The notification came yesterday and what a delightful wake-up call. I knew there’d been about a thousand submissions last year, and that they’d had to make a delay this one due to an increase, so it was quite unexpected. (Each category is drastically different—but it still makes my head spin to be on a list with Ars Technica! Awesome.)
My thanks go out to the judges, bows to the fellow finalists and best wishes all around!
If you’re a Firefox user and live on the web like I do, neck deep in trying out new features and beta services, then you should give Mozilla Lab’s Ubiquity a try. It’s an experimental plugin for FF that reminds me a lot of the desktop application Quicksilver.
By a key combination you bring up a command-line interface that let’s you write natural language instructions. For example, selecting text on page, bringing up the window and then typing “email this to xyz@something.com“. A similar example is translation; i.e. translate this to French. I’ve recently been migrating many of my desktop activities to web applications, including moving entirely from desktop email to Gmail, and a big plus for me is that Ubiquity works with Gmail right out of the box.
Here’s a recap of the initial features, as stated in the Ubiquity prototype announcement:
Ubiquity 0.1
Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
And then there’s the introductory video for your enjoyment.
Head over to the Ubiquity page and try it out for yourself. It’s a bit buggy (it’s a prototype, after all)—but it looks like it has great potential.
We’ll now be able to maintain better visual and personalized presence around Think Artificial. After some CSS struggling due to discrepancies between Firefox and Safari page rendering, I’ve finished implementing Gravatars on the site! (I’m sorry IE6 users, I don’t have time to test and accommodate a broken browser — please get Firefox).
If your comment shows up with a gray person like the third comment above, it means you’ll have to get yourself a Gravatar. If you haven’t heard of Gravatars, or Globally Recognized Avatars, they’re a service that allows you to upload and associate an avatar with your e-mail address. Since they’re in use by many popular websites, it’ll spare you some time when commenting or creating accounts there—all you’ll have to do is enter your email address and they’ll pop up automatically (email encrypted via the MD5 algorithm). For the record, the people on the pic with me above are Gnorb and Esther — both of which run great blogs.
Check out this really amazing animation artwork done through a web interface to the ContextFree.js library created by Aza Raskin, a port of the open source application by Chris Coyn. It provides means of creating beautiful generative art with minuscule amounts of code. Make sure you watch it to the end where the Sierpiński triangle is generated with 3 lines of code.
I’ve been tagged by my blog buddy in-arms Tim Stevens to write seven random (and not so random) facts about myself. (Yes, blog memes are still alive and well.) So it’s about time to shake things up with something personal.
The rules are:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.
You must excuse that I thought about what I should write due to a failure in my random-thought function. But the following are selected facts from a brainstorm.
The se7en random facts
Six years ago I underwent brain surgery. I had a tumor the size of a large chicken egg pushing on my cerebellum. Keen eyes can spot the tumor on the online 3D model of my brain.
Since I left kindergarten all friends I’ve made have been older than I am.
I’m an agnostic atheist. My mother fears I’ll go to hell.
I read Snow Crash in English when I was 10 years old. My teacher couldn’t believe I understood it and questioned me about its content. (Remember that I’m Icelandic)
I take pride in that last fact and sometimes mention it in vain.
I recently started doing Zen-flavored meditation.
The lovely summer of 2006, a baby raven with a crooked leg landed in my lap. I fixed his leg with braces and raised him for a year. (that’s him in the header pic). He’s living in the wild now. I miss that crazy bird dearly.
And then to name the next seven minds (in no specific order):
Last month I invited readers to apply for invitations to Twine.com, one of the major players in this first wave of semantic web applications. Twine is still in a private, invitation only beta; meaning it’s an incomplete product under heavy development (Twine intro). Due to this I set some conditions for invitees last time. But as promised, here’s the second round of invitations — this time unconditional (I know you’re all ‘telligent and enthusiastic).
Simply leave a short comment on this post if you’re interested in giving Twine a spin. An invitation will be sent to the email address you specify in the comment’s field.
Following up on my writings about a Second Life Client for mobile phones being developed by Vollee — a company specializing in bringing full-blown PC games to mobile phones by using the company’s machines for heavy processing and then streaming the result to handsets.
I exchanged emails with Julian Corbett, head of Business Development at Vollee, who revealed that the Mobile Second Life Client (SL) would not be limited to 3G but that Wi-Fi connectivity would also be enabled. This begged three additional questions which were courteously answered by Corbett.
In short, the following was clarified:
iPhone’s will be supported by Vollee.
The Mobile SL client will be Wi-Fi enabled in addition to 3G.
The Client seen in the video (see last post) is a Java implementation.
Powerset went live today with the fruit of several months of research on natural language processing and semantics. They’ve been highly anticipated and the ride to this day has been up and down. I joined their private beta late last year and at the time there were many things unperfected; the whole venture suffering for it at the hands of critics. And high expectations are often the case when products pack more intelligence.
But it certainly looks like they’ve made significant advances judging from some test queries.
The company Vollee is creating a client that offers cellphone users full access to Second Life. The company is accepting registrations for their beta rollout that begins in May. In short (and they provide all in short): All heavy lifting (graphics rendering etc.) is done on their servers and then streamed to the user’s phone. They’ve published a video which is embedded below.
Briefly rehashing what I said in my introductory post to Twine; this online service allows you to gather your data into one place (videos, bookmarks, photos, etc.). From around the web or from your own machine. And with more intelligence and metadata extraction/understanding which makes it easier to organize and find your information. Or discover information of interest to you as there’s a lively bunch of people (and AI) on there already recommending information.
So I’m pleased to announce that I have invitation tickets for interested readers & supporters of Think Artificial. Getting a nice productivity tool ahead of about 40,000 people waiting to get access.
Think Artificial has made it as finalist in the student category of the SXSW Web Awards ‘09! 
Last month I invited readers to apply for 
Powerset went live today with the fruit of several months of research on natural language processing and semantics. They’ve been highly anticipated and the ride to this day has been up and down. I joined their private beta late last year and at the time there were many things unperfected; the whole venture suffering for it at the hands of critics. And high expectations are 
