del.icio.us links
dgen's Last.fm

Creative Commons License

home :: work :: projects :: blog  :: people

2008-03-31 (Mon)

GWP vs GWP vs GWP

Interesting coincidence of acronyms:

Gross World Product

vs Global Warming Potential

vs Global Water Partnership

2008-03-21 (Fri)

Convergence

Interesting convergences:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/…/global_threat_multiplier
“…calls for an integrated response to climate change and the wealth-poverty divide.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/20/freeourdata.politics
“A government study has finally acknowledged that making data free will be good for the economy, but the campaign still has a long way to go”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/20/interviews.internet
“As the world’s largest encyclopedia is launched, the capacity of online collaboration to change the world is ever more clear”

2008-03-19 (Wed)

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

Sad news today.

Clarke’s three laws;

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://www.clarkefoundation.org/

2008-03-16 (Sun)

Library of Congress on Flickr

This is very promising - the Library of Congress is starting to add its archives to Flickr

“The real magic comes when the power of the … community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images … which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. “

Solitary / Human Tamagochi

I was hoping that I was being ridiculous when creating the “ultimate reality TV show format” - Human Tamagochi - in 2001…

but apparently Fox TV thinks it’s a good idea.

According to Boing Boing and Mother Jones

As part of the “Torture Hits Home” package in the new issue of Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic has written a terrific story about the Fox reality TV show Solitary. The show features contestants who undergo brutal psychological and physical “treatments” with a $50,000 prize as the carrot on the stick.

2008-03-13 (Thu)

Amazing video site

This is great (GB) || awesome (US);

PAD.MA is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.”

The video timeline can be annotated with a lot of metadata.

Tech stats:
Built with TurboGears, a lot of javascript, some jquery, mysql and search by solr. Streamer, mod_annodex and several other Ogg related tools are used for the video backend. ideo playback requires VLC plugin or OggPlay plugin at the moment until browsers support the <video> tag.

The code is GPL and can be found at https://wiki.pad.ma and https://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/Source.

2008-03-4 (Tue)

Speaking at ETech and SXSW

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008 sxsw

AMEE is in the USA (California and Texas) from 2nd - 13th March.

I’m presenting at

1) ETech talk (8:45am Thursday, 6th March 2008, Marina Ballroom D)

2) SXSW panel (3:30-4:30pm Tuesday, 11th March 2008).

If you would like to meet, please get in touch.