Daily Bytes

Audblog & Captioning

href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/27/in_brief_27_feb_2003.html">
Audblog & Captioning

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but pure audio
blogging discriminates against deaf people. Don’t get me wrong,
it’s a great idea; hearing the sound of someone’s voice is a great
way to make a more personal connection. (Only a dozen of my 4,000
daily readers know what I sound like in person.) But any audio
content needs to be supplemented with a simultaneous text
transcript.

It’s not only the deaf people that make me think audio blogs (like
Audblog) won’t work without
some kind of text support:

• You can’t search the web for an audio post
• You can’t translate entries using href="http://world.altavista.com/">the fish
• No RSS feeds
• Now way of skimming through a site looking for usefull things,
  you have to ear it all.
• Bad sound quality makes it hard to understand
• …

Posting by SMS or using some kind of speech-to-text technology, now
that would be cool.

Is this snow?

We don’t get much snow where I live, in fact the last time it
really snowed in Porto I was 10 years old and that was a long time
ago. Even stranger is the fact that this event didn’t happen in the
peak of the winter, its not that cold and it only lasted a few
minutes. So this is what it looked like near my house the day
before yesterday.
src="http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/Neve8.jpg"
width="640" height="480" border="0" />
To see more pictures …

XFce 4.0 Screenshots

href="http://members.home.nl/jbhuijsmans/screenshots/">Screenshots
of XFce 4 in action: Much nicer than href="http://www.xfce.org/snapshots.html#TOP">older versions.
This version actually seems to have been developed in this century.

Formula One Rules

title="The Bulletin > Features > Stories > Re-ignite my fire :"
href="http://www.bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/eddesk.nsf/All/BEB468C24F11C856CA256CD200136C12!open">
Re-ignite my fire: Thoughts about the current predictable state
of F1 and the new rules supposedly created to improve the thrill of
this sport.

It is proposed that Ferrari be required to staff its
team entirely with Italians – half from the north and half from the
south – to ensure the maximum possible disharmony and subsequent
reduction in on-track performance.

In my opinion, any attempt of rebalancing forces in any sport takes
away the fun.

Fantas: Bug

Bug
(2002): Perhaps the most original film I watched this year at
href="http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/001815.html">Fantasporto.

The film revolves around the fact that all actions will have a
consequence, or even better, all consequences had a
previous action, or something like that.

src="http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/bug.jpg"
width="100" height="128" border="0" />

The first thought I had after watching the movie was: How in
the hell will I explain what this film is about in my blog?. I
guess the best way will be with an example:

Did you ever think about the consequence of not giving a tip to a
waiter, that will go shopping after he leaves the restaurant and
that won’t have enough money to buy food for his baby, making him
cry all night, leading to his neighbour deciding she doesn’t want
to have kids, making her husband argue with her and getting a
divorce? All because you didn’t tip the waiter! And why didn’t you
tip the waiter? Probably you’ll be able to find a sequence of
events that led to that situation too.

Bottom line: Original and entertaining.

Ready.gov parody

title="Ready.gov - From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security"
href="http://www.ready.gov/index.html">Ready.gov: The US
government made this nice site so we can all know what do to in
case of a terrorist attack. Or was it so that we can all laugh a
little bit?

The slogan (Helping America prepare for fiery death), the
very elucidative images and the little boy trying to eat his own
hands on the top banner, everything seems to be a parody to the US
paranoia. But no, it’s real. The parody it’s href="http://www.idlewords.com/biological.html">here.
Update: A better paody is href="http://www.unready.net/">here.

Portuguese Blogs

Blogs
em .pt: A nice compilation of Portuguese blogs.

Fantas: 2009 Lost Memories

href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0294252">2009 Lost Memories
(2002): What if Japan had won the war, what if Germany had been
nuked instead of Japan and Korea was still part of Japan’s empire.

This is a very violent movie with lots of action and with an
important historical side to it all.

This was the third Korean film I have seen in this Fantas and I
must say I’m impressed with the overall quality of Korean films.
Last year I already saw href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0255589">Seon (The Isle),
another Korean movie, that besides being a shock movie had also one
of the best photographies I have ever seen.

Been beaten

href="http://www.daypop.com/burst/">Daypop Top Word Bursts:
Damn, Daypop was quicker than me From Daypop’s href="http://www.danchan.com/weblog/daypop/54957">weblog:

Shortly after putting up the Top 40, I realized there
were plenty of memes that make the rounds that weren’t accompanied
by links. Either the meme was a topic of conversation that had no
link, or it was a meme that had no single, authoritative link.
Catching heightened word usage is a natural extension to the Top
40. I kept the idea on the back burner until very recently, when I
realized Joe Millionaire was the buzz, but there were no
authoritative links to anchor the meme. There was the one link to
the Joe Millionaire site but few bloggers linked to it when writing
about the show (in spite of this, that link still made the Top 40).
I went to sleep that night thinking about implementing what
everyone now calls Word Bursts. The next morning (can you believe
it?) I get emails about the article in New Scientist about Word
Bursts. I also read it in Slashdot and it eventually makes the Top
40. Well, that got me working this weekend on this: Daypop Top Word
Bursts It’s catching topics that don’t have authoritative links. It
also catches those that do. There are sample posts from weblogs so
that you can get a decent idea of what the word burst is in
relation to.

Nicely done!

Mining Blogs: Using R

As i said href="http://www.andrerestivo.com/weblog/archives/001836.html">here,
I decided to give a go to the word burst idea I saw on New
Scientist. I’m going to use href="http://www.R-project.org">R to build a prototype (just to
test the concept).

R is a language for statistical computing and is both powerfull and
confusing. At the moment Iam able to anaylze the freqs of a single
weblog using the following code:

hp <- htmlTreeParse('http://www.scripting.com/')
html.elem <- unlist(hp$children$html$children)
text <- html.elem[which(regexpr("text.value",names(html.elem)) > 0)]
names(text) <- NULL
text2 <- paste(text,collapse=" ")
wrds <- strsplit(text2," ")
wrds <- sapply(wrds,tolower)
wrds <- gsub("[,.!?;:]","",wrds)
f.wrds <- factor(wrds)
freqs <- table(f.wrds)
sort(freqs)

Applied to Scripting News
this gives the following table of most used words:

• google 22
• have 23
• my 24
• was 25
• with 29
• be 32
• on 43
• it 44
• for 46
• is 50
• in 56
• that 65
• and 71
• of 72
• i 82
• a 105
• to 130
• the 177

Now it’s just a question of joining href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html">several
important blogs, do the same type of frequency analisys and
compare the results from one day to another. This way we can see
which words have big bursts and which stopped being in the
spotlight.