These are the days
Well I was watching my TV
with a quart of old Milwaukee
catching up on all the murderers
when the telephone starts to ring
It turns out that it's the President
telling me if he gets my vote
I will soon be wearing a mink coat
coz he'll make all of us Americans rich as kings
Well he had me hook line and sinker
even though it was just a recording
till the news showed guys on Wall Street
trying to fly without their jets
So I fed my german shepherd
checked the canned goods in the basement
and hoped the president's replacement
hasn't tried to get my telephone number yet.
These are the days I wish I'd been an eskimo instead
These are the days I wish I'd stayed in bed
- 'These are the days', Human Radio (Ross Rice), 1990
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"Build Your Own Web Archive" at OSCON
Tomorrow, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, I'll be presenting a session about the Internet Archive's open source web archiving tools. Full details:
Build Your Own Web Archive: archive.org's Open Source Tools to Crawl, Access & Search Web Captures
Gordon Mohr (Internet Archive, Web Group)
11:35am Friday, 07/25/2008
Web Applications
Location: E145
The Internet Archive, with support from other libraries around the world, has helped develop a collection of open source tools in Java to support web archiving. These include the Heritrix archival web crawler, “Wayback” for replaying historic web content, and extensions to Nutch for web archive full-text search. This session will explain the design and capabilities these tools, and quickly demo their use for the creation of a small personal web archive.
Heritrix has been designed for faithful and complete content archiving but has also found use in other web search contexts. Wayback allows URL-based lookup and follow-up browsing of archived web content. Nutch, as applied to archival web crawls, allows Google-style full-text search of web content, including the same content as it changes over time. Together, they provide everything necessary to archive and access accurate historical records of web-published content.
Also: last month James Turner of O'Reilly Media spoke to me in advance of OSCON. You can read or hear the interview at:
Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives.
Labels: heritrix, internet archive, nutch, nutchwax, open source, oscon, speaking, wayback
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The Presidio, a land of beauty and danger, "rendered safe"
We heard a loud "boom" at the office this afternoon...
SJMN: World War I mortar shell found in San Francisco Presidio
A San Francisco police bomb squad determined that a suspicious device found in the city's Presidio this morning was a World War I mortar shell, Sgt. Wilfred Williams said.
At about 10:20 a.m., a person walking a dog reported seeing the device in the Presidio area at Inspiration Point off of Arguello Boulevard.
U.S. Park Police responded, deemed the device it to be suspicious and notified San Francisco police.
According to Williams, authorities cleared out the surrounding area as they investigated the device. The bomb squad determined the device was a World War I mortar shell and it was rendered safe at about 2:45 p.m.
Labels: bomb squad, explosions, presidio, ww1
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Animated regular-expression prime test in faster Regex Powertoy
This
thread at News.YC motivated me to deploy some recent improvements to
Regex Powertoy. It's now noticeably faster, especially for animating regex matching, and 'matchmarks' more reliably capture the entire syntax/display/animate settings.
Considering the prime-testing regex mentioned in the thread:
/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
We can watch this match number 49 -- essentially discovering a factor and confirming that 49 is not prime -- by visiting this matchmark:
/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
We can watch the regex fail to match 47 -- confirming its primality -- with this matchmark:
/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
We can further fancy things up by including a substitution string to replace not-prime numbers, and use the 'show edits' highlight mode:
s/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/not prime/
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Note that clicking on the matched range brings up a detail view showing subgroup matches -- in this case the group's length is the factor found.
Note that Regex Powertoy requires Java -- a hidden applet makes use of Java's better-than-Javascript regex engine. (The recent changes have included replacing an old version of Prototype with the latest jQuery, and minimizing the slow JS-to-Java callouts by returning results in batches.)
Labels: applet, javascript, jquery, prime numbers, regex, regular expressions, rexexp
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AppleTV that's really TV and really Apple?
BusinessWeek strings together some 2008 predictions that are plausible without being mundane:
Ten Likely Events in 2008.
One in particular rings true:
While Apple TV has been a dud, Steve Jobs & Co. will make an aggressive play this year for the most important screen in the house. Perhaps Apple will even make a gorgeous TV itself, with all the necessary Net capabilities inside. And if Apple can't do it, someone else will.
A real television is such an obvious fit for Apple's entertainment strategy that a 'surprise' announcement at MacWorld wouldn't surprise me. The existing
AppleTV is a weak, confusing offering: a set-top box, really, that just mirrors things from a nearby computer's ITunes to a TV -- without even offering top-of-the-line 1080 HD output.
A real internet-capable TV makes more sense. So what might it look like? Big-screen LCD, full 1080 resolution, and an independent capability to connect to ITunes, for sure -- so it can be the sleek hub of home entertainment, rather than a peripheral.
One or more IPod docks on top -- so it can be used to charge, load or playback from the whole family's personal media devices. A camera and so-simple-grandma-can-use-it interface for video calls.
And the remote? An IPod Touch -- or just use any existing IPhone/Touch, which discovers the TV via wifi, or the possibly-embedded AirPort access point.
Now THAT would fit the name and brand promise of 'AppleTV'.
And since this is all just wild speculation, maybe it'll also have some funky new gestural interface, driven from the camera, infrared sensors, and/or inertial sensors. Then controlling your TV could be as fun as flicking through the IPhone interface, or playing a Wii game. Hell, make it so you can play Wii-like motion games DURING your video call with grandma.
I wouldn't bet on it but I'd love to see it!
Labels: apple, appletv, iphone, ipod, itunes, macworld, predictions, wii
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