Today’s cool link of the day is The coolest clock I’ve seen yet. Note that you’ll need flash to check it out.
Xanadu will never die
Long before there was the world wide web there was Ted Nelson and Xanadu, a vision of a global two way hypertext system into which all the world’s knowledge would be poured. I happened across Ted’s writings while I was in college and actually applied for grant money to do research using Xanadu, which at that time was to be published by Autodesk. I wasn’t that great of a student and so my grant proposal was denied (it didn’t help that I was looking for roughly $50,000, at a time when the average grant was a few hundred dollars in stipend money to fund a visit to a remote museum or library), but I never lost my interest and ultimately it led to the career I now (largely) enjoy, so I was pleasantly suprised to run across this piece in the register today, covering the public launch of the new xanadu website which among other things has the source code for Xanadu. Amazing stuff, I wonder if it’ll actually lead to something tangible this go around or if it will be just another step in the long evolution of Xanadu.
My new favorite game site
I’ve got a new favorite gaming website, gamerankings.com. It comprises everything I love best about community websites, I wish I had thought of it first. You can quickly create an account and begin to rank and leave comments about games for most of the major platforms. The site tracks your contributions over time and each user is assigned a rank based on their contributions. It’s missing the sort of ‘per post’ karma stuff from the slashdot sites which I hope they add, but as a plus they link to external reviews of games and the users can then rank the reviews as well. All in all it’s a very slick system. It occurs to me that I should do the same thing for traditional boardgames, there’s a concept no one has done before.
Picture of ridiculous speaker
news from the land of the absurd
I have been slowly upgrading my stereo system the past 4 years or so. I bought my speakers from Cambridge Soundworks because they have an excellent upgrade policy – if you bring in speakers you buy from them within a year of the purchase date they will apply the full purchase price towards the purchase of a model of speaker higher up in quality. So I have gradually been upgrading the speakers as cashflow permits.
In December Cambridge sent me a sale flyer and they had their top of the line center channel speaker on sale for $250. It normally goes for $400, so I decided to go for it. I get to the store and they knock the price down to $220 for me, I’m feeling even better about the decision. But when they haul the box out of the back I realize the thing is bigger than my tv. By a lot, I mean a lot. Becky is now convinced I’m a mental reject and my tv looks ridiculous perched on top of this monstrosity, but damn does it sound good.
stuck at home with a cold
So I’m stuck lazing around the house today with a miserable cold and nothing to do. I discovered and excellent collection of paper buildings that you can download and build. Enjoy.
Cool link of the day
Check out Jorge Colombo’s collection of sketches of folks he observes in NYC.
Back from vacation
Obviously if you’re reading this I’m back from vacation. More to follow soon, including pictures I hope since I’ve once again upgraded the Moveable Type install.
google rocks the house
I keep forgetting to tell this story. When I went down to NY a couple of weeks ago the family was after me to give them a christmas list. I had already posted to this website a few weeks prior but of course no one aside from my sister had bothered to look at it, and I had turned the server off while I was out of town because of the ongoing hardware issue I’ve had with it. So I sat down in front of my mom’s computer and in about 2 minutes had found my christmas list in google’s cache, which surprised me a little, I mean it’s not like I get a ton of traffic or am linked to a lot of people or anything. Anyway, the lesson to take away from this is, embed a few unique phrases in your documents (like ‘fabo dolphin extract cumin’ for example) and you will be able to track that document down in google’s cache. It’s really quite handy, it’s like a free backup service from google.
Coolest web app in ages
Now this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. The guy’s built a slick system that converts XML data into a visual ‘tree structure’ representation of the data by using XSL to transform the XML into SVG. (believe me, I tried to think of another acronym to stuff in there but couldn’t). Anyway take a look, you need adobe’s SVG plugin for your browser and you need a browser that handles javascript adeptly. I’ve tested it on the pc and it works fine, it failed in ns 4 on a mac though so proceed accordingly.
It’s totally applicable to some projects we have underway at work so if I’m lucky we’ll actually be using some form of this in the future on our adaptive learning project and possibly in conjunction with a database of marine organisms some of the staff are working on.
