Sunday February 26, 2006

This evening, the kids were off having fun with their friends at a birthday party, so we watched Nobody Knows. I thought I'd seize an opportunity to try a quick hReview:

0.2

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Feb 25, 2006 by Ian Kallen product Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

A moving, disturbing and excellent film (Japanese, english subtitles)

Based on a true story in Japan, this makes the New Years Home Alone Case look like a blip of a parental lapse. A young mother leaves her four kids alone for months on end in a small urban apartment. The eldest son, Akira, in an intense portrayal by adolescent Yûya Yagira, grows up real fast to look after his younger siblings. Despite a deliberate pace, the predicament that the kids were in, the sweetness of young Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) and the gritty inner-city ambience of Japan keep you rivetted to the story.

★★★★★

I've been meaning to take it for a spin for a while, this hReview was built with hReview Creator and then fiddled with a bit. I think I'll have muck with my stylesheets to give hReviews any kind of a reasonable display.

hreview japanese cinema microformats movies japan

Tuesday February 21, 2006

Today, Technorati launched a feature that enables you to identify and collect a few of your favorite things. You can select items as you browse search results, tags and so forth or you can identify them en masse by uploading an OPML file. I started mine by grabbing sixteen blogs that variously talk about the San Francisco Giants (it's almost the Good time of year, baseball time), here they are. As the baseball season gets underway, I expect I'll be refining this a bit. When opening day comes, I hope to have a truly browsable, searchable Giants blog portal of my very own. Hum baby!

Go to Technorati Favorites to start your own collection and put one of these on your blog:

technorati favorites baseball San Francisco Giants

Monday February 20, 2006

There's been recent much-ado about Krugle that I just don't get. The website isn't even open, yet folks are salivating as if they've never heard of such a thing as a code search engine. Not that I'm invested in anyway in Koders, Codase or Codefetch but they're providing a credible story already for that kind of specialized search. I'll be happy to try Krugle when they open their doors but the level of excitement in the posts about them seems really odd. Wired has some screenshots in their article about it. Let's see the web site live and then get all frothy about it, please! This just smells like more web 2.0 over-hype; people: control yourselves!

What I'd really find useful is code search built into proprietary projects. After reading Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code, I'm imagining building a Lucene full text index of a project at build time, as a maven plug-in or an ant task. The current tools out there to make source code and docs browsable would benefit so much from making them searchable; there's already a Jetty plugin, run your build, start your webserver and search the code base whenever you want to find a particular method call (or something. That would be cool!

krugle web 2.0 hype lucene koders codase codefetch ant maven

Sunday February 19, 2006

For once in a great while we have a political todo with a real smoking gun and it has been some of the most entertaining political hoopla the blogosphere has ever seen. It's like we're under an attack of laugh bombs from the QLGF (doncha know about the Quail Liberation Guerilla Front?). I posted about the I got shot by Dick Cheney page but the conversation fodder keeps on a-coming:

Zazzle

Cheney's Got A Gun (Aerosmith spoof) provides the video and soundtrack

The Bob Rivers Show - 102.5 KZOK Seattle (grr... packaging flash as a windows executable)

Dick Cheney Quail Hunt action packed game

Canned Hunting at its Cannedest

Dave Letterman's Top Ten

• Top Ten Dick Cheney Excuses
• Top Ten Surprises In The Dick Cheney Interview

And no shortage of hardy hars from Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and so forth.

I've been following this Technorati search for the blogosphere's yucks and the posts from About.com's Political Humor feed for most everything else:

• Cheney Shooting Humor Roundup
  Dick Cheney jokes are flying fast and furious in the wake of his shooting accident. Here are a few quick highlights to keep you in the humor loop: Cheney Cartoons and Parodies View a series of cartoons, doctored photos, and... ...
  ( Feb 17 2006, 07:40:08 AM PST )
• Late-Night Comics Declare Open Season on Cheney
  The late-night comedians took their first round of shots at Vice President Cheney in the wake of his shooting accident: "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 11:38:05 PM PST )
• Cheney Hunting T-Shirts & Bumper Stickers
  Dick Cheney's hunting accident has sparked a cottage industry for political bumper sticker and T-shirt sellers. Here's a sampling of popular Cheney hunting-related slogans available on various products at CafePress: Duck! It's Dick! I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 02:52:01 PM PST )
• Dick Cheney Shoots Guy in Hunting Mishap
  In what is sure to trigger a fusillade of comic barbs for weeks to come, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man while on a hunting expedition in Texas. Cheney apparently mistook his friend, Austin lawyer Harry Whittington,... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 07:58:02 AM PST )

And of course, there are the products:

In addition to the Ready... Fire... Aim t-shirt above, there's Dick Cheney: Reducing the burden on social security one old bird at a time and other stuff

Zazzle

I'd Rather Hunt With Dick Cheney Than Ride With Ted Kennedy and such bumper stickers, t-shirts, yadda yadda

CafePress

cheney humor quail letterman technorati zazzle cafepress political humor

Saturday February 18, 2006

The man is on a veritable rampage. It seems as though everybody is getting "mistaken" for quails, republican donors and other kinds of terrorists and paying for it big time. Here's the news on me:

Beware, Dick might be after you next. Check it out at WHAT SUCKER GOT SHOT BY THE VEEP? Fill in the form to get a keepsake of your very own.

cheney humor

Thursday February 16, 2006

Yahoo! has feeds, lot's of them. And they have a lot of sports feeds: NFL, NBA, NHL ... they have NASCAR but they don't have MLB? Sure, they have NCAA baseball but that doesn't count. Full coverage of baseball requires major league news. it's time for spring training to resume and they don't have MLB. What's up with that? Sure, too much hot dogs and cracker jacks are bad for you but c'mon. Are they communists or something? I bet they don't like apple pie, either.

Update
Well, they weren't apparent from those pages I looked on. But as some kind readers have advised me, there is a feed for MLB at [XML]. Thanks!

yahoo baseball hotdogs applepie

Tuesday February 14, 2006

Wow, Jeffrey Veen posted to Google Blog, the GOOG is now the proud owner of Measure Map. Congrats to the Adaptive Path folks!

google measuremap

Monday February 13, 2006

A common topic of discussion within Technorati is the audience that we serve. We strive to be of service to both the authors (bloggers) and non-bloggers (the blogosphere's newbie readers) alike as well as the advertisers who help pay us. Being generally focused on more geekly topics, I'm oft reminded that my interests are shared only amongst other "middle aged white guys talking about Ruby on Rails" (hey, I'm not that narrow!), but the blogosphere is deep and wide across topics, locales and other demographics.

Yep, even discounting the excess hype aspect, rails is cool. As a matter of fact, I'm pleasantly surprised with the easy read that Agile Web Development with Rails is. Buy it, it's a great book! Unfortunately, it's kind of an academic interest for me at this point. I actually want to reduce the number of programming languages that we're using at Technorati. While it's great to enable developers to contribute to and consume our service oriented architecture with the languages and frameworks that they are most productive in, there's also a battle against degeneration of standards and practices; the blade cuts both ways. Expertise sharing across different programming environments can be difficult and hiring the polylingual programmer is sufficiently challenging already (did I fail to mention that we're hiring?); simplify by constraining is one of the recurrent themes of AWDR's reference to "convention over configuration." In the case of programming language repertoire, less can be more. Anyway, since I'm the only one at Technorati (that I know of) with a rising enthusiasm for Rails, it's unlikely it'll be in use for work stuff anytime soon, bummer. Meantime, I'm just another white guy talking about ruby on rails... JAWGTAROR.

On the topic of who the bloggers are, it's an ever-unfolding story; Dave's State of The Blogosphere is one snapshot into it. Well, I'll be at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference's session on data oogling The Data Dump: Fun with Graphs and Charts with some more goodies. The Technorati platform has a rich set of data streams to tap, so this should be fun! See ya in San Diego!

etech rubyonrails technorati

Sunday February 05, 2006

The past few weeks have seen such a saturation of new services, it's mind boggling. The flickr and delicious acquisitions clearly stoked a yodling frenzy (y!a think?). Ya know, it seemed like in months past there were new services every few weeks or so: digg, reddit, memeorandum, personalbee, topix, tailrank, squidoo and on and on and on. But lately, it's hourly.

Now it's megtite, 30boxes, dabble, newroo, wink, tinfinger, podserve and chuquet. Goddamit, TechCrunch has a form to submit your very own web 2.0 venture for coverage. And of course, everyone's variously buzzword compliant with tags, feeds and ajax. Bubble 1.0 was a lot of fun but the sudden thud at the end kinda smarted, didn't it?

pours a glass of two buck chuck
  OK, I'm back.

I'm not diss'ing any of these services, there are a lot of really good ideas out there (nor OTOH am I endorsing any). But can they just take a few days off so we can get some work done? How about a moratorium? No more web 2.0 service launches for 48 hours, please! The funny thing is when the content is all self-referential (to the extent that the subject matter is the same or yet-another-new-service); when the services are capturing our artifacts and our artifacts are talking about them... the top story on megtite right now is coComment, on chuquet it's there along with dabble. It's what happens when you point the mic at the P.A. system.

Please, take a few days off. Go skiing or whale watching or something. Or go old school: content is king! e-commerce! woohoo!

web 2.0 moratorium yahoo flickr delicious

Sunday January 29, 2006

Off and on, I've been using a blog on blogger as a link blog and for other "quickies" to post. Tonight, I was closing some browser tabs with stuff I'd been reading about BerkeleyDB (JE) and went to post them here with ecto.

Strangely, ecto was giving me errors, so I check its console:

Response:
Your post has been saved as a draft instead of published. You must go to Blogger.com to publish your post. To prevent these errors in the future, request a review at:
http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?blogID=ABCDE
Sorry for the inconvenience

The irony here is that it's relatively trivial to produce a list of recently created spam blogs from the blogspot service merely by watching the publish activities on any given day. I do it all of the time. There's a massive amount of spam on that service that percolates up from some simple correlations. And Technorati's index is subsequently scrubbed often on that account. It's a little inconvient. Yet the blogspot people continue to rely on the "Flag As Objectionable" button as their main weapon. Get a clue! Look how trivial to game that system is; I'll surmise that I got googlebowled (bloggerbowled would be more apt) by some dingleberry black hats. Very inconvenient. Given the rampant fraud going on within blogger, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see.

Google is pretty much operating an open-relay, the blogosphere's equivalent of an SMTP spam-mill, because they lack the imagination to watch their own numbers and their spam rolls out unabated. This has been a ballooning problem for at least a year and a half. It's actually kinda inconvenient. Don't think they haven't been advised. Long before maverick-man coined the term "splog" I'd been sending my friends at the big G data on the extent of their problems. They know.

Dudes, go down the hall and ask the smart people at gmail how they do it. Now I have to go through the blogspot captcha gate instead of using ecto to post on their platform, hardly worth the bother.

Enough of the ironies and inconveniences. On the subject of ecto, please think kind thoughts for Adriaan. I am.

blogspot spam ecto splogs google technorati

Wednesday January 25, 2006

Google has a study of how HTML is really being used out in the wild. They've posted their results, Web Authoring Statistics

December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: it's all in there.

I think this is a demonstration of Google's expanding interest in grokking the semantics of that are latent in document structures. The results are broken down by

• Pages and elements
• Elements and attributes
• Classes (class="")
• HTTP headers
• Page headers, head element contents
• Metadata, meta tag contents
• The body element
• Text elements
• Table elements
• Link relationships (rel/rev)
• The a element
• The img element
• Scripting: The <script> element
• Editors and their custom markup

I'd love to see how the data changes over time. I suspect parts of the web are becoming more orderly (web 2.0 applications are likely using well formed document structures) while the web as a whole is probably atrophying (the vast installation base of crappy or misconfigured tools are likely the preponderant generators of markup). I'm anticipating a lot of interesting data emerging as the ascendance of microformats continues. Goog, looking forward to follow-up surveys!

google microformats html

Sunday January 15, 2006

Calvin Yu has published his Tails Firefox Extension that will surface the microformats on a page, looks good! The plugin shows the hCals and hCards in a page, he's got a nice screenshot of the hCard renderings. Adding contacts (like Smartzilla) and events would be nice but the plugin could just point at the gateways for contacts and events on Technorati. BTW, for Firefox you can one-click install Technorati search in the browser search box on the Technorati Tools page.

microformats firefox technorati

Saturday January 14, 2006

Last summer, Ryan King and Eran Globen blogged about citeVia and citeRel as a means of denoting conversation semantics between blog posts. A good summary and subsequent brainstorming is on the Microformats wiki. The blogosphere is currently rich with implicit distributed conversations. A little explicit microformat boost is, IMNSHO, exactly what's needed to nail the coffin in a lot of the crufty old centralized group systems (like Yahoo!'s and Google's). The future of virtual community is here and it is in conversing with blog posts.

There's a lot of discussion of primary citations and secondary props ("Via") but there's not as much on reply-to semantics except for in a few of Eran's posts. Isn't reply-to central to a conversation? Citations are more bibliographic (like when you're linking for a definition, a quote or to identify a source). On the other hand, conversations are about exchanged replies. This is as old as the Internet. Email clients put Reply-to headers in messages when you reply to them. RFC 850 defined it for NNTP over twenty years ago. Reply-to has been the binding for conversations for years, why stop now? That doesn't mean not to use cite and via, those are cool too but they're orthogonal to conversing and more pertinent to definition, quotation and source identification. I'm not entirely sure how I'd like to use via since it's kinda like citing a cite -- maybe it's not necessary at all. If you think of a via as a degenerative quote, then use quote. For instance, I think this makes sense (but then, I had a few glasses of wine earlier... I might not feel the same way in the morning):

I might agree that <a href="http://theryanking.com/blog/archives/2006/01/08/blogging-while-adult/" rel="reply-to">negative sarcasm</a>
happens (and worse) wherever there is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity" rel="cite">anonymity</a> it is one of an inductively provable 
aspect of human nature. Countless discussion boards have failed (and continue to) due to participant anonymity. However, it's also important to weigh 
in with the benefits of anonymity, would citizens of censored and oppressed societies be able to  engage in progressive debate without it? 
Take a look at the Global Voices' <blockquote cite="http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/05/23/second_draft_of_anonymous_blogging_guide.html">
<a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.eduglobalvoices/?p=179" rel="cite">Anonymous Blogging Guide</a</blockquote>.

distributedconversation microformats reply-to nntp yahoo google anonymity

Willie Dixon was built for comfort, Technorati embeds were built for speed!

Here's an inside tip: if you are a Technorati member and you claimed your blog a while ago, you can likely optimize how your Technorati embed is served and thus speed up how fast your page renders. Go to your account page for your first claimed blog (or go through them all one by one and click Configure Blog). Does the blog embed code match what's in your template? Load your blog page and View Source to compare. The old school embed code looked like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://technorati.com/embed/[BLOG-CLAIM-ID].js"> </script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.technorati.com/embed/[BLOG-CLAIM-ID].js"> </script>

technorati blog claim willie dixon speed comfort

Friday January 13, 2006

Technorati is hiring engineers for the website. You should be expert with PHP (including OO constructs, PEAR libraries, templating and application frameworks -- what works and what doesn't), savvy with XHTML and CSS -- be ready with referencable URLs to demonstrate, experienced with web 2.0 services (i.e. even if you don't blog you podcast or addictively use technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, digg, reddit, rollyo, squiddoo, etc) as well as having programmed in at least one language other than PHP and Javascript. Lotsa bonus points for using microformats and Ruby on Rails!

This position is full time, requires US work eligibility and is on-site (San Francisco, 3rd and Brannan). So, is it you? Check out the job listing and send your resume!

php technorati microformats rubyonrails xhtml css web20