Craig Talbert's Weblog

ServiceNow's ODBC driver is a wrapper for ServiceNow's SOAP interface

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:35:00 -0600

I setup ServiceNow's ODBC driver and then setup a Linked Server to connect to one of our ServiceNow instances from SQL Server Management Studio. When you run a SQL query from SSMS on your ServiceNow instance and check the v_user_session table, it seems to be using SOAP to pull the data and then doing any necessary work for joins or aggregates in the driver code.

We've been trying to troubleshoot some problems where data that's in an instance database doesn't always show up in the view mappings of particular tables (the .do URLs also used for the SOAP interface). I've always thought of ODBC drivers as connecting "directly" to a given database, but in this case the driver connects to the model (database) through the view. I have to say it's a pretty creative approach, I wouldn't have thought of implementing an ODBC driver in that way.

Information Obesity in 1950 and 2012

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:47:00 -0600

Last week, Big Think posted an excerpt of an interview with Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, on information obesity (a term Johnson believes is more apt than information overload). I was reminded of it today when I was flipping through a book I'm about to lend to a friend of mine, Mental Health Through Will-Training originally published in 1950, written by neuropsychiatrist Abraham Low (1891-1954). There's a passage he wrote in 1950 that is probably more relevant today that it ever could have possibily been 62 years ago (reproduced from page 195 below).

... our age is hopelessly addicted to the worship of sheer information. Present-day men and women receive the bulk of their education through the channels of information, especially after they have reached adolescence or adulthood and are eligible for what is called "adult education." Then they are given the doubtful benefit of lectures and forums, book reviews, popular expositions on science and psychology, advice in child rearing and family management, instruction on how to make friends and influence people. The implication is that correct information is the surest way to correct action and that all a person needs for improving habits is to be told how to do it. Training, practice and leadership have been radically, and perhaps joyfully, discarded in this weird scheme of life in which grownup persons are expected to repose childlike faith in the magical power of theoretical knowledge. ... The notion that by some trick information can change action and direct impulses has gripped the imagination of the age. ... In [Low's] old-fashioned scheme, information is merely the preliminary to training and practice, not a substitute for leadership.

I'm sure there are some people who, when presented with new information regarding habitual behavior for them, are able to change quickly if deemed important enough. What Low is saying here, however, is an idea is more likely to be transformative if it can be combined with training, leadership and (though not explicitly stated) fellowship. In the same way that reading too much information that affirms our world view is unhealthy, lethean consumption of information that could be transformative if it was later practiced is tragic.

What is a violation of the CU Boulder Honor Code?

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:50:00 -0600

The CU Boulder honor code was adopted while I was a student here. I honestly felt like I had a pretty good intuitive understanding of what cheating was, so I never really cared much about the details of how it was defined other than the pledge that's posted in all of the classrooms.

"On my honor, as a University of Colorado at Boulder student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance."

I'm auditing a class that requires students pass a quiz on the honor code (otherwise you're dropped from the course). To pass the quiz I read the violations, which all seemed pretty common sense to me until the very last violation listed on the page.

Resubmission: Completing original work for one class and then resubmitting the work to another class without permission from both instructors.

For whatever reason, resubmitting assignments doesn't intuitively seem morally or ethically wrong to me. If anything it seems more efficient (e.g. killing to birds with one stone), and efficiency generally seems morally and ethically good to me. Remembering, that efficiency is always about what you're trying to optimize, and you can optimize somethings at the expense of others. But, in this case, if you've already completed the necessary work for some requirement, it would just be redundant to do again. It would be like re-taking a class you've already completed, or doing your taxes twice. In fact, I'd go as far as saying not resubmitting assignments, in the cases where you can, intuitively seems like an act of supererogation.

But, in the established CU Boulder ethics, it's good to know that not everyone sees it that way. Especially if the people that don't are the kind that have a lot of control over your academic career. So, hopefully this will encourage people like me who usually don't take time to dive in to the details of things like this to have a look.

Spoken Wikipedia Podcast (version 0.1)

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:19:00 -0600

There's an RSS feed of spoken Wikipedia articles (articles that someone has read aloud, recorded, and uploaded to wikipedia) associated with the Spoken Wikipedia Project that's updated manually (and has only been updated once since 2009). I've wanted to create an automated version for a long time, and got pretty close today using Yahoo! Pipes.

You can subscribe to the proxy'd version of the podcast here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpokenWikipediaPodcast

You can view the the pipe here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=d0aa629e370e6719b16454b892b811ab

It currently does not include articles with recorded versions that are split up in to multiple files (e.g. History of the Earth). It's also restricted by the 30 second time limit Yahoo! Pipes imposes on processing data, so it only gets audio files from the most recently updated articles. To remain patent free, Wikipedia uses Ogg Vorbis (as opposed to MP3) for spoken article recordings, so you may run in to some compatibility issues there.

BTW - Marissa Mayer, if you're reading this, please don't allow Yahoo! Pipes to continue to be neglected while you're CEO. It's one of the coolest things Yahoo! ever did, but it needs more tender love and care.

What Hashtags Are People Using?

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:42:00 -0600

When I'm tweeting and I have a few spare characters, I try to throw in a relevant hashtag. But, sometimes it's hard to tell which ones people are watching. If you suffer from a similar kind of OCD, I can tell you I've had pretty good luck with checking for popular ones relevant to topics I'm tweeting on using hashonomy.com, tagwalk.com and tagdef.com.

Pink Elephant Removes PinkVERIFY V2 Toolsets Page (like 5 months ago)

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:51:00 -0600

I had setup page2rss to monitor the pages listing the various PinkVERIFY'd Toolsets in January, and just now noticed that Pink Elephant removed their page listing PinkVERIFY'd V2 Toolsets on March 22, 2012 (from the looks of the page2rss changes). If you want to get some idea of what was on that page, the lastest copy from archive.org is from December of 2010.

Looking at their page, Pink Elephant added new lists for ITIL Software Scheme Toolsets and PinkVERIFY 2011 Toolsets (although it's currently empty).

I created a new pipe that monitors the new Pink Elephant pages.

Sergey 2007 vs. Semantic Web 2012

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 13:19:00 -0600

I watched a lecture Sergey Brin gave to a class, SIMS 141 at UC Berkeley, in 2007. This was probably the lecture that made me love Google. I was very impressed with Sergey, he was funny, equanimous, clever and humble. And, I really liked his answer about the semantic web (16:34).

I think that tagging and semantics are great, as long as the computers are doing the tagging and semantics. Because if people are doing the tagging and semantics for the computers, there's something a little bit inverted about the relationship between man and machine there. I'm a big believer of creating lots of innovative algorithms that can extract this kind of structured knowledge from lots of the text that's out there and created by people all the time. But I'm not a big believer that you're just going to have lots of people who enter the data very carefully so that machines can then process it.

That was 2007, and I still agree with him, but I've also noticed that both schema.org and microformats.org recently celebrated birthdays. I'm also very impressed with the outcomes of the initially heated reception of schema.org, in particular the agreement on using RDFa Lite 1.1. Every site you see with an embedded Facebook like button is using another format, Open Graph Protocal (OGP). There's some interesting analysis from Web Data Commons and Yahoo! Research. The results seem to vary significantly depending on the corpus used.

At the end of the day, I think there is going to be some kind of meeting of humans doing tagging and semantics and machines doing tagging and semantics, depending on the scale and circumstances. Like with my out of work project (and hopefully someday a full-time project), MAPT, it would not be scalable for humans to crawl, extract, and repeart the process to get the information needed. To make it work, it needs a maching learning text extraction approach. But, once you have that data, you would want it tagged somehow. And for sure you would need some amount of human Q&A.

Twitter, Google Plus, Disqus -- Great Success! Facebook, Blosxom -- Fail. :(

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 20:12:00 -0600

When I decided I wanted to write a blog and host it on rintintin, I needed to find something that ran on rintintin's minimalist set of supported software. At the time that meant it had to run on Solaris 9, work with Apache 1.x, Perl 5.6.1 and didn't require a SQL database backend (although BerkleyDB was installed). Blosxom was one of the few ones that fit the bill, but even back then it's development community had gone a little stale. There was also TWiki that at the time could just be ran with perl, rcs, diff and grep. Anything I compiled had to live in my then 20MB of space, althought I was able to get an increase to 200MB later.

TWiki required compiling the GNU versions of serveral of the base tools (the Solaris 9 versions were incompatible) and although I was able to eventually compile SQLite on rintintin, I believe any blogging software I could find that could use it as a backend had other compatibility issues. Later there was also a split in the TWiki community that created FosWiki, and I'm still not sure which side I like or what the difference is in the software. sunfreeware.com is an amazing site with compiled binaries of common software for different Solaris architecures, but I couldn't find a way to extract the binaries from their format without have root access (it looks like the new site, unixpackages.com may have a saner approach to this). That's a long way of saying I eventually just decided to work with Blosxom.

At anyrate, I wanted to add some common features to my blog this week (comments, and buttons to share on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook) and I was partially successful. The way Facebook implemented their like button, however, is a touch disappointing as it's difficult to have multiple like buttons on one page for different items, and to get blosxom to do this would require some substaintial rewriting (I tried several hackish approaches that all failed). Disqus is also a little annoying in that you can only have one active comment section using it per page, so you have to go to the permalink for an article if you want to comment.

There have been some attempts to resurrect Blosxom, for example multi.cc had some discussion of a new version. I believe Ode is also based on Blosxom. Do I want to migrate from Blosxom to Ode? You are part of the mystery.

Green Nuclear Energy Options

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 20:32:00 -0600

Solutions to advert energy and climate crises are:

A. Inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) reactors (e.g. Polywell)
B. Molten salt reactors (MSRs) (e.g. Liquid fluoride thorium reactors [LFTRs])
C. Aneutronic fusion reactors (e.g LPPX)
D. All of the above
E. None of the above

I'm pretty sure E is the wrong answer.

There have been several Google Talks on different kinds on cleaner, safer, greener forms nuclear energy over the last five years. A recent one from Richard Martin on his new book SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future reminded me of another presentation at Google given in 2006 (back when these were on Google Video) that I remembered because of it's excellent use of PowerPoint (none) and because it was about green nuclear energy that sounded promising but that made me wish I remembered more physics and chemistry. It turns out that was about a different kind of green nuclear energy, IEC fusion. Reading a bit about that, you quickly discover the people working on aneutronic fusion. The proposed thorium-based technologies use fission.

If you watch or read any of the sources linked, many people are of the opinion that are current nuclear energy sources are unnecessarily hazardous and inefficient because they're based on the methods used in the development of the early nuclear bombs and that these practicies are now fairly entrenched. This makes it difficult to get funding for research and development in to other options. Not to mention nuclear bombs and accidents at nuclear power plants have shaped public opinion against the option in general, and it will take a kind of marketing campaign to get public support behind that safter, cleaner and greener options.

I don't want the .edu domain to fool you too much here. I'm a computer geek, not a physicist or chemist or nuclear engineer. But I would like to invite anyone reading this to join me in learning more about the re-emerging green nuclear technologies, and to invite others to do the same.

(Unrelated: I added Disqus comments, a tweet button, a Like button, and a +1 button for each article. I''m going to be testing them out, so please remember in this case the additional noise is more than just shameless self-promotion)

Election Prediction Websites and Feeds

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 18:29:00 -0600

In 2004, as the election was approaching, I would check electoral-vote.com (a site aggregating polling dating and predicting the result of the electoral vote in the presidental election) several times a day, this was largely because I didn’t have a good feed reader. Now that I do, just read it's feed. But, it's now just one of many sites that attempt to predict the results of various elections. In addition to it, I also subscribe to fivethirtyeight, electionprojection.com and intrade. Intrade is the most interesting, in some ways, it creates prediction markets which kind of crowdsources the outcome of particular events, like the exact number of electoral college votes won by the Republican and Democratic nominees or things not strictly related to politics, like the opening weekend box office gross of The Dark Knight Rises.

Here's the feed URLs for all four if you want to add them to your feed readers.

FOSS LDAP Virtual Directory Software (update)

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 02:01:00 -0600

After doing a little more research on FOSS Virtual Directories following my previous post on the topic I would feel guilty if I didn't make one addition and one correction. I've also wanted to write about the ascension and probable descension of scripting languages for a long time now, so this is my chance.

ldapjs is a JavaScript LDAP server and client implementation based on the node.js framework. It's new enough that it didn't show up on my radar last time, but is quickly getting it's well deserved Google juice.

Penrose isn't as defunct as I thought it was. Having a closer look, it's suffered from changing hands a lot. Red Hat got it with a company they purchased, Identyx, and the codebase and project material has shifted from being hosted on safehaus.org to github to fedorahosted.org (with mirrors of certain parts on redhat.com and sourceforce). Even though there haven't been updates to the codebase in a longtime, the wiki is still updated and the google group is still active. Red Hat still mentions it in some promotional material.

I feel the same way about Node.js as I do about MMA, I really like it but everytime it comes up I feel like I have to defend it or explain myself. So let me start by saying my feelings about Node.js, and the ascension of scripting languages over the last 10-15 years in general, are similar to Paul Tyma's. Like Paul points out, if you're growing something that's approaching Facebook size or Twitter size, you will likely need more code in strongly-typed compiled languages to keep it healthy at that eminence. If I have a difference with Paul in that regard, it would only be that I'd consider those kinds of situations luxury problems. At the risk of sounding too self-effacing, that's probably because Paul is a better programmer than me, a better entrepreneur than me and a better project manager than me. What I mean by that is when people like him are involved in making something, it's very likely that it will win in a big way, and those efficiencies will almost certainly matter. I'm not there yet, but when I finally write something that makes me rich or famous, and it needs to be more efficient to make me more rich or more famous, I will happily rewrite all of it in C if needs be. The disadvantage of strongly-typed languages, in my experience, is that it takes longer to write and maintain code in them than in one of the en vogue scripting languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl or JavaScript). Win or lose, if you don't win big enough that those efficiencies matter, it's likely just time that you've wasted.

Like Paul alluded to, I'd tend to think that as we move away from "rotational media" to the faster solid state kinds, the disadvantages of scripting languages will become more more pronounced. Then again, a lot of things will have to change along with that. It's still a fairly recent development that file systems are aware of and optimize for solid state media. And, you know, somehow I think when the number of commits in JavaScript surpasses the number of commits in C, it's going to be like when Facebook traffic surpassed MySpace. Like it or not, it's sticking around for awhile.

Search more using scholar.google.com and less using www.google.com

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 19:54:00 -0600

I noticed today that Google Scholar had made some changes recently, according to their blog they went live May 11th, so that's kind of old news. But they added this new feature to see the most cited publications by language and topics in journal titles over the last five years. I was wondering if people still study hypnosis, and apparently they do, a little. That started me reading "Hypnotic Depth and Response to Suggestion Under Standardized Conditions and During fMRI Scanning," because I'm lucky enough to work for a university...

BUT I often argue that even if you don't have access to a university library, you can still get a lot out of Google Scholar just from reading abstracts of scholarly articles (and the ones that you can access full versions of for free). For example, if you know very little about hypnosis, I'm willing to bet you'll find these abstracts pretty informative.

Abstract from "Imaginative suggestibility and hypnotizability: an empirical analysis" in the Journal of personality and social psychology 1999 Sep; 77(3):578-87.

Hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestibility were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, nonhypnotic suggestibility was suppressed when measured after hypnotic suggestibility, whereas hypnotic suggestibility was not affected by the order of assessment. Experiment 2 confirmed a small but significant effect of hypnosis on suggestibility when nonhypnotic suggestibility was measured first. Nonhypnotic suggestibility was correlated with absorption, fantasy proneness, motivation, and response expectancy, but only expectancy predicted suggestibility when the other variables were controlled. Behavioral response to hypnosis was predicted by nonhypnotic suggestibility, motivation, and expectancy in a model accounting for 53% of the variance. Experiential response to hypnotic suggestion was predicted only by nonhypnotic suggestibility. Unexpectedly, hypnosis was found to decrease suggestibility for a substantial minority of participants.

Abstract from "The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena" in PSI Research, Vol 1(3), Sep 1982, 94-116.

Interviews that focused on childhood and adult memories, fantasies, and psychic experiences were conducted with 27 19-63 yr old females rated as excellent and 25 Ss rated as low, medium, and medium-high in hypnotic responsiveness (as determined by the Creative Imagination Scale and the Barber Suggestibility Scale). Findings indicate that with 1 exception, the excellent hypnotic Ss had a profound fantasy life; their fantasies were often as "real as life" (hallucinatory), and their deep involvement in fantasy played an important role in producing their superb hypnotic performance. Data indicate that excellent hypnotic Ss derive largely from a small percentage (possibly 4%) of the normal population who can be labeled as fantasy-prone personalities (fantasizers); this seems to be their most fundamental characteristic, serving as the matrix from which their other talents arise. In addition, the excellent hypnotic Ss reported (1) vivid sensory experiences; (2) vivid memories of their early and more recent life experiences; (3) abilities as "healers"; and (4) numerous telepathic, precognitive, and other psychic experiences. (36 ref)

Abstract from "Suggestibility, intelligence, memory recall and personality: an experimental study" in The British Journal of Psychiatry (1983) 142: 35-37

A new suggestibility test, potentially useful in the context of police interrogation, was administered to 45 subjects who also completed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. Suggestibility was significantly related to low intelligence, poor memory recall, neuroticism and social desirability.

Now, of course, reading the full articles provides some other interesting information, like in this last article it clarifies, "As neuroticism and social desirability were themselves negatively correlated with intelligence and memory, they added only marginally to the variance of the independant variables."

If you were to do regular web searches on topics related to hypnosis, I can assure you the quality, accuracy and usefulness of the information (unless you're looking for a hypnotherapist) will be no where near what you'd get from those three abstracts. Try it if you don't believe me.

How Do I Find and Evaluate FOSS Software? (Virtual Directory Example)

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:12:00 -0600

Recently I've been asked to elaborate on the process I go through looking for, and doing a kind of preliminary evaluation of, FOSS applications, as there's usually more than one FOSS solution for most common problems. The simple answer to this question is "search... and maybe browse, and, then--and only then--ask people or communities I trust if I need more information."

Last week I was interested in learning more about FOSS LDAP servers, with an eye towards ones designed to work as virtual directories or that can be used in that way. The first thing I do is check all of the code repositories where projects like that might be hosted. Thankfully, ohloh.net has most of what matters now (Wikipedia should really integrate with it some how, Wikipedia has thousands of pages for FOSS projects that never really get updated). But sometimes the most important things you find when you search are the things you didn't know you were looking for. So, it can be worth it to check some of the online source code repositories like assembla (you need to use Google, or another search engine with a site search feature, to search it's public projects), bitbucket, codeplex, code.google.com, github, java.net, joinup, launchpad, savannah, sourceforge, tigris.org and transifex.net. Dmoz is not only another site worth searching for specific applications, but also has a list of Open Source Project Hosting sites.

Once you're through with all of those, you should either have about a dozen tabs open, or a lot of sites bookmarked, or otherwise noted. Once I'm at this point, I try to evaluate the health of the FOSS projects and the quality of the software they've produced. I try to stay away from projects that are no longer active, unless I have a burning desire to take them over. Ohloh.net is really useful to tell what projects are defunct or dead because it tracks commits and the number of self-reported users of particular applications. For example, Penrose and MyVirtualDirectory both were both promising, but more or less inactive for several years.

Then I do some other iterations of the popularity game. From the initial searching I was able to tell that OpenLDAP, ApacheDS, 389 Directory, OpenDJ and OpenDS were all pretty legit (although OpenDS has been kind of abandon but I could see there was still some interest). One way to put some numbers to it is with a Google Trend search. The image below shows the search and news trends over the last 12 months, line colors corresponding to the ones above.

Icerocket, a very underrated search engine, has a similar trend feature tracking how often certain terms appear in blogs. Image below is over the last 30 days.

Sometimes it's also interesting to check the Alexa Traffic Rank and/or PageRank of project sites, the former being most useful if there is more or less one specific domain associated with a project (Alexa doesn't get granular enough to track by subdomain or specific pages). Alexa currenly ranks OpenLDAP at 168,117, but this isn't really a useful statistic for the other projects that are hosted on subdomains. There's a lot of sites that look up PageRank checking the five projects mentioned, openldap.org comes in at 7, directory.apache.org at 8, directory.fedoraproject.org at 5, opends.java.net at 5, and opendj.forgerock.org comes in at 4.

You can also search the popular social media sites to see what's getting mentioned. socialmedia.com is probably the best free search engine, in my opinion, of this kind. Although I also like Twingly's microblog search and insight reporting tool. Openbook I've also found useful for a quick search.

Then you can move on to considering some of the more implementation-related details. Will it run on platforms you support/use? What language(s) is it in? Will it work with other stuff you're currently using? How steep is the learning curve? Does it have all the features you need? Depending the answers to questions like these, you may want to consider purchasing software For instance, you can make directory OpenLDAP or ApacheDS behave like a virtual directory. OpenDJ will have virtual directory support at some point. OpenDS currently has virtual directory support, but OpenDS was rolled in to Oracle Unified Directory when Oracle purchased Sun and consequentally development on OpenDS has pretty much stopped. There's other commerical products in addition to Oracle, RadiantOne, OptimalIdm and Quest all have virtual directory products. But if you look on their sales pages it's hard to find a price listed, and that usually means they're really expensive.

A tough decision, but if you did all of this leg work at least you can make it an informed decision. If it was all up to me (it's not in this case), I would either do it in OpenLDAP or OpenDS. The OpenLDAP implementation would have have a steeper learning curve, but OpenLDAP also has a large support community. OpenDS is easier to configure and use, and if you can get about a year out of it, you could probably replace it with OpenDJ (an OpenDS fork that's still catching up a bit). The long-term viability of picking OpenDS then rests of OpenDJ development staying on track and similar enough that the transition would be easy.

Does reading poison the mind?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:23:00 -0700

If you compare the cost of going to the movies, or buying a DVD or Blu-ray, or ordering Cable/Satellite TV, it's all waaaaay cheaper than reading peer-reviewed research (assuming you don't work for a university or similar large institution that can scale/leverage the cost of licensing and subscribing to peer-reviewed journals). The irony is that a large amount of public funding goes to making research the journals publish on possible (through organizations like the NSF), meaning the general public is often paying for it twice--funding researchers to do it and then paying again if they want to reading about what they did.

It's like a regressive tax on material that you'd hope more people would read, whereas unsubsidized entertainment media is much cheaper by any volume comparison. What's the message here?

At anyrate, I was happy to sign this petition that I hope will encourage Elsevier not to make an already bad situation any worse.

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Pink Elephant and ITIL Official Endorsed Tools

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:59:00 -0700

I used page2rss and Yahoo! Pipes to put together an RSS feed monitoring the changes on the pages listing PinkVERIFY'd Toolsets (3.1, 3.0 and V2) as well as the Endorsed Software Tools (Gold, Silver and Bronze) on itil-officialsite.com. There's some noise in it, but it works reasonably well for what I'm using it for.

Since page2rss has been monitoring these lists PinkVERIFY added a process for Summit Platform (Release and Deployment Management) and added new Toolset, Dexon. itil-officialsite.com added Cherwell and USU Valuemation 4.2 to it's list of Bronze Endorsed Software Tools.

You can view the whole pipe or subscribe to it's RSS feed. Feel free to suggest improvements or clone the pipe and make them yourself. :)

Books scanned and recently added to the Internet Archive

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:36:00 -0700

Almost hypnotic.

http://statusboard.archive.org/

Meng Speaking at Naropa (Video)

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:47:00 -0700

A few months ago I wrote about Meng's recent talk at Naropa on Search Inside Yourself (SIY). Naropa has been nice enough to post some excerpts from his talk on their YouTube channel (playlist of all four videos, also embedded below) They're worth watching.

CU Boulder's Photo Database Updated

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:08:00 -0700

I hadn't see anything new in their RSS feed since July 27th, but today the photo database (RSS) just updated (in my feed reader, at least). Check it out, nice pictures.

A list of blog directories and search engines (part 2)

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:52:00 -0700

This is building on the previous list. It includes sites created after 2006 (like Twingly, which is really cool) and a few that I had forgotten to put on the previous list. Again, where possible, the links below will take you to the directly to a submission form and the sites are listed by how valuable I'd say it is to have a blog listed on them.

Twingly - A newcomer, but really a very clever site
Alexa - Is another large search engine, also keeps statistics estimated site traffic.
Yandex - A popular Russian search engine with an English version.
Infotiger
FyberSearch
semager - A German search engine with an Enblish version
blogarama - Requires regisration
NGOID (Next Generation Open Internet Directory News Network)
Feedgy
Search-O-Rama
WASALive
LS Blogs
Acoon
Myahint
super.info
Gnibo
HopHunt

A list of blog directories and search engines

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:50:00 -0700

I'm not sure how many bloggers take advantage of blog-specific search engines and directories, but more of them should. I keep a list of blog directories and search engines that I submit urls/feeds to when starting new blogs. The current version of the list (below) is derived from a list I made in 2006 (with the now defunct sites removed and then further narrowed to free services available in English). Although it was pretty comprehensive in 2006, I don't think I've added to it since then. So the while sites on the list should be well established, it may be missing some newer ones founded in the last few years. Where possible, the links below will take you directly to a submission page. The sites are listed according to how valuable I think it is to have blogs listed on them.

Technorati - You'll need to create an account to submit your site, and then it needs to be approved manually by Technorati staff.
IceRocket
BlogTopSites - Requires registration.
BlogPulse - Easy to submit to, and also a very useful site for monitoring blog trends.
BlogDigger
Plazoo
Syndic8 - You'll need to create an account to submit your site.
Liquida
BlogFlux - You'll need to create an account to submit your site.
GlobeOfBlogs.com - Difficult registration process required for submitting your site.
feedmap.net - This allows is a geographic searching tool (e.g. can find bloggers physically near you)
Blogs Rater - Promotes your blog when you rate other blogs.
RubHub - RubHub is based on XFN relationships, you'll need to add XFN code to your blog in order to use this.
Flookie - Described as a family-friendly blog directory.
BlogShares - Blogshares is a blog directory that functions (in ways I don't completely understand) like a stock market.
GeoURL - This is like feedmap, but requires adding some peculiar meta tags to your blogs HTML.
A2B - Another service similar to feedmap and geourl.
podblaze - If your blog includes a podcast, you can submit here in addition to iTunes.
PimpMyBlog.com - A lot of broken images, but apparently still functional.

Of course, don't forgot Google and Bing. :)

Open Air 1340 AM Denver (KVOQ)

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:58:00 -0600

I probably listen to more Denver/Boulder AM radio than most other people. I drive an old Saturn. One of the first things that broke was the radio, but not completely. The AM on it still works, but with FM is permanently stuck on one frequency (static). I was initially disappointed when I heard 1340 AM, which used to rebroadcast Colorado Public Radio's FM news station (KCFR).

I was much more optimistic when I heard that 1340 AM would become a new CPR station, Open Air, that as Westword put it will "fit between KBCO's relaxed mix of contemporary artists and rock staples and the vibrant take on new sounds served up by Radio 1190" and learned Radio 1190's now former General Manager, Mike Flanagan, would be running it.

I love Radio 1190 (I just bought 60 Watts in the latest pledge drive), and I'm happy to see it replicate itself to some degree. It will be difficult for a public radio station match the passion that a group of largely volunteer music-loving college students brings to Radio 1190. But, Open Air will probably bring other things to the table and will be aiming at a slight older demographic, "like college radio but it's graduate school" as Mike put it.

For example, KVOQ (the call letters used for 1340 AM in Denver) has an IBOC (digital radio) license (according to the FCC's database and iBiquity). I'll admit, the current digital radio implementation leaves much to be desired, but I'd say any station that already has the license and gear should go ahead and use it. I know whenever I told friends about Radio 1190, they often said that they wouldn't listen to it in their cars because of the AM audio quality.

It looks like they're planning to host their website at openair1340.org or openaircpr.org or openairradio.org. openaircpr.org is currently the only one that takes you to an active site, although I like openair1340.org more. But, I guess it's their decision. :)

N. B. You wouldn't want to confuse this with the Open Mic events formerly know as Open Air Denver and their page at openairdenver.com or the outdoor cinema Denver OpenAir.

ITIL V3 Foundation Certificate- (PBT) Results

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:58:00 -0600

Dear Craig Talbert,

CSME hereby certifies that you have participated in the examination:

Examination: ITIL V3 Foundation Certificate- (PBT) 
Student Name: Craig Talbert 
Student Number: 43252003274489856000 
Result: PASS

Overall Score: 36.0/40 (90.00%)

Topic Level Scoring:
ITSM Overview: 100.00%
ITIL/Lifecylce Overview: 100.00%
Terms: 85.71%
Key Principles: 75.00%
Processes: 88.88%
Functions: 100.00%
Key Roles: 100.00%
Technology & Architecture : 100.00%

Congratulations on successfully completing your ITIL certification.  

...

Sincerely,

CSME

Special thanks to Roc Paez and IT Skeptic

I'd like to take a minute to recognize wkhtmltopdf

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:53:00 -0600

I'd just want to say wkhtmltopdf is excellent at converting HTML pages to PDF using WebKit, wkhtmltopdf makes it easy to generate PDFs from multiple HTML documents, wkhtmltopdf integrates easily with other tools to smoothly automate generation of PDFs and to email them, wkhtmltopdf takes me on a joyride, wkhtmltopdf keeps me off of drugs and gets me up every morning to go to the gym (YMMV). So, like I say, wkhtmltopdf pays off.

A semi-automated ranking of ITSM and help desk issue-tracking vendors/applications by popularity

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:45:00 -0600

My first contribution to Google Fusion Tables is an attempt to identify popular, and hopefully by extension useful, ITSM and help desk issue-tracking applications. So, it's appropriately named, ITSM and Help Desk Applications (Listing and Ranking).

I created it first by crawling for unique URLs on all of the sites (that I know of) that list these kinds of applications (helpdeskreport.com, pinkelephant.com, helpdesks.com, helpdesk.com, helpdesklist.com, philverghis.com, dmoz.org and web-based-software.com). I then ran them through a link checker looking for pages that were defunct, repurposed, redirected or merged (this is the "semi" of the automated part), then queried the PageRank, the Alexa Traffic Rank, and the location of their web server based using the ip2location database. By my count this makes 323 unique vendors/applications (some vendors have more than one application in this domain).

The Fusion Table is sorted primarily by PageRank (a good metric, but not particularly granular as it's on a scale of 1-10 - the higher the better) and then by Alexa Traffic Rank (not as good of a metric, but much more granular - the lower the better). It also contains the country and in most cases the city and region (e.g. state) the IP of their web server is associated with.

PageRank ranks individual pages on the web whereas Alexa measures traffic going to a particular domain. As such, for vendors that do more than ITSM and help desk software (e.g. HP, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, etc) I used the PageRank of the page on their site for their ITSM and/or help desk product(s). In such cases, their PageRank will be reasonable but their Alexa Traffic Rank will be heavily skewed in comparison (this is because, for example, only a fraction of the traffic to Oracle's domain represents interest in their ITSM products). In this context, however, this it is a not-perfect-but-useful metric to help discriminate among vendors/applications with sites that have the same PageRank.

I know PageRank can vary based on the datacenter queried, and Alexa has a sampling bias, and the location of a company's web server does not necessarily mean they are headquartered nearby. Remember, perfect is the enemy of the good. And, you know, Voltaire said that.

Equally as interesting as the ranking is the (approximate) geographical distribution of ITSM and help desk application vendors.

(View Full Screen)

Lesser-Known Internet Archive Web Crawler Data

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:14:00 -0600

I stumbled across a repository on the Internet Archive that I hadn't seen publicized before, it's "raw" data from web crawls that don't look like they're necessarily in the Wayback Machine. Some of what's there is public, and interesting, like the Archive Team crawls.

The Archive-It project is also got my attention. I wonder why CU Boulder isn't on this list? I think I'd be for someone hosting a lot of our public data for free.

link and guid tag URL bug fix

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:44:00 -0600

If you subscribe to this blog in a reader, you may have noticed (like I have) that each time I update it would mark all of the posts as new. I discovered this is because of a recursive percent-encoding bug. For each item in the feed it would re-encode the percent sign used in the code for the tilde character in the URL. So, %7E in the first item would become %257E in the second, and %25257E in the third (%25 is the percent code for the percent character), and on and on and on. Needless to say URLs containing these codes were not only invalid (except for in the first item, the only one you'd test after posting a message) but as it was used in the RSS feed link and guid tags most of the feed readers and crawlers probably got confused, or just marked me as a spammer (which I'm guessing is more likely).

Chade-Meng Tan at Naropa 2011

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:55:00 -0600

I was fortunate enough to see Chade-Meng Tan (Meng for short) speak at Naropa today (technically yesterday). That's a blurry photo of him below showing us some cartoons.

He was speaking about a course he developed at Google, Search Inside Yourself (SIY). SIY is designed to (as I understand it) to make employees more successful and happy, make businesses more profitable, and as a side-effect also promote world peace. It's based on existing concepts from Emotional Intelligence, meditation and mindfulness training.

I'm really very impressed with what Meng has put together, I believe it has amazing potential, and I'm sure in the vast majority of cases it will help all those involved. I am a touch worried, however, that there may be a small minority of people who are, for example, scatterbrained burglars who would use mindfulness training just to become more surreptitious burglars. Out of curiosity I Googled (irony noted) a bit on the topic after the course, and there is at least one study (full PDF) showing that, similarly, people with otherwise high Emotional Intelligence may not always use it for the greater good.

In anupubbi-katha (gradual instruction) sila (virtue/moral conduct) is taught before mindfulness and meditation, and I've heard before it's partially to guard against people misuing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. I wanted to ask Meng about this in relation to SIY when he was here, because I'm sure he's thought about it, but I couldn't think of a way to do it without sounding unduly contentious... and, you know, everyone was having a good time, I didn't want to be a buzzkill, and overall I really like what he's doing.

If Meng egosurfs maybe he'll find this and if there is anything worth shoring up along these lines this might be a helpful reminder. :)

Ordered a System76 Starling Netbook

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:14:00 -0600

Work took away the netbook they gave me :(. Well, they actually gave me a laptop to replace it, but I do miss the convenience of a netbook, and my personal laptop is almost dead. I've liked what System76 is doing for a long time (making laptop/desktop Linux a reality), and they're a Denver company, and I met one of the guys who works there at a Wikipedia 10 ~~party~~ function in a library and he seemed like a nice guy. So, if I was going to spend money I figured I might as well spend it on their products, even if they are a little more than what I'd pay if I bought comparable Dell. This is actually the first new computer I've ever purchased for myself, all the other ones I got second-hand one way or another.

Reading some reviews the only criticism I heard repeated about System76 net/notebooks was the battery life, so I upgraded to the six cell battery and opted for an SSD rather than one of those magnetic plate spinning things, which always seemed problematic to me (as easy as they make it look).

You'll also find that Googling the animal name sakes of the System76 machines is a learning joyride. Pangolins, for example, are fascinating.

I might have gotten a Chromebook if it had official VPN and RDP applications for the OS. There are some apps for both, but they seemed a little convoluted. Their 3G plans also seemed a little ridiclous.

Why RSS isn't that cool anymore

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:54:00 -0600

Several weeks ago I started using Firefox 4, and discovered that the RSS button I had used for so long (the icon with the orange background and what looks like a dot in the center with two white concetric circles if only viewed from 0 to 90 degrees) was removed from the toolbar in the default setup.

Apparently this change was controversal, and was the result of heatmap testing done by Mozilla over a year ago. Alexander Limi of the group working on the UI wrote: "It's one of the lowest-used buttons in our entire UI, even among our power users (beta users that supply the test pilot data), with only 3% of users *ever* clicking it even once during the test period."

RSS was very cool around 2003, and back then I envisioned it largely replacing email. Mostly because I could see its utility being on so many email lists and would get so many memo-like emails. The problem with email is that messages are "pushed" to you, you may be interested in some of them some of the time, but not many of them all of the time. Email filtering is only effective if there is information to filter on and it doesn't change. That assumes of course, the messages weren't blocked or tagged as spam somewhere in the process.

RSS is a "pull" service, you can view updates as you want to read them and there's no need to put them through a spam filter, you can just stop reading the feed if you want to. Not to mention, as a publisher, you generally can't unsend an email, but you can remove an update from your RSS feed (for whatever it's worth).

When you think about it, those are fundamental parts of what make Twitter, Facebook, and now Google+ so popular. They're a little like RSS feeds with social filters. That's probably why only dinosaurs like me used the RSS button in the old version of Firefox. If I recall correctly, it was also a feature that MySpace was slow to implement.

Anymore, you're probably better off using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc to notify a group of people of a something they might want to know about rather than RSS (or at least as auxilliares to it). More people use those social media sites, I'm sure, than there are people who know about RSS. Of course, RSS is still useful "behind the scenes" and especially if you're in a position where you can't use social media. I'd still say that leaves RSS somewhere inbetween an anachronism and "not cool."

Google+

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:08:00 -0600

Google+? Yeah, I'm on it. I owe it all to a fellow black and white blogging aficionado.

New OIT Website and CU Boulder Youtube Channels

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:20:00 -0600

OIT (formerly ITS) just launched their new website (oit.colorado.edu), very cool. I noticed last night they posted a video on Youtube highlighting the features of the new site.

http://youtu.be/iRgFWOa5_0w

While we're talking about CU Boulder and Youtube, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the official channel for the University of Colorado Boulder as well as for the CU Digital Media Test Kitchen. I'm sure there's more official CU Boulder channels, but those the ones I've come across working here.

Webpages ran by the OIT Labs group you probably don't know about

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:52:00 -0600

Doing tech support for OIT (formerly ITS) as long as I have, I've seen parts of its webpages that usually don't see the light of day. If I could remember them all of the top of my head, I would just post them in one entry. But I was reminded of two used by the Labs group that most people don't know about, but for a handful of people they could be very useful.

Most people know, or I'm guessing could find, the software search page. It's very useful if you want to see what labs have what software. But say, for instance, you want to see what software is in a particular lab? If you modify the GET request in the URL by changing the "labname" value to *, you can do just that.

http://webdata.colorado.edu/labs/map/labinfo.php?labname=*

Voilà! More than I'm sure you've ever wanted (or cared) to know about software in OIT Labs, and with a CTRL+F (or a Command-F for people with a sweeter machine) you can search it until your heart is content.

Say you wanted to add to that list? The Labs group has a page for that too, conveniently known as the ITS Lab Software Requests page. I've never gotten the Staff Login to work on it, despite being staff. It does, however, seem completely willing to make me a Lab Liaison by simply entering my name.

Catch Wrestling Books

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:42:00 -0600

Most people who are interested in Catch Wrestling have probably read, or at least know of, Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture by Martin "Farmer" Burns. When I had a look, I was surprised to find that there are several more old-timey books on Catch Wrestling that (as far as I can tell) have barely seen the light of day.

With some inspiration from the DIY Book Scanning forum, some very useful software (Scan Tailor), and despite the Sonny Bono Act, I was able to get two books on Catch scanned and up on the Internet Archive. I also found some decent ones already on Google Books. These are worth checking out:

A Hand-book of Wrestling by Hugh F. Leonard, the Instructor in Wrestling at the New York Athletic Club (1897)
Amateur Wrestling by Professor Edward Clark Gallagher of Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanical College (1925)
Professional Wrestling by Ed Wallace Smith, Sporting Editor of the Chicago American and wrestling Referee (1912)
Wrestling by Walter Armstrong (1890)

I also would have liked to get a hold of Wrestling in The Catch-hold and Graeco-Roman Styles and Wrestling, Catch-as-catch-can Style, but the librarians tell me all editions of both are non-circulating.

Jack Shannon's new book also looks very promising, but it will be at least 75 years before it's in the public domain.

Telephony Intelligence Data Services

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 17:19:00 -0600

Telephony Intelligence Data Services owns tnid.us and also tirs.us. In terms of accuracy and scope, the database they're using to do CNAM lookups is the best I've seen freely availbable on the Internet. This is me. I bet your cell phone number is in there too. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time trying to find sites that do CNAM lookups, so maybe tnid is more par for the course than I realize. At anyrate it does look like like tnid.us is starting to get noticed.

Web Services

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:19:00 -0600

Having had the opportunity to use some of the existing technology (which shall remain nameless) developed around web services over the last year, I've noticed that most of it only supports a subset of what's in the WSDL 1.1 specification (published almost exactly 9 years ago) and even less supports WSDL 2.0 (published in 2007). In 2005 the large companies providing public UDDI registries discontinued them. The best alternative (that I know of) of something UDDI-like, seekda's web service search engine, seems to be inactive since 2009. It's not surprising to me that it's hiatus correlates with the SOA obituary written by Anne Thomas Manes earlier that same year.

I more or less agree with her conclusion, but not exactly the cause. Of course, the economy impacts the development of technology at all levels. What's missing from the analysis is the impact event of XMLHttpRequest in 2005. XMLHttpRequest does something very similar to web services but with much less overhead and formalism. It's true that the two technologies are not mutually exclusive, but one is focused on accomplishing a specific goal and the other requires a "redesign of [an organization's] application portfolio" as Anne puts it. That kind of work takes time, and if it does pay off, it happens much further down the line. XMLHttpRequest fits much more with the iterative model that has worked well for web applications. That's why truly disruptive and successful companies like Facebook move fast and break things, rather than spending inordinate amounts of time mulling over their application portfotlio.

mod_rewrite

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:34:00 -0600

It took me a long time, but I finally worked out the mod_rewrite rules to direct URLs appropriately so I can run blosxom on my rintintin account. They more or less looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~talbert/
#Paths I don't want blosxom to handle 
RewriteRule ^/forms/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/sw/ - [L]
#Paths I do want blosxom to handle
RewriteRule ^$ blosxom.cgi [L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)(.*)$ blosxom.cgi/$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Z]+)(.*)$ blosxom.cgi/$1$2 [L]
#If its not a file or a directory, it's also a bloxsom URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a|c-z])(.*)$ blosxom.cgi/$1$2 [L]

You may be wondering why I left 'b' out of the last regular expression, and why the [0-9] amnd [A-Z] ones are split up the way they are. For a reason unknown to me, trying to condense these in to one expression, or one expression that includes the lowercase 'b' results in Apache producing a 500 Internal Server Error (on rintintin, at least). You are part of the mystery.