It seems like what's missing is a tag dictionary which is able to group & graph relationships between words based on their actual definition. Such as being able to place in a hierarchy "Fruit" within the context of "plant" "apple" "leaf" in a way which would be relevant. It would be difficult to create such a dictionary, and to keep it modern might even be more difficult. If you look at something like Wiki-pedia(which has hyperlink style references to related topics and words which are connected to other words/topics), and you stripped out of that all of the back story and just kept the main topic and the words which are hyperlinked, organized these words in a treestyle hierarchy, and built a comparative reference based on common typos and variations, you might get close to the tool you're looking for. Such a task might seem nightmarish at first, but since there are much fewer words and phrases in existence than new ones every year, eventually the tool would become useful.

I felt the same way when I was doing research into this, about 4 years ago now. I think that basically describes a universal ontology, and the fact is that such a thing has massive hurdles, not least because of multiple word meanings.

Sadly, you'd have to put "Fruit" not only into the context of the words you noted (and others), but also in the context of the slang usage for "effeminate" or "gay". "apple" would have to be linked to the fruit-plant sense and the computer-hardware-software-corporation sense and the Beatles-music sense, etc. etc.

Wikipedia handles that with those disambiguation pages, as would (presently at least) any sufficiently complex word-to-word or phrase-to-phrase ontology. Or, that's my meagre understanding of the situation at least.

-k

RE: The Need for Creating Tag Standards

Compact, computer-controlled, 3-dimensional woodworking machine with an easy-to-use interface. It allows a novice to make a complete project without a shop full of tools.The unique configuration allows it to perform many other woodworking functions, including ripping, cross cutting, mitering, contouring, jointing and routing. The CompuCarve can work in most soft materials, including wood, plastics (polycarbonate or cast acrylic) and certain types of high density foam.

Craftsman 3D printer.

[That is damn cool.]

Craftsman 21754 CompuCarve Compact Woodworking Machine, Computer-Controlled at Sears.com

i confess i don't get this
i know u know much more than me about this acidus but i don't see the arguments as presented in the article as self evident
i don't want all the web pages i visit to look the same
i enjoy a varied and interesting visual journey as well as one of content
i am a fundamentally visual person
idealogically i like the idea of the reader/user being in control
but the situation will evolve
you are setting out an idealogical position -- an arguably extremist and certainly presciptive position -- "things should be like this"
they may well move to that point but you're fighting 500 years of print tradition and the written tradition of the monks with their extraordinary layouts before that (in the west) calligraphy (in the east)
visual style is important
it is an element of semiotics
i'm reminded of those (who i strongly sympathise with) who rail against fashion -- high street fashion -- alternative fashion -- music fashion etc --- fine we should be individuals but we're fundamentally not -- some are more individualistic than others but fashion is an element of fitting in and being social -- we mirror the behaviour of others - that is part of the social dialogue and multi-threaded discourse -- i'm influenced a little by x and a little by y -- i identify to an extent with a particularly group, with a particular set of values, with a particular set of ideas. It is not merely a question of corporate identity. It is a statement on a fundamental level about who i'm as an individual and how I see myself fitting into society. To assert a visual style is content.
I'm not suggesting you are wrong but i do think there is more to this than technical questions.

[ I agree with this completely and will add my own completely separate argument that's based on pragmatism, devoid of artistic consideration.

That argument is that since you can't trust the user agents to actually do what they're supposed to do, developing a web page is aiming at a moving target already, even just for the PC platform. Try to evolve that to be universally readable on cell phones, screen readers, and all the rest... it's an exercise in absolute madness.

I recall my Second Disillusionment about 5 years ago, when CSS was new to me and i said to myself "Wow, this is smart, separate layout and content... brilliant!" So i get right into it, read the spec, learned the spec, read some books and web sites and started to see just how much bullshit you had to go through because of varying support for the specifications. Well, for IE do this shit, and then opera might freak out, because it's hella strict, and firefox will deal, but take 35 seconds to render.

So most people are happy to say, fuck it, ok, if the UA is going to ignore or fuck up half my work, I'll go with a print-emulating look that i don't even have to develop -- just grab a template and tweak the CSS. I did. And that was... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Publishing on the Web Is Different!

RSnake is a fucking genius. Using a file:/// URL pointed at the manual PDF installed with Acrobat, you can execute JavaScript in the local zone. Oh yeah, local file access, program execution, completely uncrippled XmlHttpRequest.

This is not good.

[Yeah, I went ahead and removed the PDFs from thesupernicety, just to be safe. Fortunately, there weren't many. Some people are super boned. -k]

It hits the fan!

Another DoS vector I see with Ajax applications is something I'm going to call Control Logic Denial of Service. All those web services and Ajax endpoints are API calls into the application. By looking at the JavaScript code that’s pushed to the client, I can see in what order and how often these webservices are contacted, as well as what the parameters are. In essence, this is a blueprint of the steps the applications takes to function normally. However, it is also a blueprint on how to use the application incorrectly. Some webservices may allocated resources where another one cleans them up. An attacker simply never calls the clean up functions. Or I simply call all the functions out of order. Even if the code fails gracefully, it is extremely expensive for a program to generate an Exception, even it gets caught.

[ Very interesting. Webservice authors take heed. -k]

Punching them in the brain! Control logic DoS.

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

I got published in this month's issue of First Monday! Make sure you check out the issue because there are a number of good articles in it.

[ Good stuff, as usual, Tom! Congrats! -k]

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

...
Remote Buddy makes that remote kick some serious ass. For instance. You can use the remote to advance slides in powerpoint. You can use the remote to go back and forward in firefox. You can control vlc with the remote...

OMFG the remote rocks.

Remote Buddy is in "beta" and the developers say you'll get free upgrades for all the 1.x releases if you pay the low low price of 9.99 euros (that's $12.81 in girly-man american dollars.

[ Looks like a pretty rad bit of software.

Makes MediaCentral kind of redundant, which I like. MediaCentral has problems. Primarily, it's not good at handling "OMG I can't read that file format" conditions. It'll sit and choke.

Also, it's really not designed to handle iTunes libraries as, ahem, extensive as mine. When I go into iTunes mode, and go into "Albums" it sits and chokes for *minutes*. That renders it useless. I wonder if this app suffers the same way when in fullscreen mode...

Course, all my poor old non-intel macs don't have the built in reciever. I could get a keyspan remote, but that would hardly feed my desire (almost completely unreasonable desire, i might add) for a new intel-mac Mini.

Curse you, Apple. Curse you. -k]

Remote Buddy

Decius wrote:
This font pkg makes ansi fonts work in the terminal.app of osx. Hello my name is timball and I'm addicted to irc.

Put the ASCII.ttf into /Library/Fonts/ then in the terminal.app:

Terminal - Window Settings...
[Display]
Set Font...
All Fonts - New - Regular - 11pt

Set as default if you want it that way... I know I do.

--timball

Decius: Thank You! If someone had done this, say, 20 years ago macs might have actually been useful for BBSing and apple might have been in a better place in the market.

[Hm. I guess I might try it. I use courier new, and don't seem to have any problems with much of anything. I'm not that heavy a terminal user, however, to be fair. And I don't use it for IRC.

I do use Visor, because having a terminal at the touch of Command-~ no matter what app i'm using is pretty damn awesome.

-k

RE: ASCII Font

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.) and Apple® today announced that hit programming from CNN, Adult Swim and Cartoon Network is now available for purchase and download on the iTunes® Music Store (www.itunes.com). The new content features such favorites as Cartoon Network’s “Johnny Bravo,” Adult Swim’s “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and original episodes of the award-winning documentary series “CNN Presents,” all available for viewing on a computer or iPod®.

At $2 a show is this reasonable? Yes, actually, I think it is. If I add up the cost of my Tivo subscription and full cable, and divide by two, I think the resulting number is higher then the amount of television I watch a month. As more programs get added to this thing, I can just pay per view whenever I'm bored and I want to watch something. Television, for me, is now dead. I might miss it on days when, like, airplanes have hit the world trade center, but I'll bet I'll find other ways to get the information I want.

Only real thing that I'm waiting on is MTV. I want my MTV. Not bullshit MTV with the Real World and all that crap. The old MTV. With music videos all the time, and the occaisonal extremely strange animated feature. Maybe what I really want is MuchMusic. Whatever. I want it to just stream to me all the time. I don't want to pay per click or choose things from a menu, and I don't want to have to install a satellite system in order to watch it. Where is my MTV? Why is there no market for this? Kids these days. God!

New TBS, Inc. Network Programming from CNN, Adult Swim & Cartoon Network Now Available on the iTunes Music Store

Could you write a good image recognizer for a 100 MHz mobile phone processor with 1 MB heap, 320x240 image, on a poorly-optimized Java stack? It needs to locate and read two-dimensional barcodes made up of square modules which might be no more than a few pixels in size. We had to do that in order to establish Semacode, a local start up company that makes a software barcode reader for cell phones.

God Damn It!

[I'm confused. Why are you angry? Because you wanted to do this? -k]

Semacode - Image recognition on mobile camera phones