Jeffrey Barr

After a hellish hard drive crash, I decided to bite the bullet and convert the family to Ubuntu computers only. The main drawback for my wife was no more iTunes. While I did not mind giving up DRM proprietary sites in the changeover process, the wife has podcasts to which she wants to listen.

There is actually a very easy way to get the RSS feed for any iTunes Podcast. For example, while running, the wife enjoys Gleeful: A Glee Podcast

The iTunes link can easily be found via Google.
http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/gleeful-a-glee-podcast/id330735362
now place that URL as the parameter of this python script itunes-url-decoder.py as done below with the result.
python itunes-url-decoder.py http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gleeful-a-glee-podcast/id330735362
http://feeds.feedburner.com/gleefulpodcast
you now have a feed that Rhythmbox in Ubuntu can use.

Our home PC was a 2004 Windows XP machine. I say was because the hard drive died a horrible death last week and would not boot up. In the past I'd panic; however, we now use Mozy Unlimited Backup and I had 35 GB of data stored online. Basically, we would have lost about 10 days worth of files, not a lot, just a few pictures.

In fact, I didn't even have to deal with our Mozy account because of a Ubuntu USB drive. I had created for work a USB stick that one could boot any PC with to an instance of Ubuntu 10.04. I inserted the USB stick into the PC, rebooted and came to a prompt asking whether I wanted to try Ubuntu. After getting to the Ubuntu desktop, I mounted the hard drive that I could no longer boot and a portable external hard drive and easily transferred all of my data files, including installation executable files for some of the software I use, to the portable hard drive. Voila, I now had all of my data backed up on a portable hard drive in a manner of minutes.

I'll still keep Mozy, but am now transferring the bad PC to a Linux box and considering setting up a cron job to save all my data files to a local portable hard drive as well, using something similar to a Pogoplug Multimedia Sharing Device.

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.