My friend François asked me to flex my PageRank muscles to help him in a competition. Good luck!
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LibraryThingy
I uploaded the list of books I own to LibraryThing. Feel free to take a look at my shelves.
I’ll be writing future concert reviews and whatnot at http://jmbr.superadditive.com
There’s a new blog aggregator dedicated to Sage, it is called Planet Sage. Enjoy!
Goodbye, Bob
Robert Anton Wilson passed away today. We will miss him.
Superficies
I recently came across Superficies, a very nice tool for exploring surfaces and differential geometry concepts that I wanted to share. Here’s a link to its english manual that will give you an idea of the program’s features.
This is GPLed software written in Delphi and although binaries are only available for Windows I had no problem running it under Linux using Wine.
Quick way to use mimetex with SMF
SMF is a nice web forum package but it doesn’t display mathematics by default. If you want it to render LaTeX, one option is to use mimetex. Here is a quick patch to enable [tex]…[/tex] tags in SMF version 1.1. You can get the latest updates to this patch with:
darcs get http://darcs.superadditive.com/smf-mimetex
Using Axiom with vi keystrokes
Maple’s command line interface honors vi keystrokes so I thought I should have those in Axiom too. Here’s a short recipe for that:
First of all, put the following line in your $HOME/.inputrcfile:
set editing-mode vi
This will tell the readline library to use vi-style editing by default.
After this, you will have to install rlwrap if you don’t have it on your system.
Now invoke Axiom with the following:
rlwrap -c -f /usr/local/axiom/mnt/fedora5/lib/command.list axiom -noclef
Note that you may have to replace the argument to the -f option with the location of command.list on your system (this will give you Axiom-specific completions).
That’s all!
New tool for collaborative filtering
A new collaborative filtering tool aimed at rating news from RSS feeds has arrived: AmphetaRate.
AmphetaRate is a centralized ratings/recommendation service that provides personalized news and blog recommendations through a news aggregator interface. Using compatible aggregators, you can rate articles found in your subscribed feeds to discover unread articles that suit your taste, thus filling your news addiction.
They provide an API and I hope Bloglines implements this functionality soon.
Citizens as reporters
Today I read (via www.smartmobs.com) this article commenting on how blogging is helping people bypass traditional news sources:
The next step is “Vblogging,” for video blogs, with images derived from digital cameras, webcames, mobile phones and palmtop computers, which are becoming ever more versatile and cheap.
“Those with a desire and a little technology [will have] the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field,” says Forbes.com, the website of Forbes magazine.
So the challenge to traditional journalism as the determinant of what is news and how news should be filtered will only intensify.
I can’t remember a single time I’ve been a witness to an incident and my point of view matched the one journalists gave afterwards in the news. Considering that, I can only perceive the trend towards news decentralization as a very good thing.