P. S.: Post Scriptum

I wonder how Caine would have commented David Carradine’s death. Especially the modus operandi.

I can see it. The light dissolves, and a new scene is in front of our eyes:

Master Po walks. Young Caine is thoughtful…

-What’s the matter, Grasshopper? Continue reading In memory of David Carradine, what would Master Po say?

I know I haven’t written anything in ages. And maybe it is a good thing. Part of it is due to the fact that this blog has become so serious, so high level, that I felt I did not have anything worth enough to write on it. On the side my other small blog, the one on which I presented pictures of my life has come to a stall too. This happened long time ago, when I left Italy, as connecting to the internet through the mobile in Germany was just too costly. For some time I kept on posting pictures on Flickr by hand. That stopped partially as I got annoyed to Yahoo behaviour who required me to pay for the service (while they also put ads on the side), and when I went for a visit in Buchenwald. The wight of those last pictures prevented me from adding anything.

So little by little I stopped recoding my use of life and my internet life. I did not stop having a life, I just stopped speaking about it.

Those days I am mostly on facebook. In my life I left Jena, submitted my thesis, and went to Dublin City University, to work with Barry McMullin’s group, in the Artificial Life Lab. It is a one year contract that is now 4 months through. And I am actively looking for what to do next.

Funny enough my father is blogging way more than me, those days. He blogs in Italian with a short summary in English. If you can read Italian it is quite interesting.

I just came back from the vacations to discover that my website is now a mess.

All the delicious mindmap data have been deleted, and so did the MySQL data of the wiki.

I am not really sure how it could happen, but I am just not going to investigate.
I am, more pragmatically, moving my website to another host. It will take some days, and a lot of the data will in any case be lost.

Please if you came to my page looking for any of the previous services: the delicious mindmap, the wiki aggregator, have patience.

As soon as the transfer have been made, I shall post a new message.
So if this current message is the last one, you know that we are still using the old host.

Pietro

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

Some of you know that I left ProtoLife. I hope in the future to keep on colaborating with the P.A.C.E. project, but for now that’s it. I want to go back to Germany, and finish my Ph.D. .
Somehow this seem to have a higher priority. Beside is getting clearer for me each day that I am hardly a ‘company’ type of person. I’d rather make research inside the university, or nowhere at all. While I was in Venice I met with the local group of Go players. Sandro, one of those made a big impression on me, being a person of great knowledge, whose only excuse was: “I don’t look at television, I read.”.

When I came back to Rome I decided that it made sense to read more. More than this, that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read, and not reading any bullshit the latest friend suggested me. I remember telling a friend, “you know, I decided to stop just following my nose, on what books to read…”
His answer was quite funny: “If you don’t follow your nose, what do you follow? Other people’s nose”. And then he added: “This is actually a serious question, you might for example, find some people that you really don’t like, ask their suggestion, and then took off the book they suggest you from your reading list”. As you will see by the end of this entry, this ended up being very near the mark.

So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in. As an example I often gave where the acts of the Second Vatican Council (in particular Dignitatis Humanae). Since I am not catholic (nor even Christian), by suggesting something that was not traditionally seen as a classical text, I was implicitly suggesting: the documents that are behind the world we are living in, the documents that most people refer too, but few really read.

I did not receive many lists, but here and there someone would suggest a book or two, that I would dutifully add to my note. I then started keeping track of this list in a separate page on my blog. Since I did not publicize the page no one would read it. The list is nowhere ended, and I feel its inadeguateness knowing all the wonderful books that should be there, but I preferred to keep it small, and add new books slowly.

While I was keeping the list in the back burnere, and slowly going through some of those books, I found another list a much better one from which I am about to fatten my list. And the story of how I found it, and how it relates to my list is very funny, so let me tell it to you.

A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked

a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th enturies.

They crossed the information between the various people and came to a list of 10 really dangerous books, and 21 ‘honorable mentions’. The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people. Just to understand where those people come from the book is important. Fundamental I would say. You have it all: Freud, Darwin, Gramsci, Marx, Engels, Mao, the Kinsey report (the Kinsey Report! That I wanted to read from so long). Dewey, that I have been told set the foundation for modern relativism thinking (so dear to our new pope). There is also Mein Kampf, which I am not sure if I’ll have the guts to read, but I probably should. And many others, Betty Friedan (don’t you want to understand Feminism? Read it, too), Keynes, Adorno… Is a wonderful list.

Interesting enough I was not the only one to see this as my next reading list. On the delicious page of the people who bookmarked the article the most common comment is “my next reading list”, ” A very interesting list of powerful books that have changed history.”, “some good reading”, “…some of these would make my required reading list…”, “…would make an excellent library booklist.” and so on.

One of the things that you should not fail to notice is that each book in the top ten most dangerous book is presented with a link. The link to Amazon. But is not just a normal link to Amazon. Amazon let you sign an agreement so that you can advertise some books from your website, and if people buy your book, they get a discount, and you get a percentage. So, yes you got it, each of those book is presented in that format. If you click on those links to go to Amazon, and you buy the book, the right winged journal will get a percentage. Will get a percentage out of you buying Mein Kampf, and The Communist Manifesto. “Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.”. Ah, the irony of all this.

So, to answer my friend, “no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!”

And if you read all this, and want to add something to my reading list, feel free to suggest:
“what books or document would you suggest to understand the world we are living in”. And tell us why, in what way was this book so unique that reading it is a must. Now the line is yours.

This evening I played with calendars. In particular with the calendar published by Mozilla. SunBird. It is pretty amazing. Also here they managed to install an open standard with which anybody can write his own calendar. The program let you then save it into a file or publish it on the web. You can also upload claendars from other people, and they will appear superimpressed on your events, so that you can see your event as well as the other calendar event.

Think about it, it is extreemly easy, and extreemly powerful. I can just write down the dates that for me are important, and people can use the info to define meeting, set up ambush, or find out when the campervan is unattended. Infinite power.

More, it is possible to set up calendars for particular type of events. For example we could, at work, set up a calendar for all the conferences on artificial life, artificial chemistry, complex system. etc. Or even a separate calendar for each of type, and each person could just subscribe to the calendars that he is interested in.

The calendar is still very limited in many ways. For example events can be assigned only to one category. The whole idea of tags and folksonomy has here yet to come. For example eventually people should be able to set each event in multiple categories, or even suggest categories for events of others.

In any case, my calendar is at http://www.pietrosperoni.it/calendar/agenda.ics. If you have firefox with the calendar plugin inserted you can just see it. If not you probably need to wait until I integrate it with my blog, which will take quite some centuries.

Update: Another thing that is definitly missing is an integration between this software and the smart phone technologies. What’s the point of having a cool phone that can connect to the net, so you can be everywhere anywhere you are, and have such phone have all your appointments, if you cannot let this phone speak, on the net, with your calendar. It does not seem such a hard thing to obtain, although I would not know where to start, so I would predict that within 6 months, no, no 4 months, a program should me around that let me integrate the 2 things. If it isn’t already there.

Funny, I am in the program commitee without anybody ever telling me. No problem, I am happy to be in the list and happy to help. But it did surprise me quite a bit.

So if you didn’t know about it:

Call for Papers:
WORKSHOP on Artificial Chemistry and Its Applications (ACA)
Submission deadline: May 27th 2005
Organized by
Hideaki SUZUKI [S] (ATR Network Informatics Laboratories, JAPAN)
Tim HUTTON (University College London, UK)
Jian-Qin LIU [S] (ATR Network Informatics Laboratories, JAPAN)

Part of ECAL 2005 – 8th European Conference on Artificial Life
Monday 5th to Friday 9th September 2005
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent (UK)

Since my Windows crashed, and I am now running on an old linux Suse 8.0, on a small partition, I was looking forward to reinstall linux as the only OS, with a newer version: Suse 9.2.

After a day of work, the system administrator of the company I work for was not able to install linux on my weird computer (ACER 340). The first problem we had to face was that having an external CDROM (and Floppy) it would never boot from there. Ever. Period. So we had to move all the files to the HD. Even then it was not trivial to convince him (male and bastard) to load from the HD. And when we managed we got an “EBDA too big” error. He tried changing the ‘magic’, but then concluded that my ‘magic’ was of the wrong kind .

Then we tried to start it under windows and we got a:
“WARNING not enough free memory (load buffer size)”

Which was a similar error: something is too big and the memory is too small. In any case he was able to fix my windows system so for the next months I will keep on using windows and asap I will switch to linux.

Linux don’t run away, our union is just postponed.

I feel the duty to make a short comunication.

My windows system finally crashed under the weight of virus, worms, and similar. I had to recover under linux, but for some weeks I will be unable to have an OS of any kind working properly and completely. Eventually I will install a Suse 9.2. For now I am working with an old Suse 8.0 and many thnks do not work. For this reason, for now, I am unable to make any of the wonderful hacks I planned to do. (I cannot even look at the maps myself right now )

But I keep on studying Python, so eventually everything will turn out well.

I am happy that some users have actually started to use the site on a regular basis, and I would appreciate if they were to make a link to the map maker if they link to their own map. This since the map maker is not that easy to find, from an individual map.

I finally did it. I bought myself a new phone (nokia 6670). Or shoudl I say a smatphone. Infact you should not think of this as a phone at all, but rather as a computer. A small wearable, easy to connect to the internet in any time, computer. Who happens to be of the same size of a phone. Happens to be usable as a phone. But not let it trick you. It is a computer. And nothing else. It runs an operating system: (symbian). When it freezes (and it happen) you need to reboot it (it seem that microsoft did not patent that feature).

It took me quite some time to learn to use it. And I don’t see how anybody who is not good with computers could do it, unless properly helped. In the first week I just learned to use it as a normal phone. phoning, answering, sms, … Then I started to study the more fancy stuff. I knew what I was after. Possibility to:

• send and receive e-mail
• update my blog
• check my feeds
• chat

And all this possibly at a low cost. I was not after pictures and those fancy and idiotic application.

The beginning was quite problematic. Starting from understanding that surfing via wap or via web is NOT the same thing. And if you have paid for wap you should not surf via web or find all your credit gone pretty soon. And do not believe those people at the help line that might be telling you that if you are surfing from your phone than it must be wap, thus you are covered. They don’t know what they are speaking about. Or to be totally honest, they know, unfortunately they speak for the average person. Not for your new, kickass smartphone (a.k.a. computer disguised as a phone).

Soon I learned how to get my mail from the phone (forwarding it from the gmail account to the tim account), and even get an sms every time I received an e-mail. The next step was to totally divide my mails into personal mails (gmail) and automatic mail deliveries (yahoo account). So that I only got sms for interesting stuff. I still get a couple of sms a night for spam, but all in all the system works quite well.

I then looked for a good rss reader. Rss orbit, although I have to say with quite some problems. From incorrect spacing (makes reading poetry freaky), no links in the text (useless for so many feed, del.icio.us to start with), and some feeds that would simply not work. Also it required me to ask for the feed manually each time. All the comodity of having the site come to you when it had updated, disappeared. I started using it only on few important sites, who update quite often. I also mailed the programmer, asking if some of theose bugs/feature could be fixed. and he very kindly responded. Eventually most of them will. The automatic update instead will not happen until internet flat rate for mobile will be widespread enough.

For a chat program I use IM+. I tried many, but none seemed to work well. And IM+ seemed to be professional enough. I was also very lucky. Being their first costumer with a Nokia 6670 I asked them for a free licence in excange for me testing some of their software on my phone. It worked fine for both. It was a fun extra hour of work, and I was happy to be paid with that licence.

But before moving to the blog feature let me say that soon I had started usng the camera installed, let’s say, a bit too much. In short I started taking a picture of everything. It was so fun to just be able to take picture and scrape them, all while not having to carry any extra piece of technology (i.e. camera) at all.

I tried various type of software to post to my blog, … and eventually I learned how to send pictures to flickr (via email). I also learned how to do it so that flickr would then post both the picture and my comment to a blog. SO that is what I did, I started a new blog, that I updated only from my mobile . The picture also appear at my page in flickr. And can be feed scraped from both sites.

So the result is:
I have a new cameraphone.
I have a new moblog.

And I am having lot’s of fun.

As I said I am right now in Venice. The situation is spartane at best. We have no telephone, or internet at the office. To make things harder, Vanetian people decided to test their economic skills on the ground of: Many turism, much for internet, thus internet cafe cost should float. An hour in an internet cafe can easily cost 7 (seven!) euro. Which was a lot even when one euro costed less than one dollar.

If you need to get in touch with me, send me an sms, right now. Don’t send me an e-mail or you might be asking for a looong wait.

For the rest, everything is ok, Venezia is truly nice. And I love every bit of it… especially when the sun is out.

Breaking news,

just as I was going to ask for a contratto di mezzadria to my father, I have been contacted by Mark Bedau to join him in protolife and the P.A.C.E. project for the next 6 months.

I have accepted.

I will move to Venice by the end of September, and live there for the next 6 months.

Pietro