Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Monday, October 27, 2003
OCLC Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google - if I understand this correctly, it is pretty significant. Firstly, WorldCat is a really,
really big list of books with metadata. See
Tim Bray's comments on WorldCat for a great introduction. Anyhow, beginning sometime November, Google queries should return WorldCat results. I presume they won't be treated as regular webpages. Probably only some queries will trigger WorldCat results. The WorldCat results will link to a page which will tell you the closest library that contains the book. Very nice. Via
Internet News.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Thursday, October 23, 2003
A first for me. Saw someone today wearing a
Blogger T-shirt. He'd got it for free since he'd been paying for Blogger Pro. With the low percentage of bloggers around, it felt good seeing the sign "I am a blogger."
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Monday, October 20, 2003
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Curbside recycling--A Closer Look at Plastics - I was looking at the bottom of my water bottle, and saw the ♹ symbol.
added: apparently this Unicode code-point is unsupported. ah well, just follow the link to see what I mean. I wanted to see which plastic this was, so I found the page I linked above. #7 is "other", so I still don't know, nor feel like investigating further. I think it's lexand, anyway.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Puzzlepieces - yes, I'm linking to my own blog. Someone from a UW address just found my blog by searching for "michael fagan blog." If that was you, leave me a comment or tell me in person :-)
What's wrong with university course websites? Quite a few things, most of which I observed before starting university.
- poorly designed in general (they're professors, not webmasters)
- bad navigation
- bad usability
- bad URLs
- often pages are password protected needlessly
- most documents are in ugly Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and PDF file formats
- isolated: few courses that I am taking are within the same portal; most websites are completely different, done by different people
- one way: few have caught onto any kind of social software other than e-mail
- forum, comment-enabled blog, wiki, anything!
- I've sent only one e-mail suggesting an RSS feed for one of my class's announcements, which are already in a database. No reply.
My principal suggestion: all universities should have at least a few people
just to run the course websites (which really should be integrated with the university website in general), the system should include an easy means for non-techincal professors to edit their websites, and that they should all be trained in how to do so. The other issues I think are important too, but this would solve the bigger problems.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Maybe I should have blogged this yesterday. Last night me and my roomate (who's from mainland China, lived in Canada for a year and a half now) watched the launch of China's first man in space. We saw it both on
CBC in English, and on
CCTV (government run), in Mandarin. The CBC had better footage.
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
University of Waterloo - I live about two hours from my home, yet it seems like a different climate zone. Rained
again today. Umbrella not completely broken yet.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Youth & Drugs: Society's Mixed Messages
- this book, I believe, contains the paper
Stories that hurt: Tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs in the mass media, which includes the fact I read in my psychology textbook that was the original intention of this post. Paraphrased:
alcohol accounts for 1/6 or less of drinks in the real world, but more than most other drinking combined on TV.
Monday, October 06, 2003
ABCNEWS.com : A Tiny Video Camera That Never Forgets -
(note: I posted this days ago, but to the wrong blog) a recording device that is always simultaneously recording and erasing, that stores the past X time when recorded, was
my idea. Via
Linkfilter. Observe that I am blogging
more when I have more work I should be doing...
Sunday, October 05, 2003
Marc's Voice - have I mentioned that Marc rules? I rarely blog any of his posts because almost every single one is fantastic. In his language, I would say that he just groks it. Everything.
Friday, October 03, 2003
Thursday, October 02, 2003
Family Source Advanced Search - I saw this new search engine via
About Web Search, and took a quick look for possible addition to my
Kids page. Why must every search engine copy Google's advanced search so exactly? Also I'll have to send an email to
Gary mentioning that there's a new search engine that caches documents (unfortunately by internal ID rather than URL). It's nice to see that they also include the date of last crawl; however site clustering would be useful too.
I would also like to see a definition of "family friendly." Try searching for various obscene terms to see what
is included in thier index.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
A Year in Cornwall: How To Make Photos More Searchable - I haven't been blogging (to my sideblog on the lower right, unless you're reading this via RSS) the comments I make on other blogs in a while. Not that I consider my comments to be less important, I just can't be bothered. I know applications will do this for me automatically eventually. Anyhow, this link goes to my most recent comment, via
Scripting News.
Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die - a very well written article, almost all of which I agreed with. I was surprised to see prisons on there; I also agree that they deserve to die, but for more reasons than are mentioned in the article. Maybe later I'll think up some of my own technologies I'd like to get rid of. Via
Blogdex.
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