randomosity

Video on the other blog

We all know I love my gadgets. As I blogged earlier in the week one of the first things I picked up on arrival was a new disposable cell phone. I chose a little Sony Ericsson 530i from 3.ie because it allowed unlimited Skype usage. I have been blown away by how well the Skype functionlity is implemented on this phone and the mobile itself has demonstrated a few other neat features. My original plan was to get the cheapest thing I could for the interim and purely utilitarian considerations. Then come July 11th ponder the 3G iPhone. However, I have to admit that I am rather pleasantly surprised by the little 530i. Its a solid little phone and pure candy bar form factor. I am glad to be back to candybars and from experience will not use a slider or a flip in the future. I put a crystal case on the 530i to protect the screen (experience with my last SE).
The camera on the 530i is a common 2Mb. I love having a camera with me at all times and the resulting photos are quite fine. Being able to bluetooth these back and forth with my MacBook Pro is brilliantly convenient. And then I noticed that the photo menu offered an option to Blog This…
When I pressed the blog this button it was clearly linked to blogger and I figured (intriguing) I’ll attach this to my existing blogger account at some point and try this. As it turns out its much easier than this and I am very impressed.
To blog one’s life on a Sony Ericsson 530i with 3, you snap a pic, choose blog this and leave the rest to the phone. 3.ie creates a brand new blog on blogger for you, uploads the picture and then emails to your phone a special token. The phone is now linked to this blog. You claim your token via a browser and are then given the option of personalising the blog that was autocreated or simply linking the incomming posts to an existing blog. I happened to have an old one sitting around (NapoleonicTourist…unused since 2006). I pointed to this one and lo and behold there was the pic (not too exciting as I grabbed an image of the wood floor in the apartment). However, this is a very slick and smooth process. It would be very cool if I could send it to my own wp blog, but haven’t figured this one out yet…maybe. But as it stands…very cool and I am going to play with this, see what happens and make 3.ie a little richer for every post ;-)

There was a time when the the brilliant illuminated manuscripts of Irish Monasteries represented the passionate collection of the works of the solitary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intricate knot patterns are a study in a real pattern language. Years ago, when my creative juices were sought a middle ground between a clear systematic approach and yearning to find break out of these same systems, I discovered the work of George and Iain Bain. - father and son. The elder Bain made a lifetime study of finding the patterns in the knotwork and devising techniques to allow others to appreciate these and to replicate these celtic masterworks for themselves. His son built on these techniques to devise a an even simpler way of creating the elabourate designs. I was hooked and produced some large scale knot patterns. I also discovered the wonder of doodling in square and triangular knot patterns. At one point I even delved into zoomorphical celtic artwork and dicsovered and even larger challenge.

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Faced with finding a place to live in Dublin, I decided to quickly attempt to create a mashup of potential properties mapped throughout the city. This is, I sense, an increasingly common sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find anything that accomplished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manually in either the My Maps section of Google Maps or create a KML overlay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynamically generated and capture the list current to when I was looking at it. I would note that many sites have their own spatial displays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dublin scene. The site I was using to look for rental opportunities is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selections on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) listings in the area of the listing you have chosen. You can additionally select a particular agency and have their listings plotted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My objective was to create a custom search, take the detailed results, identify the location, geocode it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple - in practise subject to the vagaries of daft and the tools used.

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As I was wandering to the whole food store tonight I heard the droning of an aircraft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a helicopter blade, but I could identify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then as the sounds grew closer a huge Ford Tri-motor roared over the trees a block away. The Tri-motor was cruising at no more than 1000ft accompanied by a helicopter shooting video. It was an amazing sight. The sun was at a lovely evening height giving a wonderful orangey ambience, the sky clear and I was transported to another era. I was drawn back to a time when an airplane was the novelty (rarity) that the Tri-motor is today. What would it have been like to have seen this virilely powerful metal beast soaring over a small town bringing the hope/promise/threat? of a faster communication and transport? The sheer size and mechanical wonder must have inspired an awe even more substantial than my serendipitous amaze.

The helicopter buzzing about the larger ship seemed like a hawk being menaced by a sparrow or two. Especially as another helicopter came shooting across the skyline heading in for a closer look as well. I will have to find out where the magnificent beast was heading. A new addition to the Canadian Warplane Heritage at the airport perhaps. Given that only 18 are known to still exist, I was blessed with a rare experience tonight.

Marvin McInnis challenges the widely held belief that Canadian agriculture was adversely affected by the First World War. His talk at the University of Guelph Rural Roundtable yesterday, presented a nuanced and revisionary look at the common story that wartime demand drove Canadian farmers to double acreage devoted to wheat and unwittingly create a dangerous monoculture. A situation that led to a massive collapse in GNP when the price of wheat collapsed after the war. McInnis’ earlier paper “Canadian Economic Development in the Wheat Boom Era” sets an appropriate stage for this further discussion. In this paper, McInnis questions the conclusion that Canada’s rapid economic growth during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century rested on western settlement and the ‘wheat boom.’ This has been a persistent and widely accepted view until more recent re-examination has questioned the role of wheat in this growth and determination that other factors were of greater consequence to this growth. This story though has supported the consequent one that envisions wartime demand and response to it as greatly affecting Canada’s agricultural economy.

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The latest additions to The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project were published today. When I took a look at the three new mysteries I was reminded what a powerful addition to the teaching of Canadian history that this collection is. The new mysteries: “The Redpath Mansion Mystery”, “Death on Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy,” and “Death of a Diplomat: Herbert Norman and the Cold War” keep raising the bar of how to effectively present material using the web. The project is a collabourative effort amongst Canadian historians to provide engaging and fun teaching tools directed towards high school and university level students. The mysteries are presented as self-contained websites, each one with its own theme and approach. Typically they provide compelling narrative and also offer a wealth of primary documents and other source material to aid in learning about Canadian History and historical methods. With the addition of these new modules, the breadth of the site is reaching a point of critical mass and offer a nicely diverse collection from throughout time and geographic area.

The folks at Many Eyes recently introduced their new comparison cloud tool. Basically, it lets you visualise two fragments of text displaying word frequency for each in the same cloud. It’s an interesting addition to the more familiar word cloud. Using a standard word cloud you get a matrix of words with relative size, weight or colour highlighting frequency in a selected text. This quickly allows you to visually perceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a particular theme or style of writing or speaking. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abutted. You can now visually compare two texts from the same author for similar empahsis or quickly determine a difference between texts. In the example presented at Many Eyes, they compare the US presidential State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less frequent mention of Afghanistan and the increase in mention of Saddam. Whether this allows one to conclude a change in policy or not, it does demonstrate the use of the tool for provoking questions for further exploration.

On Saturday, the Ontario government officially announced how much funding each university in Ontario is to receive for maintenance and renewal of facilities. I just happened to see announcements from a few institutions appear simultaneously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather different ways in which they presented this news.

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I use both GraphViz and OmniGraffle to construct charts involving relationships and processes. Over the last few days I was noodling my way through a schematic of sectarian associations in Northern Ireland. Trying to get the players and organizations straight was simply impossible for me without some sort of visual aid. I did a quick scan of the usual suspects to determine whether anyone already had something that would suit my needs, but only found textual compilations. Although comprehensive, these required more than casual scans to get an immediate sense of who fits where. I put the chart before the horse this time and started drawing on a napkin. I presupposed that I would need to visually distinguish between political organizations and paramilitary ones, and also between religio/political affiliations. The colours green and orange sprang to mind as good visual cues ;-) Chronology was also a factor and I had an additional temporal dimension to consider. The napkin was overwhelmed.

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About a year ago I adopted the French Republican Calendar for my personal journalling. Why? Really for no other reason than to be different. It offered me the opportunity to learn the Republican Calendar through practise (a word-a-day sort of arrangement). The upheaval of the switch to a new system in France in 1795, caused confusion, was not widely adopted and in the end was discontinued by Napoleon during the Empire. This was not before such references such as the Coup of 18 Brumaire and lobster Thermidor forever embedded the poeticisme of the calendaring system in our historical memory.

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