How long does an article have to be for people to bookmark it as ‘toread’ ? Here is a graph that tries to answer that question. I have taken 1500 most recent bookmarks under the tag ‘toread’ from delicious. I have then retrieved webpage for every single bookmark and calculated word count after stripping out HTML tags.

The graph plots log(wordcount) on y-axis and url index on x-axis. The normal distribution seems to start at 2.3, i.e. 230 words. 230 also has the first big spike when plotted on a histogram for word counts below 2000. But never the less, 230 seems too short an article to be bookmarked for later reading.

I’ve recently found quite a bit of interesting tech + code stuff online. Feel free to add your own findings below. Here’s my brief roundup:

This week Google released an off-line toolkit for web-apps called Google Gears. So far it works only on IE7 and Firefox 2+ (I believe, correct me if I’m wrong), but it essentially is a browser plug-in that wraps a SQLite database and provides developers a common interface using Javascript for storing and retrieving data locally through their browser. Unfortunately, when installed it can constantly bother the user by requesting permission to download data, unless the user authorizes a particular site. This is an obvious and necessary security measure, but annoying nonetheless. Still, it will be interesting to see what developers come up with using this technology.

Google Maps adds Street View. This is a pretty interesting technology Google has integrated into their browser-based mapping service. Aside from providing a highly detailed on-the-ground view, it raises all sorts of privacy concerns. I’m very curious to see how people will start using this technology.

Facebook’s Developer Platform
A few months ago when there was talk of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg passing on buyout deals from Yahoo and Google to the tune of about $2 billion I thought he was crazy. With the massive release and opening up of their social network via their API and developer’s platform, Zuckerman makes good on his promise to stick around for the long haul. I’m now wondering if Facebook may have just dealt the fatal blow to all other similar social networking sites. Sure, Myspace probably isn’t going anywhere, with its horrid, yet customizable layouts, but for the discerning developer and socialite, Facebook is the place to be. The depth of the integration Facebook is providing via its developer’s platform is staggering, with applications being able to be fully integrated directly into the Facebook UI.

Microsoft’s Surface
FINALLY! Someone has come out with a table interface for computing tasks. We’ve talked about these sorts of interfaces at the iSchool and I think it’s great, though having more configurable installations with a camera and projector would probably be more useful in the contexts I would love to use it in. Still it’s nice to see that 30 years after the classic desktop + mouse paradigm was developed something new is being developed.

Gentoo Linux:
You live in the CS computer labs and you want everything you install to be compiled with GCC’s -O2 flag. It will take 14 hours to install and another 4 days to figure out why your sound card isn’t working. (Hint: It’s cuz you forgot to compile it at install time, genius.)

RedHat:
Your boss told you to install it.

Slackware:
Pssshaw! Package management systems are for the weak. You don’t care that you can hose your glibc libraries six ways to Sunday or that it takes 2 days to install MythTV (and its dependencies) from source, you’re a Real Man(tm)!

Ubuntu:
You’re so Web 2.0 that it hurts. Now that it’s okay to bash Apple (cuz, dammit, they delayed 10.5 for the iPhone!??!?!), you need to rock a new OS to maintain your alpha-geek status. So you install what all your cool blogger friends have been hyping… and OMG, it has a Terminal just like OS X!

Patrick Blanc overgrows the vertical surfaces of buildings in the most beautiful way. What he creates is far away from any fancy horticultural show, his Vertical Garden could rather be called eco-art, or greener architecture consisting of a variety of plants trailing gently up any interior or outside wall. Imagine the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon but this time on modern concrete buildings.

Read the rest of the article at Ping. I’d love to see some of these on campus. Beats the pants off ivy. Nothing is more infuriating than ivy wearing pants…

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack

A dog owner in the US state of Maryland says her golden retriever Toby saved her from choking to death by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre.

Debbie Parkhurst, 45, said she was eating an apple at home last Friday when a piece became lodged in her throat and she began to choke.

Ms Parkhurst said she pounded on her own chest but could not move the piece.

Toby joined in, jumping on her chest and dislodging the apple, then licking her face so she would not pass out.

link

reverse angle

One of the nice things about the San Francisco Bay Area is its vast array of gorgeous open space. Yesterday, a few friends and I literally stopped to smell the flowers out at Mount Diablo State Park.

The amount of colorful life in this area is really something. In addition to wildflowers in the east bay, there are mushrooms down low in the north bay, eagles up high in the south bay.

But what of the city itself?

(cc) patrick boury

Today I explored a whole different side to open space in the bay area: public urban green-space. Spots such as the Yerba Buena Gardens and Golden Gate Park are well known, but there are many hidden green gems in even the densest urban areas of San Francisco. By city ordinance, newly built or renovated buildings must dedicate a portion of their square footage to open space that is publicly accessible. Rick Evans of SFCityGuides.com writes that while developers will fulfill their legal responsibility in creating these spaces, they often keep these small gardens and parks unadvertised. Evans maintains that in order to find these quiet gems, you have to poke around, ask questions and overcome the “I don’t belong here” feeling.

Knowing (the location of the park) is often half the battle. And there are a variety of ways to find them, from browsing online satellite images to observing the high perimeters from the sidewalks. But sometimes you have to push open an unmarked door, wander to the end of a hallway or go to an odd floor in a tall building to find these secret patches of green.

A sample:
The sun terrace at the famous Crown Zellerbach building features a peaceful tree-lined seating area, a stunning view of the cityscape (including a full-length look at the iconic Transamerica tower), a small monument to our first president — all on the 15th floor.

Also, there’s a small rooftop cafe at a SF art school that features a Diego Rivera fresco and cheap bites to eat.

But I’m not going to be that guy that spills the beans. The value of these places is in the secrecy.

Many of you will be pleased just to know that these emerald patches exist. For those that must explore, I’ve compiled a map (using this handy mapping tool) of some of the hidden urban parks and rooftop gardens. If you’d like to browse the compilation, or add your own secret spots, please leave a comment here, or drop us a line: localoaf at free-google-email-domain dot com.

The immensely talented design collective Worther’s Original have created an installation called Shadow Monsters. It’s a processing app that augments your shadow puppetry with reactive audio and animation…live, on the fly.

Shadow Monsters evoked the same astonishment I felt the first time I saw my fingers’ shadows rearrange themselves into an uncannily lifelike nether-bunny hopping across my bedroom wall. Only now the bunny has fangs and throbbing tendrils.

While discussing geography, one of my classmates pitched an idea she’d like to try: follow a homeless person around for a day with a GPS, mapping their use of space (with consent, of course). Where do they really go? Where would they want you to think they go? I often think of the homeless as landscape fixtures, which is dehumanizing, but as much a product of their geographic consistency as of my lack of empathy.

So I figured this kind of thing must have been done, and a quick search turned up the animated heat map of the homeless in LA above. As with any heat map it’s mostly interpolation, but the movement over the course of several months is interesting. One of the cartographers that worked on it has some interesting comments on the process, too. SFGate has a less interesting and less detailed map of the homeless in SF. I think the much smaller scale of my classmate’s idea would be somewhat more personal and interesting, but I couldn’t find something like it in my hardly exhaustive 3 mins of search.

On a related note, the City of Berkeley is mounting an unfunded effort to crack down on public madness and panhandling. The curious can find the proposal and (5 hours!) of video from the March 13th City Council meeting on the City website.

Thanks, Lynette and Brian!

i wrote my first greasemonkey script. for those who aren’t familiar, greasemonkey is a firefox extension that allows the user to run scripts that programmatically change the current web page on the fly.

see the wikipedia page.

and download the extension here.

anyhoo, i spent a short while this weekend whipping together monkeybarrel. (click here to install)

monkeybarrel is a script allows the user to discover more greasemonkey scripts. for a given page that you visit, it searches userscripts.org to see if there are any scripts that apply to the page. if the script turns up some results, it links you to them.

i think if people knew about more scripts, greasemonkey would take off, as being able to edit a page is a powerful thing. this is my attempt to help that:

another great greasemonkey script that nfultz hacked together a berkeley version of a script that inserts a library link in amazon.com book pages. (click here to install)

you guys see any other uses for greasemonkey? i like to think of it as inverse screen scraping: instead of taking this html and finding some programmatic way to to pull out data and strip out formatting, you have a script that edits or inserts stuff in your page, fitting into the formatting in in a nice way.

UPDATE: userscripts.org had to disable installation of MonkeyBarrel, because it generated server load and created other issues. Please get the new version that doesn’t slam servers.

That’s KAPer as in a practitioner of Kite Aerial Photography (KAP), not a misspelled pickled flower bud. Yesterday the GIIF-CAMFER GeoLunch featured Charles “Cris” Benton, an architecture professor here at UC Berkeley who’s become well-known for helping to revive the lost art of taking pictures from kites. His talk was fantastic, broaching not only the fascinating DIY technical innovations he’s made in kite design and camera cradles, but also the history of KAP (and other non-plane aerial photography, like pigeons with exploding powder-charged flashes), the social impact and perception of the practice, and the artistic implications of taking landscape photos from a perspective that is not your own.

Continue reading ‘Confessions of a KAPer’