Technical Ramblings

I’m not sure if I’ve posted on this before, but I noticed a few new features in the site, so I’m going to mention it again.

FilmTrust is a film rating site, much like the ratings built into NetFlix or other similar services. You rate things you’ve seen, and FilmTrust offers to you suggestions as to what you might want to look into seeing. However, instead of just basing it on what movies you’ve seen and what everyone else thought about those movies, it also uses social connections to make these estimates. You create a “friends” network, and give each of these friends ‘ratings’, which determines how much affect their opinions have on your recommendations.

According to the tour, this calculation is “… calculated using the trust ratings you have for your friends, what they have for their friends, and how those people rated the film.”

One of the cooler aspects of the project is that it is rich with information in RDF. So, you can take the information from the site, and pull it into a local RDF store, and manipulate it ot your heart’s content. If you wanted to do your own suggested ratings system by looking at the reviews that each of your friends have offered, you can do that: you could, indeed, redisplay much of the information available on the site solely by using the RDF information and doing your own calculations. (This would, I’m pretty sure, bring up the issue of copyright, so I wouldn’t recommend it without at least discussing it with the project maintainers first.)

FilmTrust is an academic research project being run by Jennifer Golbeck. More information is available on the About FilmTrust page.

Other people have already written on the topic of FilmTrust: MortenF has some nifty toys based around it, Danny’s post a month ago talked about it, and there’s always the random non-english post when you get any project large enough to get a significant following.

I’d like to see more people joining it, especially people with an interest in good computer related movies, because I need some suggestions. So, join today, and add me as a friend!

Sometimes, problems have easy solutions. The “Get your comments emailed to you” plugin was not enabled. I reenabled it in the admin interface, and all is well. So, you should be getting your comments emailed to you.

Turning on “Allow only commenters with previously approved comments” somehow let about a dozen spams get through: apparently this setting doesn’t apply to trackbacks, or something. So, for the time being, it’s going to continue being set so that I have to approve all comments.

Set up Subversion today at work: rambled about that, and how awesome it is, and how happy I am I did it, over on noets, specifically, the subversion post. Posting via IRC is easier than posting via WordPress when I’m distracted by taking care of the chillins.

Plans for this weekend: Get new furniture in the bedroom, finish flickr posting app (specifically, figure out how to set it up so people can upload multiple photos at once), then move back to working on traffic cam stuff. If they’re open on the weekend, grab a sagonet server. Solicit customers 😉

Again, if anyone wants webhosting, where I’ll install things for them, at $10/month on a Linux box (barring unreasonable use cases, like multi terabytes of traffic a month, or more than 10 gig or so of hard drive space), feel free to talk to me and we’ll see if I can work something out that would work well for you.

Has anyone been using the “Get comments to this post emailed to me” option? Is it still working? I upgraded some stuff about a week ago, and I haven’t been able to tell if this feature is still working: I haven’t seen a lot of proof to that effect, which makes me wonder if it isn’t.

If you can check back if you think you should have gotten a comment, and let me know…. actually, nevermind. I just tried to check out the subscription manager, and it’s borked by a missing function, so I’m betting that the whole thing is busted.

Sigh, what a pain. I really think this is a useful feature, so I will be reinstalling it, although I have no idea if I’ll be able to keep the subscriptions.

If you were expecting email replies, you should check back on the site: You probably haven’t gotten them. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Additionally, I recently modified the design of the weblog a bit: I changed the Gallery 2 Recent Image thing to be a flickr recent images feed (fetched using Magpie RSS), which I’ve been updating more recently. I’ve also modified the CSS so that the paragraphs run closer together: the default WP template practically double spaces the lines, which was bugging the heck out of me until I fixed it 😉 If it’s more b0rked in any of your browsers, feel free to let me know, but I even tested it in IE at 800×600, and it looks pretty decent, so I’m happy with it.

While I’m on the topic of design… check out cutting edge CSS: it’s an absolutely amazing site demonstrating the nifty things that can be done in CSS.

Since I’ve gotten a couple people asking about it – my application for my phone to post to flickr has a basic shell built, and works, but I’m llooking to add a few more features and make it more user friendly before I post the code for you all to use.

Featureset right now:
* Ability to store options, including default tags, username, password, and security
* Browsing through filesystem in a filebrowser and selecting a photo to upload
* Uploading a photo, and adding additional tags to the defaults

Other Features that I want to implement:
* Actually respecting the security that’s stored.
* Uploading more than one image at a time
* Less confusing interface.

So, it’s still on my todo list, and I’m going to continue to work on it, it just hasn’t gotten done yet. Mostly because I’ve been too busy reading Snow Crash.

One thing I’m not sure if people want to do is type in a title and description for the image while uploading the image. I don’t have any t9 enabled input boxes that are easy to use. So, it’s a question of whether I want to use the more difficult (and possibly confusing) Form box, or if I want to just skip it for the time being.

Actually, now that I think about it, the appuifw.Form wouldn’t be as bad of a way to go as I thought it would be… Hm. Will have to check that out.

The W3C fifth annual Tech Plenary is in Boston, Massachusetts this week, meaning there’s a large group of the people who I typically work with exclusively over IRC very nearby. Unfortunately, free time is not exactly forthcoming during the daytime, so I missed out on the Semantic Web Interest Group F2F meetings. I was able to grab a few tidbits over IRC: one of the more interesting ones is the fact that Forum Nokia is run with a lot of metadata underneath, as Patrick Stickler’s Slides demonstrate. (Powerpoint files, so a powerpoint viewer of some kind is required.)

In addition, Patrick mentioned a series of other links, which are available from the irc chump for Patrick’s slides. One of the more interesting ones to me is the Device Profile Search, which I assume works off the RDF available from URLs like, for example, the Nokia6100 Device Profile. A list of profiles of this kind from a number of manufacturers is available from the UAProf Profile Repository, a number of which have been aggregated into my Redlandbot service, and are used periodically for answering questions like “What Java Platform does the Nokia 3650 run?” (The answer, in machine readable form, is “Profile/MIDP-1.0, Configuration/CLDC-1.0, rdf:Bag”. This service subject to change at any time.)

So, seeing some demos of that from Patrick was cool. I’m still hoping to catch some of the Semantic Web people lingering in town for a F2F meetup, if nothing else than for getting my picture included in some codepiction stuff for demos. Hoping to gather some people either in the next couple evenings sometime, or on Saturday if anyone is left.

New category here on Technical Ramblings: Reading, for things I’m reading, plan to read, want to read, think you should read, am glad I never read, etc. For the most part, I’ll just mention books here unless they’re technical related, since this is tending to be my “technical” weblog compared to my “personal” LiveJournal.

Right now, I’m reading Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Although this may surprise some of you, I’ve never read anything by the author before. I had never even heard of him until just recently. About a month ago, when MS announced that an image-rendering exploit in their code made it possible to hijack your machine by using a specially formatted buddy image on MSN, someone on /. responded with “Already been done, see Snow Crash.” At the time, I paid the commenter no mind: but later that day, I discovered that I had a copy of Snow Crash sitting on my bookshelf. I set it aside at the time, but grabbed it again later, and started reading it over the weekend.

Snow Crash is a book describing a somewhat surrealistic future, in the relatively near future: it describes kids who are only two generations down from WW2 vetrans, so it can’t be more than a dozen or two years in the future. It’s an interesting world: where governments have stopped being national things and instead become small, suburb level regions controlled by all kinds of specific franchises, from the Mob to Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. There are a million vague edges throughout the story: for example, the US Government still exists, but only in tiny pockets, and there’s no indication of what control it actually has over anything.

The book fits right into the niche of books that I just “can’t put down” – where a lot of vague areas are left in the plot, but the level of detail is incredible. The description of the creation of the Metaverse, something like a visual version of the present day Internet, goes into the creators – the ACM – and the way that it was created, the size of it, how it works, and more. Descriptions of single rooms take up multiple pages, while the development of the “real” world as a whole is left almost entirely to the reader’s imagination, with minor tips dribbled throughout.

I’m not quite done yet – I’ve been reading it for two days straight, but forgot it at work tonight – but thus far it’s been an extremely entertaining book, drawing me away from IRC and the computer in general, something that very few books succeed in doing.

Other books I’ve read recently: Jumper and The Runaway Jury. The first was a reread, the second a first time.

Wombat takes charge : learning how easy it is to work with location stuff in Python, he starts work on a project that sounds a lot like the work I’ve started on locative stuff. Looks like I need to get back to that…

As FrankK reports, Darla will record an orgasm ringtone if she gets requests on her blog for one. Think she’ll follow through? I’m interested in finding out.

Flickr stuff is close to done. I’ve got a user interface put together, using code stolen from the included file browser provided by Nokia. You can browse through, select a picture to upload, and upload it, using the given tags, security, and stored username/password. It’s not ready for prime time yet, because I want to set up a way to do multiple uploads at once. I’d also like to be able to type in titles/descriptions, but the limitations of the UI widgets available blocked me there. I don’t have anything that I can type t9 into with ease, so getting the data out would be a pain. Is it so much to ask for a t9 enabled appuifw.query window?

Jess asked me yesterday if I’ll ever make any money hacking these things together. My answer is probably not: I don’t like the idea of charging people money for something. I’ve never even asked for donations, because I just think it’s not fair to expect people to pay me for the work I do. Despite this, if anyone wants to offer me money to do what I’m doing, I’d be glad to take it. I really need to move this stuff to a server that isn’t hosted in a house with four cats running around: they have a tendancy to pull out the ethernet cable nightly, which means downtime for everyone.

I’m looking to move stuff soon, I’ve had my eyes on one of the Sagonet bargain servers for a while. (The reason I’m going for my own box rather than a virtual box type solution is memory based: I want to run julie off a different machine than my own, and that requires me to use a hell of a lot more memory than any virtual hosting solution I’ve yet found.) The price is good, it’s just that initial extra setup fee that’s putting me off.

However, every day that goes by is another day that I realize I really just need to move stuff and be done with it. Waking up every morning and having to restart my menagerie of bots is getting old. I want something stable.

Is anyone looking for hosting? $10/ a month, and I’ll do all the work to install anything you want! 🙂

I’ve worked out how to post images to flickr using HTTPlib and Python from the flickrup source code. I have no idea if this is the best way to do it, but it seems to work, so I’m writing an application to surround it in a UI. In the process, I’m creating a pretty generalized application framework that I should be able to use on some of my other applications. So, I’m enjoying that.

Some things that it’s done so far:
* Established a couple generalized option configuration methods, which let me load and save from a file
* Created what i hope is a UI for changing those options (which will change per-app)
* Added in some general stuff to make sure the UI works, like locks to make sure the application doesn’t just quit

I’m probably not going to release the framework on its own, at least not until I come out with the Flickr app that I’m writing it for, simply because I’m writing the functions as I go along. If it ends up being worthwhile and reusable enough, I may list it seperately on my page of Symbian Projects.

I think that this could be really fun for me to play with, and I hope I get it working soon, because it seems like a cool application idea. The basic idea behind it is to combine the filebrowser code that is included with the examples in the distribution with a flickr uploading option, as well as the option to view the images. Granted, I can’t do anything other than open them in the default viewer right now, but then at least people can see what they’re getting into.

I’m starting to get to the point where I could see how having a bit more advanced symbian UI widgets would be helpful: something like Putty’s menu, where things can actually be in submenus and the like. I can also see how it’d be way more difficult to code, so I’m not lamenting the lack, just noticing it more than I used to as I get into more and more complex applications. One thing that I have learned is that the Text widget makes a really good way to keep messages and so on on the screen without any complex threading or anything, which is nice. Little things like a progress bar (which seems to be underway) might still be nice though.

Just some random meandering thoughts while I’m writing. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have an app at least starting to take shape for Flickr, and maybe I can devote some more time to the traffic cam project too.

I’m looking to find out whether anyone has any desire to see new applications based on RDF. What would you like to see that hasn’t been done yet? What do you think would be a cool demonstration?

This can be web apps, local apps, whatever. Most of my stuff these days are in Python, most of my RDF stuff is based around Redland (when it’s not dying because of something I broke) and most of my platform-specific knowledge is Linux based.

Given these constraints, what “cool thing” hasn’t been done to pieces yet? Would a redux of Plink be in order, perhaps with better tools for automatic information removal to avoid the situation of angry users? A web service allowing you to use julie’s database for queries? Mail filtering? Image searching by all kinds of fun stuff, a la MortenF’s application, only with a user-upload section?

I really am low on ideas at this point, so I’m interested in hearing what thoughts other people might have.

When I got back into the mobile world recently, with a couple of apps I wrote and hanging out in the #mobitopia IRC channel again, I wondered why there wasn’t any central aggregation for the mobile world. The Semantic Web has PlanetRDF, and there are more than a dozen other similar aggregation services for different portions of the web, from Apache to Gnome to Adium. Despite the large weblogging community surrounding the Mobile world, however, there was no similar aggregation.

I say was, because there is now. PlanetMobile is an aggregator for all things mobile related. It features posts from a variety of sources, from Engadget to the mobile platform category on my weblog. It also shows the recent flickr images tagged with “mobile”, as well as the latest posts from both del.icio.us and Technorati, all aggregated in a handy little sidebar.

The CSS is taken in large part from PlanetRDF, which has already gotten me some compliments (which I’ve suggested be forwarded onto the chaps). The Planet aggregator is running the whole shebang behind the show, along with the Magpie RSS Aggregator for the sidebar.

If you can think of another Mobile feed that should be added, I’d be interested in hearing from you. If you think that it’s a cool idea, and want one for your own specialty interest, also feel free to let me know. If you think that I’ve somehow impeded upon your copyright, also feel free to let me know. If you just think I’m a weirdo, I’m always open to that too.