Year: 2012

First Cyprus hackaton

The guys from The Cypriot Enterprise Link are organizing the first ever hackaton in Cyprus. In case you don’t know what a hackaton is:

hackathon, noun : An event where engineers, designers & ideators come together to intensively and collaboratively build awesome things over a short amount of time.

Neither the venue, nor the exact date and time are announced, but it’s going to take place some time in September. But if you are a programmer, designer, and/or entrepreneur, you should probably follow the news on this one and attend. Even if you don’t want to do anything with coding right now, an event like this will probably be brilliant for networking.

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.