So, people tell me 2009 ended recently. Apparently there were fireworks and stuff. This blog as seen very little action during 2009, despite my various good intentions for a blog ‘reboot’ (ala Pawel).
Like many of my online friends, I blame FriendFeed. I find commenting on a FriendFeed post a much more productive way of having a conversation around some new development sweeping the web than writing a dedicated blog post. Still, despite this being my “year of FriendFeed”, I started writing a few blog posts / articles / essays this year which never made it out of the Drafts folder. There is a positive side to unpublished drafts – they serve to nicely organize some thoughts, even if they are ultimately never shared. Anyhow, it’s time to clean them out and move on – and as part of that process – here are the highlights of my posts that never were.
Continue reading ’2009 – the posts that never made it’
Today I attended a presentation by Maria J Martin about Uniprot and various other EBI database services. At the end of the talk, someone asked something to the effect of “How about simplifying user submission of annotations / corrections” – they wanted something in addition to the current ‘free text’ feedback and comments forms, and wanted a way to easily suggest annotations in a structured way. There was some suggestion of wiki’s etc, and how this had been tried to some extent, but they hadn’t got it right yet.
Here is my take on an approach to user submitted content to Uniprot. Essentially users should be able to add/change annotations piecewise, directly via the standard Uniprot web page for each protein record. These changes would ‘go live’ immediately, but since a large part of the value in Uniprot lies in its curation by expert annotators, the interface would also provide a very clear separation between user-submitted ‘uncurated’ annotations and the current expertly curated annotations.
I’ve made some mockups of how some parts of the UI may look in my little fantasy world:
Continue reading ‘A proposal for encouraging user contributed annotations to Uniprot’
Those who have been watching may have noticed I quietly started developing an Android application in the last month or so. It’s still super-buggy and far from feature complete, but I thought it was time to announce it here (“release early, release often”). It’s not ready for real users yet, but developers may like to take a little look.
Continue reading ‘Occyd : tagging for locations’
A quick post to share some bookmarklets I made.
I’ve found QR-code “2D barcodes” really handy when playing with my Android phone.
Sometimes, I have a web page open on my desktop PC, and I want to quickly load it in the Android Chrome browser to see what it looks like. Rather than re-typing it with my thumbs, the Barcode Scanner application allows me to scan a QR-code from the screen of my computer, and if the decoded text contains a URL, open it in the Android browser.
These two bookmarklets turn the URL of the current page that is open in your browser into a scannable QR-code:
Google Charts API based bookmarklet: Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is:
javascript:location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chl='+escape(location.href);
Alternatively, I made a Kaywa QR-code generator version. Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is:
javascript:location.href='http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d='+escape(location.href);
They both do the same thing, so you probably only want one. Only tested on Firefox.
(Update: seemed WordPress ate the javascript in the bookmarklet links … should be okay now)
Since I got a new toy for Christmas, I’ve become interested in geolocation and the fun things you can do when you have an internet-connected GPS-enabled device in your pocket. I’m also a compulsive delicious tagger, so I quickly discovered the existing practice for geotagging delicious bookmarks.
Essentially, this seems to be: add the tag ‘geotagged‘, along with the tags ‘geo:lat=X.xxx‘ and ‘geo:lon=X.xxx‘, where the X.xxx‘s are the latitude and longtitude numbers that are likely to come straight out of your GPS, in decimal degrees (WGS84).
This is all very nice, but the problem with tags in this format is that there is no easy or efficient way to use them to retrieve all items tagged for a particular locality. Sure, if I’m standing right on top of the Eureka Tower at -37.821362,144.964213, I can search for tags geo:lat=-37.821362 and geo:lon=144.964213 to find all the geotagged links for that exact location, but what if I’m standing 50 metres across the street looking up at the tower and want to search for links near my current location ? Continue reading ‘Delicious geohashes … mmmm … tagging *drool*’
