* Daniel Frey, Web-Based Comic Reservation System

* Kristen Frey, The Mambo Community Component

* Amal Harb, Implementation and Customization of Open Source Software
to Meet Organizational Goals of a Web-Based National Arab American
Event Directory

* Jason Myszkiewicz, OneVote: Voter Relationship Management

* Edward Robb, Metal Cladding, Inc.: An E-Business Strategy

* Robin Vail, The Informatics – Public Relations Hybrid: Gilda’s Club
WNY Goes Geek

* Charlynda Winkley, Redesigning the UB Graduate School Website: A
User-Centered Approach

* Fascinating interview with the maker of Mad Hot Ballroom. Copyright clearances made up nearly half the cost of the film.

* Enlisting the power of the interweb to find an apartment in Greenpoint. Need to do something, since NYC is the 13th most expensive city in the world to live in, and the most expensive in the US.

* “Now, for the first time ever, you can re-create the harrowing experience of being chased out of a house and down the street by a naked fat middle-aged tow truck driver and his flapping penis, just as Miles and Jack did in the blockbuster movie, Sideways!”

* AIBO Daft Punk Video contest winners.

* Design porn from Business Week

I just got a letter in the mail from a collections agency, billing me for 24 dollars worth of hosting I never wanted. (Actually $5.88, plus $20 in collections fee, I guess.) The clickthrough agreement for their free hosting allows them to change the conditions of that hosting at their whim, and they changed my hosting from free to pay. This is about as stupid a way of making money as I can think of.

I don’t spend that much on hosting. Every year, I maybe spend $400 total in outside hosting for various projects. I can rely on the university for most of my hosting needs. I probably influence something on the range of ten or twenty times that in companies I advise, students, and the like. Put that at $8,000 or $10,000 a year.

I actually took them up on the free hosting offer to evaluate their services. I wasn’t impressed with the response time on their servers, and went to another hosting company. And I can guarantee that when people say “I saw this ad in Dr. Dobbs for 1-and-1, and they look like a good deal,” they will hear of my experience with the company and stay far away. So, they weasel $5 out of me rather than actually behaving human and winning long-term profitable business. It’s just not a good way to make money.

It’s not like I’m going to fight a $24 collections in court. It’s not worth my time and effort. The most I can do is file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (they already have several), and tell everyone and anyone who asks to only work with reputable hosts. Never take 1and1 up on free hosting because it is isn’t really free. And if you can’t trust them on something as dumb as this, I sure wouldn’t trust them with any real business.

Having made a decent dent in the wines and cheese, seminar participants gave one last elevator pitch for their projects, and with inhibitions slightly lowered, provide feedback on the program. Some of the suggestions were familiar by now, and happily some of them we have already taken action on. We have been much more picky about our incoming class this year, and that will improve things. We have a plagiarism process and policy in place, and I will reinforce this with the faculty in the coming year. We have made some changes to how we are teaching web development, and a graduating MI student will be teaching for us in this area. And we will be slanting one of the offering to provide a more business take on risk assessment and budgeting. There were other suggestions as well, and although my notes are elliptical, I do think we are moving in the right direction.

Oh, and finally, by request, a quote from one of our very own students, in T-shirt form.

In class, we had discussed whether executives will blog, or just have convincing ghost writers. Here is a job
that seems to be the latter. They would need to get good people: maybe they should hire me :).

On the mapping front, Google has released Google Earth. Go try it, lots of cool stuff.

I had mentioned my ideal next computing set up. It’s a Vaio U71 with a heads up display, and either a Twiddler (or maybe frogpad or kitty, once I try them out).

As noted in class, the new 2257 guidelines (or see the Fleshbot writeup) are being fought by an adult-industry advocacy group, the Free Speech Coalition. As I noted in class, I do think there is a need for record-keeping, and I think objectives of 2257 require a certain amount of balancing, but it does appear that the new regulations over-reach. A much more sensible process would be to require web producers (“secondary producers”) to keep records of where they got the images, and to provide this electronically on a page on the website.

Obviously, Kevin has done nothing wrong here, and neither has the company. The issue is, how far do they have to do before they (either Kevin or the company) move from opinion leadership to shilling?

As an aside, I saw one of these on the road last week, and it’s truly a beautiful machine. I wonder how well it holds up over the long run. (Worth a shot, no?)

* TCM Locative Reader – Introduction
* Mousehunter at Banff
* and skim for interesting chunks on these two blogs: Mapping Hacks and the “locative” category from We Make Money Not Art.

The method is easy to follow. You simply look for where your Alexa traffic ranking falls when compared with the Technorati Top 100, and that’s your rightful place, apparently. Since my ranking is better than Swirlee’s, I am now number 100. Heck, I am number 1 among untenured professor bloggers by the same measure.

Glad that’s settled.

* I could write a review of Batman Begins, but instead I’ll have your read the one by Tom Coates and just urge you to go see the movie. I’m also kicking myself for not sneaking in to St. Pancras Station before my meeting at the British Library last year — is was awfully tempting. But then, I would probably have been picked up as an “enemy combatant” or something…

* Trying to look like a local? Order like a pro with the In-N-Out secret menu. Or, at the grocery, with the Cook’s Thesaurus.

* To the plagiarist in my summer class, “Here are some of the many reasons I hate plagiarism and those who practice it…”

* Map hacking, Roman style.

* Trying to suss out the housing situation in New York? If you are a Federal Anti-Terror Agency (FATA? No, that’s already taken), Chelsea seems to be the place to watch. Of course, if the cost of apartment rentals in New York is getting you down, there are always alternatives.

* vSkype — Skype with video — is in beta. I guess it still has rough spots. However, I recently had a colleague participate in a defense via video link, and we ended up using NetMeeting for the video and Skype for the audio. (The combination gave us the best combination of audio quality with video.) I’ll look forward to using it, and hope that it is as solid as their VoIP app.

Internal sensors allow the android to react “naturally.” It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it’s the little, “unconscious” movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans.

Well, that ruins my plans for robot slapping. I guess I can always go after kitchen appliances.

But John has a problem. He needs to collect the proper links from a *lot* of such pages, and doesn’t want to fuss with reading through the page source for each of them. So, instead, he saves the page, and runs it through a program that will extract the links for him. I put together just such a program, and below, I will explain how it works. If you want to run the program, you will need to download a free copy of the Python interpreter here and install it on your computer.

Python programs, like HTML, can be written in a regular plaintext editor like Notepad. The programs are normally saved as “something.py” instead of “something.txt”. Below, I’ll have the program bits in blockquotes, with explanations interspersed.

# A script for John that strips out the search URLs from
# a saved Yahoo search response page
# Alex Halavais, alex@halavais.net
# 15 June 2005

# We need the "regular expression" module
import re

Any part of a program that starts with # is just ignored by the interpreter. It is meant for human-legible comments. In fact, code with enough comments, and sensible naming conventions, doesn’t need to be documented: it is self-documenting.

Anyway, the only read “code” part of this is the request to “import re.” When you have a programming task, you often need to import several libraries. Libraries are a bit like toolboxes: they contain the tools you might need on any particular programming job. In this case, I am going to be doing some pattern-matching of text, and so I want to use regular expressions, which is a kind of pattern-matching language. You can use regular expressions in many computer languages, and they are a bit tricky when you get started, but make more sense after a while. Just as you can use wildcards to search for things in certain systems (fish* gets you fishing, fisher, fishsticks, etc.), regular expressions allow you to finely tune different kinds of wildcards.

OK, so we have our toolbox, on to the next bit…

# We are going to set up a regular expression
# pattern that catches each of the links.
# This relies on noticing that the link anchors
# are assigned to the class "yschttl"
# (Yahoo search title?). The url itself is a
# long internal link with a lot of stuff in it
# we can ignore until we get to the "A//"
# part. That's the beginning of the URL we want.
# We collect everything after that until we hit a quotation mark.
URLS = re.compile('a class="yschttl" .*href=".*A//([^"]+)')

This is, again, mostly comments. That last line is scary enough that most people decide immediately after looking at it that they will never learn to program and should go and meditate in the woods. Don’t worry, it looks to everyone like that. Basically, it says I’m looking for a link statement in the HTML code that is associated with the class “yschttl” (Yahoo SearCH TiTLe? Yeti SCHool TurTLe?). Really what I am after is the piece between the inner parentheses, which reads [^”]+ and basically means “give me everything at this point until you hit a quotation mark.”

Still don’t get this part? No problem. You can always put off learning about regex (regular expressions) until you are 40 — no one will think less of you for it, and there are often other ways at getting at the same stuff.

# First, we need to ask what the input and ouput file names are
fileIn = raw_input('What is the name of the saved html file? ')
fileOut = raw_input('What would you like to call the output file? ')

In this part, we gather the names of two files, and store them in variables called “fileIn” and “fileOut.” I could have called them foo and bar, or anything else I liked. But sine they will be storing the file names, it makes sense to label them properly.

When I use the = sign here, really I am saying “put the thing on the right into the variable on the left.” In fact, in some languages, a < - is used instead, and that makes some sense. Anyway in each of these cases we are putting in a "raw_input." What is that? It is whatever the user types in. Further, we are telling the computer that before finding out what the user types in, it should print out a quick question. When the interpreter gets to this part of the program, it will print out the question and wait for the user to type in an answer. Then the answer will be stored in fileIn. It then does the same thing for fileOut. # Now, read in all the text in the file indicated and store it in “inText”
inText = open(fileIn).read()