test

Yesterday reminded me of the most frustrating of my days as a programmer. I was going through some activities on my test (WordPress) blog site in preparation for class, and twice I ran into frustrations. First, it was in trying to embed a video in a blog entry. Somehow, the code for embedding was corrupted after saving the post. It happened over and over. I finally came to the conclusion (which may be right or wrong) that if I just saved the post once, and did not edit it again, all would be well. This is unsatisfying because it is always nice to be able to edit a post when one desires to do so.

The second frustration came when I installed a plugin to create an administration menu at the top of the blog page. The menu is normally hidden in an administration panel. After following the instructions, I either got no menu or a menu represented as a bullet list. Eventually I tested it with Firefox (since I normally use IE7 because Firefox is not compatible with XP Tablet) and it worked. Then I tested it on another machine and it worked. I came to the conclusion that it must be something about XP Tablet. But, this morning, when I tried again on IE7, it worked. So, I have no explanation for what was happening.

Which reminded me of two days of hell when I was programming in the early 1980s. I was working via a terminal and writing code on an IBM 370 and was writing code in FORTRAN, BASIC and IBM’s EXEC 2 scripting language. I can’t recall which language I was using, but the code I had written would not execute properly. I went through it (what seemed like a million times) line by line, word by word and letter by letter, but could not explain why there was a bug. I am not the greatest programmer, and typically make silly coding errors, but no matter how hard I tried to see the apparent error, I could not. Eventually, late in day two, I decided to look at the bytemap of the code. Lo and behold, one of the characters that displayed as a normal character was represented by a different bit sequence than the one I had expected to be there! I was “that close” to giving up. In hindsight, another strategy would have been to literally retype the entire program.

By the way, I’ve realized that when playing with changes to WordPress, I should simply close the browser and reopen it after every change.

This post is cross-listed at http://lorne.sisatspace.com/2007/09/28/the-thrill-of-debugging-%e2%80%a6-not-2/. 

 

Hope this works...

interesting ariticle about potential of social networking sites.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1463

While stumbling around in the dark (not much knowledge regarding social technology out there), I have found some incredible websites, who have put the use of technology in better way than others. Here is the one, I never thought of blogging using mobile or any phone. Belive it or not, you can do it, just dial 712-432-Mooo (6666) and utter. Unsurprisingly, the name of the website is www.utterz.com.  

 

Also, I found a good review of social technology tools at www. dlib.org. 

 

 

Tool                   Software                                                            Storage              Open Source                     API                      RSS

 

CiteULike          Tcl, Common Lisp, Perl, Erlang                 PostgresQL                No                                 No                  1.0 (DC, PRISM)

 

Connotea          mod_perl                                                          MySQL                        Yes                                 No                  1.0 (DC, PRISM)

 

del.icio.us         mod_perl, HTML::Mason                             MySQL                        No                                 Yes                  1.0 (DC)

 

Flickr                      -                                                                               -                               No                                 Yes                  2.0, Atom

 

Frassle               mod_perl, Apache::PageKit                      PostgreSQL                Yes                                   -                        -

 

Furl                    Java, JSP, Lucene                                            MySQL                        No                                 No                    2.0

 

Simpy                      -                                                                             -                              No                                Yes                    0.91, 1.0 (DC), 2.0, Atom

 

Spurl.net          PHP                                                                       MySQL                        No                                Yes                    2.0 (DC)

 

Unalog             Python (Quixote), PTL, PyLucene             ZODB                           Yes                               Yes                     1.0 (DC)

 

Source  <http://www.dlib.org/>

 

 

 

My first encounter with,  www.digg.com leaves me with the impression of untidy webpage, so does del.icio.us which obviously has less content but almost has similar design pattern. Page can be made little tidy by zeroing down on area of interest or preferences you select. Like other website they also allow you to create and manage your accounts. Organizations are also adding this kind of social networking tools or links on their websites like other commercial, entertainment, and many others websites. A survey found, Digg's presence around 24.4% and del.icious presence around  23.2% on websites (source: www.poynter.org). 

 

Digg

 

* Profile: Profile setting is pretty simple, and so do other settings. Regarding topic it had all the topics check-marked by default so you need to uncheck topics not of your interest. It allows to change your blog settings or if you are not into blogging you can even disable blogging. Also, If some one out there is pestering you, block him/her.  It might take up to an hour to block a person  orpeople whom you don't want to blog you. 

 

* It was strange I couldn't find any tags on this website.

 

Del.icio.us

 

I would like to start off with William Shakespeare's popular quote , "What's in the name?" But sometimes you find some names very intriguing and want to know more about it. Here I found something on del.icio.us, in this sort of address, "del." takes the place of the usual "www." and ".us" takes the place of ".com." Between those combinations of letters, "icio" was an obvious choice. Both delicious.com and delicio.us redirect you to the del.icio.us page.

Source: www.poynter.org

 

* Profile: Profile setting is easy to use.  Del.icio.us has some good features which I didn't see at www.digg.com settings option (I hope I haven't missed!), It allows you to transfer your existing bookmark(s) from your internet explorer (s) and given you an option of making it public or keeping it private. Also, it could be integrated with Facebook or your Facebook account.  Some of the features under settings were hard to understand especially related to blogging, and I don't see any option for disabling blogging or blocking troublesome  users.

 

* Del.icio.us allows you not only to add tags but to see it many ways. You can have a list view or cloud view. You can see at the tag cloud in two ways alphabetically and by size.

 

* Del.icio.us also has a hotlist which tracks the popular topics amongst users.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Wikipedia, Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking). To cut important articles, advertisements out of the newspapers, magazines, etc  and posting them on the refrigerator. Similarly, now "social bookmarking" sites serve as virtual refrigerators, empowers users to utilize the online space and allows them to store more than they could on their fridge (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=125705).

 

According to Ellyn Angelotti (www. poynter.org), "They (social bookmarking) also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another."

 

I had not considered social networking before coming to this class.  I knew about chatting, email, and the social networks that develop on on-line games like Everquest, but that was about it.  So I've done some web searching and thinking and was considering what to post when Max, one the the student consultants in the computer lab, comes in for his shift.

"So Max, what do you think about social technology?"

 He starts talking about email and chatting.  Then he opens a browser to digg.com and starts reading.

 "How do YOU use digg.com?  I mean how do you use it and what do YOU get out of it?"

"I can find out about what is happening in the world faster using Digg.com than CSPAN, for instance"

"Can you bookmark stuff, and share with friends?"

"You're talking about 'del.ico.us'"  "You should check out reddit.com, its like digg.com, but fewer people and more targeted."

At this point I'm thinking Max is going to be a guinnea pig for me this semester  :)  We talk more about the various technologies out there and how he uses them.  In short, Max uses digg and others as an alternate source for news that he considers FASTER than tradtional mediums for news.  Then he shows me last.fm, where he logs in and see what music he and his friends are and have been listening to.

 "Why would you want to use the internet to track what music you and your friend listen to?"

"That is how I get exposed to new music.  My friends will be listening to something, so I'll check it out.  The site even has a setting to tell it how to recommend music to you.  Settings include music just like this, slightly out of the genre and way out of the genre."

We discuss stumblUpon.  He's heard of it, but doesn't really use it.  He logs in and demonstrates some features.

"You know all of these things are considered Social Technology, right?"

"No.  I mean I guess they are, but I just think of it as using the internet to get in touch with the world."

"Would you say you're an early adapter?"

His Blackjack phone rings.  He checks an email.

"Definitely."

He then shows me a website about gadgets.  (I didn't get the URL).

"Thanks Max...I feel really old now."

"Why?"

"Because it never occured to me to use the internet to communicate with my friends in a passive way."

"huh?"

"Well.  The technologies you're using are great for keeping in touch with friends that are out of state or country, but in a personal way.  You are discussing music, getting cutting edge news, learning about new technologies, and participating in sharing all of this with your friends asynchronously.  You're getting more out of the internet than I am, and I am in IT!  Thanks for making me feel old  :)"

Max laughes and goes back to his readings from digg.com.

I just didn't get the point of all of this until I saw it first hand from someone that actually uses these sites.  I am still not sure how it will all benefit me, but hopefully this class will answer that.

Sorry for the format of this post, but putting any other way seemed to make it dry and take the 'coolness' out of what Max was doing.  =)

I stumbled on StumbleUpon by visiting Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s blog (Planned Obsolescence). At the end of each blog post she includes buttons that allow you to “bookmark” her post to social bookmarking/networking sites such as Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. In fact, StumbleUpon is designed so that one can find new websites without having to depend on one's favorite sites to highlight them. It has many features that are similar to other social bookmarking sites. It is easy to argue that its unique feature is its “stumble on” button, which when pressed opens a new web page. It is still unclear to me exactly what causes a particular web page to display, but I think it has to do with a person’s individual interests (that you can set up in your profile/preferences) and (perhaps) the interests of friends. And the displayed page is almost certainly one of the bookmarked (thumb up = “I like it”) pages already selected by StumbleUpon users. Apparently, more than 3.4 million people have accounts on this site so that seems to make for lots of stumbling.

Once you have registered with the site, and set up your profile (you pretty much have to set some profile parameters, which is probably a good idea since this helps the stumbling process) you can browse existing lists of bookmarks (categorized by websites, people, and video). You can always press the “stumble on” button to display a web page. As noted, you can mark a page with the “thumb up”, and you can tag and comment on (blog) pages. The recommendation is that one should mark higher level pages rather than lower levels ones. I’m guessing here, but perhaps an example is that if you were looking at my web site, and you liked my list of publications, you should mark my main page rather than the publications page. (There is also a “thumb down” button that allows you to indicate that you are not interested in a particular site and similar types.) And, you can “discover” your own pages, which means that when you give a thumb up to a page that has not been previously marked that way. Your suggestion is then submitted for approval (I guess when others stumble on it). Users also get a “stumbler ranking”, but it was unclear to me exactly how that is calculated or how it is indicated to other users.

Here is an example of how the stumbling process worked for me: I gave a thumb up to a video by Weird Al Jankovic (“ebay”). Then I pressed the Stumble On button, which displayed “Call the future”. Then I pressed the button again, and the next page was “Meteora, Greece” (I can't link it now). One more press got me to “Speedtest”, which seemed to be quite useful.

Some other interesting features include a toolbar that contains the various buttons and a tools menu, tag clouds, groups (I have not figured out how to use these), and code snippets for page sharing. You actually get your own web space – mine is http://olfmanl.stumbleupon.com/. Of course, you can, so to speak, stumble on other sites by looking at the pages of other users – these become available, for example, when you recommend a site that someone else has already reviewed.

Some concerns I have: The site is not especially easy to navigate, at least when getting started. If I was not intent on reviewing the site, I probably would have stopped dealing with it almost immediately. But, a little leg work paid off. The help section is in the form of a FAQ, and it is not complete. The default preferences are a bit strange, so it is important to check all the settings. The profile themes are not very interesting. And, for some reason, the password I entered on signing up was not accepted. The site sent me its own password via email.

So, is there any useful value in being exposed, on a semi-random basis, to web pages that others have recommended? The idea of using an individual’s preferences and the recommendations of those with similar preferences is worthwhile, I think. Clearly, the number of StumbleUpon users seems to validate that this is an approach people like. Like any web-based application, one has to commit to using it on a regular basis to determine if value is really being delivered.

This review is cross-posted at: http//lorne.sisatspace.com.