And no, that isn’t a membership card in my pocket. I’m just happy to see your new catalog. Your FANTASTIC new catalog.
The crunky old catalog has been replaced with a shiny new BiblioCommons website. With a bit of searching, I managed to track down some info on BiblioCommons:
- They have a terrible website.
- Their founder, Beth Jefferson, appears to be a mix of volunteer-ist and entrepreneur (imagine that!).
- Beth talks about BiblioCommons in a podcast I haven’t listened to yet.
- They seem to snarf information from Amazon. (Their images come directly from Amazon)
- I am addicted to annotating books.
As far as I can tell, they don’t have an official API. I managed to find a Drupal module that professes to do BiblioCommons stuff, but I don’t know enough about Drupal to tell what it’s up to.
And their login pages confuse cURL. Boo!
Joe Mamma is currently selling some really nice snowboarding jackets for 50%-75% off. And if you have a wee little skull (unlike me, dear reader), you can also get some pretty slick helmets for redonkulous prices.
Being a weenie, I created a Wikipedia page for
Richard Colvin, the gent at the centre of Canada’s detainee abuse scandal. Take a look at the initial batch of
released memos written by Richard Colvin. SPOILER ALERT: nothing conclusive.
Google has
announced an experimental alternative to HTTP:
SPDY. It’s a datagram-oriented protocol that multiplexes streams across a single TCP connection to minimize latency. The initial explanation sounds pretty neat.
It looks like
OC Transpo is rolling out a new website on November 12. You can get a sneak preview at
www.octranspo1.com. The content is pretty much the same, but it’s all web 2.0-y. They seem to have replaced the clunky old travel planner with an all-in-one thing.
A couple of years back I wrote a javascript version of a quasi-diagnostic test used to help diagnose Asperger syndrome. I wrote it for a lark: I was working with peeps that were socially awkward (like me), and I wanted to play with javascript. I stuck it on this blog and forgot about it.
Today I noticed a link from Common Sense Atheism pissing on some god-botherer’s ebook. It turns out that my AQ test has been tramping around the intertubes and is now moonlighting in theist/freethinker debates.
The apple falls close to the tree.
US courts have a spread sheet that they use to ensure that sentencing is fair. The prosecutors fill in a few fields and the spread sheet spits out a suggested sentence. But apparently
there are data entry errors in about 10% of cases – simple stuff, like addition errors, or filling in the wrong field. The defense lawyers didn’t catch the mistakes, which resulted in variances of up to months in the final sentence. Oops.
Gawp has impressed on me the value of
curation – that’s the process of normalizing and verifying data so that it can be used elsewhere. Clean, useful data is clearly awesome, but I didn’t realize it would be possible to build a business on it.
AggData apparently has. They scrape publicly available data, normalize it and make it available for a small fee.
I’m amazed that they can
employ five people with a business model based on pure curation. Good for them! Further proof, if any was needed, that we live in the future. (Via
Weather Sealed)
Four hours, dear reader. Four hours. That’s how much
time is devoted to policy discussion at the upcoming
Green Party convention. Doesn’t seem worth the effort of dragging myself 1400(ish) kilometers to Pictou.
I just got a pushy call from a telemarketer telling me that I was getting a “second notice” of my car’s warranty expiring, and that I should re-register it through them. I’ve never owned a car. They refused to tell me where they got my phone number, anything about the car in question, or the company they are working for. It sounds like a scam (and the RCMP thinks so too).
The call was from 1.916.219.8163. It comes about five days after I moved the number to Rogers’ wireless service. I hadn’t received any phone spam in my 2.5 years with Virgin Wireless.
Anyone else gotten these calls?
“The problem is TransFair can’t limit the usage of ‘Fairly Traded.’ They can & rightfully do frown upon...” 
“Just for your information “Fairly Traded” and “Fairly Traded Certified” are two different things....” 
“Bevans, I think you need this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/pl ugins/time-machine/ It lets you do hourly.” 
I have two...” 
“you don’t have a clue unless you’ve went through it or know some one who has.My daughter was 7 of age when she...” 
