Jon Udell

Radio commentary on citizen use of public data

A while ago I recorded a commentary for New Hampshire public radio on the topic of public data. The themes will be familiar to readers of this blog: transparency, citizen use of government data. I wondered when it would air, and then last night, while doing the dishes, I heard myself on the kitchen radio. The [...]

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16.04.2008 17:05:41 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Syndication of rules versus syndication of data

To follow up on last week’s item about parsing the kinds of dates and times that people actually write, Google Calendar’s Quick Add feature looks like the clear winner. Here’s a test page with expressions like: Third Saturday of Every Month, 10 - 11:30 am Let’s try the Chronic module from Ruby: irb(main):007:0> Chronic.parse('Third Saturday of Every Month, [...]

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10.04.2008 12:33:05 - Jon Udell

Hard link

A conversation with Phil Libin about EverNote’s new memex

In his 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay As We May Think, Vannevar Bush famously imagined the memex, a mechanism that would augment human memory. This idea of mental augmentation inspired Doug Engelbart, and we’ve been chasing the dream ever since. On this week’s Interviews with Innovators, Phil Libin discusses EverNote, a new software-plus-services offering that aims [...]

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07.04.2008 21:08:21 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Making sense of C02 data: A scientific collaboration

This week on Perspectives, I explore the partnership between Dennis Baldocchi, a Berkeley climate scientist, and Catharine van Ingen, an MSR researcher. They’ve been working together on Fluxnet, a scientific data server and collaboration service for hundreds of scientists around the world who are measuring C02 flux in the atmosphere and trying to understand the [...]

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03.04.2008 21:09:05 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Parsing human-written date and time information

I’m working on a project that aggregates a bunch of community calendars, plus a lot of calendar info that’s just written out free-form. Some examples of the latter, in ascending order of resistance to mechanical parsing: Tue, 4/1/08 2 Apr - Wed 10:00AM-10:45AM Weekdays 8:30am-4:30pm Thu, 11/15/07 - Fri, 4/11/08 Every Tuesday of the month from 10:00-11:00 a.m Sat., Apr. [...]

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02.04.2008 21:54:54 - Jon Udell

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Office XML: The long view

For many years I have tried, and mostly failed, to get people to appreciate the value of structured information. Sure, I’ve connected with the chattering classes who Twitter, blog, and read TechMeme, but I’ve only been preaching to the choir. Inside our echo chambers we grok XML, tagging, syndication, and information architecture. Out in the [...]

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02.04.2008 17:23:24 - Jon Udell

Hard link

My close encounter with the Hannaford data breach

My debit card was one of the potentially 4.2 million exposed in the recent Hannaford data breach. Here’s part of the letter from my bank, the Savings Bank of Walpole. I’ve thanked them privately, and want to thank them publicly as well, for being proactive and doing the right thing here. They’re dealing with fallout from [...]

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31.03.2008 17:41:43 - Jon Udell

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A conversation with Tim Spalding about LibraryThing

I had a great time talking about LibraryThing with Tim Spalding for this week’s ITConversations show. He says LibraryThing is a baroque application. I think of it as deep in the same ways that Flickr is: Many features, many modes of use, many constituencies. Although Tim is flagellating himself about the way we swam around [...]

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31.03.2008 16:37:01 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Cluster computing, with large data, for the classroom

This week’s Perspectives is a two-parter: an interview and companion screencast on the topic of cluster computing in the classroom. The interview is with Kyril Faenov, the General Manager of the Windows HPC (high performance computing) unit, and the screencast is with Rich Ciapala, a program manager for Microsoft HPC++ Labs. The project demonstrated in the [...]

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27.03.2008 19:24:13 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Revisiting the InfoWorld metadata explorer

A while ago I wrote an alternative search and navigation interface to InfoWorld.com. The search is broken now because the underlying engine switched from Ultraseek to Google, and nobody has updated the search wrapper. But the navigation piece still works, and while it does, I want to invite some commentary because I’m thinking of doing [...]

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26.03.2008 15:31:35 - Jon Udell

Radio commentary on citizen use of public data

Syndication of rules versus syndication of data

A conversation with Phil Libin about EverNote’s new memex

Making sense of C02 data: A scientific collaboration

Parsing human-written date and time information

Office XML: The long view

My close encounter with the Hannaford data breach

A conversation with Tim Spalding about LibraryThing

Cluster computing, with large data, for the classroom

Revisiting the InfoWorld metadata explorer

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