Aurlog

Sandy on the web

Sometimes for the sake of it and sometimes not, I have been creating Sandy, Bedfordshire sites all over the web on social networking sites. I started with Facebook, as documented earlier; I have also created a group on Flickr, as promised. Below is a list/directory of Sandy sites I have set up:

And a couple that I haven't set up:

Go thou and contribute. While we're listing Sandy things, some sources of Sandy news:

Any further suggestions welcome.

A.D. XV KAL. OCT. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced. They are:

Your broadband will be reconnected within 15 working days.

and

You'll get an email address that you can access from anywhere online.

My money is on the first one: the second one is technically true, except that an increasing number of email addresses bounce off it, notably gmail addresses, but also including on occasion .ac.uk and ntlhome addresses. I have had two explanations for this. The first one was:

known server issues at this moment in time with regards to sending emails from or to yahoo,hotmail and gmail addresses.

The second one is more disturbing:

The most likely cause of the problem you are experiencing is most likely caused by the mail filter which appears to be recognising the email messages as spam. This is especially prevalent in issues of this kind when the same message is sent to a number of recipients simultaneously, and also when any of a number of phrases are used in the subject line of a message, or if a non-trusted file format is used for an attachment.

Unfortunately there is very little we can do to prevent messages being blocked by the spam filters in future as they are trained over time and use by the messages that pass through them, and to retrain the filter to accept message types that were previously blocked would, in effect, be to nullify the positive spam-blocking effects of that filter.

What I understand from the second paragraph is that I'll just have to live with a non-functional email address which will always bounce emails from several friends, relatives, and other people who might be contacting me so that I don't get spam. Maybe if I didn't use email, I wouldn't get any spam. This is made worse by the fact that the Orange filters are not that reliable in my experience, mistaking routine commercial mailshots for genuine spam and missing a great deal of genuine spam. The Gmail spam filter, on the other hand, I have found to be excellent.

This a shame as we have been with freeserve/wanadoo/orange since we got the internet years ago and, despite their bad press, I have never had a word to say against them. True, they took one non-working day longer than promised to re-install broadband when we moved house and were confused about when exactly we should notify them of our moving, but we have very rarely had a connection problem or anything like that. If, however, we are paying for an email address we can't use, our loyalty may begin to wane.

A.D. X KAL. IUN. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Realunching

I clicked on a link in the BBC website's gardening section and got the following 404 message:

The BBC gardening Techniques section has been realunched and some of the content may have moved or been removed. Use the links below to explore the new content. We apologise for any inconvenience.

I'm quote concerned as to what realunched might mean. I wish this kind of error were an isolated example at the BBC. More curious is the website of the International Paralympic Committee which you would have thought would have slightly more concern over accessibility but has a homepage with no title and which requires me to scroll horizontally to read all the text.

Anyway, I'm off to alunch. If I am peckish later in the afternoon, I may realunch. Although perhaps if I eat too much I might realunch over my desk, which I will have to clear up. Who knows?

A.D. XV KAL. MAI. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Comment me do

Please comment on this post. My previous attempts at comments rss seemed sluggish to appear in feed readers if they did at all. I guessed this was because my makeshift rss feed lacked guids. I have rectified this, which was fun. So please comment so I can see what happens. For once, a moderate quantity of spam wouldn't be totally unwelcome.

You can even follow along by subscribing to the comments feed and tell me when nothing happens.

A.D. VII ID. FEB. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (7) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Ten years on the internet

As 2006 comes to an end, I am running out of time to say that I have been using the internet now for ten years. One of the first things I did, under the tutelage of sil, was to start writing my own pages, so I have been on the web for ten years too. I don't know what editor I used to edit those pages, although I remember only ever using Lynx to browse them while still at university, only being introduced to flashy new browsers with pictures the following year when I started work. Sadly no record exists of it on the Wayback Machine. The earliest existing version of webpage I have written is from June 2001, although the July 2001 version is more comprehensible.* The current version, which is basically a fancy list of links for work, is not really too different.

My first email was to Tim and easily persuaded me of the advantages of electronic communication. From the university's computer centre, I asked if he wanted to go for a drink. By chance he was also logged on somewhere in town and agreed. With little delay, therefore, we proceeded to the pub. In the days before mobile phones, this was something.

* Where it says Respect my authority! there should be an image of Cartman in policeman guise. The two words moo around the email address should have a little image of a cow similar to the icon you can see (hopefully) in the address bar above. I think the Cartoons image was a Dilbert image.

A.D. XIV KAL. IAN. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (6) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

You are person are of the year

005 (Well, it was on Ceefax). Time Magazine has named You person of the year, Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

There is a word to describe this but I don't want to use it on my weblog, so I shall link to it here. I don't think any of those definitions really does the word justice except perhaps sense 4 of the artistwd entry. This is the trouble with American definitions of a British word. Anyway, here is the opening paragraph of the Time article to ram the point home, as it were:

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

For your convenience, I have abbreviated the rest of the article thus:

...cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia...million-channel people's network YouTube...online metropolis MySpace...Tim Berners-Lee...Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0...revolution...from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing...rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms...Facebook...Second Life...Amazon...podcasts...global intellectual economy...seizing the reins of the global media...massive social experiment...

In a bucket.

A.D. XV KAL. IAN. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Aurlog left out again

Aurlog has been left out of the Time Magazine 50 coolest websites again. I think it is because of Time's American bias. Out of the fifty, I think I've only visited Myspace and YouTube. That's how cool I am.

A.D. XVIII KAL. SEPT. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (62) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Worldcat now on the web

OCLC have now put WorldCat (1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide properly on the internet (rather than through Google or some other means). It says Beta although I don't know if this is a proper beta, although the write-up and other documentation don't seem to mention the fact at all, or a Google-style beta. Looks like the second.

The aim of the thing is clearly to enable one to find items locally. I tried to find Vromans's Perl pocket reference somewhere near my postcode, and managed to get to a good set of results on the third screen: I didn't even have to tell it that what I entered for location was a UK postcode (rather than a US zip code or a small town in Germany), a degree of intuition rare in library software. Cambridge University is actually not that far away really (28 km according to Worlcat), although the fact that the next two nearest libraries were Oxford and the British Library gives some idea of the paucity of coverage in the UK: the next nearest location is Institut informacijskih znanosti / Knjinica in Sloveniaafter which I'm looking at McGill in Canada and the Boston Public Library. All for so little a book.

Although not properly FRBRised, the interface is refreshingly helpful in narrowing down large results sets, having options that look a little like the gubbins on the left of this weblog. For instance, search for Hard Times and you get about 5300 results. The five most popular authors are listed on the left. Click on Dickens and you're on a more manageable 156. Click on Book format and you're down to 153. Click on English language and you're down to 119. This leaves you with a further choice of dates. These choices are only the five most popular, which is a shame (well, it doesn't clog the screen up which is definitely a good thing), especially in this case the top five dates are 1900, 1800, 1901, 1910, and 1880. A majority of all these hits are not actual editions from those dates, but unknown publication dates, where the cataloguer has put [19--?], or in one case [1---] (which means that the cataloguer knew which millenium the item was published but not the year, decade, or even century). For comparison, I tried our catalogue, which is for a large university research library (about 1 million records compared to 1.3 billion), and got 40 hits, had to go to a separate screen coyly marked Filter and use some pull-down boxes to get 6 results which looked on the nail.

For me, what seems very promising is what Lorcan Dempsey mentions: a simple syntax for linking. The example he gives is http://worldcat.org/isbn/0679454438 for The road to reality by Roger Penrose. If nothing else, this might be a better way of referring to a book rather than linking to an Amazon record. It looks neater, should be more accurate and complete, and even lets you buy from Amazon using a link on the right. It could be the book equivalent of the ubiquitous IMDB link. The only problem is I couldn't see any documentation on how to do it on the WorldCat site. Incidentally, the aforementioned book can apparently be found in Bedfordshire Libraries, which gives the lie to my comments above about poor coverage, which applies only to Perl books.

WorldCat also lets one put a searchbox on your site, which is modelled below:

It should work, so do try it. All very good, although the scary list of terms and conditions and personal details needed for registration seems a reassuring return to a more-library-like fear of loss of control and openness.

A.D. VI ID. AUG. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (37) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Big Brother 2006 rss feed

As a follower of Big Brother I am always disappointed that they don't have an rss feed for their news. So, I decided to use Feed43 which screenscrapes websites to provide feeds, with a little setting up. I configured a feed which you can find at http://feed43.com/bigbrother.xml. I have subscribed to it on Bloglines and will see how it goes over the next few days.

A.D. VII KAL. IUN. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (7) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Tom