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<channel>
<title>Jon Udell</title>
<atom:link href="http://blog.jonudell.net/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net</link>
<description>Strategies for Internet citizens</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:42:11 +0000</pubDate>
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<item>
<title>John Faughnan’s amazing Outlook hack (and why it matters)</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/21/john-faughnans-amazing-outlook-hack-and-why-it-matters/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/21/john-faughnans-amazing-outlook-hack-and-why-it-matters/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:36:24 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=435</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
Although I’ve conversed online with John Faughnan since my days at BYTE, we’ve never met, and we had not even spoken on the phone until last week when he joined me on an episode of my Interviews with Innovators podcast. It was a great pleasure to finally connect in realtime with the prolific author of [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
Although I’ve conversed online with John Faughnan since my days at BYTE, we’ve never met, and we had not even spoken on the phone until last week when he joined me on an episode of my <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3743.html">Interviews with Innovators</a> podcast. It was a great pleasure to finally connect in realtime with the prolific author of thoughtful analysis and commentary on <a href="http://notes.kateva.org/">things in general</a>, on <a href="http://tech.kateva.org/">information technology</a>, and on <a href="http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/">resources for parents of children with cognitive or emotional-behavior disabilities</a>.
</p>
<p>
John was a country doctor, and he retains his medical license, but he doesn’t see patients nowadays. Instead he directs the development of clinical productivity software, with particular focus on methods of knowledge representation, and on strategies for effective collaboration.
</p>
<p>
We share a passion for strategies that entail simple but often overlooked uses of common software applications. For example, did you know that it’s possible, in Outlook, to edit the subject of an email message after it’s been received, and is just sitting in your archive? Try it, and you’ll find that you can. Color me amazed. I’m just the sort of personal information management geek who’d have discovered a hack like that, but I never did.
</p>
<p>
Now, why would you want to do such a thing? It’s a defensive strategy. The message entitled “Re: Next week” probably ought to be entitled something like “Consensus reached among A, B, and C on issue X for project Y.” Which title would you rather scan, in search results, six months later?
</p>
<p>
(John would like to find, and personally thank, the developer responsible for this feature, so if you know that person, or are that person, speak up!)
</p>
<p>
You can think of this technique as a kind of enhanced tagging. It’s related to a strategy for enriching email — embodying the journalistic principle of “heads, decks, and leads” — which I described in my book and in <a href="http://jonudell.net/GroupwareReport.html#53">this report</a>.
</p>
<p>
People mainly still think of information architecture as a discipline practiced only by designers and publishers. But what John and I have always thought is that we’re all becoming designers and publishers of streams of information, that those streams can all be navigated and searched in one way or another, and that the value of those streams depends on the ability of ourselves and others to navigate and search them effectively.
</p>
<p>
We also think that effectiveness requires two things. First, obviously, software that embodies the right principles and enables the right practices. But second, a broad awareness of right principles and practices. Those, we agree in this conversation, are not necessarily intuited by Gen X, Y, or Z just because they’re so-called digital natives. This stuff needs to be articulated, and it needs to be taught.</p>
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<title>How to wire up a timer-triggered WPF event handler in IronPython</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/17/how-to-wire-up-a-timer-triggered-wpf-event-handler-in-ironpython/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/17/how-to-wire-up-a-timer-triggered-wpf-event-handler-in-ironpython/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:29:16 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=431</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
In the last installment of my little series on turning Internet feeds into TV feeds, I had decided to use IronPython to fetch data from the Internet, but C# to drive the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application whose display my local public access TV station will broadcast. This division of labor between C# and IronPython [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
In the last installment of my little series on turning <a href="http://del.icio.us/judell/tvfeeds">Internet feeds into TV feeds</a>, I had decided to use IronPython to fetch data from the Internet, but C# to drive the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application whose display my local public access TV station will broadcast. This division of labor between C# and IronPython arose because the XAML that drives the display needs to be refreshed periodically, and I didn’t know how, in IronPython, to properly delegate a timer-based event handler for WPF.
</p>
<p>
In <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/01/more-ways-to-turn-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/#comment-124594">this comment</a>, Michael Foord, author of <a href="http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/">IronPython in Action</a> and a major contributor to the <a href="http://www.ironpython.info/">IronPython Cookbook</a>, showed me the way. Thanks Michael!
</p>
<p>
Based on <a href="http://www.ironpython.info/index.php/Invoking_onto_the_GUI_(Control)_Thread">his example</a>, I’ve rewritten the C# program shown <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/01/more-ways-to-turn-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/">here</a> as the IronPython script shown below.
</p>
<p>
I haven’t yet decided which version to deploy, but I’m leaning toward the IronPython version. Not because it’s more concise. It isn’t, really. Nor because I feel any need to use the same language for both components of the solution — that is, the feed fetcher and the feed displayer. I don’t care about language uniformity for its own sake.
</p>
<p>
I am, however, thinking that the folks at the TV station may want to modify these programs themselves. They’re pretty simple, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to tinker with them. From that perspective, code that can be modified with nothing more than a text editor will be more accessible than code which requires a compiler.
</p>
<p>
I’m reminded of my early days as a website operator, when I was always glad to discover that a third-party application was written in Perl, rather than in C. That meant I could, and sometimes did, tweak the application in ways that otherwise would have been difficult or even (lacking C source code) impossible.
</p>
<p>
The difference here, of course, is that all of the underlying machinery — XAML, WPF, and the entire .NET Framework — is exactly the same<sup>1</sup> when approached from a scripting language like IronPython or a compiled language like C#. This ability to use common infrastructure from different langages — and from very different kinds of languages — has always seemed like a big deal to me, and still does.
</p>
<hr />
<sup>1</sup> The same, that is, modulo the kind of boundary-crossing issue that stumped me until Michael Foord pointed me to CallTarget0, the wrapper for creating a delegate in IronPython. </p>
<hr />
<pre>
import clr
clr.AddReferenceByPartialName("PresentationCore")
clr.AddReferenceByPartialName("PresentationFramework")
clr.AddReferenceByPartialName("WindowsBase")
clr.AddReferenceByPartialName("IronPython")
from System import *
from System.Windows import *
from System.Windows.Markup import *
from System.Windows.Media import *
from System.Windows.Input import *
from System.Windows.Threading import *
from IronPython.Runtime.Calls import CallTarget0
def LoadXaml(filename):
from System.IO import *
from System.Windows.Markup import XamlReader
f = FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open)
try:
element = XamlReader.Load(f)
finally:
f.Close()
return element
class Scroller(Application):
def tickhandler(self,sender,args):
def update_xaml():
self.window.Content = LoadXaml(self.xaml)
self.timer.Dispatcher.Invoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal,
CallTarget0(update_xaml))
def __init__(self):
Application.__init__(self)
self.xaml = "scroller.xaml"
self.window = Window()
self.window.Content = LoadXaml(self.xaml)
self.window.WindowStyle = WindowStyle.None # go fullscreen
self.window.WindowState = WindowState.Maximized #
self.window.Topmost = True #
self.window.Cursor = Cursors.None #
self.window.Background = Brushes.Black #
self.window.Foreground = Brushes.White #
self.window.Show()
self.timer = DispatcherTimer()
self.timer.Interval = TimeSpan(0, 60, 0) # refresh hourly
self.timer.Tick += self.tickhandler #
self.timer.Start() #
Scroller().Run()
</pre>
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<title>Dan Bricklin on becoming a Happy Caster</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/17/dan-bricklin-on-becoming-a-happy-caster/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/17/dan-bricklin-on-becoming-a-happy-caster/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:08:33 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=425</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
The Conversations Network is embarking on a new phase in which it will expand its ambition to capture, publish, and curate spoken-word audio from a wide range of sources. One of the challenges will be to help more people effectively capture audio to a reasonable standard of quality. Dan Bricklin, my guest for this week’s [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
The Conversations Network is <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/16/future-of-the-conversations-network/">embarking on a new phase</a> in which it will expand its ambition to capture, publish, and curate spoken-word audio from a wide range of sources. One of the challenges will be to help more people effectively capture audio to a reasonable standard of quality. Dan Bricklin, my guest for this week’s <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3727.html">ITConversations show</a>, has ascended that learning curve in recent years. In this conversation he explains why he’s become interested in audio recording, and what he has learned about equipment, and techniques, which can be readily transferred to individuals and organizations wanting to make decent recordings of their own events.
</p>
<p>
When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that. Yes, we’ve made digital photography accessible to the masses, but there was vast demand for enabling the so-called Happy Snapper to point, shoot, and take a decent photo. There’s been comparatively little demand for enabling the <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/07/happy-snappers-and-happy-casters/">Happy Caster</a> to plunk down a microphone, punch record, and capture a decent sound track.
</p>
<p>
Over the last few years I’ve slowly and painfully assimilated just a fraction of the audio lore possessed by domain experts like the Conversations Network’s founder Doug Kaye, and its senior audio engineer Paul Figgiani. So it was refreshing to hear from Dan Bricklin that it has also been a struggle for him to become competent in this domain.
</p>
<p>
I guess the demand for point-and-shoot photography will always outstrip, by orders of magnitude, the demand for plunk-and-punch audio recording. But the latter demand is growing, and in this conversation we speculate a bit on what the Happy Caster solution might be.
</p>
<p>
Mainly, though, Dan focuses on two things. First, the new opportunity to capture spoken-word events that would otherwise be lost, and publish them for audiences that didn’t attend, or couldn’t have attended, in person.
</p>
<p>
Second, the minimal setup that will enable folks who are not audio experts to accomplish that capture and publication.
</p>
<hr />
<p>
PS: A bit of backstory on this recording illustrates some of the challenges of the audio domain. In my <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/10/16/faq-for-podcast-and-screencast-interviewees/">FAQ for interviewees</a>, I invite remote interviewees to record themselves locally, then send me the track which I combine with my own locally-recorded track. Why? If you’re sending voice over the network, whether it’s POTS (plain old telephone service) or Skype, there’s a lot that can and often does go wrong. Eliminate the network and you avoid all those problems.
</p>
<p>
In principle, combining local tracks recorded separately is a great solution. In practice, it has almost never worked out, and this case was no exception.
</p>
<p>
Usually the problem is that interviewees lack the gear or knowledge required to make a decent local track. Attempts to record directly into a computer always end badly. Most people don’t own standalone digital audio recorders. In one case, a musician who routinely records his music through a mixer nevertheless produced an unusable track because he’s not used to recording his voice and overshot the limits.
</p>
<p>
In this case, Dan was quite capable of making a good recording, and he did, but things went wrong on my end. What Dan recorded was an MP3 file. What I was expecting was a WAV file, because I was going to edit the combined recording and it’s dicey to uncompress an MP3, edit, and then recompress.
</p>
<p>
Now, Dan had recorded the MP3 at a bit rate — 192kbps — that he judged would be high enough to survive an edit. But would our discriminating audio engineer Paul Figgiani agree? We weren’t sure, so I sent Paul samples of Dan’s MP3 track and the WAV file I made from the telephone track I’d recorded using the <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/27/the-digital-darkroom-revealed/">Telos</a>. Paul’s verdict: “I think we can make the 192 kbps mp3 version work. The bit rate is high enough … lets go with it.”
</p>
<p>
So far, so good. But when I loaded up my local track and Dan’s remote track into Audition, things didn’t line up. My WAV track was slightly longer (or shorter, I can’t remember) than Dan’s MP3 track. The difference was only about 1.5 seconds over an hour-long recording, but still, it had to be dealt with.
</p>
<p>
Audition has a time-stretch feature that can be used to solve this problem. And I could swear that I’ve used it successfully before in these circumstances. But this time, I couldn’t make it work. Every time I tried to stretch the shorter clip, it snapped back to its original position. I fiddled with every approach I could think of, or could discover by searching, and finally threw up my hands and just used the original recording that had both halves of the conversation in sync. If this Audition behaviour rings a bell with anyone, I’d love to know what went wrong and how to avoid it next time.
</p>
<p>
The moral, anyway, is that if a reasonably technical guy like me is struggling to keep his head above water in this domain, it’s clear that non-geeky civilians will just drown. I’m quite curious to know when, or perhaps whether, those civilians will constitute a market that technology providers want to serve.</p>
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</item>
<item>
<title>Homophily, anti-recommendation, and Driveway Moments</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/16/homophily-anti-recommendation-and-driveway-moments/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/16/homophily-anti-recommendation-and-driveway-moments/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:17:37 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=416</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
The folks at National Public Radio love to create driveway moments:
You’re driving along, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself at your destination, so riveted to a piece that you sit in your idling car to hear it all the way through. That’s a Driveway Moment.
The podcasting counterpart, for me, is the [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
The folks at National Public Radio love to create <a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/driveway">driveway moments</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>
You’re driving along, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself at your destination, so riveted to a piece that you sit in your idling car to hear it all the way through. That’s a Driveway Moment.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
The podcasting counterpart, for me, is the Ashuelot Moment. I’m jogging along the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashuelot_River">Ashuelot River</a>, and I’m so riveted to a piece that I take a longer route so my run won’t end before the story does.
</p>
<p>
The <a href="http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/podcast.php">Long Now</a> podcasts are my most reliable source of Moments but they’re only on a monthly cycle. <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks">TED talks</a> are another good source, though I’ve lost track of how to subscribe to the comprehensive audio-only feed. The Conversations Network, to which I contribute a <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/series/innovators.html">weekly show</a>, produces occasional Moments, but a lot of the material there is so closely aligned with my own particular interests and inclinations that it doesn’t often surprise or challenge me.
</p>
<p>
Another good source is Christopher Lydon’s <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/">Open Source</a>, which launched in 2005, suffered a <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/umass-lowell-an-october-suprise/">setback</a> in 2006, and then <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/open-sources-shiny-new-macarthur-grant/">recovered</a> in 2007. It took me a while to reconnect after the hiatus, but now I’m finding it to be more stimulating than ever.
</p>
<p>
Here’s my most recent Moment, from <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/real-news-ethan-zuckerman-solana-larsen/">this Open Source show</a> with Ethan Zuckerman and Solana Larsen. Ethan is speaking:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
My hope was that with the Internet, suddenly we’re all connected, we hold hands and sing Kumbaya. And it just hasn’t worked out that way.<br />
<br />…<br />
You loook at a site like Digg, or Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism. We’d all get together and decide what’s important. But, who’s we? Or as per the Lone Ranger, who’s we, white man? Or more to the point, who’s me, white geek?
</p>
<p>
If you’re getting your news from these sites, you’re getting a very particular, tech-heavy view of politics, a fairly focused view of the world. And you start falling victim to homophily, which is what happens when all of your news and opinions are coming from people who’ve got the same background and the same values as you.
</p>
<p>
Homophily is the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. It’s the tendency to walk into a room, find the person most similar to you, and form a bond. It’s a natural human tendency, but it’s probably worth fighting against. Homophily makes you stupid.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Of course I share tribal affiliations with Ethan Zuckerman, so I’d have been likely to find that particular show one way or another. But <a href="http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/">Global Voices Online</a>, the project that Ethan and Solana discuss on that show, is all about resisting homophily, and enabling us to tune into global perspectives offered by people in circumstances very different from our own.
</p>
<p>
Just because we can, though, doesn’t mean we will. Homophily <i>is</i> a natural tendency. It’s easy and comfortable to immerse ourselves in the familiar. It’s hard and uncomfortable to seek out the unfamiliar. How do we overcome that?
</p>
<p>
Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.
</p>
<p>
Lately I’ve started to wonder about the notion of anti-recommendation systems. One example of an anti-recommendation system is LibraryThing’s <a href="http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/">UnSuggester</a>, which find books least likely to coincide with yours. It’s a whimsical feature that honestly hasn’t been useful to me yet, but I think the idea merits exploration and development.
</p>
<p>
Although it isn’t automated or automatable, I’d argue that the <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/passion-thursday/">Passion Thursday</a> series on Open Source is a kind of anti-recommender. The series includes shows about birdwatching, the pursuit of truth, poker, the potato, cursive handwriting, and the <a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/passion-the-theremin/">theremin</a>, an early electronic instrument recently notable in the repertoire of the indie band DeVotchKa. The only common thread is someone’s passionate interest in something.
</p>
<p>
We’re not inclined to resist homophily and seek out otherness. But passionate storytellers can take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go, and create Moments there.
</p>
<p>
Passion is a good way to lubricate the engine of serendipity.</p>
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<item>
<title>Will people understand and embrace the right identity systems? Maybe yes!</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/15/will-people-understand-and-embrace-the-right-identity-systems-maybe-yes/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/15/will-people-understand-and-embrace-the-right-identity-systems-maybe-yes/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:25:14 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=415</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
In conversation with English and Welsh friends last week, the subject of Britain’s imminent National Identity Scheme came up. My friends, who are worldly and well-educated but not technical, voiced concerns about the amount of personal information that will be stored. Their understanding was that a lot of this information will be kept on the [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
In conversation with English and Welsh friends last week, the subject of Britain’s imminent National Identity Scheme came up. My friends, who are worldly and well-educated but not technical, voiced concerns about the amount of personal information that will be stored. Their understanding was that a lot of this information will be kept on the new ID card. In fact, the <a href="http://www.ips.gov.uk/identity/downloads/national-identity-scheme-delivery-2008.pdf">proposal</a> says that only a subset will stored on the card, which will be backed by a cloud-based (and decentralized) National Identity Register. But either way, my friends’ concerns are of course valid. If governments or businesses aggregate too much personal information, accidents and abuses will occur.
</p>
<p>
At the same time, my friends do recognize the need for a strong and secure means of identification. So they’re not opposed to identity cards on principle, they just don’t want those cards to contain, or link to, extensive dossiers.
</p>
<p>
At this point, channeling <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/">Kim Cameron</a>, I launched into an explanation of the <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/?p=352/">laws of identity</a> and the <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2005/07/05/IdentityMetasystem.htm">identity metasystem</a>. Well, sort of. I didn’t say anything about cryptography, or digital certificates, or XML web services. But I did paint a picture of a world in which individuals interact with many identity providers and many relying parties, in which all actors trust one another in exactly the ways they already do today, and in which disclosure of personal information is minimal and context-dependent.
</p>
<p>
Halfway through I thought, well, this will never fly. This whole scheme is based on decentralization and indirection, and I know people don’t take naturally to those concepts.
</p>
<p>
But…they completely got it! Maybe that’s because the threat of a monolithic system leads people to appreciate the virtues of a decentralized one. Maybe it’s because ongoing experience with the Net makes people more comfortable with the principle of indirection. Maybe it’s both these factors and others as well. In any event, it was a hopeful moment. Identity geeks have struggled, for many years, not only to devise right systems, but also to motivate an understanding of what makes systems right, and why. Now that right systems are coming into existence, it’s good to see that (some) people are ready to appreciate and embrace them.</p>
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<item>
<title>How the WorldWide Telescope works</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/14/how-the-worldwide-telescope-works/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/14/how-the-worldwide-telescope-works/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:33:24 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=414</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
On my Perspectives show last week, Curtis Wong and Roy Gould relate the history and educational mission of the WorldWide Telescope. On this week’s show, principal developer Jonathan Fay describes how the underlying technologies enable the WWT’s seamless view of the sky.
There were a bunch of things I wanted to know, including:
How does the WWT [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
On my Perspectives show <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/The-story-of-the-WorldWide-Telescope/">last week</a>, Curtis Wong and Roy Gould relate the history and educational mission of the <a href="http://worldwidetelescope.org/">WorldWide Telescope</a>. On <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/How-the-WorldWide-Telescope-works/">this week’s show</a>, principal developer Jonathan Fay</a> describes how the underlying technologies enable the WWT’s seamless view of the sky.
</p>
<p>
There were a bunch of things I wanted to know, including:
</p>
<p>
How does the WWT project build on, and extend, the <a href="http://cas.sdss.org">SkyServer</a> project to which Jim Gray made fundamental contributions?
</p>
<p>
What standards and protocols enable the various sky surveys to be woven together?
</p>
<p>
What’s the relationship between Deep Zoom and the WWT’s own scheme for managing and viewing tiled multi-resolution imagery?
</p>
<p>
How much of the data is stored on Microsoft servers, how much is stored elsewhere, and in what ways do the supporting data services cooperate?
</p>
<p>
Jonathan answers all these questions, and he also answers one I didn’t think to ask:
</p>
<p>
What technique is used to project the stars onto an imaginary sphere at near-infinite distance?
</p>
<p>
The answer to that last question is that a new kind of spherical projection had to be invented:
</p>
<blockquote><p>
Imagine taking a round room, and trying to put a bunch of bathroom tiles on it, and grout it. The tiles seem to come together and have parallel lines for a while, but eventually it stops working well. Maybe you can take one line around the equator, but as you go up you have fewer tiles, and weird-shaped tiles, and nothing lines up.</p>
<p>That’s the problem we have. We’re looking at spherical data, so we had to come up with a new spherical transform that preserves the poles. In previous projects, like Virtual Earth or TerraServer or Google Earth, the poles weren’t important, because nobody lives there and nobody needs map directions for driving around there.</p>
<p>So we had to come up with something called TOAST: tesselated octahedral adaptive subdivision transform. It creates a 360-degree wraparound view that’s either a planet surface or the infinite sphere of the sky, and lets you represent it using a 3D graphics accelerator, very rapidly and efficiently. So we can have an image pyramid the way Deep Zoom does, and TerraServer before it, but we don’t have to give up the poles.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
This transform isn’t proprietary, and in fact it’s being applied to the 50-odd full-sky surveys hosted at NASA’s <a href="http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/">SkyView</a> virtual observatory. The implications are pretty astounding. This imagery is stored in astronomical databases using what’s called tangential projection, which suffers from polar distortion when combined into large mosaics. Now the imagery can be combined into large mosaics — or indeed a complete view of the sky — and seen without distortion. What’s more, multiple surveys can be aligned to that spherical projection. That’s why, in WorldWide Telescope, you can cross-fade between a view of the Milky Way in visible light and views in infrared or ultraviolet light.
</p>
<p>
What the WorldWide Telescope really is, Jonathan says, is a browser, like a web browser but for an information space defined in astronomical terms. Here’s how he sums up the work that was necessary to make that possible:
</p>
<blockquote><p>
The vision of getting everybody access to all this astronomy data required systematic changes at every single level. We built on some things that Jim pioneered with <a href="http://www.us-vo.org/">NVO</a>, and worked from there, but it was very systematic. How people process the data. The client to access the data. The protocols over the wire. Educating people, providing the context for it. </p>
<p>We put a lot of things together, but we also created a systematic model for how to do everything end to end, top to bottom, left to right. Now there may be other people who use the pieces that we’ve created, and then change them to use different data sources, different visualizations. Say someone creates a Mac client, or an iPhone client, that’s possible. Or a mobile phone version of it, or a web-based version. Over time we or others can replace various components, but as a reference model for solving all the problems in order to get the data into people’s homes and into their eyeballs — you had to solve for all of those problems, otherwise people are still blocked from being able to really explore.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
For Curtis Wong, the WWT is an extension of John Dobson’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk_astronomy">sidewalk astromony</a> — a way to bring telescopes to the public and to enable astronomers to share their knowledge of the sky with everybody. For Jonathan Fay, it’s the perfect application of earth and sky visualization technologies he’s been developing throughout his career. Their interests and talents combined, as Jonathan says, like peanut butter and chocolate:
</p>
<blockquote><p>
Curtis had been exploring how to create an educational environment with rich tools for exploring space, and he’d been collaborating with Jim Gray on TerraServer, and now he was looking for the technology to make it possible.</p>
<p>Here I had this technology, and was looking for somebody who was enthusiastic about having a purpose for it. So it was the peanut butter and chocolate moment.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
Yum.</p>
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<title>More ways to turn Internet feeds into TV feeds</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/01/more-ways-to-turn-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/01/more-ways-to-turn-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:11:42 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=413</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
Last week I started looking into ways to Internet feeds into TV feeds. Although I did come up with a way to turn a data feed into a video file, that wound up being overkill. It turns out that the local station is willing to broadcast the signal from a computer display. To create that [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
Last week I started looking into ways to <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/25/turning-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/">Internet feeds into TV feeds</a>. Although I did come up with a way to turn a data feed into a video file, that wound up being overkill. It turns out that the local station is willing to broadcast the signal from a computer display. To create that signal, several folks suggested using PowerPoint, but I found that its <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/26/from-powerpoint-to-ironpythonxaml/">scrolling credits feature doesn’t accommodate</a> really long lists of credits. So I decided to try XAML, the application markup language that works with Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), in concert with IronPython.
</p>
<p>
The plan was as follows. A long-running IronPython script periodically fetches the feed from a web service, interpolates the text into a XAML template that animates the crawl, and displays the XAML in a fullscreen white-on-black WPF window.
</p>
<p>
Here’s the XAML template:
</p>
<pre>
<Grid xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="%s" Height="%s">
<TextBlock xml:space="preserve" FontSize="%s" Margin="%s,%s,0,0"
FontFamily="Arial">
<TextBlock.RenderTransform>
<TranslateTransform x:Name="translate" />
</TextBlock.RenderTransform>
<TextBlock.Triggers>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="FrameworkElement.Loaded">
<BeginStoryboard>
<Storyboard RepeatBehavior="Forever">
<DoubleAnimation From="%s" To="-%s"
Storyboard.TargetName="translate"
Storyboard.TargetProperty="Y"
Duration="00:%s:%s" />
</Storyboard>
</BeginStoryboard>
</EventTrigger>
</TextBlock.Triggers>
<Run>
<![CDATA[
%s
]]>
</Run>
</TextBlock>
</Grid>
</pre>
<p>
Some of the values depend on the number of items in the feed, so the script interpolates those values into the template. Then it formats the feed and plugs the formatted text into the template’s CDATA section. The formatted text looks like this:
</p>
<pre>
EVENTS FOR MON JUN 30 2008 FROM THE ELMCITY.INFO CALENDAR
06:00 AM: lap swim (ymca)
07:00 AM: AA: On Awakening Group (eventful: Keene Unitarian
Universalist Church)
</pre>
<p>
After generating the XAML, the IronPython script fires up an Application object, creates a window, loads in the XAML to start the crawl, and sets a timer to refresh the XAML.
</p>
<p>
I ran into a snag when I tried to set that timer, though. There are a few different timers you might imagine using in this context, including Python’s own timer object and various timers available in the .NET Framework. All but one of these, however, will complain about <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/nikola/archive/2008/03/13/calling-web-services-and-accessing-ui-from-timer-event-in-silverlight.aspx">invalid cross-thread access</a> when you try to update the application’s user interface from a timer event handler.
</p>
<p>
The right timer to use, it turns out, is .NET’s System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer. But when I tried it, I ran into another snag. In C#, you create a WPF-friendly timer like so:
</p>
<pre>
DispatcherTimer timer = new DispatcherTimer();
timer.Tick += new EventHandler(event_handler);
</pre>
<p>
event_handler is a method, but EventHandler returns a delegate that encapsulates that method. I couldn’t find a straightforward way to create a delegate, and do that encapsulation, in IronPython.
</p>
<p>
If you know how, I’d love to hear about it. Then again, it really doesn’t matter. Logically this program has two loosely-coupled parts. The engine part reads the feed from a web service and formats it as XAML. It can be a Python script that runs on a scheduled basis to fetch and format the feed.
</p>
<p>
The user interface part loads, displays, and then periodically refreshes the XAML. It can be a little C# program that runs forever, displays the animation, and refreshes the data, like so:
</p>
<pre>
using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Markup;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Threading;
namespace CalendarCrawl
{
public class CalendarCrawler
{
static private Application app = new Application();
static private StreamReader getXaml()
{
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("WPF.xaml");
return sr;
}
[STAThread]
static public void Main(string[] args)
{
Window win = new Window();
win.WindowStyle = WindowStyle.None; // go fullscreen
win.WindowState = WindowState.Maximized; // go fullscreen
win.Topmost = true; // go fullscreen
win.Cursor = Cursors.None; // go fullscreen
win.Content = XamlReader.Load(getXaml().BaseStream);
win.Background = Brushes.Black;
win.Foreground = Brushes.White;
DispatcherTimer timer = new DispatcherTimer();
timer.Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 1, 0); // every hour
timer.Tick += new EventHandler(eventHandler); // wire up handler
timer.Start();
app.Run(win);
}
static private void eventHandler(Object sender, EventArgs args)
{
app.Windows[0].Content = XamlReader.Load((getXaml().BaseStream));
}
}
}
</pre>
<p>
It was odd how reluctantly I came to this division of labor. Evidently I still need to remind myself that in a world of loosely-coupled applications and services, when you need to get something done, There Is More Than One Way To Do It.
</p>
<p>
Here’s another way. If the engine doesn’t have to talk to the .NET Framework’s WPF machinery, there’s no need to use IronPython. Any flavor of Python makes a handy tool for talking to RESTful web services, wrangling text, and interacting with the file system.
</p>
<p>
Here’s yet another way: A <a href="http://jonudell.net/examples/SL-Scroller.html">Silverlight version</a> of the user interface. It’s nice to know that option is available. However, I’m leaning toward the C# version. The target machine is Vista, it already has .NET and WPF, why use a long-running browser instance just to host this tiny little thing?
</p>
<p>
One final point is worth mentioning. XAML is really just another source language for the .NET runtime and framework, like C# and IronPython and others. You can, for example, create an application window by writing a Window tag in XAML markup, and specifying parameters as attributes. Or you can do it by invoking System.Windows.Window from IronPython or C# or another .NET language, and specifying parameters in code. The boundary between markup and code is very fluid, and you can draw the line for reasons of convenience, maintainability, and taste. It’s a very flexible system, and it becomes even more flexible when you can use a dynamic language like Python to generate the XAML, the code, or both.</p>
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/categories/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/tags/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/jonudell.wordpress.com/413/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=blog.jonudell.net&blog=109309&post=413&subd=jonudell&ref=&feed=1" /></div>]]></content:encoded>
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<media:title type="html">jonudell</media:title>
</media:content>
</item>
<item>
<title>From seeing to hearing: A conversation with Susan Gerhart about assistive technologies for the sight-impaired</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/30/from-seeing-to-hearing-a-conversation-with-susan-gerhart-about-assistive-technologies-for-the-sight-impaired/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/30/from-seeing-to-hearing-a-conversation-with-susan-gerhart-about-assistive-technologies-for-the-sight-impaired/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:01:48 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=410</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
For many of us, the podcasting revolution has opened up the audio channel as a new option for receiving information that we might otherwise read. But for the sight-impaired, like Susan Gerhart, who joins me for this week’s ITConversations show, the audio channel isn’t optional. Her myopic retinal degeneration has forced her to shift almost [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
For many of us, the podcasting revolution has opened up the audio channel as a new option for receiving information that we might otherwise read. But for the sight-impaired, like Susan Gerhart, who joins me for <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3715.html">this week’s ITConversations show</a>, the audio channel isn’t optional. Her myopic retinal degeneration has forced her to shift almost entirely into audio mode in order to read, and to work on the computer.
</p>
<p>
As a lifelong technologist, Susan is a capable user and evaluator of software and computational devices. When she entered the world of assistive technologies — including the <a href="http://www.nvda-project.org/">NVDA screen reader</a>, the <a href="http://levelstar.com/">LevelStar Icon</a>, the <a href="http://www.knfbreader.com/">Kurzweil NFB Reader</a> — she decided to share her experiences on a <a href="http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/listen-up-technology-materials-and-strategy-for-non-visual-reading">blog</a>. In our interview she summarizes what she’s learned so far about using these technologies to adapt to her changing vision.</p>
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<media:title type="html">jonudell</media:title>
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</item>
<item>
<title>From PowerPoint to IronPython/XAML</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/26/from-powerpoint-to-ironpythonxaml/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/26/from-powerpoint-to-ironpythonxaml/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:30:26 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=408</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
As per the comments on yesterday’s item about creating a video crawl for local TV, it turns out there’s no need to produce a video file. Instead it’ll be OK to use a computer display directly. The computer could be running, for example, a PowerPoint slideshow in a loop.
Here’s the apparently standard recommendation for making [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
As per the <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/25/turning-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/#comments">comments</a> on yesterday’s item about creating a video crawl for local TV, it turns out there’s no need to produce a video file. Instead it’ll be OK to use a computer display directly. The computer could be running, for example, a PowerPoint slideshow in a loop.
</p>
<p>
Here’s the apparently <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/education/crawlingcredits.mspx">standard recommendation</a> for making scrolling credits in PowerPoint. It was written for earlier versions, but seems applicable also to the current 2007 version:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<b>Create movie-style crawling credits in PowerPoint presentations</b></p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>In a PowerPoint presentation, create a new slide for credits or any other list that you want to scroll from bottom to top.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Type your credits or other text. Don’t worry about text running off the bottom of the slide. In fact, it should run off the bottom if you are going to have enough text to make a crawl effect work well.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Right-click the text, and on the shortcut menu, click <b>Custom Animation</b>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Select the text that you want to scroll. In the <b>Custom Animation</b> task pane, click <b>Add Effect</b>. Point to <b>Entrance</b>, and click <b>Credits</b>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Click <b>Play</b> to see how the effect will look on-screen.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Move the text block completely off the top of the slide. When you play your presentation, the text will crawl or scroll from the bottom of the screen and disappear off the top.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>
But it doesn’t look like you can get more than three screenfuls of data into the crawl. For example, I made a textbox with 200 lines of text numbered accordingly. Then I animated it using several varations on this technique.
</p>
<p>
First I put the top of the textbox at the top of the slide, like so:
</p>
<p>
<img border="1" src="http://jonudell.net/img/pptcredits01.png">
</p>
<p>
The effect: Line 0 crawls into view from the bottom of an empty slide, and the crawl ends with line 25 at the top and line 50 at the bottom.
</p>
<p>
Next I put the top of the textbox at line 25, like so:
</p>
<p>
<img border="1" src="http://jonudell.net/img/pptcredits02.png">
</p>
<p>
The effect: Line 0 appears at the top of the slide, the crawl ends with line 50 at the top and line 75 and the bottom.
</p>
<p>
Is there a way to include more than three screenfuls of data in the crawl? If not, it looks like it’d be necessary to create a series of slides, each with two screenfuls of data. The first slide would need to have its first line of data at its top. But the second and following slides would need to have their <i>middle</i> lines of data at their tops. Gnarly.
</p>
<p>
I’m sure that could be done, but why bother? Absent a requirement to produce a video file, there a zillion ways to make text crawl up a computer screen. This might be a good opportunity to explore the combination of IronPython and <a href="http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/wpf/thread/7a391faa-8607-4c2b-84d4-4ee3bf55a679/">XAML</a>.</p>
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</item>
<item>
<title>Turning Internet feeds into TV feeds</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/25/turning-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/25/turning-internet-feeds-into-tv-feeds/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:02:46 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=406</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
I’ve cobbled together a way to turn an Internet data feed into a video crawl that can run on my local public access cable TV channel. Before explaining how, I need to explain why. Here’s the short answer: As much as I want everyone to use the Internet for all it’s worth, most people don’t [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
I’ve cobbled together a way to turn an Internet data feed into a video crawl that can run on my local public access cable TV channel. Before explaining how, I need to explain why. Here’s the short answer: As much as I want everyone to use the Internet for all it’s worth, most people don’t yet.
</p>
<p>
A couple of years ago, I was campaigning in my community to open up the parent portal into PowerSchool, a student information system that was being used internally by teachers and administrators but wasn’t available to parents via the Internet. At one point I made a <a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/11/30.html">screencast</a> that addressed the perceived risks, and showed the compelling benefits, of opening up the portal. The screencast was published on the Internet, available to the whole world, and the whole world includes Keene NH, so that ought to be a good way to bring my message to the community, right?
</p>
<p>
Wrong. Nobody watched it.
</p>
<p>
A while later, it hit me. There still aren’t many folks here who are inclined to receive a message like that from InfoWorld.com, or from YouTube, or from any other Internet destination I might use. But there <i>are</i> significant numbers who tune into the local public access station. Why not show the screencast there?
</p>
<p>
So I dubbed it onto a MiniDV tape, took it down to the station, and gave it to the executive producer.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<b>Him</b>: What’s this?
</p>
<p>
<b>Me</b>: A demo and discussion of the PowerSchool software. Will you run it?
</p>
<p>
<b>Him</b>: Sure.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
And lo, a couple of weeks later, I heard from the assistant superintendant of schools. He thanked me for applying the external pressure that they’d been needing in order to break through an internal logjam, and he invited me into the beta program. Now, two years later, it’s fully deployed and making a big difference.
</p>
<p>
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a community information project that’s all about feeds and syndication. But slow learner that I am, I continue to invite people to use Internet feeds and Internet syndication. And people continue to mostly decline the invitation.
</p>
<p>
For example, I’ve been working on <a href="http://elmcity.info/events">calendar syndication</a>. The syndication flows two ways. First, inward. The service pulls events from various local websites, and I’m working with the proprietors of those sites to clarify why and and to publish true calendar feeds.
</p>
<p>
Second, it syndicates outward. With a JavaScript call, you can include the day’s events in another website, like <a href="http://citizenkeene.ning.com">CitizenKeene</a> or <a href="http://www.cheshiretv.org/calendar.htm">Cheshire TV</a>.
</p>
<p>
But this is all still just Internet stuff. And as we’ve seen, the community doesn’t (yet) tune into the Internet for local information. It does tune into public access cable TV.
</p>
<p>
So why can’t Internet data feeds show up there?
</p>
<p>
Well, of course, they can. Here’s a <a href="http://jonudell.net/img/animation.gif">prototype video crawl</a> (the link goes to an animated gif, just for convenience) made from yesterday’s combined calendar. We’ll need to work out the details of format and workflow, but I think it’ll work. And it seems like a great way to connect two worlds.
</p>
<p>
Calendars are just part of the story. Consider, for example, the public library’s <a href="http://www.ci.keene.nh.us/library/catalognewlists.htm">RSS feeds</a> announcing new books and DVDs. I’m one of probably a handful of subscribers to those feeds. Now imagine that the feeds showed up as a video crawl on TV. I bet a lot more folks would find out about new books and DVDs. And maybe, just maybe, the reception of that feed via TV would lead to discovery and use of the more convenient and powerful Internet feed.
</p>
<p>
We’ll see. Meanwhile, below the fold, I describe the method I’ve come up with to do this. The paint isn’t dry, and I’ll be very interested in comments and suggestions.
</p>
<p>
… the fold …
</p>
<p>
Our public access TV station, as may be typical (though I dunno), is a mostly Windows-based operation. As is surely typical, there’s little money to spend, either on people to produce these feeds interactively or on software to produce them automatically. So the requirements seem to be:
</p>
<ol>
<li>Windows-based</li>
<li>Cheap or free</li>
<li>Fully automatable</li>
</ol>
<p>
My first idea was to leverage SMIL. I knew it would be easy and free to transform a feed into markup that can be played by Real, or QuickTime, or Windows Media. And I hoped it would also be easy and free to render that markup into a video format. But there I ran aground. If there’s a free, or at least cheap, SMIL renderer that can be scheduled to run automatically, I’d like to know about it, because that’d probably be the ideal solution. But I haven’t found one.
</p>
<p>
The next idea was to produce the animation frame by frame. And that’s what I’m actually doing for now. It sounded a lot harder than it turned out to be. After installing the Python Imaging Library, it was possible to write this very concise frame generator:
</p>
<pre>
import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
s = """
EVENTS FOR WEDS JUNE 30 FROM ELMCITY.INFO (HTTP://ELMCITY.INFO/EVENTS)
06:00 AM lap swim (ymca)
07:00 AM Cheshire Walkers: Indoor Walking Program (eventful: Keene Recreation Center)
...
Trainers Academy - Level II (eventful: Monadnock Humane Society)
TOR 7pm (swamp bats)
"""
lines = s.split('\n')
def frame(index,top):
image = Image.new('RGB',(720,480),(0,0,0))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 18)
for line in lines:
draw.text((10, top), line, (255,255,255), font=font)
top += 25
image.save('cal%0.3d.gif' % index)
top = 450
for index in range(len(lines)*8):
print index,top
frame(index,top)
top -= 4
</pre>
<p>
This yields a sequence like cal000.gif…calnnn.gif.
</p>
<p>
I wasn’t sure how to make a video directly from that sequence, but I knew that ImageMagick could turn it into an animated GIF, like so:
</p>
<pre>
convert -adjoin cal???.gif animation.gif
</pre>
<p>
So I did that, and went looking for ways to convert that into a video format. ffmpeg will do it, but the results weren’t pretty, and ffmpeg can be a dicey thing to ask people to install. QuickTime, I found, did a better job. You’d need QuickTime Pro for Windows, which isn’t free, but $30 won’t break the bank.
</p>
<p>
Now the question became: How to automate the QuickTime conversion? I installed the QuickTime SDK, went looking for examples, and found <a href="http://www.xsi-blog.com/archives/103">just what the doctor ordered</a>. Thanks, <a href="http://www.xsi-blog.com/?author=14">Luc-Eric</a>!
</p>
<p>
Luc-Eric’s JavaScript solution, which runs on the Windows command line courtesy of the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9bbdkx3k(VS.85).aspx">Windows Script Host</a>, turned out to provide a double benefit. In addition to showing how to automate the conversion of a batch of GIFs to an AVI, it showed me that there was, in fact, no need to produce an intermediate animated GIF. You can just point QuickTime at the sequence in the same way that you can point ImageMagick at the sequence. I hadn’t known that! So ImageMagick dropped out of the toolchain, and there was one less component to require the station to install.
</p>
<p>
So that’s where things stand. I’m pretty sure there’s a better way to meet the requirements, and I’ll be delighted to discover it. But maybe there isn’t, in which case it looks like this will work.
</p>
<p>
Either way, it’s the end result that will — or maybe won’t — matter. We’ll do the experiment, and we’ll find out.</p>
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<title>A conversation with Jean-Claude Bradley about open notebook science and the educational uses of Second Life</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/24/a-conversation-with-jean-claude-bradley-about-open-notebook-science-and-the-educational-uses-of-second-life/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/24/a-conversation-with-jean-claude-bradley-about-open-notebook-science-and-the-educational-uses-of-second-life/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:40:34 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=405</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
On this week’s ITConversations show I finally got to meet Jean-Claude Bradley, the Drexel chemistry professor who coined the phrase open notebook science and who champions the principles behind it.
There were a couple of surprises for me. First, I was intrigued to learn about Jean-Claude’s vision for mechanized research. I’ve always thought of open notebook [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
On this week’s <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3705.html">ITConversations show</a> I finally got to meet <a href="http://www.chemistry.drexel.edu/people/bradley/bradley.asp">Jean-Claude Bradley</a>, the Drexel chemistry professor who coined the phrase <a href="http://precedings.nature.com/documents/39/version/1">open notebook science</a> and who <a href="http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/">champions the principles</a> behind it.
</p>
<p>
There were a couple of surprises for me. First, I was intrigued to learn about Jean-Claude’s vision for mechanized research. I’ve always thought of open notebook science as a way to speed up the iterative cycle of research and publication, and to engage more human minds in collaboration. Of course Jean-Claude thinks so too. But he also thinks that when data are published in accessible formats, and exposed to computational processes running in the cloud, we’ll be able to automate certain aspects of research.
</p>
<p>
It reminds me of George Hripcsak’s effort to <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/17/a-conversation-with-george-hripcsak-about-electronic-health-records-and-clinical-truth/">mechanize the interpretation of electronic health records</a>. In general, we’re collecting way more data than the collectors can analyze. Crowdsourcing is one solution to this problem. Mechanization is another. We’ll need both.
</p>
<p>
The other surprise was hearing about Drexel’s fairly aggressive use of Second Life. I’ve been an <a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/10/16.html">amused skeptic</a> on that front, but Jean-Claude’s passionate advocacy requires me to rethink that stance.
</p>
<p>
What didn’t surprise me, but might well surprise tuition-paying parents of Drexel students, was Jean-Claude’s attitude toward the classroom. He mostly doesn’t see a need for it. The content delivery aspect of education, he feels, is best handled in other ways, including screencasts and podcasts as well as traditional texts. There can, and should, be a range of sources, to accommodate the differing inclinations of learners. And teachers need to be competent producers and orchestrators of those sources. But for Jean-Claude, the best way to engage directly with students is to meet with individuals, not with whole classes.
</p>
<p>
Now admittedly, a chemistry class doesn’t invite and thrive on group discussion in the same way that, for example, a literature class does. And yet Jean-Claude says that a literature class was one of the models for his use of Second Life. When group interaction is central to the educational experience, he thinks that virtual environments — though he doesn’t require their use — may outperform real ones.
</p>
<p>
I remain skeptical on that point, but I’m always open-minded, so I hope Jean-Claude will take me up on my offer to visit one of his virtual environments and document the interactions that happen there.</p>
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<wfw:commentRss>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/24/a-conversation-with-jean-claude-bradley-about-open-notebook-science-and-the-educational-uses-of-second-life/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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<title>The story of the WorldWide Telescope</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/23/the-story-of-the-worldwide-telescope/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/23/the-story-of-the-worldwide-telescope/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:14:57 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=404</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
My guests for this week’s Perspectives are Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong and Harvard-Smithsonian science educator Roy Gould. At Ted 2008 they jointly delivered the first preview of the WorldWide Telescope, an elegant and powerful application for exploring the sky and weaving narratives about it. In this extended interview, you can hear (or read) the whole [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
My guests for <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/The-story-of-the-WorldWide-Telescope/">this week’s Perspectives</a> are Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong and Harvard-Smithsonian science educator Roy Gould. At Ted 2008 they jointly delivered the <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/224">first preview</a> of the <a href="http://worldwidetelescope.org">WorldWide Telescope</a>, an elegant and powerful application for exploring the sky and weaving narratives about it. In this extended interview, you can hear (or read) the whole story behind the WWT.
</p>
<p>
I’d known that the WWT was based on Jim Gray’s work, and also that it was dedicated to him. I’d also heard several of the talks he’d given about <a href="http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/">SkyServer</a>, <a href="http://skyquery.net/">SkyQuery</a>, and the SQL and XML web services technologies powering those projects.
</p>
<p>
What I hadn’t fully grasped, until I began preparing for the interview with Curtis and Roy, was Jim Gray’s larger vision for that work. In 2002, with Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins, he published a paper entitled <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2002-75">The World-Wide Telescope: An Archetype for Online Science</a>. Here’s the abstract:
</p>
<blockquote><p>
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online scientific archives and analysis tools, rather than examining the raw data. Today this analysis is primarily driven by scientists asking queries, but scientific archives are becoming active databases that self-organize and recognize interesting and anomalous facts as data arrives.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
Although the WWT isn’t an instrument for professional scientists, Roy Gould thinks it will be used by citizen scientists to collaboratively search the fast-growing corpus of sky imagery. That is, of course, a poignant echo of the <a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/02/help_find_jim_gray.html">collaborative search</a> for Jim Gray when his sailboat went missing.
</p>
<p>
But for Curtis Wong and Roy Gould, who grew up in Los Angeles and New York, respectively, where neither had access to the dark night sky, the WWT is first and foremost a way to reacquaint our society with the night sky, and to teach us about the universe.
</p>
<p>
Roy Gould says that when his team surveyed high school students around the country, they found that a majority believe that stars reside within the orbit of Pluto. They also believe that galaxies are closer than stars, because “stars are just point sources, no matter what the magnification, so they must be very far away, whereas galaxies, whatever they are, look big, so they must be closer.”
</p>
<p>
To fulfill its educational mission the WWT delivers seamless navigation of the sky, contextualized in a variety of ways. Objects are described onscreen, and linked to sources on the web. When you find your way to a stellar neighborhood, thumbnails of the objects in that neighborhood invite you to explore images from a variety of catalogs: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Hubble, Chandra.
</p>
<p>
What’s more, the imagery is correlated so you can see the same object in any of the wavelengths of light used to observe it. If you look at the Milky Way in the standard view, and then switch to infrared, a band of incandescent whiteness emerges from the cloud of stars.
</p>
<p>
You can use the WWT to explore the sky randomly, but most people will enjoy taking one of the guided tours. Curtis Wong’s lifetime of experience as a creator of interactive multimedia is distilled into this feature of the WWT. Tours are slideshows that move from one object in the sky to the next, and may be annotated with text, spoken-word audio, and music. But at any point you can pause the tour — or hop off the bus, as Curtis says — and explore the neighborhood on your own.
</p>
<p>
The WWT isn’t just a player of tours, it’s also an authoring tool for creating them. You create slides, navigate to objects in the sky, annotate them, and save the results in an XML format that you can reuse and share.
</p>
<p>
Like images from catalogs, tours are contextually available. So if you happen upon the Ring Nebula while exploring randomly, and if there’s a tour that mentions the Ring Nebula, then that tour will surface.
</p>
<p>
Curtis envisions a hypermedia web of sky narratives. For him, this storytelling aspect really is the heart of the project. In the interview he reveals for the first time that an early prototype for the WWT, shelved years ago, was to have been called <i>John Dobson’s Universe</i>.
</p>
<p>
Dobson, a leading amateur astronomer and innovative telescope builder, founded <a href="http://www.sfsidewalkastronomers.org/">San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers</a>, a group that encourages telescope owners to take their telescopes out in public and share their knowledge of the sky. The WorldWide Telescope is poised to carry on that great tradition, and take it in some amazing new directions.</p>
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<title>A conversation with George Hripcsak about electronic health records and clinical truth</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/17/a-conversation-with-george-hripcsak-about-electronic-health-records-and-clinical-truth/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/17/a-conversation-with-george-hripcsak-about-electronic-health-records-and-clinical-truth/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:45:05 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=403</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
George Hripcsak, professor of biomedical informatics, is one of the recipients of a Microsoft Research grant to support work on the computational challenges of genome-wide association studies. These studies involve scanning complete human genomes, and looking for correlations between certain markers of genetic variation and certain diseases.
Doing that correlation is a computational challenge, but as [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
George Hripcsak, professor of biomedical informatics, is one of the recipients of a <a href="http://www.genome.gov/20019523">Microsoft Research grant</a> to support work on the computational challenges of <a href="http://www.genome.gov/20019523">genome-wide association studies</a>. These studies involve scanning complete human genomes, and looking for correlations between certain markers of genetic variation and certain diseases.
</p>
<p>
Doing that correlation is a computational challenge, but as I learned in my <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/Making-sense-of-electronic-health-records/">interview with George Hripcsak for Perspectives</a>, that isn’t the challenge his research addresses. Instead he’s tackling a different challenge: mining electronic health records to figure out what they say about the diseases patients may have.
</p>
<p>
Why? Suppose you’ve sequenced the DNA of thousands of people for a study. If you’re trying to correlate genetic markers with disease, you need to know what diseases those people have. George calls this “collecting the phenotype” — that is, the expression of the genes responsible for diabetes, or a tendency to complications in labor, or whatever.
</p>
<p>
Traditionally that’s done by interviewing patients, a painstaking process that doesn’t scale. Given electronic health records, how much of this phenotype collection can be done automatically, and to what level of accuracy? That’s a different kind of computational challenge.
</p>
<p>
There are basically two ways to go. You can try to templatize the process of clinical data collection, so that health records can be harvested more effectively by researchers. Or you can try to understand the language that clinicians actually use when they describe patients.
</p>
<p>
For a decade now, George Hripcsak and his colleagues have been pursuing the latter approach, using a system for understanding natural language called <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell/Making-sense-of-electronic-health-records/">MedLEE</a>, which was developed at Columbia.
</p>
<p>
Ultimately I believe, as George Hripcsak does, that we’ll need a hybrid system that makes use of both structured templates and natural language understanding. But given that health records must primarily serve patient care, and can only secondarily serve research, I like how he harmonizes those objectives:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
To the degree we make documentation efficient in serving health care, I think it’ll also be more accurate for the sake of research. If you’re filling out a record for the sake of billing, you’ll have an incentive to use diagnosis codes that optimize billing. Does that then reflect clinical accuracy? And would that then be useful for research?
</p>
<p>
The important thing is to be grounded in the clinical truth. Put health care first, and then use new computational methods to extract accurate information.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Amen.</p>
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<title>Future of the Conversations Network</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/16/future-of-the-conversations-network/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/16/future-of-the-conversations-network/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:43:47 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=402</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
As recently announced by Doug Kaye, the Conversations Network is embarking on a new phase. The existing channels, including ITConversations and Social Innovation Conversations, will continue. But rather than creating more such channels, the Conversations Network wants to help individuals and organizations capture and publish their own spoken-word audio, mainly in the form of events [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
As <a href="http://www.blogarithms.com/index.php/archives/2008/06/05/cn-phase2/">recently announced</a> by Doug Kaye, the <a href="http://conversationsnetwork.org">Conversations Network</a> is embarking on a new phase. The existing channels, including ITConversations and Social Innovation Conversations, will continue. But rather than creating more such channels, the Conversations Network wants to help individuals and organizations capture and publish their own spoken-word audio, mainly in the form of events that are experienced only by attendees but that could be experienced by anyone, anywhere.
</p>
<p>
This new mission dovetails with <a href="http://podcorps.org">PodCorps</a>, a matchmaking service that connects event producers with volunteer stringers who can record those events. When it launched I <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/04/16/doug-kayes-podcorps-launches-today/">wrote</a>:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
There’s a huge opportunity here to transform communication patterns in a fundamental way. Checking my <a href="http://elmcity.info/events">local events calendar</a>, for example, I see that the following event is scheduled for tonight at the local college:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p> Mon., Apr. 16<br />
7 to 8:30pm<br />
Pond Side 2 located on Bruder St - Keene State College</p>
<p>Building Smart - Highlighting Local Best Practices</p>
<p>Come and join us in discussing the challenges and successes of implementing innovative building materials, technologies, and design solutions into the built environment.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The information exchanged at that meeting, and at countless meetings like it, has historically been available only to those who attend. There are a million reasons why local folks who might want to attend nevertheless cannot: no babysitter, schedule conflict, etc. And of course remote folks have no opportunity to attend, even though the information exchanged might be highly relevant to them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Assuming that more of these kinds of events become available, how will we find them? Doug writes:
</p>
<blockquote><p>
We will do this using a social-networking model, which allows anyone to post links to recordings he or she finds, to build collections or playlists of their favorite recordings, to share those playlists with others, and to rate and comment on playlists or individual recordings posted by others.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
In other words, <a href="http://del.icio.us/judell/webjay">Webjay</a> for spoken-word audio. It’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds.
</p>
<p>
In my <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/05/13/a-conversation-with-lucas-gonze-about-discovering-sharing-and-experiencing-music/">interview</a> with Webjay’s creator, Lucas Gonze, we talked about some of the reasons why the curatorial model that Webjay promoted hasn’t yet succeeded. One of them, amplified in <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/05/13/a-conversation-with-lucas-gonze-about-discovering-sharing-and-experiencing-music/#comment-123429">this comment</a> by Greg Borenstein, is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that pervades any distribution of — or even just linking to — MP3 files.
</p>
<p>
That kind of FUD shouldn’t be an issue for spoken-word audio that is explicitly free and legal. So I hope that we can evolve a culture of uninhibited collaborative curation. We’ll see.
</p>
<p>
I’ll also be curious to see what kinds of new channels and shows may arise from this effort. That isn’t the primary focus. Rather, the idea is to capture, share, and find recordings of events that have already been planned, organized, and held. The Conversations Network mainly seeks to enable the curation of those events. So someone might, for example, assemble the best recorded material in the alternative energy genre, from a variety of sources. I’d like to subscribe to that curator.
</p>
<p>
But there’s another kind of curation. It’s what I do when I select, from among the many people and ideas that I encounter, those I’ll feature on my two series of interviews: <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/series/innovators.html">Interviews with Innovators</a> and <a href="http://perspectives.on10.net/blogs/jonudell">Perspectives</a>. The world is full of interesting people and ideas, and we may also see the emergence of curators who select and highlight them in original ways. I’d like to subscribe to those curators too.</p>
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<title>exchange2ical available on CodePlex</title>
<link>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/11/exchange2ical-available-on-codeplex/</link>
<comments>http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/11/exchange2ical-available-on-codeplex/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:51:27 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jon Udell</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://jonudell.wordpress.com/?p=401</guid>
<description><![CDATA[
The Exchange-to-iCalendar script that I mentioned here is now published to CodePlex. It’s intended for organizations that run Exchange and would like to publish selected calendars in iCalendar (aka iCal, or .ICS) format without having to rely on a client machine running Outlook 2007.
I’ve never run a real Exchange server, so I’m wide open to [...]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class='snap_preview'><br /><p>
The Exchange-to-iCalendar script that I mentioned <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/06/06/questions-for-exchange-admins-about-public-calendars/">here</a> is now <a href="http://www.codeplex.com/exchange2ical">published to CodePlex</a>. It’s intended for organizations that run Exchange and would like to publish selected calendars in iCalendar (aka iCal, or .ICS) format without having to rely on <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/05/23/free-online-calendar-publishing-part-1-outlook/">a client machine running Outlook 2007</a>.
</p>
<p>
I’ve never run a real Exchange server, so I’m wide open to suggestions as to how to actually publish the ICS file created by this little IronPython script. Right now, it just emits that file. For user Jon on Exchange host Zanzibar, you would do something like this:
</p>
<p>
<tt>ipy Zanzibar Jon > jon.ics</tt>
</p>
<p>
There are lots of ways jon.ics could get pushed to a web-accessible location, but I’m not sure what the default should be, or whether to do a filesystem operation, or an FTP transfer, or something else.
</p>
<p>
My idea is that you’d schedule this command to run on a regular basis, and that it would run under an account that has the necessary privileges to access the specified user’s calendar. But again, I’m not an Exchange admin, so if that sounds like the wrong thing, let me know what the right thing would be.
</p>
<p>
As for the iCalendar output, this script currently does the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. It doesn’t, for example, try to “fold” long lines in the output (e.g., event summaries and unique IDs), which I gather the spec recommends but does not require.
</p>
<p>
There’s only been minimal testing. I’ve run it against a couple of different Exchange servers (2003 and 2007), validated the ICS output using <a href="http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/">this handy validator</a>, and verified that the resulting files — containing both individual and recurring events — can be successfully imported, or subscribed to, in Outlook 2007, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal.
</p>
<p>
If you have a need for such a thing, try it and let me know how it goes.</p>
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