Pito’s Blog

Welcome! If you're interested in the same kind of things I am, consider adding this site to your favorites, or better yet, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (using BlogBridge, of course) . Welcome, and thanks for visiting!

Aleksey (my colleague on BlogBridge) is planning to move from the Ukraine to Australia. Here’s a fairly fascinating account of the experience of proving that he knows enough English to be permitted to Australia. Check out this post from noizZze to read about his interesting adventure:

“IELTS test is an indispensable part of the process as we have to prove our language abilities along with technical skills and other stuff when applying to the Skilled Immigration Visa. According to the requirements, I need a pretty high score (somewhere around 7 of 10) and Kate’s needs to be at least 5. One interesting fact that puzzles everyone I speak to is that if your spouse (non-primary applicant) fails to get above the threshold, you are to pay approximately USD $2000 for him/her to study the language there in AU upon arrival. Interesting!”

(from: Short Report: Living through the IELTS Test)

Popularity: 11% [?]

I am not an expert in the semantic web but Freebase looks like it to me. I am surprised more hasn’t been written about it. It is absolutely amazing and head-spinning. I will have a hard time describing accurately, hence the headline.

For me, it seems like Freebase does what the Semantic Web guys have been talking about forever.

In Freebase’s own words: “Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.” (from Freebase FAQ)

A mental image for Freebase that works for me is that it is a lot like Wikipedia with the major difference that instead of free form text and images that you see in Wikipedia articles you see semi-structured layouts in Freebase.

Semi-structured, that is, the information is structured via types: this is a person, that is a computer, this other thing is a country, etc. So for example, in the entry for BlogBridge (type is Software Product) , you see a description of the software, just like in Wikipedia. But now, in the section that says what platforms the software runs on there is a list of entries of type computer operating system. So when I am editing the entry for BlogBridge, and I want to correct or add to the list of computer operating system it runs on, Freebase already knows the list of known operating systems.

Interactively on the web, it’s quite interesting, but it really makes your head spin when you contemplate what it means as an internet API. I mean we have specialized APIs to look up books (Amazon) and CDs (CDDB) and many other things. But here’s a unified and communally editable pool of API accessible information.

Check it out. It is worth studying.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Aleksey (my colleague on BlogBridge) is planning to move from the Ukraine to Australia. Here’s a fairly fascinating account of the experience of proving that he knows enough English to be permitted to Australia. Check out this post from noizZze to read about his interesting adventure:

"IELTS test is an indispensable part of the process as we have to prove our language abilities along with technical skills and other stuff when applying to the Skilled Immigration Visa. According to the requirements, I need a pretty high score (somewhere around 7 of 10) and Kate’s needs to be at least 5. One interesting fact that puzzles everyone I speak to is that if your spouse (non-primary applicant) fails to get above the threshold, you are to pay approximately USD $2000 for him/her to study the language there in AU upon arrival. Interesting!"

(from: Short Report: Living through the IELTS Test)

 

Popularity: 7% [?]

Check out this post from Lifehacker:

“Want to play with RSS feeds? Try xFruits, where, according to tech enthusiast Steve Rubel, you can “teach your feeds all kinds of new tricks.”

He’s not kidding around, either: you can create a PDF file from an RSS feed, send an OPML to your mobile, aggregate, and lots more. I played with it a little bit and was suitably impressed by all the options; it looks like they’re even adding the option to create RSS feeds for your desktop files soon. â_” Wendy BoswellxFruits [via MicroPersuasion]” (from: Mash up RSS feeds with xFruits)

I haven’t looked at this yet, but it is quite intriguing.

Oh… Why haven’t I looked yet? Well ever since xFruits was mentioned on LifeHacker, it has been unable to be reached. The server is probably getting overwhelmed by loving interest like mine.

I say “server” singular? I am just assuming that we are talking about a single server. But even if that’s not the case, the fact that the service is unavailable right now says something about how hard it is to build a scalable web service, especially if you are giving it away for free. It is why it’s nice to see Yahoo, Google and Amazon publishing services.

Popularity: 8% [?]

If you are a blogger then you probably keep an eye out on the ‘circulation’ of your blog. It’s a black art full of subjetivity and highly detailed technical tidbits that have to be understood and then interpretted before you really know what the data means. Still if you are interested, check out this post from FeedBurner Weblog (Burning Questions):

“[snip…]While it’s always encouraging to see feed subscription numbers go up (Google’s recent inclusion of subscription data for Google Reader and Google Homepage increased the number of feed subscriptions FeedBurner can report to publishers by 53% alone), these subscription numbers in a vacuum only tell part of the story. Equally important is the extent to which people are reading feeds and interacting with them. In today’s post we’ll take a look at one aspect of the feed aggregator market - the web-based aggregators - and draw some conclusions about how audiences are consuming content in new and different ways. [snip…]”

(from: FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market)

Popularity: 6% [?]

I say it’s the Newton of the 21st century. I love my mac as much as the next guy, but mac fanatics become insufferable at a certain point. Bah, humbug.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Everyone has a column or article these days of gift suggestions. Here’s mine for all of you who need to buy something for your favorite geek “who has everything.” I bet they would really like these sculptures.

Check out the whole site, they start at about $80 for a pocket sized doohikee and go to like $300 for a larger one. Kind of pricey, I admit.

Bathsheba Sculpture, via Kevin Kelley, Cool Tools

Popularity: 6% [?]

This is a public service to my readers. Here’s the coupon.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Yes, every year some wag writes a funny article about carving a turkey, but this one is really funny! Among the many chuckles:

All conversation dies when he picks up his weapons. The festive warmth
that filled the room moments earlier is replaced by a merciless
judgment that records every failure of knife work like points lost in a
troubled double axel at the winter Olympics.

From the Boston Globe: Carving out his niche - The Boston Globe

Popularity: 6% [?]

Does creating something that demonstrates that a security scheme doesn’t work make you a suspect yourself? Does pointing at it from your blog make you of questionable character? I suppose you might even wonder about clicking on the link below. Does that say you are a bad person?

I hope not. Check this out, it’s pretty insterezsting and instructive! Chris’s NWA Boarding Pass Generator

Popularity: 8% [?]