Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
The Amazon Conduit will be working again on October 15, 2009. Thank you to everyone for your patience.
Have a great weekend,
daisy, Team Vox
In my last Team Vox post, I let you know that we're aware that the Amazon conduit is broken and that we're working to fix it. Many of you want to know when it's going to be fixed and I'm so sorry I haven't gotten back to you about that sooner.
Unfortunately, I don't have an exact date to give you, but rest assured, the Amazon conduit will be fixed in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I'm about to finish my latest book and I could use a few suggestions as to what to read next, so... if you don't mind, let me know in the comments what's on your nightstand and/or what book you think I absolutely must read next.
Thanks! :)
Some of you may have noticed that right now you cannot add books from Amazon to your Vox library. Giving people a glimpse into what's on your night stand is important to many of you, so I just wanted to reassure you that we are doing our best to get this bug fixed. I'll keep you posted.
So sorry for the inconvenience.
Hope you have a great weekend!
daisy
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
— Walt Whitman
Two years ago, I was absolutely sure of the direction I wanted my life to take: there were no valid paths open me other then graduate school. It appears this path has become overgrown with vegetation, as i can no longer seem to find it. Maybe it was the immaturity of the forest of life that made this path so easy to maintain.
I am reminded of a time when I was much younger; all I wanted was to be a paleontologist. I quickly discovered that the dreams of a child are often fleeting, as my they quickly turned towards becoming an electrical engineer; to follow in the footsteps of my grandfather. Eventually this dream also slipped into an abyss as I discovered a fascination for computers.
I am still mesmerized by computers, and have a strong desire to do something in the general field of computer science, but am no longer sure that dream involves graduate school at all. I think I need some time for a little self discovery; time to discover more closely who i am, and what I want to do with my life and career.
In case it is not yet obvious, I am talking about getting a job. I am hoping a few years in the workforce of my chosen trade will help me decide if I want to work in research, or if I will be content with a lifetime of software development. Maybe the death of my previous path will allow me to forge a better one, as I proceed into the future.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
— E.W. Dijkstra
The summer REU has ended and it was,
overall, a very rewarding experience. I do not think I was really
prepared for the overwhelming amount of work that goes into research,
but I did learn a lot about computer science
in general. The project I was participating in was entitled, Dynamics of Knowledge Creation in Open Biomedical Ontologies.
The goal of this project was to examine how knowledge grows over
time, and what intrinsic qualities in a social network leads to maximal growth in a technical network.
First, a little bit of background. An ontology is a set of concepts within a domain and these concepts must be representable in a machine parseable form. Think of an ontology like a dictionary; ontologies contain a set of terms which define a domain, and a set of relations mapping terms to other terms, and terms to other domains. My part of this involved parsing these ontologies and placing them into a database so that we can build knowledge graphs, and look at how they change over time.
Most of the communities in Open Biomedical Ontologies communicate by either mailing lists, SourceForge's bug tracker, or both. Notre Dame provided us with an API to access most of the data required, but some of it was not provided; like the mailing list data. I built a webcrawler to place this information into a database.
Once I had all of the required data, I needed a tool to calculate some graph metrics on it; such as centrality, density, and clustering coefficient. I built a gdf parser to parse Guess graph information, and output the data in the form of csv files.
In essence, I spent most of the summer
building tools to download empirical data. I plan to compare this data to a
simulation designed by Dr. Yilmaz. Once we are confident in the accuracy of this simulation, we can begin to examine how
changing structural elements of the social network affect the
technical network, and which characteristics maximize innovation.
All in all this project has been fascinating. It quickly turned into a multidisciplinary project involving sociology, graph theory, and computer science. A friend of mine once sent me that E.W. Dijkstra quote. He mentioned that Computer Scientists are often wanted for their ability to manipulate massive quantities of data in a variety of fields. I am now convinced he is right.
We need to talk. It's not me, it's you. You're just really busy at the moment. I'm just moving too fast. You need some space.
Tabbed user interfaces are really meant for grouping collections of user-interactables into logically categorised, more manageable arrangements. More than 5 tabs and you should be thinking "This isn't great," more than 10 tabs and you should already be thinking about making changes.
Enter Firefox, where I seldom have fewer than 30 tabs open at any given time. Anyone, who has tried to use Firefox once the tab bar starts getting wider than the window, knows that this UI is a square peg in a hole that doesn't exist. Tab widths are almost always greater than tab heights, so who thought it was a good idea to have tab bars run horizontally?
Fortunately some people have realised that disaster is afoot. I like Aza's suggestion that web apps are treated more like OS X dock items than plain old tabs.
My current approach to tab management is a rudimentary grouping mechanism, based around the awesome Tree Style Tab Firefox extension: Once I have a bunch of tabs open on a particular topic, I create a blank tab, set its address to data:text/html,<title>Sci-fi</title> (or whatever the relevant category is) and dump the relevant tabs in there. A recent addition to my management
policies is "shelving" a tab group that I haven't interacted with for a
while, meaning I bookmark a tab group and close all the tabs. Being
able to reduce the number of active tabs (usually in the region of 10 to 20) really helps with
Firefox startup times. I just wish I could navigate my tabs without the
mouse (filtering, selecting, etc.)
Alexander Limi has a great post about approaching redesigning tabs. However, one sentence troubles me greatly:
The first thing people say when we indicate that we are looking into alternative approaches is usually “But I like my tabs. Please don’t take away my tabs!”
People really say this? Who are they? They can have all my confounded tabs! I want something better than tabs.
Links from my Neighborhood
Check out the RockMe. Schedule. I'm not sure if this is a...
All of us as Six Apart
Vox's parent company
