Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity has a lot of promise:

Ubiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. It’s a Firefox extension, so it works on Macs, Windows, and Linux.

With only a couple keystrokes, it lets you use language to instruct your browser. You can translate to and from most languages, add maps to your email, edit any page, twitter, check your calendar, search, email your friends, and much more. All without leaving the page you’re on.

The first live example I saw reminded me of how a person could add an appointment in Newton (the web is strangely empty of examples, but you would write out “lunch with Dave next Tuesday” or something like that). The second example reminded me of Mac OS X’s Spotlight. The third example finally showed me something useful, and the video above is along those lines.

I’m wondering, however, how long until Apple adds those features to Spotlight.

Posted June 15, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: Ubiquity. Be the first one.

I’m simply in love with this video. Watch through the credits to see a bit of how it’s made.

Posted June 12, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless.. Tags: animation, Sorry I'm Late, stop motion, Tomas Mankovsky, video. Be the first one.

Philip Greenspun suggests small organizations use a blog for their website (ironically, not blogged):

The Small Business Web circa 1994

In 1994, a small organization that wanted a Web site would hire a “Web designer” skilled in the exotic art of “HTML programming” to produce a static Web site, i.e., a cluster of linked pages with a distinctive design and color scheme, giving information about the company or non-profit org. None of the pages would have a date on them because, by definition, nothing on the Web could be more than four years old.

The Small Business Web circa 2009

Managers of new small enterprises or established non-profit organizations sometimes ask me “Whom should I hire to build my Web site?”

I ask them what they want the site to do. The answer is to promote their business and distribute some basic information to customers. What they want is a static 1994-style graphic designer-produced Web site.

I explain that publishing on the Web is like producing a word processor document or writing an email. Would they hire a designer to write their documents and emails? No? Then why would they hire a designer to build their Web site?

he goes on…

Posted June 11, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: blogging, blogs, communication, web communications, website. Be the first one.

It can be difficult to get the Zimbra iSync connector, as the company doesn’t offer a simple download from their site. Fortunately, the license allows us to freely redistribute their software.

Download the Zimbra iSync Connector here.

Posted June 11, 2009 by Casey
Categories: Dispatches. Tags: connector, download, iSync, zimbra. One Comment.

The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

Posted June 10, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: cache, perm-permalinks, plugin, web archiving, wordpress, wordpress plugin. One Comment.

Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for books: “What is the book about?” and “is it any good?”

Unfortunately, these questions are completely unaddressed by the information provided. To see relevant information, the user must click on each listing individually. That is, she must navigate by hand instead of by eye, and must use her memory to compare information across time instead of space.

The problem is that this graphic was designed as an index into a set of webpages, but is used as a catalog for comparing a set of books. The purpose of this graphic should not be to return a list of query matches, but to help the user learn about books related to her topic of interest.

Posted June 9, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, search results. 2 Comments.

The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Posted June 9, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: archive, Hanzo Archives, link rot, perma-permalink, permalink, plugin, web archive, wordpress. Be the first one.

Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:

Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

Posted June 8, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Technology. Tags: plugin, post listings, wordpress, wordpress plugin. Be the first one.

[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

via John Beales.

Posted June 7, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Technology. Tags: Axis web cam, FLV, streaming, transcoding, video, VLC. Be the first one.

Well, not ‘leaked,’ but just in time for the new Transformers movie, Patrick Boivin has posted this video of Bumblebee breakdancing.
Read more…

Posted June 5, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless.. Tags: autobot, breakdancing, bumblebee, dancing, movie, transformers, video. Be the first one.