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New library for mobile Drupal applications

josh — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:55:37 +0000

Just released a library for mobile webservices on Drupal over on Patronizing.

A look into Detroit

josh — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:31:19 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot of Detroit blogs lately. One of my favorites is detroitblog. They manage to find human-interest stories about parts of Detroit most outsiders don’t see. The view of the city isn’t always pretty, but they manage to show the humanity of those involved. The articles are also carried in the Metro Times.

Glemie Dell Beasley

I bring this up because the Detroit News had a recent article on urban hunting. The thing is though, detroitblog did the same story months earlier.

The News story has some interesting new content, but you don’t get the background from the original. There’s no real history and “Little Mary” is missing. They took the real meat out of the story.

Maybe the local weeklies will start picking up readers as the dailies die off.

Why Android will kill the iPhone

josh — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:40:09 +0000

Somebody has created an application for Google’s Android OS that scans barcodes, searches for a corresponding torrent on bittorrent search sites, and automatically downloads the content: Torrent Droid.

This is why Android will kill the iPhone. Porn and warez and shady applications.

Apple is repeating the same damn mistake they made in the 80s with the Apple II series and the original Mac. They’re pushing yet another closed platform. Android is going to clean up in the marketplace in the next few years, just like IBM PC clones did back then.

Yeah, I know: user experience, design, blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. The incredibly varied marketplace that open development for the Android opens up will completely change the mobile software ecosystem. Oh, there will be crap. There will be an unbelievable amount of crap out there for it. But Sturgeon’s law and all that. ANYBODY with access to a relatively decent PC can develop for Android. I need to pay around $1k just to get the hardware to develop for an iPhone. Some crazy bastard is going to develop the Android’s VisiCalc, and then: Boom!

World of Goo publisher filing for bankruptcy?

josh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:15:49 +0000

I just heard a rumor that Brighter Minds, the indie publisher behind World of Goo, filed for bankruptcy. If you haven’t played the game, check it out. It’s available for the Wii on WiiWare and also for the PC.

The gameplay and concept is original and addicting, and the art is this great mix of Dr. Seuss and Tim Burton.

New information science blog: patronizing.org

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 21:45:00 +0000

I’ve started a new information science blog. It’s going to contain details about new information science related projects. Just added a new post about using Google Co-op for electronic references.

Microsoft Office Research Service for OAI repositories

admin — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:40:00 +0000

I implemented a Microsoft Office Research with Apache Axis. It provides access to MSU Libraries’ OAI Repository. Details here.

Amazonian magic

admin — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 22:17:10 +0000

I spent the weekend working on integrating our Library catalog with Amazon. Should have been working on more important things, but this is cool.I’m using greasemonkey to integrate our catalog with Amazon’s web service. For more details, check here: MSU … Continue reading →

use proper caution when driving your zombie badger

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 08:22:43 +0000

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User’s Notes. Published in Strange Horizons. via Slashdot.

And hordes of fierce Ninja Snowmen at The Kingdom of Loathing. via metafilter.

Automatic Bookmark Classification

admin — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 09:58:50 +0000

I had an idea a few weeks ago about using an online directory such as Yahoo or the Open Directory Project to help classify and organize bookmarks. You could connect to a bookmark server, and it would arrange your bookmarks into categories or whatever. Fortunately, the ODP provides their data as RDF, so I was able to parse it and index by URI. The information is now available through a XML-RPC interface. You can find more info here.

sweet code

admin — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 09:26:22 +0000

Ok, after posting my last post, I did some googling and found some other LJ members also interested in social network analysis type stuff. One of them is phyxeld who posted a perl script to get users with common interests here. Careful, the code is scary (perl makes my eyes bleed.) Anyways, I wrote some CGI scripts to wrap around it and put it up on the web. Check it out here. WARNING: I’ve modified the script to sleep for 3 seconds after every interest query, so if you’ve got 100 interests, it’s going to take AT LEAST 300 seconds to run. So open it up in another tab/window, and let it go. If there are any problems with running the scripts, let me know. It’s kinda fun to mess around with, but I really wish LJ offered a web services interface or something to get interests and other info.