Viridia.org

Old idea, new name: Podcasting combined with GPS.

When I visited Edinburgh Castle, you could rent these small audio players that would narrate to you as you wandered about the grounds, explaining the history and various stories behind the specific location where you were. (Nothing sophisticated here – just a small sign in each room showing what number to punch on the audio player.)

What if, however, we could have something similar that works everywhere, all the time? You go out hiking on a trail, and listen to stories told by others who have walked that trail before.

A lot of folks have thought about the idea of a GPS-indexed ‘net. However, they tend to get bogged down in things like “the spam problem” and so on.

Podcasting provides a user experience model which fits naturally with this idea. Podcasts aren’t just a big soup of audio files, they are organized into “feeds”, each feed being (ultimately) controlled by a person and backed by their reputation (even if the feed is an aggregate of the work of multiple commentators.) Moreover, because feeds are in competition with each other for mind share, there is competitive pressure not to degrade the listening experience, which is why there aren’t very many adverts in podcasts.

Secondly, as an auditory rather than a visual experience, podcasts require less attention to be taken away from the visal experience of travelling.

A location-based podcast would, of course, have to be a lot ‘denser’ in terms of number of stories than a regular “global” cast. The GPS data serves primarily as a filter, removing entries that don’t match the users current location. This means that instead of getting an RSS feed of all of the stories, I only get the .001% of stories that happend to coincide with my current location.

The solution is a compilation cast – i.e. I select a feed based on the reputation of an editor, who combines many casts into a single aggregate feed. This combined feed will be dense enough so that at any given location, the chances of finding a matching story are good.

The thing we want to avoid is to simply grab all feeds for a given location, unfiltered. Without someone’s reputation in the loop, there’s no competition between stories, which means that the quality will rapidly degrade and spam will dominate.

I’m just stunned at how bad of a thesaurus Thesaurus.com is. Actually, most of the online thesaurii are pretty awful, however Thesaurus.com is awful in its own way.

Thesaurus.com has a lot of content, but it’s not comprehensive. You look up a word and you get hundreds of results (many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the word you are searching for), but at the same time, whole classes of meanings are just — missing.

For example – yesterday I wanted to find a synonym for the word ‘sharing’, in the sense of a common interest or attribute, such as “sharing a love of great films”, or joint ownership of a bank acount. Well, Thesaurus.com has no such notion – instead, it only lists “sharing” as a syonym of “dividing” or “apportioning” and a few other similar synonym, all of which seem centered around the concept of partitioning of a ‘rival good’, which is not what I am looking for. And this is not the first time I’ve had this experience.

Anyone know of a really good thesaurus out there? I’ve tried a bunch.

Everyone likes to sing, but there’s so few opportunities to sing with other people. How about a web service that allows voice over IP sing-alongs? You’d see a list of “channels” where people are singing, and then you could join a channel and start singing along. There might be some latency issues – but you could probably overcome that by choosing to sing with people who were “nearby” (in network terms).

I had to remove the little applet from Irrepressible.info because it was causing the site to be unviewable in IE browsers. (Speculation as to the possible collusion of Microsoft with repressive foreign governments is expected to follow shortly…)

I recently bought a DvD of Pixar’s The Incredibles, and so far I’ve watched it 5 times, and I haven’t gotten tired of it yet. I’m not sure what it is about that movie – the characters designs are so disorted to be almost grotesque, and yet they are animated so gracefully and naturally that you almost don’t notice. Plus the characters themselves are very compelling and human…I want to know more about them.

Accelerando is a new science fiction novel by Charles Stross, which is just brimming over with ideas. Even the casual throw-away ideas are great. I mean, what other book would have characters speculating that perhaps the cosmic background radiation is irreducible computational noise left over from some really big calculation…?

The main theme of the book is: what happens when your children become so technologically advanced that you are no longer capable of understanding them anymore? And what happens when their children become so advanced that they can’t understand them anymore? And so on…

Some of the cultural references are daunting…for example, one of the main characters is a robotic cat names AiNeko. I laughed out loud when I read that…because its a play on words of “Aibo” (the name of Sony’s robotic toy dog they marketed a few years back, and “neko”, which is not only the Japanese word for “cat”, but also the name of a famous software program in which a kitten chases your mouse pointer around the screen.) There’s also the Free Genome Foundation, which is a reference to the Free Software Foundation. The goal of the Free Genome Foundation is to create an optimized version of the human genome (with various software bugs such as cancer and sickle-cell anemia edited out), but free of any patents or intellectual property encumerances, so that anyone can have a superchild without having to pay massive corporate royalties.

Fun stuff… 🙂

I just started working with Mercurial, a new distributed SCM system and I have to say that I am quite impressed. Mercurial is a direct competitor to GNU Arch, Darcs, BitKeeper, Monotone, and other open-source distributed SCMs, however it seems very well architected and polished.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that you not only run it as a command-line utility, but you can run the same program a web server, allowing you to distribute your files over a network; You can also configure it to run as a .cgi script, so that if you have a larger web site, you can incorporate a Mercurial repository within it fairly easily.

The code was pretty easy to set up and use. Within less than an hour, I was able to:

• Compile and install the package on my laptop.
• Create an initial repository.
• Check in an example file.
• Compile and install Mercurial on the remote host I use for viridia.org.
• Propagate the changes from my laptop to the server.
• set up Mercurial to function as a .cgi script.
• write a .htaccess file to tell Apache to use it.

You can see the result here.

You might have noticed the small banner ad in the right hand-column. This is a little bit of Javascript that links to Amnesty International’s Irrepressible campaign home page.

The general idea is to support efforts against Internet censorship by spreading politically censored content as widely as possible, making it impossible to block. I had a similar idea a while back about creating a “poison pill” that would force the Chinese government to block large numbers of web sites, thus making the “great firewall” a self-imposed denial of service attack.

So I finally managed to get the database migrated over from the old host – as you can see, the old articles are here now. I was able to migrate all the user comments as well.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to migrate the actual user accounts, because the table format changed too much from that version of WordPress to the version being used here. So you’ll need to recreate your account info if you had an account here before.

I am still working on migrating the themes, static pages, photos, etc.

I’ve been working on a Thesaurus.

I’ve always been fascinated by thesaurii – I used to read Roget’s when I was a teen-ager (although read is probably a less accurate description than surf.) I also have had many an occasion to use a thesaurus in my programmig work, when I want to name something.

I’ve decided to create a programmer’s thesaurus. I looked around on the web, and while there are quite a number of computer dictionaries, there was no “computer thesaurus” that I could find.

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