I _Really_ Don't Know

I love specialized controllers, providing an interaction metaphor that works with a keyboard and mouse is always sub-optimal as they are general input tools - that's one of the things that's so awesome about the iPhone, it allows the application to define a much more specialized interaction - look at the way different apps use the multi-touch. That's just the start, too. The iPhone has limited gestures and is 2D, I expect much more to happen with it as interaction designers get to grips with the underlying change in capability that multi-touch provides.

I wrote last year about a whole host of multi-touch devices that show off the cream of what's currently possible. One of the stand-outs for me was the JazzMutant Lemur, shown here as a music sequencer.

The ALA are selling a lovely little Copyright slider to simplify deciding if a work is in the public domain or not - I haven't held one, so can't comment on build quality, ease-of-use or even the usefulness of the device, but it seems like a great idea.

My first thought on seeing it was that it would be great for them to make this available as a PDF for people to download and make their own - after all the ALA is all about making sure everyone has work to do ;-)

In contrast to a post I wrote a while ago on Big Retro Headphones...

I recently bought a pair of Shure SE210 earphones. I've known about Shure for years - in the 90s I had a pair of Shure personal monitors loaned to me for an evening and they just sound amazing. I'd given up all hope of ever owning a pair of anything like that due to to the cost.

No, not you. At least I hope not.

Like Robert Sutton, I am a self-confessed asshole. That is, from time to time, I have the potential to act like an asshole to the people around me.

The inimitable Ed Summers has been working inside the Library of Congress, building examples and demonstrators of how LC could be getting themselves into the semantic web, the linked-data web.

It appears he's got fed up of waiting for the support, permission and infrastructure he so richly deserves to get this data out there and he's been and gone and done something smart outside.

I've been working with RDF for almost 3 years now. There's not much evidence of that here and I was recently challenged on why that is.

In large part it's because I don't get it. There are a lot of things I'm still struggling with in terms of how to think about solutions when using RDF and how best to work with it. Sure, I can write SPARQL with patterns several levels deep. Sure I can work with Turtle and RDF/XML in several programming languages (Java, XSLT, PHP and sed of course). I think I even understand how to think in an open-world way.

Biometrics really annoy me. In a previous life building secure authentication systems for Egg, a major internet bank, I did a great deal of research into biometrics. Not only are there issues for a substantial minority (think those with glaucoma, burns victims, those with no hands), whichever biometric you pick. But there is also the fundamental problem that you can't 'reset' a biometric in the same way as a password or a certificate.

Even more annoying is the way in which proponents seem to ignore even the most compelling evidence against biometrics - such as the obvious fact that your fingerprint is neither secure nor secret. Nor is it non-reproducible.

Data Portability is a great campaign, starting to gain some momentum, about ensuring the data you put into sites like facebook and linkedin is available for you to move between sites as you choose to move. Some major sites, including facebook have agreed to work with the group to develop standards for portable data, but still a long way to go.

So, dull bit done - there's a host of videos going around promoting Data Portability...

I love graph viewers and visualizers and being able to play with them on your own data is better than anything :-)

SpiderFriend is a visualizer for your facebook friends network, it graphs you and your immediate friends on the edge of a sphere with connections between y'all. Nice, but the visual treatment doesn't allow you to see clearly who knows who.

RePEc, Research Papers in Economics, have been doing some interesting work on allowing the author community to self-specify variant forms of their name.

This is interesting, the example they give is of John Maynard Keynes: