Internet Social Network

You really have to check this out when you get a chance.

clipped from www.touchgraph.com TouchGraph Google TouchGraph Facebook TouchGraph's powerful visualization solutions reveal relationships between people, organizations, and ideas. Explore the wealth of information in today's growing data collections with our intuitive visual interfaces.

Your Web Site - (Test on Multiple Browsers)

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

clipped from browsershots.org Enter your web address here:   Linux Epiphany 2.14 Firefox 1.5 Firefox 2.0 Galeon 2.0 Iceweasel 2.0 Konqueror 3.5 Opera 9.24 Opera 9.50 Windows Firefox 1.5 Firefox 2.0 MSIE 5.5 MSIE 6.0 MSIE 7.0 Opera 9.24 Safari 3.0 Mac OS Firefox 2.0 Firefox 3.0 Safari 1.3 Safari 2.0 Safari 3.0 Select all | Deselect all Screen size Don't care640 pixels wide800 pixels wide1024 pixels wide1280 pixels wide1400 pixels wide1600 pixels wide Color depth Don't care8 bits per pixel16 bits per pixel24 bits per pixel32 bits per pixel Javascript Don't careDisabledEnabled1.31.51.61.71.82.0 Java Don't careDisabledEnabled Flash Don't careDisabledEnabled679

USB Flash Memory Stick

This is a neat concept that basically allows you to boot linux from any machine. Sweet, I like it!

clipped from www.pendrivelinux.com Boot and run Linux from a USB flash memory stick USB Linux installation enables you to install a portable Linux operating system on a flash drive or USB key no larger than your thumb. This portable Linux version can then be run from any computer that can boot from a flash device, allowing you to bring your operating system, desktop, applications, files, e-mail, personal settings, favorites and more with you. It’s like having your own personal operating system you can carry in your pocket. On this site, we provide many simplified portable Linux flash drive installation tutorials. Pendrive Linux install from Linux Pendrive Linux installation from CD

Free & Open Source Portable Apps

clipped from portableapps.com Convenient Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind. Open PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). It's open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use. Free The Portable Apps Suite™ is free. It contains no spyware. There are no advertisements. It isn't a limited or trial version. There is no additional hardware or software to buy. You don't even have to give out your email address. It's 100% free to use, free to copy and free to share.

Simple List of Open Source Products

Free and open-source software is good for you and for the world. This is the best Windows software that we know of. No adware, no spyware, just good software.

clipped from www.opensourcewindows.org

Great Port Checker

This is a great tool to check the ports on your machine for security holes.

clipped from www.yougetsignal.com The port forwarding tester is a utility used to identify your external IP address and detect open ports on your connection. This tool is useful for finding out if your port forwarding is setup correctly or if your server applications are being blocked by a firewall. It is important to note that some ports, such as port 25, are often blocked at the ISP level in an attempt to prevent malicious activity.

Sweet 10 Minute Email Address

clipped from 10minutemail.com Welcome to 10 Minute Mail By clicking on the link below, you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes. Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don't want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it's free. Enjoy! Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address. Get my Ad-Aware malware protection.

Firebug

Here is a great free web development tool that is free and open source.

clipped from www.getfirebug.com Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Release Notes

clipped from www.vmware.com VMware Server 2.0 Beta Embrace your ability to get more—for Free. VMware Server equips you with a stable, easy to use, free virtualization platform ideal for organizations wanting to consolidate multiple servers down to few and simplify the headaches and expense of server provisioning.

Intel Mash Maker (Video Example)

clipped from softwarecommunity.intel.com Click To Play The Intel Mash Maker is a pretty neat utility that I just loaded. Click on the picture above to see a demonstration of the capability that it provides. Intel Mash Maker : Videos and Example Mashups

Flocking / Swarming Technology Advancements

This article was posted a couple of weeks ago so I’m behind the power curve on this one. Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, have come up with a new technology that would allow Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to control themselves.

They state that future development could see the deployment of UAVs that are capable of controlling battles in the sky. This is not exact new technology however because Atair Inc was the first company to demonstrate algorithms of this nature.

Daniel Preston, lead engineer for Atair Aerospace, Inc. reported that autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs have flown using flocking and swarming algorithms. Atair AS has pioneering the development and implementation of flocking and active collision avoidance algorithms on UAVs. The technology was first tested December 16-18, 2004 in Eloy, Ariz. where two fleets of five Onyx systems were airdropped and successfully flocked in tight formation to target. Onyx systems are autonomously guided parafoil systems (UAV gliders).

Swarms are the way to go in my opinion. But not only should they communicate with one another they should take care of one another.

Canadian troops in Afghanistan are being put at risk because of the limited capabilities of the aerial drones that provide them with surveillance, say soldiers on the ground. The use of Sperwer unmanned aerial vehicles are being hindered by extremely hot temperatures.

U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk UAVs operating in the Middle East have a unique heat problem. Being relatively small, unmanned, aircraft, they do not have industrial strength air conditioning for their electronic systems.

Hot or cold temperatures are condition that a UAV swarms should able to adapt to, cooling down or heating up the ailing element. In this particular case does size matter? This raises an interesting question, are the reconnaissance swarms that are being worked on to large consequently making them unable to adapt to changing conditions. If the swarms were smaller would they have the same overheating problem? Perhaps smaller swarms (possibly insect size) that can fly closer to the ground could take advantage of cooler areas basically addressing the temperature problem.

A novel by Michael Crichton titled “Prey" weaves in this very concept based on nano-bots, although in his book the UAVs go rogue and start reproducing and improving upon their capabilities based on what they had learned that day (a little far fetched). It's interesting that the subject groups that originally were used to come up with the flocking and swarming concepts were small in nature. And that is the very thing that is being disregarded when developing and testing the algorithms. In this case perhaps size does matter.

Bluestream XML CMS

The Xdocs DITA enabled XML CMS is a single sourcing solution for companies that are looking to automate creation, delivery and reuse of their documentation content.

clipped from http://www.bluestream.com/products/xdocs10

Neat Tool for Clipping Content to Blog

I ran across this tool and thought that I would share it. I'm posting this entry in my blog using the tool so if it posts we will know that it works. Only click on the "Get Started" if you want to install the tool otherwise I suggest that you visit their site as listed (http://www.clipmarks.com/clip-to-blog).

clipped from www.clipmarks.com

Publishing on the Semantic Web

There is an interesting article that was just posted by James Hendler on the recent 2007 Science FOO Camp held at the Googleplex in Mountain View California. Hendler led a session on August 4th regarding the future of academic publishing and out of that session came 12 topical areas including (paraphrased, reordered and augmented):

• ID, logging, review status tag, trust mechanisms

• Data processing and workflow reuse; digital object provenance

• Review as a service that can be applied to an object

• Downstream Tracking / History (Cross Article or Domain Correlation)

• Community Enhanced (Social Networking)

• Citation Labeling (Citation Ontology)

• Annotation/metadata for non-text scientific objects

• Extensible geo-tagging / GIS / Unique Ids for any domain

• Semantic Authoring Aids

• Authoring Tools that add value for metadata

• Unique ID for people (w/o necessarily revealing identity) - persistent ID

• Fantasy Genetics - prediction market for science

When a document is place in a workflow, information obtained from each lifecycle state is very valuable yielding product quality control information regarding the personnel who have edited, review, or collaborated on the documents content. Information that is a little more difficult to track but is included in the list is the post release information (basically who touches the information after it is made available). This might be what Hendler refers to when he talks about the peer review status and downstream tracking capability for the document.

Embedded objects in the document carry their own tagging information depending on where it was obtained. There are a couple of new startups that are building around a new tagging idea called Deep Tagging. Deep tagging is extremely useful in organizing and sharing lengthy video and audio files online. Here is how deep tagging works in Veotag:

1. Users upload a video or audio file to Veotag

2. Using a web-based deep tagging tool, users can assign tags (Veotags) to specific clips from the file.

3. When other users are viewing this file, they have the option to play the whole file from the beginning to the end or jump back and forth between different Veotagged clips.
   
   

Citation labeling is a different animal all to itself. There are a number of different up and coming products that assist in citation labeling including Zotero. The ability of Zotero to query page content across links is pretty cool because it has the ability automatically capture citation information from the linked source. The added benefit to the product is that it is currently free and open source. It is kind of raw at the moment but it has promise.

Community enhancement is a hot topic at the moment in fact I recently posted an article entitled the Social Networking Revolution.

There is a great workshop coming up called Semantic Authoring, Annotation and Knowledge Markup (SAAKM 2007) which is the 4th International Conference on Knowledge Capturing to be held at Whistler, British Columbia, Canada October 28-31, 2007.

Social Networking Revolution

There was a recent summit on social networking put on by AlwaysOn Stanford that was very productive. I would have liked to have seen Dan Nye (CEO of LinkedIn) on the panel as well but still it was a pretty productive summit.

The panel included:

• Travis Katz (Senior Vice President of MySpace)
• Dustin Moskovitz (co founder of Facebook)
• Rich Rosenblatt (CEO of Demand Media)
• Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning)
• Karl Jacob (CEO of Wallop)

The panel brought up an interesting point that social networking has already taken hold of the online gaming market, not only from gaming sites that host games like chess but through other more sophisticated teaming environments hosted by valve and the like. Other authors including Stefan Decker and Martin Frank envisioned the Social Semantic Desktop as a result of combining the ideas of Semantic Web, Peer-to-Peer computing and Social networking.

With gaming set aside, the transformation from a hyperlinked web content currently used today to a Semantic Web-based technology is another dimension that Danish Nadeem addresses in his thesis called "Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support Personal Information Management". Nadeem and others suggest that a semantic desktop approach would enable the casual web user to take part by publishing, learning and forming their own social network with relatively little difficulty.