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Fact-finding among the fjords

IR Workshop and DSpace User Group Meeting 2006: Bergen, Norway

The University of Bergen hosted a lively and entertaining conference for DSpace users from 19th-21st April (though I only narrowly avoided registering for a Norwegian Fishermen’s conference being held in the same venue). [1]
Many speakers laid particular emphasis on the theme [...]

С днём рождения … меня!

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Thank you Olya, for my new Soviet calendar. What better day than my birthday, to read all about the balalaika, на русском языке – and celebrate the birthday in 1723 of proto-Marxist Baron Holbach
Балалайка у русского … как мандолина у итальянца, гитара у испанца, банджо у американского негра..
Old-world style almanacs and miscellanies [...]

D, E and F

I’ve found myself in the realms of ETDR (Electronic Theses, Dissertations and Reports) lately, particularly looking at DSpace, e-Prints, and Fedora. All very interesting and promising systems, with a lot of well-designed functionality. DSpace is probably the more instantly attractive solution, but Fedora has a lot of potential. With these (and other) open source solutions [...]

3D Photos

A browse round Flickr led me to this
set of home-made 3D photos. Here are the instructions on
how to make a 3D photo,
and here is some
free 3D photo editing software. And here is a
3D picture of the moon.

Here are some places to order 3D specs: Imago 3D, Assistpoint.

Psychotic redaction

In case anyone missed it, redaction’s in the news, as part of the tussle between Italy and the USA over the killing of Nicola Calipari in Iraq:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D89R8NR80.htm

http://www.repubblica.it/2005/d/sezioni/esteri/niccal3/rror/rror.html

The US Army appears to have issued what it thought was a “redacted” PDF (copy attached). Unfortunately the text behind the censor’s black boxes is still present, and easily [...]

Crash course in GML

GML is the XML language for geography developed by the Open GIS
consortium. It is an implementation/encoding of OpenGIS in XML. In its
current version (3) it appears to exist as a specification
from the Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC), and also as a draft
ISO standard.
In its simplest sense, GIS data is built around basic elements such as [...]

Big pictures on a small screen

You’ve got to be impressed by this totally amazing animation from THE ZOOMQUILT. Blow your mind!
Simpler, though no less effective, is this beautiful panorama of Paris by night.

How the web is woven

WEBDAV, Blogging and CMS
Discovered that one of the web’s big problems (bane of my life for years now) – namely the lack of an open and
effective method for directly editing web pages as you look at them in the browser, without jumping through all
[...]

That Spoof Government Web Site – In Full

Winner of the Steve Bell award for Timely Satire must surely be
www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/
which got the Government’s back up within 12 hours of going online.
If you really do need to prepare for an emergency, the genuine web site is
at www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk/, though be prepared, it’s a lot to take in, in one go: this is not a web [...]

Czyborra vanishes

I was disappointed to find that Roman Czyborra’s excellent paper on
“the Cyrillic Charset Soup” has vanished from the Web. Luckily I had
saved a local copy, including the character charts, so here it is for
posterity (possibly) in PDF format (courtesy of OpenOffice.org).
This also seems like a good moment to bookmark Joel Spolsky’s article
There Ain’t No Such [...]

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