Take Action: TrueMajority.org

Over at TrueMajority, you can nowwin free ice Ben and Jerry's ice cream for a year if you can guess when Alberto Gonzales will resign.

blogger dashboard widget

Sigh... I downloaded Google's Dashboard widget for posting to Blogger, but it doesn't work with the New (i.e., Google version) of Blogger that they pushed me into switching to. Despite having almost no knowledge whatsoever of javaScript, I've managed to fix it so it will authenticate to the new Blogger, but I can't figure out how to get the list of my blogs to populate the dropdown blog list you get after you've successfully authenticated.

I will probably end up just hardcoding in my own blog and getting rid of the menu, but for tonight, I give up. The web interface isn't exactly substantially less convenient than a widget anyway.

thoughts about photo metadata

Since Flickr introduced machine tags, which are designed to make it easier to add machine-readable metadata to photos, I've been thinking of how to encode information about the people who appear in a photo in a good systematic way. My current thoughts is that the best way to do this would to use a namespace like people and a bunch of predicates like the following:

• number = number of people in photo
• name_1 = name of the first person
• gender_1 = gender of the first person
• whatever_1 = more information about the first person
• name_2 = etc...

Maybe some predicates to link to a homepage or a site with more information about the person. There's already flickr:user= which is being used to link to Flickr users (although it's not entirely clear whether each person using it is talking about the owner of the photo or the subject of the photo in the value, so it might make sense to even encode something like this in a people tag. If I had the time, I'd build my hypothetical really great social networking site with a feature to let you tag your photos with links to your friends within the site who appear in your photos, and get at a wealth of information about each of them.

relaunching

My blog returns, most likely for just one post.

I'm currently working on a brand-new social networking site model that I'll almost certainly never finish coding, what with my tiny amount of free time and spare energy. But it's a brilliant design. I swear.

I'm also working on a Cocoa program that's going to use the Flickr API to do something completely pointless statistics on people doing Mav's 365 days project, which is much more likely to actually get finished and much less likely to ever be used by anyone including myself. Getting it done will, unfortunately, require me to punch myself in the face every time I catch myself trying to user perl syntax in an Objective C program. I swear using perl at work has rotted by brain completely.