Mitch was saying how podcasting is different from radio. Earlier, he was saying how we’re differienting less and less between a blog and a website. Personnally, I have a hard time appreciating these differences. I see communication, with humans at each end (preferably), be it through a blog, rss, twitter, cellphone, radio or sandwich suit.

But now I’m kind of feeling it. What lead me here is the design, the look of a website. Me, I don’t really are. I’m using a default wordpress look from the 80’s. Sprinkle a bit of functionnality and voilà, job done. Honestly, I wish I could do better. I wish I had a vision, really, because I know I can do better. Also, I’ve had a few complaints about my style. Now compare this to an audio recording. If the quality is too low, it simply becomes too hard to listen to. Physically too hard, I mean. I bet it’s worst if the language used isn’t your native tongue. Or, if like me, you enjoy speeding up your recordings (2/3 usually works just fine) the small hiccups in the recording turn to quick bursts of noise. Again, this makes listening to the recording very bad. Quality here is primordial, at least if you respect your readers - uhh, I mean listeners.

Which brings me back to this blog, and maybe a justification I should enhance it a tad. I will certainly do that as I move it to Drupal. There, I said it. Also, I might get into podcasting. Although I hate the term, I did a few years of radio in another life and I’m pretty sure I could come up with a few audible limerics just for you. But only if I can record properly. I’ve had my lesson.

So the paradox, or dilemna, if you prefer, is should I find a service that does what I want or should I code it myself, releasing it as free software for others to deploy as well? And what of the data? There’s this little thing called traceability which is an important factor in trust…

A third leg to this problem is client side processing, generally with Javascript, but you could do it with Java or Flash or even Inferno, I guess. For the universal redirect revealer, I had this idea to let the client do the redirect in the background and compare that with the result currently in my database, thereby letting the clients themselves feed the database, leaving the server to simply collect the information and provide it for known URLs. I called it subversive, and so did the people that integrated Javascript into browsers: it doesn’t work. Security, what a bummer. So you can’t fetch data from other domains, but you can still parse and mangle data at will and that might come in handy if you can get enough traffic.

Now the forth leg (yeah, this one cought me by surprise too) is human processing. Think of all those tasks where a human, even a 10 year old, can beat any amount of raw silicon processing power. We’ve seen this already with the ESP game where humans compete to tag images and more recently reCaptcha by the same team, where badly OCRed books are cut in words and shown as captcha challenges. Or more directly, all the tagging that’s going on, be it on personal blogs, bookmark sites, video directories, etc.

It’s a great world out there, with the merger of the desktop and the internet (or the cloud as it’s called when you sprinkle a bit of glue code on top of it) closing in on us and more importantly, breathing out to mobile devices of all sorts. I want a pen I can use to write a song name, do a simple gesture and have it played directly through the pen or on the nearest media player. I’m not asking for much!

Honestly, I don’t have real plans to resuscitate that box and last week, I got a request for Durl. Turns out, people missed my del.icio.us graphics. While I didn’t want to rewrite Durl, I thought a little bit of code that could turn the del.icio.us RDF feed into a sparkline would be all I needed. But I didn’t want to worry about hosting…

I already knew about Joe Gregorio’s sparkline web service so next I looked for a Javascript RDF parser, pretty sure such a thing would exist. That’s when I found the Simple javascript RDF Parser and query thingy by Jim Ley. I also have the bits to take care of RSS 2.0 feeds but I’ve not implemented that yet. I also need to parse Atom… and what else? Anyway, doing this in Javascript opens the doors to a bunch of possibilities. I’m so not sure where this is going to take me next.

Anyhow, I’ve got a small demo of sparklines for del.icio.us / RDF. Turns out I still need to host a bit of PHP to act as a proxy to fetch the del.icio.us feed or any other RDF feed. I’ve got to fix URL encoding and until then, some URL just won’t work (with queries or other strange characters).

If you have a wordpress blog, your RDF feed is probably at http://example.com/wp-rdf.php or similar. For this blog, it’s at http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/wp-rdf.php. Or you can enter any URL that was bookmarked a few times at del.icio.us and see a graphic for that URL posting history. The graphic is read from left to right, older to current period where the height represents the number of postings in that period. Red lines indicate periods of high activity. The duration of a period depends on the number of bins and the elapsed time between the first and last feed items.

Questions, ideas, suggestions?

Mais non, je ne quitte pas ce carnet. Je crois encore qu’il y a une place pour l’autonomisation technologique par l’innovation collective. C’est le tagline de Koumbit et je suis très fier d’être toujours de son conseil d’administration et de supporter sa mission.

“Le prix de la liberté c’est la vigilance éternelle.”

La seule raison que j’ai eu d’ouvrir un compte MySpace, c’était pour éventuellement tester Post Also, un module qui permet à Drupal de publier sur plusieurs sites à la fois et qui supporte quelques API de blogues populaires. Éventuellement, ça supportera peut-être MySpace. Il faut bien tester un moment donné.

J’aurais pu aussi vous faire croire, j’imagine, que la Bande-Passante allait fermer (ce qui est le cas) à cause de la nouvelle compétition, comme Station C (ce qui n’est nullement le cas !). Ce qui fait un bon poisson d’avril, c’est un équilibre entre les parts de vérité et puis la pogne. Mais ça aussi vous le saviez. On essaie tous les jours de nous en passer !

It’s using a bit of Ajax to show the destination URL and its title, storing the results in a database for instant results on the second and later requests.

I’m not too sure about the name, if you have any ideas, please share. If I was to theme this a bit, I’d maybe use a whistle blower allegory or, just thinking about this, a small amount of water used to soak and expand the tiny URL. That would certainly be friendlier ;) Should it be called the “expander”, then? Hmm…

Next phase will do a better job of following redirects and noting every hop. In some cases, like a login redirect, it’s probably more interesting for the user to see the URL right before the last one.

Finally, here are a few miscellaneous ideas to occupy my time:

• Store more HTTP headers and HTML head
• Interface to submit text containing a redirected URL and modify it using the final URL and its title
• Web service API
• After a while, we can offer a short URL service ourselves, defaulting to a known short URL from another service
• Tie into del.icio.us (popularity, tags)
• Directory of short URL services (redirectors)
• Tell if URL is password protected
• …
• More ideas?

A couple of week ago, André found himself at a computer (which I have a hard time imagining) and decided to look up his last name I guess and well, found me at the top of the results. So he decides to write, only to tell me to contact him since he has terrible news. Two months ago, my dad, who works with horses, got hit smack in the head and spent some time in the hospital afterwards. It was shaky at first, but he seems to have regained his health from what I could gather. But my brother André, for some yet to explain reason, thought my dad had succombed back then and felt it was important to tell me, even if it was six weeks later.

For as long as I can remember, by dad was always close to dying. At least that how I mother put it, very often. He had a car accident, heart attacks, the stress of horse racing, etc. And now this last accident! I called my brother to hear his terrible news, expecting the worst, and he confirmed my deepest fear: the death of a close family member.

I was quite shaken, but it just didn’t sound right. How could my dad be dead for six weeks and I only learn it now? I called him, his number was discontinued… I called uncle Richard, his brother. He had spoken with dad only two weeks ago. Then my mother also confirmed she spoke to him two or three weeks ago. He was still recuperating from his head injury.

Then I turned to the net myself, and that’s how I’m keeping tabs on my dad at the moment, since there’s no way to reach him. I looked up the horse race websites, figuring out how to look up schedule and finally find my dad was training a few horses, even winning just a week ago! So now I keep an eye on the race results, and worry a bit if I don’t see his name after a few race days…

I even called jockeys and owners, leaving messages on their home phones telling them who I was and simply stating I’d like my dad to call me back. Those numbers weren’t too easy to come by! Even worst, my dad works in Amish country and communication there is very 1800’s.

So there you have it, the story of how my dad almost died and how I felt real grief for 24 hours.

Another thing I wanted to talk about, but it will have to wait a bit, is the visit we had yesterday night, March 18th 2008. Two inspectors and two cops in uniforme showed up around 19h30, mandate in hand. They want our computers, well, not ours, but kinda. It’s complicated when you’re sharing the rent with a large web host. Anyway, that story will have to wait a bit. No computers were harmed, let me leave it at that for now.

La lettre est aussi disponible en format PDF et en anglais.

Merci à Djiem pour le dessin. N’oubliez pas le Forum de Rawdon !