Jeffrey Barr

Got an email from Facebook explaining that they have settled the Beacon Class Action Lawsuit with details here.

Two things stuck out.

1. Attorney's fees could (probably will) be up to one third of the $9.5 million dollar settlement
2. Facebook will
   

   provide $9.5 million to establish an independent non-profit foundation that will identify and fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security

So the settlement basically says that Facebook will pay a bunch of money to some attorneys while creating a foundation that basically does what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) already does for the most part.

Sounds like a great settlement to me.

I've created a sample wave that has public access for those that want to try out the robot but do not have an OpenCalais key. Just add a new blip with text and it will highlight the words and phrases found by OpenCalais.

I recently got an invite to use Google Wave and since I had no one to actually use it with, I decided to try out the API instead. Some initial thoughts are:

The API needs some work and better documentation.

• There is no way for a robot to access past waves, wavelets and blips. It can only access information entered after the robot is added.
• There is no way for a robot to actually manipulate the tags of a wave, only the actual wave and it's associated blips/wavelets.
• Finding out what is possible takes time because documentation gets limited as one traverses deeper into the API (eg what types of annotations are allowed).

Google is serious about support.

• The Google wave group is well monitored and I got answers quickly.
• there is a good amount of code available for many robots, extensions and gadgets which I found useful to help me understand how to do certain tasks.
• The instructions for getting started with the Java API, Eclipse and the Google App Engine were very good and easy to follow.

This brings me to my first robot, SemanticBlip. It takes all subsequent blips in a wave and highlights the Keywords as found by the OpenCalais API. Eventually, I'd like to add tooltips with subject area, relevance values and/or links to RDF data. I also look forward to having access to the wave tags to save topic information as well as the captured keyword data.

Here is a screen capture of part of a blip that contains the OpenCalais FAQ.

To use the robot add the address semanticblip@appspot.com to your contacts. It requires you to have your own OpenCalais license key which does get stored in the Google Datastore, so use at your own risk.

I'd love suggestions on things to add or change to the robot, so please leave comments.

Hit the iTunes/Calais link above to go to a page that allows a user to search a database of apps available in the iTunes store that have been categorized using the OpenCalais Web Service. The code to do this is part of the Drupal Calais Module. My original interest came from trying to identify apps for a variety of medical conditions, but I soon realized Calais could provide a lot more info.

A friend whose websites I maintain is at ISC West. He is a dealer/installer and invited me to come out and walk the floor with him. So, I'm off to Vegas for a night.

A Palindrome in the form of a 224 word poem.

I got an email solicitation related to another website I have. I was curious, but wary and checked a number of terms in the email on Google. One thing I checked was the provided phone number. That is what led me to the site 800Notes. It calls itself a "Directory of UnKnown Callers."

Just reading through random phone numbers, you get a sense of how helpful the site is and how much you need to research companies and people with whom you may do business.

Just set this up using a Linksys Dual-Band Wireless-N Gaming Adapter. It was easy to set up on my wireless network. Just went through the gaming adapter set up on the PC and then plug it into the ethernet port on my DVR. The DVR found the network and started downloading the catalog of shows right away.

However, besides some interesting kids shows, there is not much free stuff available worth noting. I was really hoping for some TV shows that I want to start or have started to watch, as it would be nice to see what I've missed. I'd be completely sold if they just had all the previous seasons of BSG.

If you got to this site looking for group theory information related to Cayley Tables, hit my Thesis link in the upper left corner. It links to my Master's thesis in Computer Science from San Diego State University in 2005. The title of my thesis was Computational Tools for Group Theory: A Program for the Generation, Identification, and Analysis of Finite Groups.