December 2007 Archives
"Ask SFist" has a highly technical explanation of the subprime mortgage fiasco that somehow even the most math-challenged can follow.
Just discovered this year-old series of blog posts by Alex Faaborg at Mozilla on making structured data in web pages discoverable and actionable by the browser:
0: Introduction
You may remember me writing about GreaseDoggy, a Greasemonkey script that the Cosmo team put together a few weeks back for detecting events in web pages and adding them to Cosmo calendars. At the time I remembered seeing a Firefox extension for microformat detection, but I couldn't remember its name, and I didn't bother to search hard for it. Well, that extension was Operator, and these blog posts re-introduced it to me.
Operator adds a toolbar with menus for each type of microformatted data it finds in a web page - addresses, contacts, events, locations, "tagspaces", bookmarks, and "resources" (I'm not yet sure what those are). For each item, you can choose from a list of handlers to take an action on that data.
For example, when viewing The Bad Plus at Villa Montalvo, you can:
Pretty exciting stuff! I'll try to bribe our team to make this happen.
0: Introduction
You may remember me writing about GreaseDoggy, a Greasemonkey script that the Cosmo team put together a few weeks back for detecting events in web pages and adding them to Cosmo calendars. At the time I remembered seeing a Firefox extension for microformat detection, but I couldn't remember its name, and I didn't bother to search hard for it. Well, that extension was Operator, and these blog posts re-introduced it to me.
Operator adds a toolbar with menus for each type of microformatted data it finds in a web page - addresses, contacts, events, locations, "tagspaces", bookmarks, and "resources" (I'm not yet sure what those are). For each item, you can choose from a list of handlers to take an action on that data.
For example, when viewing The Bad Plus at Villa Montalvo, you can:
- map Villa Montalvo with Google or Yahoo! by either street address or geographic coordinates
- download a vCard for Villa Montalvo (on OS X, this launches Address Book and prompts me to add an entry)
- add Villa Montalvo as a Yahoo! contact
- download the event as iCalendar (on OS X, this launches iCal and asks me to choose a calendar to add the event to)
- add the event to 30 Boxes, Google or Yahoo! calendars
- download a KML file (which presumably would open Google Earth if I had it installed)
- search del.icio.us, flickr, Ma.gnolia, Technorati, Upcoming, Yedda, and YouTube for things tagged "blues", "jazz", or "music"
Pretty exciting stuff! I'll try to bribe our team to make this happen.
I’ve written an experimental implementation of a URI Template processor for javascript. Based on the current spec. It supports IRI Templates also.-- James Snell
Part One
Part Two
Hulu test!
This is brilliant: bike-sharing. Especially awesome: the first 30 minutes are free, and you can return the bike anywhere in the city. Need to go downtown to get some new shoes? Grab a nearby bike, ride down, drop it off, do your shopping, grab a nearby bike, ride home, drop it off. Pay nothing, use no gasoline, and save a car parking space. Absolutely genius. Makes me want to get off my fat chair ass and finally learn to ride.
WorldChanging
WorldChanging
So yea, a couple days ago I discovered a really great Cosmo bug whereby other people could create resources inside my WebDAV home collection. I fixed it pretty quickly, but it was bad enough that we had to kick out a 0.10.1 release. That one was my fault. Sorry!
Chandler Blog
Chandler Blog
So what has (director Chris Weitz) learned in postproduction? That fantasy can quickly become a reality. "There was no effect we aimed to do that was not possible for our guys," he says. "It just comes down to how many nerds times how many processors in the render queue."Wired
Microsoft released the final version of the SSE (now FeedSync) spec on Tuesday.
James Snell has some great comments.
I'm interested in how this all shakes out because Cosmo implements its own synchronization protocol, Morse Code for synchronizing data between the server and Chandler Desktop. The data model is EIM, something Chandler-specific, rather than Atom, but the synchronization concepts are the same - check for changes since some previous point, identify deleted items, etc. I'm generally more interested in using protocols, data models and representation formats designed by the community than ones designed by me ;) And, the more work that can be handled using Abdera, the better.
James Snell has some great comments.
I'm interested in how this all shakes out because Cosmo implements its own synchronization protocol, Morse Code for synchronizing data between the server and Chandler Desktop. The data model is EIM, something Chandler-specific, rather than Atom, but the synchronization concepts are the same - check for changes since some previous point, identify deleted items, etc. I'm generally more interested in using protocols, data models and representation formats designed by the community than ones designed by me ;) And, the more work that can be handled using Abdera, the better.
iwanttoseethat.com is a cute little site that lets you and your friends flag the movies you want to see and plan events to go to those movies together. A group of us used the site to organize an outing Friday night for The Golden Compass. Very nice, I like.
The next step after planning a movie night is of course to put it on my calendar. It would be handy if iwanttoseethat had a button that I could click to automatically add it to my Cosmo calendar at Chandler Hub. As it stands, I have to load my calendar in the browser and manually enter the details, copying them from the iwanttoseethat page. That's a minute of time I could be using to update my Facebook status!
A couple weeks ago we came up with a little Cosmo hack called GreaseDoggy that helps save me that minute. It's a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that detects event information in web pages and presents just such a button to stick an event on a Cosmo calendar.
In order for the script to find an event in a web page, the event data has to be marked up with hCalendar, a microformat for calendar data. It doesn't seem like many people know much about microformats yet, but some big web sites have caught on to hCalendar, like Upcoming and Eventful. hCalendar's really simple, and marking up the event info in a web page is a lot simpler than publishing a separate iCalendar resource describing each event. And imagine how much harder it would be to write a simple tool like this if it had to process a bloated steaming sack of iCalendar. So hopefully tools like GreaseDoggy will help increase the awareness of microformats and get web site authors using them to enable simple but awesome uses like this.
Of course now that I can one-click add events to my calendar from web pages, I want GreaseDoggy to detect more types of data. A Cosmo calendar is really just a collection of items that can be marked ("stamped") as events, tasks, and/or mail messages. I'd love to be able to copy a message from GMail into my calendar so that later I can mark it as a task and give it a due date or whatever. And maybe someday we can migrate from a Greasemonkey script to a full-fledged Firefox extension so that we can present a real UI for configuration, hook into right-click context menus, and so on.
But in the meantime, if you find GreaseDoggy useful, hound web page authors to mark up their events so the script can find them. And let me know so I can convince my boss to let us spend more time on fun tools like this.
The next step after planning a movie night is of course to put it on my calendar. It would be handy if iwanttoseethat had a button that I could click to automatically add it to my Cosmo calendar at Chandler Hub. As it stands, I have to load my calendar in the browser and manually enter the details, copying them from the iwanttoseethat page. That's a minute of time I could be using to update my Facebook status!
A couple weeks ago we came up with a little Cosmo hack called GreaseDoggy that helps save me that minute. It's a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that detects event information in web pages and presents just such a button to stick an event on a Cosmo calendar.
In order for the script to find an event in a web page, the event data has to be marked up with hCalendar, a microformat for calendar data. It doesn't seem like many people know much about microformats yet, but some big web sites have caught on to hCalendar, like Upcoming and Eventful. hCalendar's really simple, and marking up the event info in a web page is a lot simpler than publishing a separate iCalendar resource describing each event. And imagine how much harder it would be to write a simple tool like this if it had to process a bloated steaming sack of iCalendar. So hopefully tools like GreaseDoggy will help increase the awareness of microformats and get web site authors using them to enable simple but awesome uses like this.
Of course now that I can one-click add events to my calendar from web pages, I want GreaseDoggy to detect more types of data. A Cosmo calendar is really just a collection of items that can be marked ("stamped") as events, tasks, and/or mail messages. I'd love to be able to copy a message from GMail into my calendar so that later I can mark it as a task and give it a due date or whatever. And maybe someday we can migrate from a Greasemonkey script to a full-fledged Firefox extension so that we can present a real UI for configuration, hook into right-click context menus, and so on.
But in the meantime, if you find GreaseDoggy useful, hound web page authors to mark up their events so the script can find them. And let me know so I can convince my boss to let us spend more time on fun tools like this.
Man, I feel like I have been fixing bugs forever. Someday I'll build a real feature again.
Chandler Server (Cosmo) 0.10 released
Chandler Server (Cosmo) 0.10 released
That area of SOMA was pretty dodgy when I lived at Maz 11 years ago, but I don't recall anybody ever being killed outside my door. Douchebags rolling around the block pumping grotesquely distorted bass, sure. Loud slutty crowds in that shitbag club's parking lot, always. Death - somehow we managed to avoid that.
SFist
SFist
I've moved here from Tumblr. Want to write a little more about my work, and I
think a more extensive blog system is the way to go. Installed Movable
Type 4 and will be updating here now on. I’ve copied a few
entries from over there to preserve continuity. If I get around to it, I’ll
bring over the rest of the data from Tumblr, Vox, my old MT installation,
and maybe LJ too. Probably too lazy though.