Whoa…mapping software on Gnome: Roadster. Totally amazing! Looks like Cairo is being used for the map graphics. Man, it would be great to hit “export” and get maps or parts of maps as SVG files! So cool our future present is…
Archive for June, 2005 Page 3 of 5
I have done a real bad job trying to conquer my self-assigned tasks for the Open Clip Art Library. Man, I’m tagging it here: I’m finishing them all this month — that’s right! Is anyone else with me 
The great thing about OCAL is that the project is successful each month because people are always submitting new artwork, so you can’t go wrong as the incoming folder fills up. So, its really easy to just let that happen and not push for the infrastructural developments.
I have been so annoyed with Bluetooth on Linux. I finally had to write a little nasty script to get all my Pictures from my Sony Ericsson t610 phone using my new bluetooth dongle:
#!/bin/bash
# Get all pictures from a SONY t610 Phone using bluetooth
COMMAND="obexftp -b 00:0A:D9:5A:DA:AC -B 10 -c Pictures"
FILES=`$COMMAND -l -v | grep "<file " | perl -pe "s/.*name=\"(.*)\" size.*/\1/"`
for file in $FILES;
do
$COMMAND -g $file
echo "Got file $file"
done
Man, why does bluetooth support have to suck so bad in the *nix world. Edd Dumbill though has done some great work to get it up to spec, but man, talk about a time sink. Get a bluetooth phone and a bluetooth dongle and make sure to have some time to spare.
I came across this while checking my google rank. I’m really looking forward to teaching in the fall.
Man, its great to have savvy relatives. Check out photos to Aunt Flora’s 100th Bday. Here’s me taking a picture of the picture taker (a classic) and then others of me looking way too intense for the occasion.
So many new media artists and theorists are into making Data Visualizations, but I honestly think they should be re-classified as “abstract data visualizations” where appropriate. Check out this BuzzTracker. From the website: “Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.” Basically, the data that is visualized is obvious, as it is the largest cities that produce news and have news bureaus, and secondly, what does this reductive imagery actually tell us about world events? The only thing of interest to me is how this type of map could map to the movie War Games and possible thermonuclear scenario charts.
Anyhow, I dream of a day where visualizations help discover new information and relationships and not abstracted wallpaper’ification.
On another note, both of the projects I talk about above only use Google News anyhow. Man, some new players are needed in the search game. Google is M$ 2, mark my words in 10-15 years.
You know, I guess I should also provide a solution as to how to remake this type of project so that it regains functionality. Like if one could zoom in and out of the data and actually discover links on the map. I find Chicago Crime way more interesting and variable. And, its quite useful to discovering trends in Chi-town crime.
Now I’m heading back to Tufte’s school of reductive logic and mapmaking.
I got Gotmail development up to date. I merged like all but 1 or 2 really old patches that have been chilling in the patch tracker for awhile. I also fixed many bugs and cleaned house on the project manager at sourceforge.net and put out a huge press release for gotmail. What I would really like, but don’t have time to do right now, is to push to get an Evolution e-plugin that uses Gotmail to get your hotmail directly in Evolution.
Right now I have written a bash script hack which I use to move all my hotmail into the Evolution mail folder structure automatically. Would that be useful to anyone?
