Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2005

Bookmarkletting Resource

I am begining to be a fan of bookmarklets , the JavaScript codes that can be embedded in web browser bookmarks. I use a bookmarklet almost everytime I post to this blog and when I add an entry to my del.icio.us portfolio. I am right now interested in creating bookmarklets for my personal uses and here are some useful links that I got from a preliminary search: jalarie: BookMarklet Editor HTML URL-encoding Reference | W3 Schools More useful resources on bookmarkletting will be populated in my del.icio.us portfolio here . Keywords: javascripts , bookmarklets , programming

Miscellaneous: Audiometer, Digital Signal Processing, and Hearing Aids

A relative of mine has a hearing problem and today we and her mom went to see an audiologist for a free hearing check. The process began by the audiologist interviewing her about personal background, e.g. when the hearing problem started, whether she has ever had any accident, etc. We then proceed to the audiometer lab where she was asked to stay in an acoustically isolated sound booth for an audio responsiveness test. My relative was asked to put on a headphone and the audiologist used an audiology workstation (a Pentium personal computer with hardware interfaces to audiology instrumentations, such as the audiometer ). The workstation was used to generate the sounds of various frequencies and various loudnesses separatedly for the left ear and the right ear. I remember the frequency range was logarithmically spaced from 250 Hz to 15,000 Hz, in various increments. For each frequency point, the audiologist started with a typical loudness, such as 60 dB, and increased/decreased the loudn

Captcha -- The Word Verification Technique

Browsing through an article on PlanetRDF.com made me learn a new geek word. I just know that there is also a proper word for the "word verification" techniques to prevent automated operation of Web software by computer codes (see image below). As pointed by the Planet RDF article, according to Wikipedia , this proper word is "captcha", an acronym for " c ompletely a utomated p ublic t uring test to tell c omputers and h umans a part." Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human, a common type of which requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Keywords: languages

Reuters News: Did you say dogging or blogging?

This is interesting and worth considering: Reuters News quoted by Planet RDF : Reuters, London: Proponents of the latest Web trends were warned on Tuesday that the rest of the world may not have a clue what they are talking about... When I asked the panel whether people were talking about blogging, they thought I meant dogging. A blog, short for Web log, is an online journal, while podcasting is a method of publishing audio programs over the Internet -- a name derived from combining iPod, Apple's popular digital music player, with broadcasting, even though portable devices are not necessary to listen to a podcast. Keywords: news , languages

Personal Portfolio of Web Metadata

Today's Research Question How do we extract metadata (RSS, FOAF, RDF) from webpages and web objects (such as PDF files, JPEG images, PowerPoint slides) and store them somewhere to build a personal portfolio some part of which could be shared to the others by means of the social web? This could enhance personal knowledge management experience and, from the social effect, could also expand individuals' knowledge by sharing parts of their portfolios with the group of people having the same interests. There are a number of interesting projects that could somehow be integrated and developed to achieve this. To me, given the popularity and content-richness of del.icio.us and the innovative browser integration of Piggy Bank , these projects are currently two outstanding candidates. Keywords: social-effect , semantic-web , social-web , metadata

A Thought on a Reasoner-enabled Version of Del.icio.us (and perhaps Technorati)

I have been adding more bookmarks to my del.icio.us account and have begun tagging them with RDF-like object/datatype properties. Adding more and more object/datatype properties to the bookmark, a provoking thought popped up: It would be nice if tagging can be assisted by ontologies and a logic reasoner. Look at del.icio.us/thitiv . The _hasAffilication:CUPhoto property should be a subproperty of _hasAffiliation:Chula (provided that CUPhoto stands for Chula Photo Club .) Also, aticles on 'tagging' are subclass of articles on 'metadata'. But articles on 'metadata' are not essentially the articles on 'tagging'. 'Friends' versus 'people' is also another example. Bookmarks about my friends are of course bookmarks about people. But not all the people I know or found on the Internet (through search engines) are my friends. Ontology-assisted tagging sounds promising to solve this problem. In principle, this problem is partly related to

Metadata-rich Bookmarking with MIT's Piggy Bank

Piggy Bank Semantic Bank I found an interesting project by MIT which builds a Mozilla Firefox browser plugin called Piggy Bank that allows us to extract RDF metadata from a web page or to easily create one on our own if a web page doesn't provide so. Piggy Bank allows us to manage our bookmarks based on their RDF metadata. Users can also share their RDF-enriched bookmarks with their friends and colleagues through a central server called the Semantic Bank . Keywords: semantic-web , web-browsers , firefox , metadata

Parallel/Cluster Computing Element-Free Galerkin Method Papers

My master thesis was about parallel computing + meshless finite-element analysis on a Beowulf-type Linux cluster. I have uploaded a paper I presented at the 8 th. East Asia-Pacific Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction (EASEC-8) conference in Singapore in December 2001 and a copy of my master thesis to the school web server. I think they would be useful for those interested in these reseach areas. Keywords: parallel-computing , cluster-computing , mpi , beowulf , linux , meshless , finite-element-analysis , structural-engineering , computational-mechanics , thesis , phd

Web 2.0 = Tim Berners Lee's Semantic Web meets social software

Web 2.0: The new buzzword in Internet technology | Kairosnews This article from Kairosnews gives a concise definition to Web 2.0 "Tim Berners Lee's Semantic Web meets social software." A link to the article Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software on social software is also provided at the Kairosnews blog. On my first glance, the article seems interesting and I have put it on my must-read list. Keywords: semantic-web , social-software , social-web

Technorati, Blog Tagging, and Del.icio.us

Paolo Massa Blog: AAAI05: terrific talk by Marty Tenenbaum I did a blog search on the "semantic-web" late last night to get to know someone blogging on this research area. This posting by Paolo Massa popped up from the crowd and a look at it introduced me a new buzz-word "Web 2.0", which from my preliminary understanding has something to do with the social web I am fascinated by. I also noticed the Technorati logo at the bottom of his blog page and so many categories and tags in his blog items. Being awed by del.icio.us and wondering what is the connection between Technorati and taggings, whether it would be the blogging version of del.icio.us, this morning I began researching on this and, bravo, I finally found the blogging version of the fascinating del.icio.us. The results? Now you can see Technorati tags in all of my postings...waiting for the Technorati bot to come and pick them up. Keywords: semantic-web , blogging Update: Oct 4, 05: I have changed the Tech

Application of XML Web Services in Scientific Computing

During a visit to my school web space, I found my report on the application of Web Service technology ( SOAP + WSDL + UDDI ) in scientific computing I wrote for my XML Technology class back in 2003. The report is about an application of Web Services (WS) in matrix computations and might be useful for those interested in the application of WS in scientific computing. A PDF version of the report can be downloaded from here . Keywords: web-services , scientific-computing

Good old memory reminded by Google

To test some idea, I tried a Google Image search with my first name as a keyword this morning and all of a sudden a picture of the fresh-graduate me popped up. Google reminded me of the very first home page I've ever created on the net. It was back in 1999 when I was a graduate student in structural engineering taking classes for a master degree. The site was hosted by Tripod.com which is among the very first to offer free web hosting. Although abandoned for many years, this very first home page reminds me of the good old days. This early version of my background and description of my personal interests can be found here , and my very first resume (or C.V.) is hosted here . One of my favorite picture as an undergradute student at Chulalongkorn University is mirrored from the Tripod site and put on Flickr here . Keywords: google , friends , student-life , photography

This is del.icio.us !!!

I found a number of blogs that mention about del.icio.us during the past few days researching on the semantic blog. I just have a chance to try it out to day and it's really cool. Del.icio.us is really useful in terms of organizing the huge amount of bookmarks my Mozilla Firefox browser based on keywords (plain-text keywords, but of course could again be linked to ontologies and semantical descriptions), saving them from being accidentally deleted, being able to access personal bookmarks from virtually any computer connected to the Internet, and also sharing the bookmarks with someone who happens to share the same interests as myself! Keywords: tagging

Silicon Chips versus Potato Chips

After reading some more articles on the Semantic Blog, I visited the HP Semantic Blog demonstrator today and found an interesting entry by Steve Cayzer. Quoted: "The difference between silicon chips and potato chips. How would you do this on google?" It's fun and interesting to see a photographic equivalent of this question on Flickr. As pointed out by Mr. Cayzer, see here for a sampler of pictures tagged with keyword "chip." Keywords: semantic-web , ontology

Semantic Publishing of Desktop Data

I came across an article on semantic publishing of desktop data by Knud H. Moller et al on Monday. This article present an interesting idea of augmenting RDF metadata to objects on individual desktop computer by means of blogs. The prototype was implemented specifically for Mac OS X to provide metadata for Personal Information Management (PIM) entries. I feel that the authors are trying to mimic Tim Berners-Lee et al.'s vision in the famous Semantic Web article in Scientific American magazine. The article discuss a lot about how to create and publish these metadata. Anyway, as soon as I finished reading this article many questions arose: How will these metadata be queried? How may these metadata on desktop objects be published across the Internet/Intranet? Will the metadata be referred to URIs? What could the strategy to map these URIs to PIM entries on the desktop software? Keywords: semantic-web

Newcomer to the Blogosphere

I'm a Ph.D. researcher in the application of the Semantic Web and Web Services in structural engineering. I've heard about blogs. I've been visitors to many blogs. But I've never owned one myself. I recently found an article from HP Lab in Briston, U.K. HP Lab in Briston, U.K. which mentions about "Semantic Web + Blogging" in knowledge management and became more interested in blogging. This blog will be my first hand-on experience into the Blogosphere. Keywords: blogging