Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Click on a (Google) map and get Latitude and Longitude in different notations (Flickr/Robogeo-ready). By Pierre Gorissen.

Apparently keeps a lot of the layout intact when converting pdf to Word.
Idem pdf to txt, image, html…

"Gaspedaal nam de databank niet over, maar sluisde zoekopdrachten die mensen op hun site doen, door naar de zoekmachine van AutoTrack en herformatteerde de resultaten zodat het lijkt of je op Gaspedaal zoekt."

"Gaspedaal stelde dat het databankrecht bedoeld is tegen (zo goed als) integraal kopiëren van een database. Met een verwijzing naar de Europese richtlijn waar de Databankenwet uit komt, wordt die stelling afgewezen. Databankenrecht kun je ook inzetten tegen mensen die systematisch zoekopdrachten doen en die herpubliceren."

Mybloglog-like service, but for Twitter users…
You need to login once at the Twitterremote domain to enable the widget tracking.
I objected in the comments against yet another service scraping Twitter logins whereas there are alternatives for proving ownership of a Twitter account…

Follow-up of the similar "Cleeper" iPhone bookmarklet: select the text of an html block level element by _just clicking_ and send it to your mail client with link and title.
The difference with the built-in "Mail link to this page" is the text selection + the fact (as I added in the comments) that you can preconfigure the javascript with your own address (e.g. iClipper@yourdomain.com).

Gmail does a better (privacy) job here than Yahoo and hotmail, but they _do_ send along the originating ip if you use IMAP, either on the iPhone or via thunderbird (and even the originating ip of the machine on the original network behind on top of the ip address of the internet gateway).
The headers are probably added by the IMAP client, but the Gmail smtp server should strip them out if they are serious about privacy…

(Tried to comment all this, but my comment didn't get through…)

I used to use http://www.myipneighbors.com/ (formerly hosted at http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html ) for this (but the site is down now).
Still don't understand how it works – or do they just scrape the "ip:64.191.203.30" from msn search (msn is more complete…) or do they build their own database?

"MobWrite converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system."
Try the demos, that will make it clear!
SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library.

"Headless Gecko/XULRunner which exposes a web service API for screen scraping using a real browser DOM—just pass it the URL of a page and the URL of a screen scraping JavaScript script (a bit like a Greasemonkey user script) and get back RDF/XML"
(via Simon Willison)
I once used Watir to automate scraping, but this seems to be a more appropriate solution…

Type mapof.it/<location search query> to get redirected to the same Google Maps query (optionally other maps by encoding it is mapof.it/set/<location>)

"While it is often possible to recover lost websites using a combination of search engine caches and web archives, the process can be very time-consuming especially if you are trying to recover a large site that had more than a few dozen web pages.
This tool, Warrick, lets you reconstruct any lost website (or single web page) automatically."

You can actually download the Perl sourcecode for it at http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html#downloading !

"If you are finding it hard to pick the right chart type for your type of data, this easy flow chart ourtesy Andrew Abela should help you make the decision quickly. Start from the center and take the route that best matches your data."

Handy bookmarklet for the Iphone that lets you:
- select the text of an html block level element by _just clicking_ it
- edit this text
- send it to (mobile) Twitter and press the submit button

When use CouchDB ?

* when your documents will probably vary a lot (no predefined structure)
* when your queries will not change (”Relational databases to static data and dynamic queries, CouchDB does dynamic data and static queries) – calculating ‘views’ takes time – once they’re calculated every updated is processed incrementally
* when your queries can be expressed in map-reduce form
* when you need your data to be spread around, and to be really scalable generally
By @elisehuard, Brussels-based Ruby On Rails Developer

I unsubscribed from one of the most interesting geeks I used to follow, for the same reason I hate Tumbleblogs and lifestreams:
these tools make it all too easy to post stuff. For the poster it might be comfortable to braindump and share indiscriminately. For the reader it's just too much and too hard to follow.
Sharing tools should enforce discipline on the poster so they are properly tagged/categorized and the follower/reader/subscriber can select the kind of material and frequency that is relevant to them. Now there's now way to distinguish between links, multimedia, personal versus topical stuff, half-baked thoughts versus well-researched articles. (Sorry @alexbosworth if you stumble upon this!)
(exrss tag indicates rss unsubscription)

European Court of Human Rights rules the taking of a photograph itself is a violation irrespective of whether it's subsequently published or otherwise made public.

How do Youtube videos become viral? Flemish Canadian examines the role of the "related videos" features, based on statistics collected via the Youtube API.
Found: "When picking videos to recommend, YouTube will prefer videos that are as popular as the current video, i.e. located in the same region of the 'long tail' of popularity. This means that YouTube's recommendations will not significantly affect the overall popularity of a single item in the long tail and will instead spread the attention between equals."
Conclusion: "the best place to promote a YouTube video is in fact outside of YouTube altogether"

Explanation of some of the common terms when it comes to standards:
- Specs
- Interoperability
- Implementation
- Standards body
- Open Specification
- Standards community
- Open Community
- (Open) Standard

"database met serienummers (IMEI-nummers) van gestolen, kwijtgeraakte en gevonden mobieltjes"
"U kunt gratis uw gestolen of verloren toestel toevoegen. Kopers van tweedehands telefoons kunnnen van tevoren zoeken in de database of het toestel niet van diefstal afkomstig is. "

Energy cosumption driven down by having your consumption compared with that of your neigbours (i.e. people with the same kind of infrastructure).
Interesting to see how data visualisation can lead to behavioural change, showing the power of data and statistics. Also interesting in the light of the discussion in the Netherlands on "smart energy meters" that track the way you use electricity and provide you with smart reporting.

Essential checklist…
The posting should still elaborate on how to hide your friendlist however, see http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2007/12/18/network-privacy-settings-on-facebook-i-wouldnt-consider-a-country-a-close-knit-community/#comment-193114

Iphone friendly version of www.railtime.be, the "official" train schedule site for the Belgian Railways.
I guess they proxy the railtime.be in real time.

The original Tikiwiki of the Small Sister project has been replace by a blog, and their first product is out: SmallMail, a mail system that uses the TOR network for completely anonymous mail transfer.

Report on how British government and civil servants can use the web to engage (and collaborate) with citizens, and open up their data so it can be more useful for society as a whole. The UK is a forerunner in this, and some of their initatives are a model for similar efforts in the Netherlands ("ambtenaar2.0").
BTW: the draft of the report was put up for public review before it was presented to government.

Ning kennisnetwerk van politiemensen – waarschijnlijk naar het model van ambtenaar20.nl.
Onduidelijk of het grass-roots effort is dan wel gesponsord door de organisatie zelf.