Month: July 2012

WP Help – build a help system into your WordPress project

Mark Jaquith has updated his WP Help plugin to version 1.0. This is very handy for those people who build WordPress-based projects for other people to use. Anything from your mother’s blog to a super-duper custom WordPress application could a few pages of help, explaining how to do things. And that’s just what this plugin helps you build.

One of the best features for those who build a lot of similar systems and give them away is the synchronization of help documents. Here is how Mark describes it:

If you have a standard set of help documents you want to use on multiple sites, this lets you do that. Create the documents, grab the (secret) sync URL for that site, and then plug that URL in to other sites. Those other sites will automatically pull down those documents, and keep them up-to-date (even handling new documents, deleted documents, renamed documents, and re-parented documents). Any internal links in the original document will be rewritten to be local to the destination WP Help install. So go ahead and use the WP internal linking functionality on your source site and know that those links will work on all the destination sites!

boilerpipe – Boilerplate Removal and Fulltext Extraction from HTML pages

The boilerpipe library provides algorithms to detect and remove the surplus “clutter” (boilerplate, templates) around the main textual content of a web page.

The library already provides specific strategies for common tasks (for example: news article extraction) and may also be easily extended for individual problem settings.

Extracting content is very fast (milliseconds), just needs the input document (no global or site-level information required) and is usually quite accurate.

My Galaxy Nexus now runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. …

My Galaxy Nexus now runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. All had to do was go to Settings, About phone, Updates. The update was there. It was automatically downloaded and installed. No problem what so ever. The phone does seem to work faster afterwords. The new Google Now service looks interesting, but I need to use it more to see if it actually works for Cyprus. If you are interested in features and reviews, have a look this Engadget post.

When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide: ‘People Staring at Computers’

This is a rather lengthy story, but it touches on many different topics – art, privacy, Apple, law, government, and more. And even though it is long, it is very well written and is absolutely worth the time.

Later that year I worked with interactive artist Theo Watson on an extension of “Important Things,” called “Happy Things,” which took a screenshot every time you smiled, and uploaded it to the web. We got pictures from all around the world, with people smiling at everything, from cat memes to the Wikipedia article for Nicholas Cage.

Sometimes this kind of work is associated with “human-computer interaction,” but this term makes it sound like we’re interacting with computers, when in fact, most of the time, we’re interacting with each other. I like to think of it as “computer-mediated interaction.”

In mid-May, 2011, I took a timelapse using my laptop’s webcam to get a feeling for how I looked at the computer. After a few days of recording, I watched the video.

I was completely stunned.

There was no expression on my face. Even though I spend most of my day talking to and collaborating with other people online, from my face you can see no trace of this.

Valve launches the Linux blog

Valve, a well-known game development company, has launched the Linux blog. Apparently, there are quite a few efforts taken to port games to Linux.

The Valve Linux Team

Our mission is to strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers.

Initially formed in 2011, the Valve Linux team is currently 11 people and growing. Our mission is to investigate open source development with a specific focus on supporting Steam and other Valve products on the Linux platform. The Linux background of our team varies from those who have a deep knowledge of Linux development to those who have just scratched the surface. However, one thing we all share is a great passion for supporting all things Valve on Linux.

While I’m happy to see more Linux activity and interest in Open Source, I have to say that I am a bit puzzled with the timing here. The two trends that I see are:

The move from desktop gaming to the console gaming.
The move from desktop computing (desktops, laptops) to mobile computing (netbooks, tablets, smartphones).

Valve probably sees these differently. Maybe Linux advanced far enough on the desktop to stir this interest. Or maybe they are betting on the rise of Liux-based gaming consoles. I don’t know.

Regardless, I hope they will continue their work in this area, and I really hope that it will result in improvements to Open Source software. After all, we could use some expertise from people who clearly know what they are doing.