One Trick Pony

November 18, 2002

The Guts of the Forthcoming WebQuest Portal

Category: Uncategorized – Bernie Dodge – 12:16 pm

What perfect timing! I’ve started to gather information about PHP/SQL packages to support the next leap forward for the WebQuest page. Just last week, the Internet Scout Report people rolled out the Scout Portal Toolkit! I think it’s just what I was looking for. Here are the features:

“For a resource portal site to be worthwhile it has to provide significant functionality for the average user looking to locate or learn about valuable online resources. The Portal Toolkit provides a number of site features intended to meet this need.

Cross-Field Searching - A wide variety of metadata may be used to describe a resource. This feature allows users to search across all appropriate fields for a given set of keywords, or to search for resources that only contain (or do not contain) specific terms in specific fields.

Resource Annotations by Users - Portal users can add their own comments about an individual resource. This facility adds value to the resource entries and encourages interaction within the user community. It also allows portal developers to leverage off of their user community to increase the value of the collection, benefitting all concerned.

Intelligent User Agents - This feature allows portal users to specify a set of criteria for resources that fit their interests and then be automatically notified when new resources become available that fit that criteria.

Resource Quality Ratings by Users - This provides a systematic means through which users can share their evaluations of resources, allowing other users to view the resources with the highest rankings. In addition, through this mechanism portal developers can gather aggregate feedback on the resource entries or areas within their collection and resource developers can better assess the strong points of their work and how it compares to other similar resources within their discipline.

Suggested Resource Referrals (Recommender System) - By evaluating ratings and other information entered by users, this feature allows the portal to recommend other resources that may be of interest to a user.

Hot damn!

Ants Invade iBook!

Category: Uncategorized – Bernie Dodge – 9:59 am

From Slashdot:

“Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs!”

This has generated over 500 replies on Slashdot, 450 of them being lame jokes about buggy software. The rest, though, discussed the mysterious attraction that electricity has to ants. Alex did a research paper about this a year ago and dug up information from Texas Tech about fire ants and the havoc they wreak on transformers in the Southwest.

I can add my own datapoint to this topic, and it pre-dates laptops by several decades. Back in my Peace Corps years in Sierra Leone, I was lucky to have electricity in my house. The light switches were these plastic enclosures that were bowl-shaped, kind of like an old-fashioned doorbell. Every month or so, the lights would start to flicker and we’d hear a crackling sound coming from the switch. It became a routine chore whenever this happened to unscrew the switch and empty it out. What was it filled with? Thousands of ants, some still twitching, that had packed themselves into the switch until it started to short out. We’d whack the switch cover onto the ground outside and out would pop a single solid bowl-shaped block of highly concentrated anthood.

If this ever happens to my PowerBook, I think I’ll use some other non-whacking strategy to clean it out.