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Dalston driving lessons type
September 15, 2008 by pierreTags: dalston, posters, public notices, typography | Comments (0)
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fun loop
September 4, 2008 by pierreThere has been two intresting posts on Word Aligned about software documentation as a “genre” and more specifically humour in documentation. The first one was a review of the documentation litteracy ideas and was a quite interesting starting point. But I found the second post yet more interesting : it explores the link between this form of humour and the notion of “syntactic sugar” in programming… and it is very simple and well written, I recommend it.
Makes me think of another idea that I like: the fact that formal systems like programming languages or math proofs (any form of constructed, artificial language) can be used for other things than computing or calculating, for example things like jokes or poetry*, usually associated to natural languages (english, body lanuage, etc…).
To which, Possibly Philosophy answered :
They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor’s ‘everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice’ parties finally sunk the idea.
* or music. Speaking of which: I like a lot the non-orthodox definition on the first line of the wikipedia article on serial music :
“a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those sets.”
there is an intresting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on set theory for some background.
Tags: documentation, formal systems, humour, jokes, litteracy, philosophy, programming | Comments (0)
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An experiment in the economics of production
July 24, 2008 by jeromeAn experiment in the economics of production: how can we shift focus from consumption of a finished product to investment in the processes of design, print & production?
This is a poster and a text: an analog R-Echos
Would you be interested in investing in the tangible production of this work?1. You can download the digital archive
and decide wether or not you’re interested in particpating in this project.
2. Each participant donate a minimum of £8
3. The publication is produced
4. We share the publications
which means each participant own a fair amount of publications and participants decide (collectively or individually) what to do with it.
minimum £8
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google queries reverse engineering, diff & deltas for search engine result sets
March 25, 2008 by pierreThis morning the sentence “I wonder what he googled to find this idea” made Jérôme and I think of a game: given a page of search results, find the closest list of keywords (the “google query”) that leads to it. Today the biggest search engines are based on indexation of content using keywords*: being able to find the correct keywords or combination of keywords that leads you to relevant information on a topic you do not know yet is a quite important skill. This game could be a way to exercise this skill. To program this as an online game would be interesting. You could either play it with two players, one player set the query the other one get the results and have to guess the query, or it could be played with a single player and a programs generates a random query from a list of words and push the results to the player for him to guess the query.
Now if the person who guess the query picks a not exactly identical but similar query, we would like to tell him: “not exactly but close!”, and “how close”. This could be based on finding that the words in the original query and the words in the guess are synonyms, but more interestingly it could be based on calculating the difference, distance, or delta between the two results sets that the original and the guessed query yields. Is there any code that compares search results and compute deltas? In what other situations this kind of calculus could be useful?
*there is a demo of an alternative way of searching on the company “the knowledge” homepage. This technology for sure is interesting, but since I saw it I wonder: what kind of non trivial questions would I ask there? and what would be the success rate of the answers then? hu…
Tags: diff, game, google, search | Comments (1)
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ideas for the filmshop
March 24, 2008 by pierreI went to the filmshop to get a few episodes of the first season of the Wire but their copy was out until tomorrow. I was thinking that if they had their db of dvd’s and tapes online I could have checked before going. But maybe that would not interest the owner of the shop, because people who go there to pick a dvd which is not there can look at other things and maybe take another one. So in a way it is good for the shop to not have their stock state available online.
And I also noticed that the shop is a place where people meet. It is a place of astounding social homogeneity, even electronic noise music concerts gather a more disparate crowd, the only place with an equivalent lack of different social statuses that I can think of is Rochelle Cantine in Arnold Circus. Poeple don’t miss an occasion to look around, observe other people postures and looks, check what films they are interested in etc… In the shop as well there is a small corner where people can put up adds for flat sharing, courses, etc… and it is overflowing.
So I thought of the following system: on the shop website you could post your email with a film title, the people working in the shop would print this on a card and display it in the shop. Any clients who goes to the shop and fancy it could look at the stack of cards, if he finds a movie that’s indicated on a card is in, he can take the card and send you an email saying, “hey … is available, you should picked it up it’s a great film bla blah blu”.
Or, a little more complex: the distributed film delivery system. You can login to the website, enter your name and adress and your credit card details, so the shop can bill you when you are not there. You can enter as well a list of films that you’d like to see and a list of friends of your that are members of the filmshop and that you trust. When your friends go to the film shop they can look up that list, if they find a film that you’d like to see they can borrow it and bring it to you, the shop charge your account and your freind drop the DVD on his way.
Tags: applications, dvd, films, ideas, services, shop, social, web | Comments (0)
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ambient
March 18, 2008 by pierrehttp://rooreynolds.com/2008/03/12/ambient-skype/
made me think of our discussion about the different uses of the (sometime broken) computers, and the meaning of “electronic presence”.
A previous email from Jérôme:
- when there was those bombing in London in July 05, the Cellphone Network Carriers were quickly crushed: too many people were inquiring about the safety of their relatives. A simple alternative i read about at that time (i forgot where and from whom) was to have mobile phone with an IP system that would then reply to a simple ping
- Yesterday, Pierre’s computer crashed - all the data are safe, he does backup everything vital all the time. Despite this fact, I was worried by the loss of its hardware: he couldn’t make sure Martine who stayed in France was alright and couldn’t let her know he was since he was not connected to the AIM network; not that he needed to talk to her - there always is the phone - but he couldn’t see her in the corner of his screen.
That’s typically an exemple of what I’m referring to when I am speaking about Electronic Presence, a networked extension of the self.
- Then we started our rants and 2 pences about a personnal IP which would allow others to _ping_ someone - which means they can know you’re safe/alive. one could setup an auto reply status to the ping, like: “Hospital”, “I’m fine”, “sleeping”, “meeting”. Auto status could enabled in advance using calendar applications
- It really does sounds like FaceBook status; there is some Twitter too, under the hood.
- OpenID could be a nice receptacle for this kind of development.To wich I replied:
Makes me think as well of an interesting interface that there is in the operating system plan 9 (a new more “perfect” unix that never really took off by some of the makers of unix), it is a sort of “distributed” os and there is a part of the UI that shows who’s connected to a machine with small icons like this (on the top left corner):
it is very similar to ichat buddies icons, but I like how it is built deep in to the system and UI, and linked to the idea that our personal machines could be seen as mere entry points in a more global distributed space, where our friends and loved ones are allowed to enter a common space.
and Jérôme quoted:
“Plan 9 is based on UNIX but was developed to demonstrate the concept of making communication the central function of the computing system.”
Tags: avatar, beacon, distributed, electronic presence, filesystem, openid, os, ping, tangible, twitter | Comments (4)
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Emails Uri
by jeromeA few weeks ago, both Marc Liyanage and John Gruber explored the Applescript Reference to a Uri for emails from Mail.app.
http://www.entropy.ch/blog/Mac+OS+X/2007/12/04/Copy-Message-URLs-AppleScript-for-Apple-Mail.html
http://daringfireball.net/2007/12/message_urls_leopard_mail
It could be really nice to be able to have the message:// protocol registered in Terminal or iTerm, so that command+double-click on the url/uri would do just the same as on a http:// link: open it. I used their scripts in combination with Act-On which let’s me now press a command $ then U to copy the Uri of the selected email to the clipboard (Basically: Act-On replace the clicks on the Applescript menu from Applemail by shortcuts). It would be nice to be able to log directly in todo.txt the email Uri fr later retrieval/processing.
todo.txt: http://todotxt.com/
act-on: http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.htmlTags: applescript, filesystem, osx, protocol, uri | Comments (0)
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Hello world!
October 10, 2007 by jeromeWelcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
