King of the Nerds!!!

Librarian Powers Activate!

A higher quality version of the demo is available at the TED conference site here.

More info is also up at the Microsoft Live Labs page for the technology, called Photosynth.  There is a demo there as well but my crappy work computer can’t run it (lack of even a cheap graphics card).  Be warned it requires use of IE 6/7, which already negates its viability assuming they don’t shoot for browser independence for the official release.  It might also be Windows specific, but if a Mac or Linux user (running Wine or some other means of getting IE to work….I guess) knows different let me know.

There is some other cool stuff on there as well including the team blog and links to specialized collections, including a link to a project with the BBC called “Your Britain in Pictures”, that might be worth playing around with.

The wikipedia entry provides a bit of trivia, some similar products, and other interesting tidbits.  In particular the science behind the whole deal: photogrammetry.  The photgrammetry article has a solid list of external links if you’re interested in finding out more.  Is it me or does photogrammetry have a delightfully 19th century science sound to it?

Last National Geographic has a video demo of the Stonehenge constructed using Photosynth.

Enjoy.

In case you didn’t know you can now use your Google account to sign-in/up over at Zoho.com.  In fact, assuming this works correctly, that is exactly how I published this post.  Huzzah!

Our new library website is LIVE!

I’ve been working on this for what amounts to a year or more now.  Long, I know, but I learned as I went. While I knew basic HTML when I started, enough to put together a simple page, I had to learn XHTML, CSS and, eventually PHP.  The site has seen multiple iterations prior to the final design but I’m pleased with how things have finally turned.

The main page uses SimplePie to display a couple of RSS feeds as content generated by the amazingly useful listgarden generator.  The calendar is a bit of damn useful PHP developed by James Cridland.  Some areas are still a work in progress, some are simple movement of old content into a new package, but overall I’m happy with how things turned.

Browser compatability isn’t perfect.  An advanced CSS3 selector used to pick out Children’s events on the calendar only works in Firefox, Opera, and IE7.  However in most instances everything should work in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2 (and FF 3 beta 5), and Opera 9.x.  Give it a whirl and feel free to leave comments/suggestions/thoughts.

One last note, not everthing is standards compliant….yet.  PHP is a pain in the ass to validate for that, at least as far as I can tell, so if anyone has input I’d definatley appreciate any advice in that regard.

This represents my first “real” website design and I’m pretty proud of it so try not to bruise my ego too much.

From Ars Technica:

In the decision, the justices discuss the differences between IP addresses and return addresses on envelopes when discussing whether or not Internet subscriber information deserves an expectation of privacy. The justices say that IP addresses are sufficiently anonymous to justify privacy protection because, theoretically, only the Internet service provider can identify who is associated with a specific IP address.  Link.

Interesting stuff that, as Ars points out, is likely to become a more important topic down the road. How many times have you watched a crime procedural where the IP was magically tracked back to a person/address? In all the times I saw that I happen I never once considered that it might even be a violation of a person’s privacy.  But the judges make a good point, and Ars highlights, that:

The State compares IP addresses to the return addresses found on the outside of envelopes, which carry no privacy protection. But there is an important difference: letter writers choose to include their address on an envelope. They may also opt for anonymity and list no return address. Internet users have no such choice because they must have an IP address to access a website. In addition, the string of numbers that comprises an IP address and can be collected by a website is both less revealing and less public than a name or street address posted on an envelope,

As I said, interesting, a certainly food for thought as you do your daily browsing.

Saws on my BoingBoing feed:

We Tell Stories, is an online site made for Penguin publishing in which 6 authors are telling 6 stories based on classic works through the digital medium of the internet and using non-traditional methods.

How non-traditional?  The first story The 21 Steps uses google maps while Fairy Tale uses a choose-your-own-adventure form model.  While I doubt any of these will taking over the publishing world anytime soon it is certainly an interesting experiment worth a look.

This story is too ridiculous not to pass along. A guy in Philly gets his TV, Xbox 360 and laptop stolen. He goes to the cops but doesn’t get much help (probably because they are so busy not solving the crapload of murders in the city that they don’t have time to not solve a burglary case). So he puts his story up on Digg.com and, after some ill-advised taunting from one of the burglars over Xbox Live, the gaming community manages to track down the thieves and harass them into returning the stolen goods.

I’m not even sure how to read this. It will definitely be sold in online forums as a tale of the collective might of the gaming community. And certainly if you ever get gamers to stop splitting down platform lines and all move in one direction they can do great things. But the incident is certainly problematic, although not for the online vigilant angle. The methods involved underline the problems of the internet. A group of geeks were able to start with a person’s GamerTag and end up with everything about him: name, address, photos, videos. I’d be way more worried about people using that expertise maliciously than about a group of gamers harassing a petty thief.

Once again coming my way via Rock Paper Shotgun is this amusing blog entry from PC Gamer’s Craig Pearson.  Anyone who has played an FPS on a PC knows the phenomenon and most have accepted it at face value.  Not Mr. Pearson though.  So join him as he delves the dark underbelly of online gaming in a quest to understand the hearts and minds of those strange creatures who sit alone on servers across FPSland.

Also, internet users, might take note that a new Net Neutrality Bill has surfaced. The bill seems to be a solid bit of work aimed at actually helping us (the consumers) and looking to providing us (the internet users) a viable avenue of complaint and action.  From the proposal itself:

The importance of the broadband market place to citizens, communities, and commerce warrants a thorough inquiry to obtain input and ideas for a variety of broadband policies that will promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.

The bill goes on to discuss amendments to the Communications Act of 1934 to protect the posterity and virility of the internet as a free and open forum for the exchange of ideas by “adopting and enforcing baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.” The bill doesn’t stop there, it goes on to call for an examination of current and recent practices of broadband providers with regards to anything ranging from spam protection (”unsolicited commercial electronic mail,”), packet handling and traffic handling (”practices by which network providers manage or prioritize network traffic”) to further policies increasing consumer rights within the ‘net (”potential of policies promoting openness in spectrum allocation…through protection from unreasonable interference by network owners of an open marketplace for speech and commerce in content, applications, and services”). The bill manages to go even further, calling for “Broadband Summits” that, to my untrained eyes, amount to a federally backed campaign to promote and examine the use of broadband in a fair and decent manner in a way not only transparent to the public but through which they can participate in further legislation.

The bill, in my opinion, isn’t so much a means to an end as it is an opportunity for further change. Is that change necessarily for the better? I can’t honestly say. But I can say that I think no change at all is worse.

I’m sure I’ve posted about this before, but I wanted to mention it again because I love it so damned much.  Netvibes, like the more well known igoogle, is a customizable homepage.  Using it’s various plugins you can load things like gmail (and other email clients), RSS feeds, and any other of productive (and not so productive) widgets into a web page.  Netvibes is probably my favorite webapp (discounting gmail) so far and find the abiltiy to but all my frequent stops on the web in one place not only damned handy as well as horribly addictive.   Did I mention it’s free?  iGoogle is a fine app, but I’ve found that I’ve enjoyed my experience with Netvibes more; though I can’t quite put my finger on why.  Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Some pics:

This is my homepage with feeds for email, wikipedia, google maps, and various time killing feeds.

Clicking on any like to a story from an RSS feed opens up this window.  It lists all the stories on the left with a view of the post on the right.

OK, I’ve migrated may older blogger stuff to wordpress! Yay! Most of my recent blogs were on mysapce (boo!), but I’ve moved a number (the newest) over here. I’m waaaaaaay to lazy to go back and tag them with useful stuff so deal with it. Anyhoo, I’m hoping that wordpress (and my new fondness for xhtml and css) will aide me in keeping this thing (relatively) up to date, but we’ll see. Anyhoo, should have an actual post within the next day or so.