Current listening: 9 Beet Stretch [via haddock], Beethoven's 9th symphony time stretched to 24 hours. As it says on cityofsound, the 5th movement is quite incredible. Colour me stunned. This is beautiful.
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This animated image of the Moon gives a great sense of its size [thanks Mike C].
XSH, An XML Editing Shell. Browse and edit XML documents as if they were directory structures. Cute. And yes, intriguing.
New Upsideclown today: "It used to be we didn't talk, I mean, it used to be that when we talked (which we did, all the time) I didn't notice the words and the sounds and the interpretation. We used to be two sides of the same brain, both of us both sides of the brain even!, a constant flux of thought and opinion, and the air between us glowed with body language, facial tics, murmurings, gestures, a brightness of constant information enveloping us both; both of us caught up in a rhythm, in the same dance, a polka of thought."
One of mine. Eleven Graceland endings. That's one ending for each track on the album, and thank you Paul Simon.
(Plug. Whelk: The best of Upsideclown is On Sale Now.)
Amazon Light [via Ben Hammersley], using the Amazon Web Services. Nicely done!
Amazon.com Web Services to build remote tools on top of the Amazon database search and collaborative filtering. Should be fun. See also, the Google Web APIs.
I believe in the coherence of coherences. Or, to put it another way, in the interconnectedness of all things.
Awesome diagram: Relationships of the SI derived units (first diagram on the page) [via FoRK].
The Dasher Project, a zooming text input interface.
I've seen Zoomable User Interfaces for filesystems and ZUIs for collaborative working; I'm not convinced. They're just novel interfaces to problems that could be solved in other ways. That's not to say ZUIs don't have a place, but we should look at what problem they're actually trying to solve. That is, adding a dimension of detail to otherwise flat data. And that's got to start much lower down than a groupware system, at the level of text documents. Our computer metaphors are based around single strings of texts structured by the newline and EOF [end of file] special characters. And because of this: We have discrete documents; Datatypes in programming languages are limited by this same metaphor, our datastructures are still pretty unstructured; everything is strings, strings, strings.
The alternative, and why ZUI researchers are looking too high: start by structuring the plain text document. Rebuild the last 50 years of computer history. Let us have trees, graphs and tables as fundamental datatypes to accompany the list and associative array. Constructs that break free of the text line. Only then work on replacing the spreadsheet, the www browser, the filesystem.
(Of course, it won't happen like this. We need to work in the meantime. Until then, it'll happen gradually because the requirement's there. Text is being structured by XML. Slowly standards and standard tools will emerge. Then application history will be infected from the present, Excel rewritten as ZigZag, and the rest. And the rest.)
After the Dot-Bomb [via iaslash]. Common problem areas for information retrieval in websites, and suggested solutions for the next generation. (This article has been very highly recommended by a number of 'sites I trust.)
How to write a Functional Spec, a Tutorial.
The W3C's Web Ontology Language is one to keep an eye on, a language to express classifications to enable the Semantic Web. Two problems I can see. Firstly, the maximum map size issue -- there's a sweet spot in terms of the maintainability, depth and breadth of classification systems, and I don't believe it scales to the dimensions of the www. Secondly, we've been wrestling with the ontology problem for thousands of years, since Aristotle, so I'd be inclined to label it as a Hard Problem. Or in other words, one that is unlikely to be solved by the W3C using XML (although I'd like to be proved wrong). An article that draws these strands together: From Aristotle to the 'semantic web'.
A 'site I'd like to find: Something like iaslash but for Library Scientists. If you know of one, please tell me.
ActiveBuddy, the guys behind SmarterChild and others, have just released the BuddyScript SDK. It's a simple way of scripting responses to word patterns the user enters to make chat bots on the ActiveBuddy framework, including ways of hooking into datasources. Not immediately useful for independent developers, but have a look at the Guide in the BuddyScript documentation -- it's interesting to see a way of solving the Conversation User Interface definition and state control problem (even though it isn't necessarily the one I'd use).
Commercial Breaks and Beats tracks music used in UK adverts (which is good, because without it I wouldn't know that the music in the current Lexus campaign is called Open Heart Zoo and by Martin Grech).
Extremely large and somewhat awesome aerial photograph of London Heathrow [via scribot].
The moral of this story is Don't Eat Live Octopus, but I think most of us knew that already [via Fark].
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Interconnected is copyright 2000—2011 Matt Webb.
