Interesting ontology for business information that cat be used in microformats. (The opening times part is unfortunately very very simplistic).

Nice: the perception seems to be moving towards publishers being evil and getting in the way of progress.

Some tests and explanations about the sad state of mobile internet on trains.

Somehow it would sound better if all phone companies had the same »explanation« for these phenoma. It wouldn’t cast doubts on them having no idea what they are doing.

A good example about what’s seriously wrong about the MS way of thinking: a convenient 8 step process for »removing« their default link formatting (by removing the link to get rid of the formatting and then overlaying an invisible link)

yay! people organising an exchange of non-freely available research articles. Another thing that has so much useful potential that libraries wouldn't do it.

Let’s hope they end up creating Linked Open Date triples to attach their download URLs to exisiting catalogue information.

The Big Clean conference challenge: recycle public sector data to opendata
Date: November 3, 2012
Place: National Technical Library, Prague

Google getting into semantic search

Nice. I used to love FreeHand as well and always found it much more intuitive to use than Illustrator – even for handling paths. It also had essential features like multiple pages (think a double-sided brochure) and nice touches like sound effects as feedback for the cursor snapping to something back in the mid 1990s.

Of course it’s hardly feasible to still use FreeHand today, but it’s a shame Illustrator still hasn’t picked up more of its features yet.

On Beach House’s album Bloom.

networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi

agh, fucking genius, Apple: make your OS not work with your toy device in their standard setups … 

Good points about the, erm, idiosyncrasies of library records. Asks whether there is any chance to find/have relational or linked thinking in even the latest standards.

The fish was very nice. (But _please_ teach restaurant people to not have Flash websites. And to avoid Nespresso…)

The European Digital Mathematics Library: collects digitisation resources in mathematics.

a number of cool tools. JavaScript stuff on the useful side, a Brainfuck minifier on the other side.

very interesting checker if you ever wondered what are valid variable names in JavaScript, looks like you should stick to Unicode 3.0 characters to be on the safe side

Explanation of git graphs + introduction to rebase. Perhaps a bit wordy but may help people getting started.

nice to have this merged authority file available

On the pitfalls in a seemingly simple task of finding a known article.

Relativising the importance of data.

»Data warehousing and the business intelligence industry that grew out of it has been with us for 30 years. The stated objective has always been to enable better decisions based on data, but despite the huge data stores that we’ve amassed, to what degree has data-based decision making actually increased? Little, if at all. Business intelligence has made relatively few of us smarter and more than a few of us stupider. Most of us lack the data sensemaking skills that are required to use data effectively.«

Popuplation histograms by longitude/latitude. Sweet idea.

paths in Barcelona based on flickr geotags

Sounds like a cool tool for scripting Illustrator. Sounds like it may reduce some of the horrible chores the software forces on people.

It’s interesting to see the graphics in the post used alongside the word »graphics designer«.

An insight in how confusing Unicode handling seems to be in the Windows world.

»The core issue seems to be that the virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk (and, consequently, back from disk). There seem to be at least two distinct problems here, though it’s difficult to tell for sure without proper instrumentation - 1) program data is not well prioritized to remain in physical RAM over buffer data, and 2) the garbage collection algorithm may require that all of a program’s data be in physical RAM before collection can happen, causing extensive paging.«

suggests that some of X.7’s performance issues may come from non-optimal behaviour of the dynamic_pager.

nice

damn it, the exported bitmaps can’t match Photoshop’s quality

yay for digital preservation, I guess

a pity indeed

just because it looks scientific, it doesn’t need to be …

interesting notes on functional programming

very interesting news. Let’s hope I’ll find some time to look into that.

I can’t seem to google this web page for buying train tickets for work trips.

The whole experiment seems absurdly cool. But the fact that they never actually saw a drop fall due to technical problem adds a great comic component:

»To date, no one has ever actually witnessed a drop fall. The experiment is in the view of a webcam although technical problems prevented the most recent drop from being recorded.«

Allegdly packages all IE Versions to test them all.

yay, more open data

setup iOS calendar syncing for Google Calendar

All the current html/web links in one place.

Good points about a the tricky problem of »poor« institutions like museums wanting nice mobile »apps« for their exhibitions but can only affort bland generic »solutions« which fail to do the collections they have justice.

Amusing take on Facebook and Social Network mania found in many places these days.

Somehow it took 15 years for the article to be published …

»Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor.«

I do wonder, whether anybody at MS thinks about the points, though: hardly anybody needs this kind of tool these days. Never mind the atrocious interface, aesthetics, and bugs.

Nice there’s a »professional« talk investigating Trajan usage in film posters (and titles?).

interesting but a bit of a shame that they don't really use the algorithm they found in their competition. It seems to be too complex to implement plus their modelling needs changed due to streaming.

Interesting idea to improve measuring academic impact.

… PHP scare examples in german

All I ever wanted to bitch about PHP and then some…

»PHP supports octal syntax with a leading 0, so e.g. 012 will be the number ten. However, 08 becomes the number zero. The 8 (or 9) and any following digits disappear. 01c is a syntax error.«

zdb

Mettwurstkonfigurator, what a fantastic word.

interesting

Articles making Apple seem as lame as you expect a huge corporation to be: Treat your workers as poorly as you can get away with. That’s a particular shame as Apple are in the comfortable position to have enough money to be able to afford doing better if they wanted to.

omg

About librarians cataloguing the internet and seeing the advantages of their libraries diminished by ebooks.

[Of course the boneheadedness of DFG and our librarians means that German tax Euros are still being spent to catalogue the internet in in 2012…

»Remember those heady early days when we thought we were going to catalog the web? OCLC even set up a whole project for this task back around the turn of the century (sounds like a long time ago, doesn’t it?). It was called CORC, or Collaborative Online Resource Catalog. Librarians around the world were supposed to select and catalog “good, librarian-certified” web resources. There was even talk of assigning Dewey numbers to websites — an idea which I’m sure would have brought tears to the eyes of many, especially our patrons. Today, the only evidence you can find of CORC is a few sentences in a list of abandoned research projects on the OCLC website and some links to PowerPoints and articles saluting it — most now more than 10 years old.

Of course, OCLC was not the only outfit to try it. Almost every library felt the responsibility to stuff its website with long and often elaborately annotated lists of web resources for just about everything. And there were lots of collaborative projects to develop “librarian-built” directories of web resources. The Librarians Index to the internet is a good example from the public library side, and the Infomine project at the University of California–Riverside is an example of many from the academic side. Many of these projects were grant-funded and died off when the money ran out. Some still linger — used mostly by librarians, as they have always been — as the rest of the world rushes right by our (sometimes) carefully tended websites and directories on the way to Google, Bing, and other search engines.«
]

Interesting study that, among many other things, highlights the problem presented by copyright.

»Legal uncertainty, inaccessible information silos, lack of information and lack of a critical mass are barriers to text mining within UKFHE. While the latter two can be addressed through campaigns to inform and raise awareness, the former two are unlikely to be resolved without changes to the current licensing system and global adoption of interoperability standards.«

Isn’t it a shame that there has to be unclarity about this?

Wouldn’t a great company promise their paying customers that the devices they buy protect their privacy and open the critical code to prove it (and enable others to find and solve the remaining flaws)?

Just asking

»Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today is pleased to join the linked data community by opening up access to its publication data via a linked data platform. NPG's Linked Data Platform is available at http://data.nature.com.
The platform includes more than 20 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements, including primary metadata for more than 450,000 articles published by NPG since 1869. In this first release, the datasets include basic citation information (title, author, publication date, etc) as well as NPG specific ontologies. These datasets are being released under an open metadata license, Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which permits maximal use/re-use of this data.«

nice

Nice because (a) it marks the librarians’ love for catalogueing web bookmarks as ludicrous:

»There’s some truth in what he says. We did try to corral websites into organized lists, which now seems a bit ludicrous, and many librarians worried that our skills were growing irrelevant as the web provided easy access to basic information and the number of reference questions declined.«

and (b) the author has a socia-minded and »non-imperial« attitude towards what libraries should be doing.

Command line json utility. Looks like a useful tool. But going through trough all the node and npm mess for such a detail?

Long article on the Starshop Troopers conundrum.

Presumably another warning for people who love the cloud or would think big companies (e.g. Apple) should be trusted with even simple things as the exact files you bought from them.

notes on copyright for TV vs software authors

sweet

Nice to see Mac Software makers think about people in more heterogenous environments as well. Too bad Apple show so little thinking along those lines.