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Tag: google

get your brain subscribed to

In the
‘subscribe
to my brain’ post
I promised to blog on how-to get your own

button up and running on your homepage. It seems rather unlikely
that I’ll ever keep that promise if I don’t do it right away. So, here
we go for a quick tour :

step 1 : set up a rudimentary
FoaF-file
: read the FoaF post if
you dont know what it’s all about. The easiest way to get a simple
FoaF-file of your own is to go to the FoaF-a-matic
webpage
and fill in the details you feel like broadcasting over the
web, crucial is your name and email information (for later use) but
clearly the more details you fill out and the more Friends you add the
more useful your file becomes. Click on the ‘foaf-me’ button and
copy the content created. Observe that there is no sign of my email
adress, it is encrypted in the _mbox_sha1sum_ data. Give this
file a name like _foaf.rdf_ or _myname.rdf_ and put it on
your webserver to make it accessible. Also copy your
_mbox_sha1sum_ info for later smushing.

step 2 : subscribe to online services and modify your
online-life accordingly
: probably you have already a few of
these accounts, but if not, take a free subscription just for fun and
(hopefully) later usage to the following sites :

  • del.icio.us a social bookmarks manager
  • citeUlike a service to
    organise your academic papers
  • connotea a reference management
    service for scientists
  • bloglines a web-based personal news
    aggregator
  • 43things a
    ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ service
  • audioscrobbler a database that
    tracks listening habits and does wonderful things with statistics
  • backpackit a ‘be better organized’ service (Update october 2017 : Tom Howard emails: “I thought I’d reach out because we’ve just updated our guide which reviews the best alternatives to Backpack. Here’s the link
  • flickr an online photo management and
    sharing application
  • technorati a Google-for-weblogs
  • upcoming a social event
    calendar
  • webjay a playlist
    community

So far, I’m addicted to del.icio.us and use
citeUlike but hardly any of the others (but I may come back to this
later). The great thing about these services is that you get more
value-information back if you feed more into the system. For example, if
you use del.icio.us as your ‘public’ bookmarks-file you get to
know how many other people have bookmarked the same site and you can
access their full bookmarks which often is a far more sensible way to
get at the information you are after than mindless Googling. So, whereas
I was at first a bit opposed to the exhibisionist-character of these
services (after all, anyone with web-access can have a look at
‘your’ info), I’ve learned that the ‘social’ feature of
these services can be beneficial to get the right information I want.
Hence, the hardest part is not to get an account with these services but
to adopt your surfing behavior in such a way that you maximize this
added value. And, as I mentioned before, I’m doing badly myself but hope
that things will improve…

step 3 : turn these
accounts into an OPML file
: Knowing the URL of your foaf-file
and sha1-info (step 1) and your online accounts, go to the FOAF Online Account
Description Generator
and feed it with your data. You will then get
another foaf-file back (save the source in a file such as
_accounts.rdf_ and put it on your webserver). Read the Lost Boy’s
posts Subscribe to my
brain
and foaf:
OnlineAccount Generator
for more background info. Then, use the SubscribeToMyBrain-
form
to get an OPML-file out of the account.rdf file and your sha1.
Save the source as _mybrain.opml_.

step 4 :
add/delete information you want
: The above method uses generic
schemes to deduce relevant RSS-data from an account name, which works
for some services, but doesn’t for all. So, if you happen to know the
URL of RSS-feeds for one of these services, you can always add it
manually to the OPML-file (or delete data you don’t want to
publish…). My own attitude is to make all public web-data
available and to leave it to the subscriber to unsubscribe those parts
of my brain (s)he is not interested in. I know there are people whoo are
mainly interested to find out whether I put another paper online, would
tolerate some weblog-posts but have no interest in my musical tast,
whereas there are others who would like me to post more on 43things,
flickr or upcoming and don’t give a damn about my mathematics…
Apart from these online subscriptions, it is also a good idea to include
additional RSS-feeds you produce, such as those of your weblog or use my
Perl
script
to have your own arXiv-feeds.

step 5 : make
your ‘subscribe to my brain’-button
: Now, put the
OPML-file on your webserver, put the button

on your
homepage and link it to the file. Also, add information on your site,
similar to the one I gave in my own
subscription post
so that your readers know what to do when do want
to subscribe to (parts of) your brain. Finally, (and optionally though
I’d wellcome it) send me an email with your URL so that I can subscribe
(next time you’re in Antwerp I’ll buy you a beer) and for the first few
who do so and are working in noncommutative geometry and/or
noncommutative algebra, I’ll send a copy of a neverending book. Mind
you, this doesn’t apply to local people, I’m already subscribed to their
brain on a daily basis…

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upgrade to wp 2.0

All
activity on this site this week (apart from changing the theme) was done
behind the scenes. Finally, _neverendingbooks_ is upgraded to WordPress 2.0.
It is a straightforward well-explained procedure but somehow I decided
to try this out in between a WorkShop and a
Ph.D. defense. As a consequence I had to reclone twice…
Some of the Plugins‘ functionality
didn’t survive the upgrade. In particular, the anti-spam plugin BotCheck doesn’t work any longer (one could fill out any code and
still get a reply posted) as I found out sunday-morning when I was
greeted with about 20 spam-replies… Fortunately, WP 2.0 comes
bundled with its own anti-spam plugin Akismet but one needs a WordPress.com API key which
meens signing up to a WordPress-account (free). When Akismet is
activated, it really bans all spam (it even shows how many spam-messages
it found, 30 over two days…), the only problem being that it seems
to de-activate itself at random… The new theme is called Kiwi which is a lot more
compact than the default neverending(sic) page. But there is a (heavy
some will say) price to pay : only summaries of posts are on the
front-page and the font is (too some will say) small. Still, Kiwi has
some nice extra features : the Featured Post Plugin which
allows to re-cycle changing selected old posts to the right of the
banner. Another changing part is the _Elsewhere_ list (second row
to the right) where one can display any feed. At the moment (but I may
change this as the del.icio.us site
seems to be having some problems) all _del.icio.us_ links tagged
noncommutative are shown (if the site is up…). It
appears that apart from Graham
Leuschke
nobody has a del.icio.us account or doesn’t use the
noncommutative tag. So, if you want to change this site a bit every day,
you know what to do. Speaking of tags, several new
_categories_ were created so that posts now get multiples tags,
describing better their (intended) content. Something I learned by
tagging papers at citeUlike. Btw.
you are still invited to join the
NoncommutativeGeometry Group
over there… Clearly, re-tagging
every individual post was a painstaking experience. A WordPress 2.0
feature I like is the ability to write _pages_ (as opposed to
Posts) which are kept alive in the sidebar and therefore resemble
‘stickies’ (in WP parlace ‘they live outside of the usual
timeline’). At the moment there is just one test-page NAGworldMAP
on which you can see that geocoding was added to
this site via the Geo
Plugin
(allowing to add geographic data to posts) and the instant google world map Plugin plotting these data on a Google Map. At the moment you can see
the distance I have to cycle to get to the university, but I have plans
to do something more substantial with this feature soon, so please
familiarize yourself with dragging and zooming the map (for US-citizens,
European countries often do not put geographic data in the public
domain, so there is a limit to the zoom-factor and I use the
‘satellite’-view rather than any of the other two).

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the efficient academic

Can
software help mathematicians to keep up with the neverending (sic) flood
of new research material? In the past I touched this already… Recently, there is a new fairly active Google group
the
efficient academic
which describes its interests as

Professors, Instructors, and Graduate Students
interested in getting things done more easily and quickly. We discuss
organization, task management, and tools that helps us to be more
productive and not procrastinate. We tend to discuss David Allen’s
GTD system but not exclusively. (278 members)

Personally, I think GTD is far too management-driven to be useful in
research, but I’m equally convinced that there are nice programs
around that I have to delve deeper into, in particular DevonThinkPro.
Fortunately, Serkan Cabi has
written two interesting posts on applications of DevonThink to
physics-research :

which can help me a bit. In the second post
appears another useful resource for the average desperate present-day
ringtheorist. Joanna Karczmarek
can help you to put the Hep-th
on Your Harddrive
. A mere 8Gb containing all material published on
hep-th over the years, just waiting to be put in a database-tool like
DevonThink or, if you still need an excuse to buy one, on your iPod to
read on your daily commute…

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