Month: October 2003

Visitor geography

Montevideo, , UY
Amsterdam, , NL
Chantilly, Virginia, US
Ottawa, Ontario, CA
Newark, New Jersey, US
Redmond, Washington, US
Zurich, Zurich, CH
San Antonio, Texas, US
Foster City, California, US
Amsterdam, North Holland, NL
Pasadena, California, US
Princeton, New Jersey, US
Reston, Virginia, US
Fairfax, Virginia, US
Plano, Texas, US
Creve Coeur, Missouri, US
San Jose, California, US
Wellesley, Massachusetts, US
Milton, New South Wales, AU
Milton, , AU
Vaasa, Vaasa, FI
Palo Alto, California, US
Chelmsford, Massachusetts, US
are some of my recent visitors, per CAIDA. the mapping between IP addresses and coordinates is far from perfect though. this will not change until GPSML or similar services are baked into the internet infrastructure. collecting geographical data on the side and correlating it with your posts (and those of others, think neighborhood aggregators) strikes me as an interesting experiment in spatial serendipity.

fun with blogrolls

i tried to synchronize between my newsfeeds and blogrolling.com, using their OPML import feature. unfortunately, it does not work. not even with special tools.
as usual, the workable solution was to install yet another MT plugin, do yet another scp to get my OPML from my aggregator onto my blog, which then gets rendered as my blogroll. so far so good, but i hate to do all this crap again to keep the 2 in sync. this weblog stuff is still far too fragmented. we need better integration.
i also added a new blogroll link tag to my template in the hope that some interesting autodiscovery (like autofoaf) will go on. it seems there is no consensus on the tag as of yet though, some use type=”text/x-opml”, others type=”application/opml+xml”

Intellectual dishonesty

one of the OSDN editors has a little piece on moving from desktop Linux to desktop Windows. interesting, i thought, maybe it is a piece that ventures outside the conventional wisdom of OSDN. the next 2 sentences read: I have now used Windows for an entire week. This story marks the end of that week, and I’m glad it’s over. uh-oh.
consider this gem:

First, a question: What’s up with all this “Ctrl C” and Ctrl V” copy/paste stuff? In almost all Linux programs, when I want to copy a block of text (or a graphic or whatever) I just highlight the original, then click both mouse buttons (or the middle button if I have a 3-button mouse) where I want to paste it. This is fast, easy, and takes little hand motion on my laptop keyboard. All this Ctrl key action slows me down. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I need to work quickly if I want to earn a living, and I don’t see why Windows wants me to go through all those extra hand motions just to paste a URL into a story. Geh.

never mind that there is no global clipboard on linux that can deal with non-text content.
mr miller goes then on to complain about the security updates windows strongly suggests you install. at the same time, OSDN complains about users not applying security updates. which one is it?
“roblimo” complains about the sorry state of certain windows shareware applications. you would assume that someone using linux is well prepared to do his research and locate the best application for a job. but no, zealotry prevails, and mr miller insists on using internet explorer, only to eventually install mozilla.
it goes on like this. intellectual dishonesty, as displayed in this article, puts people on my shit list. i am sure mr miller has some interesting ideas i’d like to hear, but my crap filter will probably prevent it.
just to be clear here: i switched back to windows in 2001 after 2 years of compiling, messing with the system fun. a very nice learning experience i do not want to miss. at some point, i was getting bored with setting up the obvious stuff all over again, and thus went back to windows, where stuff just works, including my peripherals. in the meantime, i have found a nice balance between my operating system layer (strictly windows on the desktop, linux on the server) and my application stack, which is mostly open source by now.

  • Mozilla
  • Thunderbird
  • Eclipse
  • OpenOffice
  • sharpreader

In addition, i run freely available software like Trillian and Acrobat Reader. I pay for only 1 program, the excellent Mindmanager.

Mapping thoughts in xml

since the new mindmanager release sports an xml file format, i decided to buy it. i hope to link in external xml sources, and use mindmanager as a visual RDF editor eventually. the necessary developer information is not yet available, but apparently xslt will go a long way. some of the immediately usable features are:

Google search tool: Click on this map part, and a search form appears. Type in your search term, and MindManager X5 Pro grabs the top 10 search results from Google for your search term and displays them in a new topic. These 10 sub-topics contain URL link and notes icons. If you click on the URL icon, you can navigate directly to that web page. If you click on the notes icon, the program opens the notes pane and displays the text that Google displayed for that site in its search results. You can also annotate these results, making this map part a useful research tool.

you can also link in rss feeds.

the xml format does not look as nice as it could have, and one wonders why mindjet did not go with XTM (extending it with their own namespace to capture formatting information). here is a sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<ap:Map Dirty="0000000000000001" OId="F2io9NtNRUepjliURM596Q==" Gen="0000000000000000" xmlns:ap="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003" xmlns:cor="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003" xmlns:pri="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003">
<ap:OneTopic Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:Topic Dirty="0000000000000000" OId="F0V9qynjdkiLsQieUwCCww==" Gen="0000000000000000">
<ap:TopicViewGroup Dirty="0000000000000000" ViewIndex="0"/>
</ap:Topic>
</ap:OneTopic>
<ap:StyleGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:RootTopicDefaultsGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:DefaultColor Dirty="0000000000000000" FillColor="fffee49e" LineColor="ff000000"/>
<ap:DefaultText TextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Center" TextCapitalization="urn:mindjet:None" VerticalTextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Top" Dirty="0000000000000000" PlainText="Central Topic">
<ap:Font Color="ff373737" Size="14." Name="Trebuchet MS" Bold="true" Italic="false" Underline="false" Strikethrough="false"/>

pretty nasty if you ask me. make no mistake though, i think mindjet have leaped forward a lot, and i can’t wait to see interesting xsl transformations being applied. i will play around with it in the next couple days.

Great books

there is an awesome bookstore in cambridge called harvard bookstore. they are open until either 11pm or 10pm every day, so of course i spent some quality time there. here is a list (ironically, linking to the one store that has decent ASIN / ISBN coverage):
It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It
The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era
Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science
The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar