2007
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Just came across A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - not all the 'elements' have examples, but I like the idea.
Paul Walk , May 1, 2007
Paul Walk
Tagged with: data-wrangling
Identity: an inconvenient truth?
An interesting post by Mike Neuenschwander on the Burton Group Identity Blog. I'm not certain I agree entirely with the main thrust of Mike's argument, which he offers as an axiom: There are no identifiers, only attributes That is to say, things are identified by their existence as a collection of attributes in a given context. Some of Mike's claims, such as "most people have [...] several dozen nicknames" seem a little exaggerated. [continues...]
Paul Walk , May 1, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech, metadata, schol-comms
Data modeling in Ruby with ActiveRecord
I had a little problem to solve the other day where I wanted to work up a database from scratch, and then transfer data from an existing database into it. On the spur of the moment I decided to see how quickly/easily this could be done in Ruby. Long story short, the thing I learned (obvious in hindsight) is that: require 'rubygems' require_gem 'activerecord' is all you need to get access to all that ActiveRecord modelling goodness outside of the Rails framework proper (assuming Rails is installed on your system). [continues...]
Paul Walk , April 23, 2007
Tagged with: data-wrangling, ruby
The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social
On Thursday I attended and spoke at the The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social conference at the Said Business School, Oxford University. I was speaking as a replacement for Brian Kelly who came up with the original idea for the talk, Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago inviting comments which I was able to incorporate into my presentation. [continues...]
Great firewall of China
Update (2018-05-08): The GreatFirewallofChina.org project has been acquired by Comparitech and the tool has moved to https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedinchina/ Someone has set a server somewhere in China to receive a URL and then act as a web client to check whether or not this URL is accessible. The implication is that some URLs are being blocked by some process in some parts of China. Maybe. It's difficult to distinguish between technical problems and political interventions from here (to be fair, the creators of this site to make a disclaimer to this effect) The site has a funky animation showing the HTTP request/response crossing a map of the world - reminiscent of so many movies where the 'hacker' does something clever. [continues...]
Paul Walk , March 17, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech
BBC 2.0
At the JISC conference earlier this week Tom Loosemore of the BBC gave a talk entitled "The BBC's 15 Web Principles". JISC have made available a summary of the talk and the MS PowerPoint presentation that accompanied it. I wasn't there unfortunately, but it has made an impression in the HE community already. Some of the 15 principles are straightforward, others less so. I found number 5, "Treat the entire web as a creative canvas" interesting. [continues...]
Paul Walk , March 15, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech
MacOSX Preview’s annotation tool….
... is embarrassingly poor. I've been a happy iBook/MacBook user for two years now - I'm pretty satisfied with MacOS X and the way it generally stays the hell out of my way when I'm trying to work (unlike some operating systems). I like Preview, the built-in PDF viewer, but had never tried to annotate a PDF with it until yesterday. The annotation tool gives you two options: You can draw a thick-lined red oval around a region of the document to which you want to draw attention. [continues...]
Paul Walk , March 9, 2007
Tagged with: mac
Software as a service - Google and the enterprise
A short report from Gartner reckons that the newest Google Apps Premier Edition is still not ready for prime-time in the enterprise, but that it is close, likely to evolve at "internet speed" and, crucially, ahead of the competition. The killer feature offered by Google's suite of tools is collaboration - something not well supported in current mainstream office suites. Still a major issue with Google Apps is the fact that the user has to be online to use them. [continues...]
Paul Walk , March 7, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech
Presenting and the The Shock of the Social
I'll be giving a talk at The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social event in Oxford later this month, entitled: Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? In this I am collaborating with my colleague, Brian Kelly, who came up with the original idea. This is in the context of Universities especially. However, this sort of debate has been had before in industry - the 'Software as a Service' concept is certainly not new. [continues...]
Paul Walk , March 6, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech
Accessible (& programmable) UK Train Timetables
Matthew Somerville has created a great web application called Accessible UK Train Timetables. For 'accessible' read programmable, so that having completed the search form, the resulting page's URL is useable in another web application in a RESTian way. for example, my search for early morning trains from London to Bath gives me the following URL: http://traintimes.org.uk/london%20paddington/bath%20spa/07:30/
Paul Walk , March 4, 2007
Tagged with: web-tech, rest, programming
OpenID
Well, I finally got around to sorting out my own OpenID ( paulwalk.net), following the excellent instructions provided by Simon Willison. As I find myself signing up for more and more remote services, nearly all of which ask me to create yet another user account, the potential value of a user-controlled, decentralised identity system becomes clearly apparent. Like many others, I have been interested by Yahoo Pipes, enough to create a Yahoo account for the purpose of trying it out. [continues...]