I am still hooked on Marc Canter’s concept of the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. Think of it as a local node that lets us have the best of both worlds: the awesome informative and communicative power of the distributed internet, and the centralization/aggregation of those bits of information created by, or most relevant to, an individual person.
So now I want my DLA to have both a front end and a back end - a public and private view. The public view will contains all of the data bits I want to be social:
- my bookmarks (an aggregate collection of del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, and any future -url that may come into being)
- my public photos (an aggregate of my Flickr photos and…
well, no other service is worth mentioning, really
) - my blogs (an aggregate of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, this blog, my business’s blog, my personal blog, all of my photoblogs, and all the future blogs…)
- posts I have made on other blogs (see sidebar on this blog for a woefully incomplete list of conversations)
- posts that I have made in message boards (trickier)
- some sort of aggregate of my media collection, media tastes and/or media recommendations (pull in last.fm, musicmobs.com, Netflix’s social component, All Consuming, when will the itunes Music Store get a comprehensive social component? etc.)
- public calendar, commentable. I want to broadcast where I’ll be, recommend events to others, and I want them to be able to recommend events to me.
- extra-blog conversation interface: my blogs are driven by my own posts, but I want a way for my friends/colleagues to be able to initiate messages and questions for me, as well: publically and privately. A sort of email/message board hybrid.
- An aggregate of my aggregates: syndicate my blogroll(s) for others to enjoy, and be able to leave local comments on. They can participate in any discussion on the external blog too, of course, but it would be cool to have the option to start up a more localized discussion on the post, as well.
On the private site of the DLA, I want aggregated everything that is relevant to interacting with my digital life: a centralized dashboard of sorts. It would include things like:
- Interface to bank accounts, credit card accounts, other online bill payments
- interface to all memberships and subscription services: Netflix, iTunes Music Store, etc.
- Interface to my cell phone plans (I am on Sprint and Cingular now on two different phones): how many minutes I’ve used, how many remain, how many MMS/SMS messages I’ve sent on Cingular because they’re annoyingly stingy about that.
- Interface to Gmail and to pop mail accounts via webmail
- Interface to any online orders I’ve placed and their status (not processed, shipped, FedEx tracking #s, etc.)
- Interface to all 8 gazillion social networking services of which I am a member or ‘user’
- Drag and drop interface to post to Flickr
- Blog posting interface to all blogs
- Interface to my also imaginary AI bot agents who have been
diligently scraping the web according to provided search terms and
concepts (may as well shoot for the moon here, right?
) - A del.icio.us-style note-taking application that functions almost exactly the same way except: a) notes are not tied to URLs, they can just be freeform thoughts and b) each note has a public/private flag
I will undoubtedly think of more to add to this, so I’ll just keep building on this entry whenever the mood/inspiration strikes.
[geeked]
What can I say - Barb groks it.
:-)
Barb basically rapped out the spec to our product that we're working on. Go Barb go!
How Berkeley Can You Be?
How Berkeley Can You Be? 10/29/2003 01:16 AM
I finally got around to sorting through and captioning the photos I took of the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade and Art Car fest that was held in Berkeley at the end of September. Going through the pictures reminded me of some of the reasons I like living in Berkeley so much. Sure, people regularly overdo political correctness here, and there were a lot of "Only in Berkeley" groups and moments in the parade, but on the whole it was an amazing display of the diversity, creativity and sense of humor that make this a fun place to live. There were also a lot of self-mocking groups poking fun at Berkley. I love it when people retain the ability to laugh at themselves, and it is a highly desirable quality for living in Berkeley. Luckily, it is also a frequently displayed quality. One of the stars of the parade was the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir, an art car from Houston Texas, of all places. 5 miles of wiring that must have taken months of work to put together, all for a bunch of plastic fish and lobsters who sing while being conducted by large crustacean. It sounds silly, but it was wonderful. I could track its progress down University Avenue by the gales of laughter is spawned as it passed by. After the parade, people crowded around for hours and were treated to special performances by the Choir. I got some good photos. If it comes to your town, don't miss it. Or it even has its own website, with a very funny account of its construction, you can check it out at www.sashimitabernaclechoir.org....
Berkeley DB 4.2.52
Berkeley DB 4.2.52 04/13/2004 12:36 PM
Provides embedded database support for traditional and client/server application
Berkeley DB 4.3.27
Berkeley DB 4.3.27 01/03/2005 02:28 PM
Provides embedded database support for traditional and client/server application
Berkeley DB XML 2.0.9
Berkeley DB XML 2.0.9 01/03/2005 02:28 PM
A native XML database with XQuery access.
Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC
Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC 12/17/2003 11:53 AM
Hunting aliens and beyond
At CFP 2004 in Berkeley
At CFP 2004 in Berkeley 04/21/2004 12:54 PM
This week I'm at the ACM's 14th Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP), at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley (walking distance from my house). There are good sessions on issues such as e-voting and digital rights management, and savvy...
Clueless in Berkeley
Clueless in Berkeley 07/12/2004 04:07 PM
I have written before of my love for my favorite feature in the Berkeley Daily Planet, the Police Blotter. Today while reading it, I ran across this absolute gem which caused me to lose a mouthful of hot Peet's coffee in front of the Cheeseboard. Knife-Wielder Earns Cellular Domicile A 48-year-old Berkeley man found himself with a new and tightly confined residence after police busted him for flashing a knife at a fellow citizen near the corner of Center Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 9:37 a.m. Friday. The felon seems to have overlooked that building on the corner and all those blue-clad badge-wearing folks who pass through its portals en route to their black-and-white cars. (For those of you unfamiliar with Berkeley geography, our new police headquarters is at the corner of MLK and Center.) How do you get a job writing stuff like this? I want one. It made my day....
ScienceMatters@Berkeley
ScienceMatters@Berkeley 09/22/2004 06:16 AM
David Pescovitz: In this month's issue of my research digest ScienceMatters@Berkeley...
Link* Flipping the Switch on Cancer: Improving the effectiveness of Cancer drugs one molecule at a time.
* Think Molecularly, Act Globally: Studying the atmosphere from a converted spy plane.
* Quantum Computing's Magnetic Attraction: A new spin on magnetic atoms.
* The secret history of Vitamin B-12
The Berkeley Pit Mascot
The Berkeley Pit Mascot 04/14/2005 06:53 PM
"The Auditor", an amazing dog, lived a long life in one of the harshest environments, the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. The mine site has no vegetation, the water in the pit is full of heavy metals and very acidic (pH 2.5) and yet the Auditor held on long after mining operations halted. He has inspired a web site and even an art project.
Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
Lab Notes from UC Berkeley 12/11/2003 01:13 PM
In this issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Grabbing waste heat from industry to warm your apartment
* Engineering our water resources against El Nino
* Simulating cyber-attacks on a microscale model of the Net
I hope you enjoy it! Link
Discovering Berkeley DB
Discovering Berkeley DB 11/25/2003 10:23 PM
I'm working on a project at the moment which involves exporting a whole bunch of data out of an existing system. The system is written in Perl and uses Berkeley DB files for most of its storage.
I'd never done anything with Berkeley DB before, but luckily Python has a module which seems to do all of the hard work for me:
>>> db = bsddb.btopen('xpand.db')
>>> db.keys()[0:10]
[':archives:index.html', ':art:test.html', ...
>>> db[':art:test.html']
'template;front.tp\x01\x01'
>>>
The Berkeley DB libraries are maintained by Sleepycat Software.
Unfortunately, their site is completely saturated with marketing
jargon. Our customers rely on
Berkeley DB for fast, scalable, reliable and cost-effective data
management for their mission-critical applications
. Great - now
what does it do exactly?
Some digging around turned up the real information: the Berkeley DB Tutorial and Reference Guide, which contains pretty much everything you could possible want to know about the technology. It turns out that at a basic level Berkeley DB is just a very high performance, reliable way of persisting dictionary style data structures - anything where a piece of data can be stored and looked up using a unique key. The key and the value can each be up to 4 gigabytes in length and can consist of anything that can be crammed in to a string of bytes, so what you do with it is completely up to you. The only operations available are "store this value under this key", "check if this key exists" and "retrieve the value for this key" so conceptually it's pretty simple - the complicated stuff all happens under the hood.
It seems like a great alternative to a full on relational database for simple applications, although I'm slightly confused by the license which allows free use for open source products but requires a license for commercial applications. Does that mean that if I use the bsddb Python module in a commercial app I need to get a license from Sleepycat?
ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches
ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches 06/17/2004 11:36 AM
Based on the model of Lab Notes, my online
research digest from UC Berkeley Engineering, we've now launched a new
publication to focus on the sciences at the university. In
ScienceMatters@Berkeley, I'll report on mind-bending research in
physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.In the premier issue:
* Crystallizing Nanoscience
* Hunting the Achilles' Heel of Hepatitis
* The Mysterious Matter of Dark Matter
If hope you enjoy it! If you do, please feel free to subscribe to the email or RSS ScienceMatters digest. Link
My Berkeley Voting Experience
My Berkeley Voting Experience 12/17/2004 06:40 PM
I took my absentee ballot over to my polling place in Berkeley this morning around 11 AM to drop it off. The polling place has the dreadful Diebold touch screen machines that are known to be extremely vulnerable to fraud. There was about a 10 minutes wait, then people were being asked "Paper or Machine". About half the people chose paper, and there was a long table at one end of the polling place where people were sitting and filling out the paper ballots (no real secrecy possible, but on the other hand no one had to use the table). I went by the Cheeseboard on my way home. Downtown and North Berkeley were empty in a way they never are at 11 AM on a weekday -- I'm guessing and hoping that lots of people are either in a battleground state or were at home calling voters to encourage them to vote....
Prostitution to be legalized in
Berkeley?
Prostitution to be legalized in
Berkeley? 07/07/2004 02:35 PM
This article in the SF Bay Guardian reports on a new ballot meaure in Berkeley, California to legalize prostitution -- another measure in SF is on the way. Link (Thanks, Creative_ten !)
Berkeley DB XML 2.1.8 (Default branch)
Berkeley DB XML 2.1.8 (Default branch) 06/22/2005 02:26 AM
Berkeley DB XML is a native XML database engine for use within your product. Made available as a C++ library with language bindings for Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and Tcl, it integrates directly into your application (it is not a standalone database server). It provides XQuery access into a database of document containers. XML documents are stored and indexed in their native format using Berkeley DB as the transactional database engine.
License: OSI Approved
Changes:
A few small fixes in the packaging of 2.1.7 and some other minor cleanup.
Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.5.0
Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.5.0 06/16/2004 01:30 PM
A transactional Java database.
Flashing, Berkeley style
Flashing, Berkeley style 08/20/2004 11:35 PM
From the ever amusing Berkeley police blotter: Exposer Stalks BART Rider A woman arriving at the North Berkeley BART station last Friday afternoon found herself being pursued by a not-so-gentlemanly fellow who exposed his shortcomings before fleeing in his wheelchair. Only in Berkeley can I imagine a wheelchair flasher....
BlogOn Blogs Berkeley
BlogOn Blogs Berkeley 07/08/2004 02:01 PM
One of the greatest reasons I love living in the Bay Area is for all the great geeky events that...
A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon
A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon 06/05/2005 11:33 PM
As long time readers know, I love the People's Republic of Berkeley, foibles and all, and have celebrated its wonderful quirks in my writing and photography for the last 3 years, and even been banned from Adsense for having done so. But sometimes the Berkeley scene and its inhabitants much-lampooned well-meaning but sometimes unthinking do-gooding missionary zeal and neo-puritanism is too much, even for me, and tonight's evening at the Berkeley CyberSalon was an example of such. I recently read about the Berkeley CyberSalon on Scott Rosenberg's blog, and joined the mailing list based on his recommendation. It seemed like a good opportunity to hear about new ideas in technology as well as a good way to meet other people in Berkeley interested in socio-political issues around technology. I also thought it was a brilliant idea for a publicist to host a salon, and it substantially increased my respect for Sylvia Paull, who had I last seen earlier this week at Kevin Werbach's Pre-Pre SuperNova party standing on a table frantically banging together two wine glasses in an effort to encourage people to sit down. When I got the email about tonight's panel discussion, it sounded quite interesting: While technology can level the playing field for developing countries, it often supplants and destroys the very cultures these societies have taken centuries, if not millennia, to develop. How should we introduce new technologies to developing countries so that we can keep the best of both worlds? ... Invited panelists include: Lee Felsenstein, who built the first portable computer, the Osborne, and has tried to port the Internet to the jungles of Laos using the pedal power of the bicycle. Eric Brewer, cofounder of spider search engine Inktomi and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, who just led a delegation of open source computing advocates to India. Richard Komans, who set up an Internet Bookmobile Project in Uganda to download and publish books on the spot, and Jessica Mitchell, a Geekcorps technology volunteer who is working with Ghana’s ISPs. And invited to join the discussion on the other side of the debate: Claudia Carr, UCB associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, who has firsthand experience of the way modern technology destroys ancient cultures. Iain Boal, social historian of science and technics at UCBs Institute of International Studies, edited a book called "Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics...
ScienceMatters@Berkeley for April
ScienceMatters@Berkeley for April 04/06/2005 12:35 PM
David Pescovitz: I hope you enjoy my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley, including:
Link* Berkeley's Star Planet Hunter: Geoffrey Marcy's search for other Earths
* Tiny Test Tubes and Nanoscale Membranes: Building blocks for longer-lasting batteries and supersensitive poison detectors
* Yosemite Then and Now: Tracing the path of a century-old wildlife survey
Pure Java Berkeley DB
Pure Java Berkeley DB 06/16/2004 09:14 PM
Wow. Pure Java edition of Berkeley DB is out. I guess pure Java version of Berkeley DB XML is coming as well. As to the performance, I haven't checked it myself but if this quote means anything, I think this is a major event for Java developers:
"With Berkeley DB Java Edition, we have a simpler setup, a 3x increase in data import speed, a 5x increase in performance and a 10x decrease in disk storage requirements."
-- Eric Jain, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
New: Berkeley Packet Monitor 1.0
New: Berkeley Packet Monitor 1.0 07/27/2004 11:24 AM
Berkeley Packet Monitor is a network traffic monitoring and diagnostic utility that uses the Berkeley Packet Filter devices built into Mac OS X.