rediscovering information i've found in the past is often fruitless. These quick notes -- slightly more than book marks -- may help. Just the fact they are ordered by time often makes them more useful to me.
In keeping with the 'haystack' theme, I'm also sticking in (sorry, I know its ugly) every blogger tool I can find.
Sure there is a lot of hype, but the Eee G4/8 from Asus is an amazing machine at ~$400. The "8G" means 8 gigs of solid state storage -- i.e. no hard drive. It weighs about 2 lb so its a wonderful travel machine that can do real work.
But how to find one -- especially the black edition.
The ASUS Eee PC is once again in the limelight. This time, it has been billed as America’s most wanted Christmas gift among notebooks products. Several large American shopping websites have started investigating what the average American would want as a Christmas gift in lieu of the fast approaching Christmas buying season; and the result from the American Amazon shopping website and CNET based on 14th of November unanimously places the ASUS Eee PC at the top spot on the wish list.
Irresistible Popularity So overwhelming is the Eee PC’s popularity in America that all the units were snapped up – creating a lack of stock; and stores were inundated with orders for the Christmas season as soon as it was put on the shelves. Long queues were noted on launch day as people flocked to put their
ETech 2008 CFP is Open The Call For Participation for the 2008 edition of the Emerging Technology Conference (AKA ETech) is open. We are going to be expanding the scope of ETech this year. We're going to look beyond the web to manufacturing, biotech, large-scale systems, sensor networks, alternate reality games, visualizations, robotics, policy, human enhancement and clean tech. The CFP closes on September 17th so submit soon! The conference will be held in San Diego from March 3-6, 2008.
A few topics
Energy Abundant and Ubiquitous Comuting From Virtual to Physical Visualization From Physical to Virtual
Its not the online world, its the world online -- EveryScape tag line.
3d, 2d, photos, who cares? Architecture, travel, geography, culture are about to change. Google earth is so 2006. If you teach yoga, take pictures for a newspaper, are a photo journalist, or are Italian, checkout EveryScapebefore reading further.
Companies like Advanced Scientific Concepts (high end) and EveryScape (low end) are changing the rules. Checkout the Advanced Scientific Concepts LADAR system on youtube.
HyperMedia V2.0 EveryScape supports HyperMedia. Not my kind of demo, but check it out.
Becoming a ScapeArtist All this does not quite make sense, unless you realize that EveryScape is signing up people at several levels of commitment and expertese to shoot the world.
A Graffiti Artist doesn’t require any special training or skills — just that you are interested in sharing the pride, passion and knowledge you have for your world.
You’ll need to be an experienced Web user and spend a couple of minutes reading and accepting the rules and regulations for adding content. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to embed links and content like Web sites, photos, videos, reviews and commentary into scapes. You’ll also be responsible for reporting and removing inappropriate content and ensuring the accuracy of content.
As a Graffiti Artist, it’s up to you to represent your world.
As an Amateur Artist, you will need the passion, pride and local knowledge of a graffiti artist combined with panoramic photography experience. We’ll provide online training resources to help you turn your panoramic art work into the immersive 3D images you see in scaped locales.
After completing the online training and accepting the rules and regulations for posting content, you’ll be able to post panoramic photos that are geo-tagged to locations or on map screenshots. You can also embed links and additional content including Web sites, photos, video reviews and commentary.
Required equipment: Point and shoot digital camera; IPIX Starter Kit; IPIX Interactive Studio Essentials Pack (minimum)
Master Artists share the same passion, pride and local knowledge with our other artists. Because of the increased expectations that go along with being a Master Artist, you must have panoramic photography experience and an understanding of photographic principles like composition, lighting, staging, etc., and more sophisticated equipment.
We’ll provide the same training that Amateur Artists get as well as additional training and information regarding where to take photos and expectations for quality. Once you accept the rules and regulations for posting content, you’ll be able to do everything that an Amateur Artist can do and earn money for your high-quality, relevant work. Required equipment: Digital SLR; Fisheye lens; PeaceRiver camera head.
Commercial Artists are where the rubber meets the road — literally. As a Commercial Artist, you will travel the highways, byways, avenues, alleys and side streets of locales acquiring GPS-tagged panoramic photos. With this critical work, you are creating the canvas that all other artists will work on.
After 2-3 days of training in the use of the EveryScape car-mounted photography rig, image acquisition and logistical coordination, you’ll be ready to roll. Because of significant time investment, equipment requirements and expectations for quality and consistency, Commercial Artists are compensated for their efforts. And loved by all.
Required equipment: EveryScape car mounted photography rig; access to a car.
IBM's Zero is out in the open, so to speak. Full stack. Groovy/php scripting. Native Java. Dojo integration. Oh, yes, there is Ivy, Json and MySQL too. I'm feeling RESTful all ready.
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.
Two features (of many) that are appealing
capacity to bundle many micro payments into a monthly payment
ability to develop applications that serve as middlemen.
For example a website featuring kayaking instructional videos could charge 1 cent per view and get payment at the end of each month for 35 cents.
Because of the ability to server as a middleman, a portal site could handle transactions for a variety of customers using the portal -- perhaps sites with kayaking, snowboarding, and yoga videos.
I've been looking for the right video camera. Quite a challenge since I'd like professional quality the size and price of a pin. For many people, the Flip may be the bee's knees, but I'd like to study some underwater issues -- duck dives, kayak rolls, trout, hatches. I just ordered this Sanyo VPC-E1 in blue. As far as I can see, its only competition is the same model in white. Other approaches to inexpensive youtube quality video + some underwater capactity all depend upon underwater housing. Not for me. We shall see.
Next generation of humans, that is. Andrew Savikas of O'Reilly gave some of his blog space to two summer interns. Read all about their approach to teenage reading.
Here is a sample of Flip Video snatched off the web. Flip Video camera :: 30-60 minutes of decent video and almost decent sound. Ask me: "Is it easy to use?" I'll tell you no lie: "Yes".
Japan's Information Architects has published a subway-style map of the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.
The map is dense; it requires attention; it is likely to be useful to anyone who is "...exploring, defining and explaining the Internet strategy and positioning."
Its worthwhile to examine the IA home page as well as the map since the homepage includes, discussion, feedback, etc.
Nutch is an open source Java implementation of a search engine. It provides all of the tools you need to run your own search engine. But why would anyone want to run their own search engine? After all, there's always Google. There are at least three reasons.
Transparency. Nutch is open source, so anyone can see how the ranking algorithms work. With commercial search engines, the precise details of the algorithms are secret so you can never know why a particular search result is ranked as it is. Furthermore, some search engines allow rankings to be based on payments, rather than on the relevance of the site's contents. Nutch is a good fit for academic and government organizations, where the perception of fairness of rankings may be more important.
Understanding. We don't have the source code to Google, so Nutch is probably the best we have. It's interesting to see how a large search engine works. Nutch has been built using ideas from academia and industry: for instance, core parts of Nutch are currently being re-implemented to use the Map Reduce distributed processing model, which emerged from Google Labs last year. And Nutch is attractive for researchers who want to try out new search algorithms, since it is so easy to extend.
Extensibility. Don't like the way other search engines display their results? Write your own search engine--using Nutch! Nutch is very flexible: it can be customized and incorporated into your application. For developers, Nutch is a great platform for adding search to heterogeneous collections of information, and being able to customize the search interface, or extend the out-of-the-box functionality through the plugin mechanism. For example, you can integrate it into your site to add a search capability.
Nutch installations typically operate at one of three scales: local filesystem, intranet, or whole web. All three have different characteristics. For instance, crawling a local filesystem is reliable compared to the other two, since network errors don't occur and caching copies of the page content is unnecessary (and actually a waste of disk space). Whole-web crawling lies at the other extreme. Crawling billions of pages creates a whole host of engineering problems to be solved: which pages do we start with? How do we partition the work between a set of crawlers? How often do we re-crawl? How do we cope with broken links, unresponsive sites, and unintelligible or duplicate content? There is another set of challenges to solve to deliver scalable search--how do we cope with hundreds of concurrent queries on such a large dataset? Building a whole-web search engine is a major investment. In " Building Nutch: Open Source Search," authors Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting (the prime movers behind Nutch) conclude that:
... a complete system might cost anywhere between $800 per month for two-search-per-second performance over 100 million pages, to $30,000 per month for 50-page-per-second performance over 1 billion pages.
This series of two articles shows you how to use Nutch at the more modest intranet scale (note that you may see this term being used to cover sites that are actually on the public internet--the point is the size of the crawl being undertaken, which ranges from a single site to tens, or possibly hundreds, of sites). This first article concentrates on crawling: the architecture of the Nutch crawler, how to run a crawl, and understanding what it generates. The second looks at searching, and shows you how to run the Nutch search application, ways to customize it, and considerations for running a real-world system.
