “Otherland” series, by Tad Williams for about 3 years now (4?), progressively acquiring each of the books in the series, then re-reading the ones before it so that I get the whole story. In doing this, I have obviously “spent a lot of time” with Renie, !Xabbu, Sellars, Sorensen, Ramsey, Orlando, Fredericks and all the other characters in the books. Now that I’ve finished them all – it’s over. I feel like I’ve lost a whole group of friends.

It’s strange how you can develop such an attachment to characters of a book which are completely ficticious. Personally, I think this comes partially from my history on the Internet. I have spent so much time online that the characters in a book are often more realistic, more “detailled” in their background, descriptions and actions than other people who I have spent hours discussing things with, worked on entire projects and laughed over common jokes.

With the detailed writing of professionals like Tad Williams, I often actually know more about the personality, physical appearance and mental processes of the characters in the books that I read, than I do about the people I meet on the ‘net.

The only up-side of finishing the Otherland series is that now I can finally read “Google Hacks”, the book that I wrote a small section of. I’ve had my complimentary copy of the book (from O’Reilly) for a few months now, but haven’t had a chance to read it because I was too busy trapped in Otherland and the Grail Network (read the book if you have no idea what I’m talking about here :).

I will strongly recommend Otherland (yes, all 4,000-ish pages of it) to anyone who likes science fiction, and especially if you can deal with the idea of fully-immersive virtual reality – it really is a treat.