He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a "Plum" or perhaps a "Kaboodle"

Technologies from the Demo conference. Some ideas we can incorporate, modify, niche or expand on, appropriate seems so impolite. Food for thought!

Perhaps next year we will be presenting!

A link to Plum

Tom

/I\

OK, This is off topic, but we're all Star Trek fans: 'Antigravity' Propulsion System Proposed

An 'antigravity' propulsion system was proposed at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) in Albuquerque on Febuary 14 by Dr. Franklin Felber. His new exact solution to Einstein's gravitational field equation gives hope to space enthusiasts that it might be possible to accelerate space craft to speeds approaching that of light without crushing the contents of the craft.

If you read the article, it's very iffy, It was read at a space technology conference not one on theoretical gravity & relativity but hey maybe!
I'ts good to dream...........

Taking a break from packing

Tom

Lectures: PARC Forum in Palo Alto

I want to make this available, Almost every Thursday afternoon at Xerox Parc are lectures from world class scientists, The lectures range from the interface between science and religion to beer to AI and the web. I haven't been attending lately but looking over the last couple of months many of the lectures have been relevant to AltHaven. Lectures are always free, with an open question period at the end. Most of the current lectures and a lot of previous years are archived and viewable on the web, (see the Archive link on the Parc Events page)

Enjoy!

Tom
/l

Semantic Web - RDF SPARQL OWL links

List "o" Semantic Links

Intro to the Semantic Web
Govtrack (public data and the semantic web)
SPARQL Query Language for RDF (tutorial)
Multiple Govtrack.us databases quariable by SPARQL (Simultaneously)
What is RDF
W3C OWL
Protege OWL (downloads and other good info)

"more to come "

Social Capital in America

This site comes out of a Harvard study and talks about the general decrease in social capital in the US. That is citizen involvement. I am looking into information on what has been done to measure social capital, and will post more as I come up with them. (see Social Capital links on the right)

Social Capital links:

http://www.bettertogether.org/

more to come.

Tom

a must read from MIT plus thoughts

Also check out Yahoo 360 we really we really need to define what makes us different from the start, a clean intuitive interface is #1, I think keeping the API open and allowing users to create modules will also be important as well as linking with other products! Google encourages the creation of google applications modules. Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon also have open API's Has anyone seen the Google Maps Craig’s Lst housing mashup? (this link is to one of them, apparently there are several)
Recommended reading O'reily, Google Hacks (latest addition), Yahoo Hacks, Spider Hacks.

The Google has little easily configurable standalone modules mostly written in Pearl using Soap.

I browsed Yahoo Hacks in the bookstore today and it seemed similar. If we can leverage the power players we have a chance to steal a march on the competition and get noticed. Social networking is nowhere near mature but there are many players.

I think an aggressive release schedule is necessary, but the product has to be creditable from the start and we will need to stay on a continuous improvement path, somewhat of an always in Beta Approach (doable in opensourse.) In my opinion we will need to encourage coding participation as soon as is feasible.

I'm posting links to Semantic info. I don't know how useful this is but if we can follow the coding standards from the start we can use that as a hook to interest participation of people with interesting ideas.

Cheers All

Tom

More to come ..... Semantic web links, Google API stuff, and Paul's PHP matrix sites.

Look for a survey draft next week!

Friends, Romans Countrymen. SEND ME YOUR LINKS!

Again Cheers all!

Your AltHaven Anthropologist

althavenfiles@gmail.com

I've set up a g-mail account to be used as a storage along with the G-Mail Space firefox extension. see: Extension Post

I'll e-mail the password to the list.

The secret question is; Who is the Wikiwookie?

I will also use this account to generate an API Key and e-mail it to the list.

Pauls PHP Resources

*Paul's PHP Resources* ( This will start our PHP list, see links on the right.)

http://www.php.net/. This is the official documentation site for PHP worldwide. The documentation is thorough, with a table of content, and a quickie function search. I use it all the time, because, unfortunately, what php offers in multitudes they do not offer in consistency.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/ A good tutorial/article site that I have used.

*Open-source World*
http://http://www.apache.org/. If you want to get a good idea what's available, this site talks about all the Java tools and other neat projects. There are TONS of 'em.

http://sourceforge.net/. This is the center of the open-sourced community, but not a browse-friendly site. If you are searching for php modules, whatever you google will take you here for downloads.

Paul aka Wiki Wookie on php & wiki

Why do I think phpWiki is the way to go?

There are lots of modules out there, and it can be devilishly difficult to pick between them. But there are some good rules of thumb you can use to pick the future winner...
1) Features
2) Quality of the Code

Is the module feature-rich and you need a lot of features? Or does it do a few things very well?

I stray away from PHP Modules that's written in spaghetti code. Too bug-prone, and a headache to keep maintaining, and code that is this badly written rarely get better over time. On the other hand, if code is written using the newest and best practices, consistently, and professionally, that's the module I tend to stick with.

phpWiki passes both criteria with flying colors. It allows you to plug-in RSS feeds, images, searches, Google, IMDB, Calendars, Weather, XML, FOAF, RDF, SOAP, Rich Tables, XML. It already has most of the features built-in that we are looking for.

But what really took my breath away was the quality of the code. I've seen programs approach it, but this is world-class stuff.
- It's internationalized, using the ISO standard coverying glyphs in many different languages.
- It uses Templating, XML, Cascading Style sheets for the presentation layer. It has a themes folder with templates, that is exensible in every way.
- It works with different databases, and file-based db modules.
- It uses a configuration file for specifics. The coding conventions are consistent, and this is a very large program too.
- It intercepts what comes into and what leaves a browser, it is mult-browser compatible and detects what browser it uses.
- It is w3c standards-savvy. Uses namespaces, xhtml, xml schemas, different MIME types.
- It handles many different types of authentication, from http_auth to LDAP to database-centric.
- It takes the object-oriented methodology as far as it goes in php.
- It is caching, and configurable about caching.
- It is self-regulating, it downloads new versions of modules, and handle conflicts. This is scary stuff for most programmers.

Here is a code sample that epitomizes its style...
from plugin/EditMetaData.php -> extends standard plugin class.
*
* This will give you an idea how big the whole system is, cause there are lots of object references here.
* It also shows you how modular it is, using a common function called pushContent, which is used to build xml trees as well as html.

function run($dbi, $argstr, &$request, $basepage) { $this->_args = $this->getArgs($argstr, $request); extract($this->_args); if (!$page) return '';

$hidden_pagemeta = array ('_cached_html'); $readonly_pagemeta = array ('hits'); $dbi = $request->getDbh(); $p = $dbi->getPage($page); $pagemeta = $p->getMetaData();

// Look at arguments to see if submit was entered. If so, // process this request before displaying. // if ($request->isPost() and $request->_user->isAdmin() and $request->getArg('metaedit')) { $metafield = trim($request->getArg('metafield')); $metavalue = trim($request->getArg('metavalue')); if (!in_array($metafield, $readonly_pagemeta)) { if (preg_match('/^(.*?)\[(.*?)\]$/', $metafield, $matches)) { list(,$array_field, $array_key) = $matches; $array_value = $pagemeta[$array_field]; $array_value[$array_key] = $metavalue; $p->set($array_field, $array_value); } else { $p->set($metafield, $metavalue); } } $dbi->touch(); $url = $request->getURLtoSelf(false, array('metaedit','metafield','metavalue')); $request->redirect($url); // The rest of the output will not be seen due to the // redirect.

}

// Now we show the meta data and provide entry box for new data.

$html = HTML();

$html->pushContent(fmt("Existing page-level metadata for %s:", $page)); $dl = HTML::dl(); foreach ($pagemeta as $key => $val) { if (is_string($val) and (substr($val,0,2) == 'a:')) { $dl->pushContent(HTML::dt("\n$key => $val\n", $dl1 = HTML::dl())); foreach (unserialize($val) as $akey => $aval) { $dl1->pushContent(HTML::dt(HTML::strong("$key" . '[' . $akey . "] => $aval\n")) ); } $dl->pushContent($dl1); } elseif (is_array($val)) { $dl->pushContent(HTML::dt("\n$key:\n", $dl1 = HTML::dl())); foreach ($val as $akey => $aval) { $dl1->pushContent(HTML::dt(HTML::strong("$key" . '[' . $akey . "] => $aval\n")) ); } $dl->pushContent($dl1); } elseif (in_array($key,$hidden_pagemeta)) { ; } elseif (in_array($key,$readonly_pagemeta)) { $dl->pushContent(HTML::dt(array('style' => 'background: #dddddd'), "$key => $val\n")); } else { $dl->pushContent(HTML::dt(HTML::strong("$key => $val\n"))); } } $html->pushContent($dl);

if ($request->_user->isAdmin()) { $action = $request->getPostURL(); $hiddenfield = HiddenInputs($request->getArgs()); $instructions = _("Add or change a page-level metadata 'key=>value' pair. Note that you can remove a key by leaving the value-box empty."); $keyfield = HTML::input(array('name' => 'metafield'), ''); $valfield = HTML::input(array('name' => 'metavalue'), ''); $button = Button('submit:metaedit', _("Submit"), false); $form = HTML::form(array('action' => $action, 'method' => 'post', 'accept-charset' => $GLOBALS['charset']), $hiddenfield, $instructions, HTML::br(), $keyfield, ' => ', $valfield, HTML::raw(' '), $button );

$html->pushContent(HTML::br(), $form); } else { $html->pushContent(HTML::em(_("Requires WikiAdmin privileges to edit."))); } return $html; }

Social Network Database

lists information on 138 social networks, I beleive this was part of a 2005 disertation project.

(I've copied this file down in case it goes away)

Anyway I thought thhe info might be useful.

* Of General Interest *

Metadata - Microsoft inadvertently protecting democracy!

Interesting post as to the dangers to the whitehouse and pentagon of metadata embedded in MS documents, particularly word. It's fun to see how governments and big corporations caan slip up but this is actually useful info for anyone worried about privacy.

Tom

Got Links? - Send um in!

info update

The blug will now update to the AltHaven list for posts and comments.

Automation is good!

* Of General Interest *

Radio Open Source from PRI on your local Public Radio Station

will talk with Craig of craigslist.org tonight (2/7/06) at 1:00 AM

This program for those who have never heard it is a "liberal" look
at the creative edge of culture and politics and is interactive realtime
with a blog, click on the link above.

Generally good stuff but I think this one is pertinent to Alt.Haven

Tonight the show is on BS in the media.

FireFox Extensions

Firefox G-Mail Space extention Allows a G-mail account to be used as file storage.

I'll publish an AltHaven G Mail account tomorrow or the next day to use with this.

We may want several.

Intro/Test

~Test Test Test ~

AltHaven!

Live from the Blog'O'Sphere

Useful Links - Feeds - Code 'n' Techniques, News and Bad Puns

forgot somethin, Oh ya!

The motto!

Never Give UP, Never Surrender!
No, thats not it,
hm,
Got It!

never, Never, NEVER SELL OUT!!

Send your links send your data, I will be posting a G-Mail account and a link to a firefox extension so that the account can be used as 2 gig of virtual storage.

I will also be setting up posts that can be used as permanent links that will work as our shared Bookmarks Pages

Atom News Feed URL:

http://althaven.blogspot.com/atom.xml