Daily Bytes

Audblog & Captioning

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but pure audio blogging discriminates against deaf people. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great idea; hearing the sound of someone’s voice is a great way to make a more personal connection. (Only a dozen of my 4,000 daily readers know what I sound like in person.) But any audio content needs to be supplemented with a simultaneous text transcript.

It's not only the deaf people that make me think audio blogs (like Audblog) won't work without some kind of text support:

• You can't search the web for an audio post
• You can't translate entries using the fish
• No RSS feeds
• Now way of skimming through a site looking for usefull things, you have to ear it all.
• Bad sound quality makes it hard to understand
• ...

Posting by SMS or using some kind of speech-to-text technology, now that would be cool.

We don't get much snow where I live, in fact the last time it really snowed in Porto I was 10 years old and that was a long time ago. Even stranger is the fact that this event didn't happen in the peak of the winter, its not that cold and it only lasted a few minutes. So this is what it looked like near my house the day before yesterday.

To see more pictures ...

Screenshots of XFce 4 in action: Much nicer than older versions. This version actually seems to have been developed in this century.

Re-ignite my fire: Thoughts about the current predictable state of F1 and the new rules supposedly created to improve the thrill of this sport.

It is proposed that Ferrari be required to staff its team entirely with Italians – half from the north and half from the south – to ensure the maximum possible disharmony and subsequent reduction in on-track performance.

In my opinion, any attempt of rebalancing forces in any sport takes away the fun.

Bug (2002): Perhaps the most original film I watched this year at Fantasporto.

The film revolves around the fact that all actions will have a consequence, or even better, all consequences had a previous action, or something like that.



The first thought I had after watching the movie was: How in the hell will I explain what this film is about in my blog?. I guess the best way will be with an example:

Did you ever think about the consequence of not giving a tip to a waiter, that will go shopping after he leaves the restaurant and that won't have enough money to buy food for his baby, making him cry all night, leading to his neighbour deciding she doesn't want to have kids, making her husband argue with her and getting a divorce? All because you didn't tip the waiter! And why didn't you tip the waiter? Probably you'll be able to find a sequence of events that led to that situation too.

Bottom line: Original and entertaining.

Ready.gov: The US government made this nice site so we can all know what do to in case of a terrorist attack. Or was it so that we can all laugh a little bit?

The slogan (Helping America prepare for fiery death), the very elucidative images and the little boy trying to eat his own hands on the top banner, everything seems to be a parody to the US paranoia. But no, it's real. The parody it's here. Update: A better paody is here.

Blogs em .pt: A nice compilation of Portuguese blogs.

2009 Lost Memories (2002): What if Japan had won the war, what if Germany had been nuked instead of Japan and Korea was still part of Japan's empire.

This is a very violent movie with lots of action and with an important historical side to it all.

This was the third Korean film I have seen in this Fantas and I must say I'm impressed with the overall quality of Korean films. Last year I already saw Seon (The Isle), another Korean movie, that besides being a shock movie had also one of the best photographies I have ever seen.

Daypop Top Word Bursts: Damn, Daypop was quicker than me :-( From Daypop's weblog:

Shortly after putting up the Top 40, I realized there were plenty of memes that make the rounds that weren't accompanied by links. Either the meme was a topic of conversation that had no link, or it was a meme that had no single, authoritative link. Catching heightened word usage is a natural extension to the Top 40. I kept the idea on the back burner until very recently, when I realized Joe Millionaire was the buzz, but there were no authoritative links to anchor the meme. There was the one link to the Joe Millionaire site but few bloggers linked to it when writing about the show (in spite of this, that link still made the Top 40). I went to sleep that night thinking about implementing what everyone now calls Word Bursts. The next morning (can you believe it?) I get emails about the article in New Scientist about Word Bursts. I also read it in Slashdot and it eventually makes the Top 40. Well, that got me working this weekend on this: Daypop Top Word Bursts It's catching topics that don't have authoritative links. It also catches those that do. There are sample posts from weblogs so that you can get a decent idea of what the word burst is in relation to.

Nicely done!

As i said here, I decided to give a go to the word burst idea I saw on New Scientist. I'm going to use R to build a prototype (just to test the concept).

R is a language for statistical computing and is both powerfull and confusing. At the moment Iam able to anaylze the freqs of a single weblog using the following code:

hp <- htmlTreeParse('http://www.scripting.com/')
html.elem <- unlist(hp$children$html$children)
text <- html.elem[which(regexpr("text.value",names(html.elem)) > 0)] 
names(text) <- NULL 
text2 <- paste(text,collapse=" ")
wrds <- strsplit(text2," ")
wrds <- sapply(wrds,tolower)
wrds <- gsub("[,.!?;:]","",wrds)
f.wrds <- factor(wrds)
freqs <- table(f.wrds)
sort(freqs)

Applied to Scripting News this gives the following table of most used words:

• google 22
• have 23
• my 24
• was 25
• with 29
• be 32
• on 43
• it 44
• for 46
• is 50
• in 56
• that 65
• and 71
• of 72
• i 82
• a 105
• to 130
• the 177

Now it's just a question of joining several important blogs, do the same type of frequency analisys and compare the results from one day to another. This way we can see which words have big bursts and which stopped being in the spotlight.