Lars Pind

namespace eval flickr {}
namespace eval flickr::people {}

ad_proc flickr::api_key {} {
    return "<em>your api key here</em>" 
}

ad_proc flickr::people::findByUsername { username } {
    set doc [util_httpget [export_vars -base http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/ \
        { { method flickr.people.findByUsername } { api_key [flickr::api_key] } username }]]
    set xml [xml_parse -persist $doc]
    set root [xml_doc_get_first_node $xml]
    set user [xml_node_get_first_child_by_name $root "user"]
    return [xml_node_get_attribute $user nsid]
}

ad_proc flickr::people::getPublicPhotos { {-multirow images} user_id {per_page 5} {page 1} } {
    set doc [util_httpget [export_vars -base http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/ \
        { { method flickr.people.getPublicPhotos } { api_key [flickr::api_key] } user_id per_page page }]]
    set xml [xml_parse -persist $doc]
    set root [xml_doc_get_first_node $xml]
    set photos [xml_node_get_first_child_by_name $root "photos"]
    template::multirow create $multirow url src width height title
    foreach photo [xml_node_get_children_by_name $photos "photo"] {
        foreach attr { id secret server title } {
            set $attr [xml_node_get_attribute $photo $attr]
        }
        template::multirow append $multirow \
            http://www.flickr.com/photos/$user_id/$id \
            http://photos${server}.flickr.com/${id}_${secret}_s.jpg 75 75 $title
    }
}

The discussion on folksonomies continues. Folksonomies—like controlled vocabularies—are here to stay, and I would like to focus on how we can make them work better.

One thing I have noticed is that I suck at tagging my links in delicious; I draw a blank, and frequently just repeat words from the title. The result is that I have a whopping 220 tags that I have used to tag only one link, and on tag that is used on 47 links, and hardly anything in between. Clay is better, with 94 tags that he has only used once, and one tag used 211 times. Liz has a better distribution, but does show the same trend. (complete data)

This is a problem, because, at least on my part, it is more an artifact of my shortcomings as a tagger, than of the links I am tagging. And the whole purpose tagging and categorization is to divide-and-conquer, so if you categorize everything in the “Other” category, you have achieved nothing.

I suspect that the expertise that we lack, is the one that professionals like Lou Rosenfeld has. But instead of re-hiring the professionals to do controlled vocabularies for us, I believe there are things we can do with the software to empower amateurs to be better taggers.

Some tricks used by the professionals are:

• Universe – knowing the complete vocabulary, so you know what categories are available
• Synonyms – that one of the meanings of ultrasound is the same as sonography.
• Hierarchy – a Volvo is a kind of car is a kind of transportation device.

So here are my ideas for making us better taggers:

• Suggest tags for me. A Google Suggest-style interface will help familiarize people with the universe of existing tags, so they can use an existing tag rather than invent their own. It would also reduce typos and inconsistencies, like “blog” vs. “blogs”, and it might serve as inspiration to get past the obvious tags. The pool of tags suggested from could be a weighted list of my own tags, my friends’ tags, all tags, and tags other people have already used for this link.

• Find synonyms automatically. In the browsing interface, Flickr is pretty good about showing related tags. Why not show these related tags when I am tagging a photo, making it easy for me to add the ones that apply. They could even do a lookup on WordNet for more synonyms. Since the related tags in the browsing interface feeds off of tags used on the same images on the input side, this would also help make strong ties between tags stronger.

• Help me use the same tags others use. When doing both the Google Suggest and the synonyms above, show the most used tags in a larger size than less used tags. There is value in people using the same tag for the same thing, and we want to encourage that, without in any way preventing people from choosing a different tag if they want to.

• Infer hiearchy from the tags. If a large number of the images tagged with “car” are also tagged with “volvo”, and very few images tagged with “volvo” are tagged with something other than car, then it’s reasonable to assume that a Volvo is a special kind of car, thus inferring hierarchy. This might not work in practice, although if people know that this is how things work, that might help. Another idea is to use the idea of related tags. If people are encouraged to use “social software” (2 tags) instead of “socialsoftware”, then when you browse “software”, “social” would show up as a related tag. But if the “social” tag was linked to “software+social” instead of just to “social”, then you would effectively have not a hierarchy, but a network, which is even better.

• Make it easy to adjust tags on old content. If the above and other ideas work, people’s tagging skills should improve over time. So why not augment the browsing interface so that it’s very easy for me to add or remove tags from my images or links right there, e.g. from a list of suggested tags on the page. A good incentive to retag my content is when I am searching for a link through one tag, e.g. “buenosaires”, but it isn’t there, so I find it under, say, “argentina”, there ought to be a link to let me add the “buenosaires” tag to that link.

This is just a handful of ideas from the let’s-try-it-and-see-if-it-works department. Maybe some of them are too complicated, or produce bad results in practice. Surely there are many other ideas to try. But at least it is a start. And in parallel with improving the tagging experience, we can also do a lot to improve the browsing experience, e.g. with collaborative filtering through a trusted network.

What I have noticed is that I suck at coming up with good tags for my links in delicious. I just cannot really come up with good tags to write—frequently I will just repeat words from the title—and as a result, most of my tags end up being applied to only that one entry, with a few tags, such as “web” and “software” being applied to so many links as to make them useless. This is a problem. After all, tagging and categorization are about divide-and-conquer. If you categorize everything in the “other” category, you have achieved nothing.

And I am not alone in this. I wrote a quick script to get an idea of how other people do compared to me, specifically Clay and Liz (apparently, Lou isn’t using delicious). Here are the results, and what they show is that we all have very uneven distributions of tags. The way to read this is that Clay has 94 different tags that he has only ever used once (first line), and 1 tag which is used for 211 different links (last line).

Clay Shirky

Elizabeth Lawley

Lars Pind

I suspect that the expertise that we lack, is the one that professionals like Lou Rosenfeld has. But instead of re-hiring the professionals to do controlled vocabularies for us, are there simple things we can do with the software to empower amateurs to be better taggers? I think so.

Here are some of the techniques used by professionals:

• Universe – knowing the complete vocabulary, so you know what categories are available
• Synonyms – that one of the meanins of ultrasound is the same as sonography.
• Hierarchy – a Volvo is a kind of car, is a kind of transportation device.

So here are some ideas for how we could improve folksonomy software to make us better at this, without involving any editors.

• Suggest tags for me. A Google Suggest-style interface will help familiarize people with the universe of existing tags, so you can use an existing tag rather than invent your own, when the existing tag applies equally well. It would also reduce typos and inconsistencies, like “blog” vs. “blogs”, and it might serve as inspiration to get past the obvious tags. The pool of tags suggested from could be a weighted list of my own tags, my friends’ tags, all tags, and tags other people have already used for this link.

• Find synonyms automatically. In the browsing interface, Flickr is pretty good about showing related tags. Why not show these related tags when I am tagging a photo, thus making it easy for me to just add the ones that apply. They could even do a quick lookup on WordNet for more synonyms. Since the related tags in the browsing interface feeds off of tags used on the same images on the input side, this would also help make strong links stronger.

• Help me know what tags other people use. When doing both the Google Suggest and the synonyms above, show the most used tags in a larger size than less used tags. There is value in people using the same tag for the same thing, and we want to encourage that, without in any way preventing people from choosing different tag if they want to.

• Infer hiearchy from the tags. I have a habit of using multiword tags, so instead of saying “socialsoftware” like you’re supposed to on delicious, I say “social software”, which really makes it two separate tags. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. If this habit is generally applied, we could look at home many links that are tagged with “social” are also tagged “software”, and maybe infer that “social” is frequently used in conjunction with “software”, and thus might imply a special kind of software (or the other way around, that software is a special kind of social), thus offering the combined tag “social software” to contain links that are tagged with both. A different example would be items tagged “volvo car”. If most of the time something is tagged “volvo”, it is also tagged “car”, we might infer that volvo is a kind of car.

• Make it easy to adjust tags on old content. If the above and other ideas work, people’s tagging skills should improve over time. So why not augment the browsing interface so that it’s very easy for me to add or remove tags from my iamges or links right there, e.g. from a list of suggested tags on the page, and I’m sure that sometimes, someone would use it. Another incentive to retag my content is if I’m searching for a link on Buenos Aires, but the link wasn’t tagged with “buenosaires”, so I find it under “argentina”, say, it should be very easy to add the “buenosaires” tag to that item.

As always, these ideas are from the let’s-try-it-and-see-if-it-works department. Maybe some of them are too complicated, or produce bad results in practice. Surely there are many other ideas to try. But this is at least a start. And simultaneously with improving tagging, we can also do a lot to improve browsing, with collaborative filtering through a trusted network.

Clay Shirky (clay@shirky.com)

Elizabeth Lawley

Lars Pind (lars@pinds.com)

Very handy when you are clearing out your stale podcast content.

As I was walking through what we’ve built so far on the CMS with all the people involved in the project, ideas for how to streamline and simplify the code, while making it do more of what they really need, kept running through my mind. I now have a long list mostly small concrete things that I started on while on the plane home, and that I simply can’t wait to get through.

And I am confident that in the process I will shrink the size of the code, and I am absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to help people accomplish more with less software.

It was a very ordinary moment, I was sitting in front of my computer, at the Greenpeace office, checking email or something equally mundane, when I saw this flash of the ultrasound for me, and I got that warm fuzzy feeling of “Yes, it’s really happening.” I could see myself holding that baby, and it felt right.

David has inspired me to look closely at LOC (Lines Of Code), and trying to keep the numbers low. Why? Less code means less code to read, write, maintain, understand, keep in your head, and especially modify when you realize that something else would be better for users or business.

Rails already has a built-in Rake stats target, but OpenACS does not, so last night I wrote this quick shell script to count the number of lines of code:

find . -name \.tcl -print | xargs grep “^][#[:space:]]” | wc -l

Current LOC for my CMS project: 9545.

Current LOC for our intranet project: 1146.

I think real project size would account for the CMS to be about twice the size of the intranet, but no more. The rest—7253 LOC, or 75%—would be due to differences in language and platform.

If I ever get a chance to rewrite the CMS in Rails, I would be happy to report.

I pay EUR 12 for about as many hours of internet access (less the time I spend sleeping, you do the math), and then when I try to actually use it, after having been out to De Balie for a few hours, I get this message:

Sorry. You cannot be logged in at this time. Please try again later.

The login page also says:

swisscom eurospot – it’s secure, it’s reliable, it’s swiss.

I think not. And the clock is ticking. Argh!

One of them is how, with Ruby (or any OO language), you can easily do lazy computation, simply using methods on objects. Nothing earth-shattering here (move along, please), but since Tcl does not have objects I find myself passing around arrays as a poor-man’s version of objects. But that requires that I calculate all values up-front, instead of only as needed. An obvious performance loss, not to mention a nuisance because you have to worry more about any overhead you are adding.

(There are ways around this, such as having attributes actually be procedure calls, so you say [$item(url)] instead of $item(url), but that has other drawbacks, including not working naturally with the templating system I am using.)

Also, now that I have gotten used to developing in Ruby, I keep bumping into instances where Ruby has simple constructs that saves me several lines of code. A classic example, that I cannot believe Tcl does not have: Array#collect. When you want to process each element of a list (such as adding quotes around them before using them in an IN clause in a SQL statement), you have to write 5 lines of code for what in Ruby is just types.collect { |e| ”’#{e}’” }.join(”, “).

There are many more and far deeper differences going on, but these are the ones I happened to be experiencing tonight, as I am sitting here ate De Balie, developing this CMS for Greenpeace.

Looks like I’m not the only one interested in Wi-Fi in Amsterdam.

I’m currently staying at Hotel Maas, which isnt’ bad, but pretty far from great. I only took it because it was in a good location for where I need to go during the day, and it was the best I could find. I’m going to consider Lloyd Hotel next time, although it’s located further away.

The other good thing about the Leidseplein area is De Balie, which is a great place to go work and hang out. Only problem: Even though they’re supposed to have Wi-Fi, I haven’t managed to get it to work for me. DHCP problems, it seems.

UPDATE: Fixed the link to Lloyd Hotel above.

I’ve always been a big fan of cordless, headset-based phone calls, where you almost forget you’re not in the same room and just talk.

Now with a PowerBook, Skype, Wi-Fi, and a bluetooth headset, it’s never been more convenient: Now you don’t even have to worry about running up the cost. I’m blown away.

I always forget to bring a powerstrip when traveling, and there’s always too few power outlets in the hotel rooms, if any (my current one doesn’t have a single unoccupied power outlet—had to pull out the minibar to get to one at all). With a laptop, a cell phone, and a camera, all in need of charging, it’s probably worth it to just bring my own.

I have no idea, but they seem to be trying real hard. Got a call this morning from KLM. Sorry, but the flight I’d booked and paid for was being rescheduled, so I’d have to fly another 2 hours earlier. I asked the simple and obvious question “why?”, and she said “I don’t know, I’m just calling to inform you”.

Hint to KLM managers: When you ask your phoners to tell people they’ve been bumped, give then an explanation to hand out. (PS! Any explanation will do. It doesn’t even have to be true. Make one up.) I think it may just be a matter of adding another required field to the form.

If I wanted a reason, I could call some number in Holland. Thanks, but no. Have them call me. Which she said they couldn’t, then said they could, and of course they haven’t, and they won’t. She wanted to get rid of me, and I can’t blame her.

Anyway, it’s not a big deal about the time change. It’s the way they choose to handle it—treating us customers as cattle that have to do what we’re told without asking questions —that makes us know intuitively that this industry is so ripe for disruption. Can we get Southwest to Europe, please? Update: Still waiting to receive the phone call, I received an email asking me to check in over the web. When trying to do so I get this:

The following errors occurred:

A passenger in the reservation is not allowed to check in with Internet check-in. Please go to the check-in desk at the airport to get your boarding pass.

Don’t waste your time on Pusher II. Stupid does not equal funny. Why it’s received such high scores is beoynd me. Please spare us for the next one ...

Now could we get the same thing for TextMate, please? That would be really useful, since I’m always working in both TextMate and the shell at the same time, and if I need to edit a particular file, it would typically be faster to just open the file from the shell, than to grab the mouse and click-expand/scroll around the folders tree to locate and open it.

I know that I can say open file.name, if that file is already associated with TextMate, but it opens in a separate window, not as part of my project. It would be nice with a command that just always opens TextMate, regardless of associations.

And when you make this feature, make sure you check if the file is already included in one of my open projects, and open it there, not in a separate window.

Thanks! :)

Before web standards, the need for a CMS was largely driven by the fact that you needed truckloads of very complex and fragile, typically table-based, markup to achieve the desired effect.

But with web standards, the markup, the XHTML, that you produce is very simple. It’s simply a matter of mapping your content objects into XHTML. Basically, for each attribute of each object, you:

• Pick the tag you wrap it in: A, P, UL/LI, ADDRESS, etc.
• Choose the structure: What’s inside what, in what order does it appear.
• Have the abiliy to attach a CSS class/ID to it.

It would seem that using an object-oriented language (which we’re not for this project) would map beautifully onto this problem: Just have a “to_xhtml” method on each of the objects that can represent content, and let it recursively render itself.

There’s still the back-end user interface, which is a lot of work, but at least the core rendering engine of the system could be very straight-forward. It’s not impossible that I’ll be doing something along these lines in Ruby on Rails in a few months, if others aren’t already doing it by then :)

This site (in Danish) for sanitary appliances sports a great example of exactly why you need an information architecht.

They start out alright with letting you choose between sinks, toilets, showerheads, etc.

But then the next category is the make, the company that produces the damn thing. But since I don’t have any preferences along that axis, that helps me nothing, and I’m forced to look through several hundreds of sinks, hundreds of toilets, and so on, until I fall asleep.

I know there’s a cost component here: The site, after all, boasts being cheap, not being a great shopping experience. But since they went to the trouble of doing two levels of categorization, you might think they could have chosen a different second level.

Here are a few alternative suggestions:

• Size: My bathroom has a certain area available for a sink. Don’t want one that’s to small, so it leaves empty space that can’t be used for anything, anyway, nor too large, so it won’t fit at all.

• Type of mount: I need a sink that’s mounted on the wall not on a table top, since I don’t have separate shower and sink departments.

• Price range: There’s a limit to how much money (or time) I want to spend on a toilet.

• Availability: Will it be here in time for my plumber?

The experience somehow reminds me of back in 2000 after two armed robbers tried to invade my home (with and my wife in it), and I went to the police station to look through literally 985 mug shots, in no apparent order. M-I-N-D-N-U-M-B-I-N-G.

The verdict? Worth Doing.

Paul Graham: Selling Web-based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines. (Thanks to Branimir)

Update: The lovely people at Apple Center Copenhagen replaced the keyboard with a US one at no cost. Even after I’d used it. The also replaced the MacMice mouse with an Apple one, which is much nicer. Thanks so much, guys.

At ølbar. Notice the camera from TV2 in the background.

evolt.org: en CSS tricks you may not know.

We need more like this, and less like this. Just the tricky details, please.

I can’t help to think that a pattern library of CSS solutions would be perfect. The trouble would be in making it really easy to search to find just the trick you’re looking for, so some visual representations of what they do would be optimal.

Russell Beattie: “It’s game over for a lot of Microsoft competitors.”

The point: Microsoft is controlling the content format (Windows Media), and are making alliances that range from content providers (MTV, TiVo et al.) to the device makers (Samsung, Creative et al.), that they provide content in and play Microsoft’s media format.

Something that’s missing from this story is that customers don’t want DRM, and all the devices play MP3 or (I would assume, haven’t owned one yet) MPEG format content.

Do the established players, like MTV, record companies, movie companies, etc., want to crush the open formats? Do they want to provide you content that you can do even less with than a CD/VHS, at lower cost (no distribution and inventory), and at higher margins, than what they do today? Sure they do. Do we want to buy it? I hope not. (Okay, maybe I shouldstop buying at the iTunes Music Store.)

UPDATE: Changed the title to help Scoble.

Turns out that it was my .mac account! A while after the switch, I figured I’d try this .mac business as well, and signed up, paid $99, and never used it since. However, a process called “MirrorAgent”, whose jobs seems to be to mirror my iDisk between my computer and the .mac servers, was eating up 40% of my CPU power. Needless to say, I killed it, and turned syncing off.

So in return for my $99, all I have so far gotten is the loss of 40% processor power for two months. Period. I haven’t used any of the other services. The upside? My computer feels fast again. It’s like having worn too small shoes, and then taking them off.

Would I recommend .mac to a friend? I think not.

They’re not particularly computer literate, but they’re smart, clued-in people. When I explained to one the idea of promoting your services through a weblog on the topic of your services, she instantly groked it, and wanted that. One of the others is a photographer, and wants an extranet, where he can upload photos with password-protection for his customers to pick the photos they want in hard copy.

So what should I tell them? Where do you go if you actually “get” the web in all the ways that we do, except the technical details? Do I sign them up fo TypePad? Get a run-of-the-mill hosting provider like Dreamhost and get them to install MovableType? That would take care of the blog part, but what about the extranet? Do any reasonably-priced options exist?

Smoke-free Nicotine
Originally uploaded by larspind.

Cigarettes have become socially unacceptable, and tobacco companies have had to change their name.

But nicotine gum! It’s socially acceptable, because “at least you’re doing something about your smoking habit”, and you’re not harming other people with second-hand smoke. Heck, doctors will even recommend them to you. It’s got all the benefits of sustainable revenue that cigarettes do, with none of the bad vibe.

The price per miligram of nicotine is almost the same as for cigarettes. Compare nicorettes’s price of kr. 55.25 for 30 times 2 mg, or 1.1 kr/mg, to this chart (from Norway, can’t seem to find any from Denmark) with average content 0.83mg per cigarette, which comes out to 1.2 kr/mg. And it would be my guess that taxes are significantly lower on the gum than on cigarettes, so even more profitable.

On this page (in Danish) they recommend that you stay at your normal level for 2-4 months, before gradually starting to reduce your nicotine intake.

That, of course, is bollocks. Either just quit (not cold-turkey, you want to be mentally prepared), or gradually reduce your intake over 4 weeks. But why on earth wait 2-4 months before doing so? Could it be so the drug company can make a little more money on your addiction?

I have some extra office equipment that I would like to sell, namely DELL computers, LCD monitors, electric height-adjustable desks, and a cordless phones. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll send you the details.

Gary: “Repeat after me: Slick, slick, slick.”
Me: “Slick, slick, slick”
Gary: “What does a cow drink?”
Me: “Milk. Wait. No it doesn’t. Bah.”

On my way home from work, I listened to Boing Boing’s first podcast (can’t find the link now), about the O’Reilly Mind Hacks book, explaining why Gary tricked me. Nice :)

“There’s nothing more useless than a car that won’t start But it’s even more useless at the end of the world”

—Bob Geldof

And, might I add, “a Pind that won’t sleep”. Damn! I thought I’d nailed that sleep deprivation problem through a combination of getting out of bed and do something until I’m tired enough to sleep, good sleep hygiene, magic herbal pills from my Chinese doctor, and now being sick. Well, I guess not.

The verdict so far? I’m liking it. It’s nice to have a real editor, rather than the shoddy textarea that browsers insult you with—particularly Safari, which still doesn’t have multiple undo, and still tends to crash on me on certain occasions (like hitting shift-tab in a popup). Loosing a posting sucks.

I’ll keep you posted on whether I buy the app when my 30 days expire, but I’ve been buying a lot of software lately, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I bought this one, too.

I have a car, a Pioneer car stereo, and an iPod. here’s the missing link to replace my current clunky solution from Belkin. Can’t wait :)

PS. I have been reading, just not writing any reviews.

I’ve had no problems when using a network cable. I noticed a traceroute to gems.rubyforge.org took a whopping 5 minutes to produce its output, compared to just a few seconds on a cable. Has anyone had similar experiences after upgrading?

However, the survey also says 7% of web users have their own blog. So it’s probably fair to assume that a large share of them also use RSS readers.

Anyway, it’s good to see these numbers grow, to see that people are willing to adopt tools more relevant to a given job than browsers and email clients.

Even better is the way they draw your attention to this feature: When you mouse over the title or description of one of your own photos, the background color is highlighted in a light yellow, alerting you that something’s up.

But, even better, the yellow color stays for about a second or two after you’ve left the title. This is what clued me in to the fact that it’s not just the usual :hover effect, something special is up here.

To make things complete unambigious, they also say in italics “click here to add a description” when you haven’t yet, and they have a tooltip that says “click to edit” (which, btw, doesn’t show up when the “click here to add …” text is already showing).

All in all, a simple and brilliant piece of work. Kudos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02nago.html?ex=1262408400&en=310cc60214964599&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

Was it that they didn’t talk enough about God, the church, that they weren’t anti-abortion or anti-gay-marriage enough? Was it that they were seen as weak on terror? Was it that Kerry didn’t have anything to say?

Or was it that they lost the Hispanics? The rural America?

I know this is pure wishful thinking, but all this speculation makes it obviously clear that the United States needs a system where the winner doesn’t take it all. Maybe there’s x number of people who are pro-choice, and y number of people who are anti-abortion. It would be nice if they could be represented proportionally. The election system currently gives too much weight to the winning majority, and too little weight to the minority.

Worse, it assumes that you’re either one or the other. That you’re either democratic or republican. There’s no in-between, there’s no Z axis that takes you to a completely different set of political opinions.

But you can’t change the political system without first being in power, so in the meantime I’m going to read Don’t Think of an Elephant.

jioasjdifo

hello

Testing post

http://43things.com/zeitgeist/

I got the Nokia 6630 on David’s recommendation and I have to say that ssh’ing into my servers, looking up the lyrics to “Like a Virgin” in the middle of a New Year’s party using Opera, and remote controlling iTunes using Salling Clicker is pretty cool.

Only one gripe: Clicker can’t switch iTunes speakers, so when I move from my living room to my kitchen, and back, I have to physically go to the computer. Bummer.

Apparently, it’s because of lack of AppleScript support for this feature of iTunes, and you can help the cause by selecting “Provide iTunes Feedback” in the iTunes menu, and telling Apple :)