The City Gate

My Library is Going Open Source

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:50:06 -0500

Microsoft and OOXML

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:08:09 -0500

I've had two recent run-ins with the new docx files being produced by Word 2007. In both cases, an unsuspecting user created a document and emailed it out thinking that as Word document everyone should be able to read it. Of course, no one was.

At the core of docx is Microsoft's new "open standard" Office Open XML. Being XML, I was able to just strip out the text in the first case. With the second document, those involved wanted the formatting preserved. I poked around a bit and discovered that Microsoft had released a patch for older versions of Word. I installed it and opened the file but all the formatting disappeared. I then tried one of those online conversion pages and received a much better result. Microsoft can't even implement their own standard. That's really not that surprising given the size and complexity of the specification. It seems like they don't want anyone else to implement it either which defeats the whole purpose of an open standard. There's a good write-up of some of the problems with the standard here. Oh, and it also may become an ISO standard soon.

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Blog as Discourse Medium

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:56:12 -0500

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman presents the thesis that communication mediums have natural biases with regard to the discourses that they enable and encourage. For example, text messaging is not conducive for creating significant literature. Also, philosophy only came about when man started to put his thoughts down in writing and thereby allowed them to be analyzed. Postman spends the majority of the book arguing that television as a communication medium does not encourage serious discourse. His best analysis deals with television as mass media. While it is possible to videotape great lectures in biology and history and so on, television has to appeal to the lowest (or at least a much lower) common denominator of the public since it is driven by advertising. According to Postman, this results in television programming being so focused on entertainment that even serious subjects like politics and religion are trivialized by theme songs and an emphasis on visual appearance. Regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions, this is a useful framework for evaluating other discourse mediums such as the blog.

Postman believed that print is the best communication medium because it encourages critical thinking. This does not necessarily mean that all print mediums raise the level of discourse. Blogs are certainly a print medium, and some have offered up the opinion that they are positively affecting public discourse. I want to challenge this claim. I am primarily interested in analyzing blogs as a popular medium (those with thousands of hits a day).

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Front Door Frustration

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 10:46:52 -0500

I recently purchased my first new car. This has opened up a new world of technology to me. The car tells me when to change the oil. It automatically turns on my headlights when it gets dark. The car also came with one of those keychain fobs that locks/unlocks the doors. Unfortunately, I am discovering that the front door of our house does not respond to the keyless remote no matter how many times I try.

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RSS Bible Verses

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:06:00 -0500

I receive a fair number of visits from people looking for RSS Bible verse services. These are often provided by the publisher of a particular Bible version and send out a new verse each day through RSS. Here are two sites that I have tried or know about:

English Standard Version - a few different options
Bible Gateway (variety of versions in the feed) - direct link to RSS feed

There are also many that send out a short devotional with one or more verses like the IBS.

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Honeypots for Spammers

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:38:26 -0500

I saw this site recently. It is a collaborative effort to identify servers hosting email address harvesters for spammers. They do this by dynamically creating email addresses that encode the time and visitor IP address. They have some interesting statistics on their site along with advice for avoiding spambots. I have seen some nice research efforts in the past using honey pots to analyze hacker techniques and monitor worm activity.

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Clustering for Web Searching

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 17:52:33 -0500

In the early days of the web, yellow page-like listings (e.g. Yahoo) were the primary method of locating information. Then came spiders collecting web pages to create repositories that could be searched using keywords (Lycos, AltaVista). These search engines did not take advantage of the connected nature of the web. Google changed that by ranking a page based on the quantity and quality of the pages linking to it.

What is next is still an open question. The most common answer is clustering. Teoma (bought by Ask Jeeves) was one of the earliest search engines to use clustering. Vivisimo and its sister search engine, Clusty, are two more examples. Now Yahoo is jumping on the bandwagon with Mindset.

The advantage of clustering is the possibility of teasing out semantic information by grouping pages based on their content and how they link to each other. If someone were to search for "Lincoln", does she want a biography of Abraham Lincoln or perhaps information about Lincoln, Nebraska or maybe tickets for Lincoln Center. Clustering allows the search engine to present some basic categories so that the user can easily refine her search. In the Lincoln example, the user could limit her search to only pages in the Lincoln Center cluster so she can get directions and concert times. Yahoo's Mindset is simpler in that it restricts the clusters to shopping or informational groupings. Right now, clustering search engines do not look like a threat to Google's dominance.

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GoogSpy

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:07:57 -0500

To demonstrate their web data extraction capability, a company has created a search engine called Googspy that allows a user to see who is paying for what keyword in Google's Adwords. I don't know how "smart" their spider is, but grabbing this data through brute force is not that difficult given enough computing power and storage space. The results are interesting. For example, Microsoft pays for keywords ranging from apple software updates to suse linux to spanish culture.

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Graph Visualization for the Web

Mon, 09 May 2005 17:14:49 -0500

Warning: this is addictive.

A colleague of mine showed me this. It uses the same type of visualization technology as the previous technology entry. This one lets you see the connections between web sites. It uses Google's clustering algorithm to create the graph. Java is required.

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Visual Thesaurus

Tue, 03 May 2005 18:30:40 -0500

This is not an example of cutting-edge technology, but rather a case of what happens when two interesting technologies are combined. It is an interactive, visual thesaurus. The two technologies that it uses are graph visualization and WordNet, which is a database of synonyms that captures word semantics. I don't think it is something I would use as a serious resource, but it's fun to play with it. To try it out, go here and click on the "try it now" image. Caveat: It requires Java, but most people already have this.

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