Day: March 24, 2005

Categories
Copyright RDF

Yahoo CC Search

Yahoo released the beta of the Yahoo Creative Commons Search allowing us to search among CC licensed material. Since CC licenses are recorded using a standardized meta language and syntax *cough* RDF/XML *cough* it’s more a matter of just checking for this information in the process of their normal operations.

There’s still a lot missing. First of all, the CC license tends to be added to a page, and this can get associated with the keyword. For instance, search on “Shelley Powers” and you won’t find CC material by me, but CC material that includes something about me. (Unless it’s a publication that is CC.). Also, there’s no way to differentiate images, video, and writing with this, though with Yahoo’s separation of media in the regular search engine, this is probably a temporary issue.

Tag this under “RDF rules”.

Categories
Culture

Behold the lowly toilet

Charles from Disinfotainment is posting videos of various aspects of Japanese culture, including this this one on a program to upgrade bathrooms within the educational system.

What’s interesting about the program is that the students have a say in how the bathrooms are designed. In addition, they also have to maintain the bathrooms. I imagine that the students do take greater care when they have to take a turn doing the cleaning.

Charles clarifies that contrary to western assumption, not all of Japan is living with the latest and newest of bathroom appliances; a significant percentage of the country is still using the old style of Japanese toilet, which is nothing more than a trench in the dirt.

Young students are also being taught how to use western toilets, the same as most of us would have to learn how to use the Japanese squat toilet. It makes me hurt, just to look at it. Great way, though, of making sure your populace stays flexible.

Categories
Burningbird

Creaky stuff

I’m working on some components of Wordform in the next few days that could impact on weblog viewing and/or your comments. One of the downsides for modifying a ‘live’ application–but a great way to test. However, if you write a long comment, you might want to copy it into the clipboard before posting.

Also, if you notice that the site is running slow, after checking the running processes I found there is a great deal of activity associated with mt-comments.cgi now, as well as MySQL so I imagine there’s another comment/trackback flood going on with the server.