boakes.org » Rich

Bite Size Science

Rich — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 09:16:03 +0000

As we move away from the peer reviewed, journal published, pay-for-access academic paper, there is a strong likelihood that shorter works will become the norm. Here, Bertamini and Munfano argue that shorter papers have drawbacks. Personally I appreciate these, but would argue to the contrary that in a meritocracy shorter papers are better because they are more focused so can be cited and used for different reasons. An experiment which aims to prove X may also support Y, and if the publication of the result is delayed for months or years whilst other data is gathered and interpreted then the advancement of Y is delayed. It also provides more opportunity for the authors interpretation to be seen to change over time. Science is not about taking a stance and sticking with it to the bitter end. Changing our minds is important and having this public, and the reasons for it is a good thing. A thought provoking read.

Weka Knowledge

Rich — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:35:35 +0000

An Open-Source data-mining suite. One of my project students is using this for test-data discovery in twitter sentiment analysis.

HTML5 Please

Rich — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:08:37 +0000

HTML5 Please is a new site reflecting the suitability of the latest Web Standards that are still works in progress. It’s somewhat similar to Can I Use.

Back from the Google Wilderness

Rich — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:39:53 +0000

Some time ago, I noticed the traffic on this site dropping off rapidly. Commensurate with it’s global norms, Google was driving the majority of new users here, and one day that traffic stopped without warning.

To see that happen is quite strange, akin to having your water supply cut off when the reservoir up the valley is full to the brim. There’s no easy way to ask why (and if you find your way through the webmaster tools to request reconsideration (in the stairless-basement; locked filing cabinet, “Beware of the leopard” sign etc), the likelihood is they won’t respond in a timely manner, and when they do respond the content will be terse and useless, at least, it was for me).

After much banging of my head on the wall of Google, eventually, an anonymous feedback engineer offered up that this site was “manually blocked” because someone else (let’s call them an operative, because it sounds dystopian) decided this is a “spam blog”. Google provided no more information than that, but eventually, after about 6 months, decided to unblock the pipes and people started to find the site again.

The Moral

The moral? It’s not safe to rely on only Google traffic for a business. If someone at Google makes an honest mistake then your whole livelihood can be removed overnight, with no warning, no explanation and no hope of a quick fix.

Hopefully, Google+ will go some way to alleviating this problem. The massive verified-human-crowd-sourced database of opinion on sites should go some way to removing the mis-flagging of normal small sites as spam blogs.

If you’d be so kind as to +1 this site, it might go some way to avoiding any future unplanned absence from the web (as google describes it).

PHP at 77

Rich — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:23:24 +0000

PHP is by far the most popular scripting language for websites.

Music for Programming

Rich — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:24:02 +0000

Several long mixes of unobtrusive mood music to help shut out the world and maintain focus. Perfect with a set of noise cancelling headphones.

HTML5 context menus

Rich — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:27:34 +0000

A brief video guide to using the menu element in HTML.

ISWC 2008 Video Lectures

Rich — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:56:12 +0000

A particularly good set of lectures on the Semantic Web.

Inference Visualised

Rich — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:07:40 +0000

Got multiple schemas? Got the need to visualise how facts can be inferred where they’re not explicitly stated? Here’s a nice example using Neo4J.

The Open Graph Protocol

Rich — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:14:34 +0000

How will the recent schema.org announcement regarding RDFa support affect uptake of OpenGraph? One to watch.

[wp]gang 2012

Rich — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:40:13 +0000

A plan to hold a WordPress event, similar to wordcamp, but a one day gig in Portsmouth during spring 2012.

Wikidata Project

Rich — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:55:50 +0000

One to watch. DBpedia already extracts a lot of data from Wikipedia. This should improve things, but I doubt it’ll be a complete replacement for some time.

Inline Padding

Rich — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:27:06 +0000

A very clear example of the formatting differences between block and inline display using CSS. Really useful if going beyond CSS101.

Async CSS Loading

Rich — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:25:25 +0000

Using JS to asynchronously load CSS can improve load times. This is interesting, but for me falls into the category of rarely useful. There will be cases where this is needed, but the maintenance then moves to a specialism that is costly.

Mobile HTML5

Rich — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:21:59 +0000

Table of compatibility showing Browsers vs Web APIs.

JSConf.EU Slides

Rich — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:20:40 +0000

A collection of the slides from JSConf.eu 2011

CORS with Modern Browsers

Rich — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:17:19 +0000

Useful review of some of the gotchas and workarounds needed if you’re wanting CORS code to work in multiple browsers.

DevOps

Rich — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:45:17 +0000

An introduction to DevOps – the duelling worlds of Development who demand change and Operations for whom stability is the goal. Yin and Yang of life on the service provider side of the web.

Smallest Federated Wiki

Rich — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:22:42 +0000

Ward Cunningham introduces a work in progress, the Smallest Federated Wiki with a series of short films.

story-and-journal-for-federation from Ward Cunningham on Vimeo.

cross-page-refactoring from Ward Cunningham on Vimeo.

wiki-json-coffeescript from Ward Cunningham on Vimeo.

pjscrape: Web-scraping in JS

Rich — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:07:21 +0000

A command-line tool for scraping data. Basic configuration achieved in JSON.