Archive for January, 2006

I wrote about Brainjams last month, and do so again today to announce their next Brainjams event, this one Monday, January 30th, in Washington DC. If you’re planning on attending this free event, head over to the registration form to claim your seat before they’re all taken.

Bringjams bring tech and non-tech people from all walks of life together to discuss how people actually use the tools many of us are building. Being in DC instead of deep in Silicon Valley should be especially interesting, so I’m doubly sad to be missing this one.

Basement.org delivers a dozen interesting uses for RSS feeds, and reading blogs isn’t on the list. Weather, comics, contacts and deals are though. They’ve titled this post “Part One”, so check back at their site later for another installment.

The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, began offering their Onion Radio News as a podcast this week. It immediately rose toward the top of iTunes podcast list.

Onion News is anchored by Doyle Redland, visualized by my dad.

Grab the podcast here or via the iTunes Music Store.

There’s a million APIs out there, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s easy now to translate street addresses to lat/long coordinates. It’s easy to grab local results, and overlay them on a map. It’s easy to use Yahoo or Google to get all types of search results (local, images, etc), and sites like Amazon to get prices and products.

But I think one of the coolest and most underrated APIs is the Term Extractor API from Yahoo!:

In other words, you point it at a piece of content — a news article, blog post, movie review or whatever — and it returns a list of terms, or keywords (or “tags” for those of you keeping score at home).

What do you do next with a list of keywords from a piece of content? Well, lots of things. Jeremy Keith wrote yesterday about a few ideas (that seem up for grabs, if you’re in a hacking mood!).

What if you treated each returned term as a tag? You could then pass those tags to any number of tag-based services, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, or Technorati.

So, instead of the simple “here’s my Technorati profile” or “here are my Flickr pics” on a blog, you could have links that were specific to each individual blog post. If I sent the text of this post to the term extractor, it would return a list of terms like “api”, “yahoo”, etc. By passing those terms as tags to a service like Technorati or Del.icio.us, readers could be pointed to other blog posts and articles that are (probably) related.

Like he suggests, it gets interesting when you let the output from this web service be the input for another service. I was lucky enough a few months ago to lend a small bit of help to the team that brought you the Yahoo! Events Browser mashup. One challenge of that product was to get images associated with each event. If you’ve ever worked with unstructured data — event listings are super unstructured — then you know that they don’t provide many high-quality hooks for understanding their content. The team tried doing image searches on venue or artist name, but the results weren’t very relevant or interesting, even when the parsed venue or artist was accurate. So, being the put-lots-of-pieces-together types there are, they decided to use the Term Extractor to discover more accurate, meaningful, and specific query terms to then find images for. Here’s how they summed it up:

To display appropriate images for events, local event output was sent into the Term Extraction API, then the term vector was given to the Image Search API. The results are often incredibly accurate.

I’ve only seen a handful of implementations of the Term Extractor API so far. If you’ve got a cool one to point me to, or a cool idea for a future implementation, please leave ‘em in the comments below.

From their leadin:

“We are targeting the official release of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in late March with the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update,” said Mozilla software engineer Josh Aas told.

According to the reporting, there are only two real areas where adjustments are needed. This is good news, and means that, as expected, we won’t be seeing any rendering engine changes:

“The first issue is some compatibility issues between the (Macromedia) Flash plugin shipped with Mac OS X 10.4.4 and Firefox. We have been working closely with Macromedia to resolve the issues.”

The other issue relates to the need to update to an Intel version of the ‘Java Embedding Plugin’ (JEP), which handles all Java applets in Mozilla’s Mac OS X products.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my exclusive desktop mail client at home and work for the last six or eight months. It’s been a perfectly capable and full-feature mail client, it’s not part of the Microsoft monopoly, and I like supporting Mozilla.

Several weeks ago though, my home instance started having problem. The indicator was that the Inbox count (the number of messages) was incorrect, and would often rapidly increase to a huge and incorrect number (200,000+ sometimes). Additionally, checking mail found sometimes fail, and the status bar would display incorrect or irrelevant information.

I did a little research and learned that I should be (have been) compacting my folders regularily to prevent mailbox corruption. To do so, highlight a folder or account, and go File > Compact Folders. Check out How to compact folders in Mozilla Thunderbird for all the details.

I tried several times to compact the folders, but either the process would fail or, if compeleted, wouldn’t fix the program. I concluded after research that this indicated the my mailbox data files had become corrupt. The mail data was OK, but the index, or table of contents of that data was corrupt.

Lukily, Thunderbird can easily create a new index file (foo.msf, for Mail Summary File), and will do so automatically if it finds the file missing. After locating my Profile Folder, I deleted all the .msf files that were causing problems. (Actually ALL of ‘em, just to be safe.) There’s a .msf for each of your mail folders, so your number of .msf files will vary — I had a few dozen.

(To be safe, cut-and-paste a copy of your Profile Folder to a safe location before mucking around in your profile.)

With the bad files out of the system, I booted Thunderbird back up and watched as it rebuilt each index file. Problem solved. It’s been working perfectly since.