Moving Stuff Finished :-)
Yesterday evening I followed the excellent instructions from the WordPress Codex on Migrating from Movable Type to WordPress. This proved to be extremely easy with all the posts, categories and comments coming through perfectly.
I had some files (photos, ppt etc) manually uploaded, so logged in to move those over. As well as migrating I moved the blog from /blog/ up to the root of the site. That all went swimmingly and I picked a nice shiny new theme called demar.
Flickr Bashing
I spent some time a little while ago writing a bash interface to the Flickr api, using curl to handle the http interactions.
I was doing it because I have a backlog of around 11,000 photos that need sorting and uploading. To get them backed up I decided to simply upload them all marked as private and tagged as 'toProcess' so that I could then start to go through them online.
vocabs
Nadeem and I have been working on several ontologies (for RDF) over the past few months and are intending to publish all of them.
The first to get published is an initial cut of AIISO (pronounced ey-s-oh pronunciation key), the Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology.
moving stuff around
Just spent the evening moving this blog over to Wordpress (from MovableType).
All seems to have gone well, though old permalinks will be broken right now, 'til I get to fix it.
Decidedly obvious
Just finished reading Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. It turns out to be quite a simple book, an easy read, bringing together Hoekman's own ideas and thoughts with plenty of anecdotal lessons.
Lookybook
A friend emailed me a link to Lookybook a little while ago and I've been meaning to blog it for a while.
Fixing a plasma TV
My father-in-law very, very kindly donated me a plasma TV recently, a 32" Phillips from a few years ago. It was refusing to switch on, the power LED on the front of the screen indicating what the manual calls "protect" mode. This means that the TV has a fault and the LED shows it by blinking red.
Finding information about stuff like this online is always annoying difficult due the variance in search terms. Is that LED blinking, flashing, cycling, going on and off or any of a number of other descriptions. I found several references to this problem on a mix of forums, but eventually found a thread describing how to fix a phillips plasma tv with a flashing red led on avforums.
Resource List Ontology
Working on our current project, Nad and I have been modelling resource lists - think course reading lists, but containing more than just reading material. A list is simply a collection of resources grouped into sections and annotated by the academic to give students guidance when using the list.
A resource list can take much more than just books. We're using Bibliontology to model the resources, so more or less anything can be accurately described. We've requested a couple of additions and are still debating those.
Emotional Intelligence in Signage
Using the 20:20 format (also known as pecha-kucha) Daniel Pink, a staff editor at Wired talks about improving signage through the use of empathy. He has two tenets:
Demonstrate Empathy