one small voicestpeter's blog: The weblog of Peter Saint-Andre, patron saint of Jabber and sometime poet, philosopher, and musicianBacklog Empty- May 17, 2007 More software updates... Following up on yesterday's post, today I cleared out the backlog on my "idletasks" folder by adding some more projects to the jabber.org software pages: The Jabber::Lite Perl library. A slick new client for Windows: xeus messenger. OctroTalk, a client for PocketPC and Smartphone. The Beep library for J2ME-enabled devices.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-16T19:43 Consensus- May 16, 2007 Science and politics... Here's an interesting quote from Michael Crichton about the "consensus" on global warming (HT: Samizdata): Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-16T10:53 Interactive- May 16, 2007 Social presence again... As mentioned I've been thinking a lot about social presence lately. Most recently I've been chatting with Steve Krulewitz, a Songbird developer who created the Audioscrobbler plugin and who is interested in how XMPP can play well with Songbird. IMHO, one thing that would be cool in Songbird is the ability to find live chatrooms where people who are listening to the same artist right now can find each other and talk. That might make the.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-16T09:03 Apriorism- May 16, 2007 Is all experience personal Overnight I received the following note about the definition of apriorism to be found in my philosophical dictionary: I think the content of the square brackets below make the definition of apriorism more truthful. apriorism ... The view (opposed to empiricism) that some or all knowledge can be gained without reference to personal experience. Well there are deep philosophical questions wrapped up in that one...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-16T08:13 Measure This- May 16, 2007 A confusing genitive... In my last post I used the phrase "a few months' hiatus". Here are some more examples of this construction: A day's work The Hundred Years' War A few minutes' wait A week's vacation What's going on here What's with the apostrophes Welcome to the genitive case. The grammarian Charles Fries would say that these phrases are examples of the genitive of measure, but it seems to me that we use this...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-15T21:57 Songbird- May 16, 2007 Open-source media player in action... After a few months' hiatus, I've started using Songbird again to play music on my Mac. It's still a memory hog and a bit on the slow side, but I assume the 'birders are working on that. Plus the Audioscrobbler plugin does a mostly reliable job of uploading my listens to last.fm. Hey it's not perfect, but neither was Firefox (in fact the old Mozilla browser starting around the M8 release) or Thunderbird or OpenOffice when I...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-15T20:53 Software Updates- May 16, 2007 Playing catch-up... I have an email folder called "idletasks", where I place messages I receive to do things like add projects to the software pages at www.jabber.org. Unfortunately, I don't process these tasks very quickly, but I did just add the following projects: The xmpp4moz library -- a very active project with lots of code built on top (including the SamePlace web client). Claros Chat, an open-source web client produced by the Claros...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-15T20:39 Jabber auf Deutsch- May 15, 2007 A friendly intro... The folks at Hitflip have published a nice little article (in German) about Jabber technologies here, which they've added to their lexicon pages.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-15T09:41 Immersion- May 14, 2007 Living social presence... Oh and speaking of living in the presence, my recent post about XMPP and social networking has gotten me interested again in a wide range of "social presence" applications, so I've refreshed my accounts at last.fm (got iscrobbler working again) and Plazes as well as the aforementioned Jaiku and Twitter. Experimentation continues...http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-14T15:45 Living in the Presence- May 14, 2007 The importance of network availability... VON Magazine is running an interesting article by Ross O'Brien entitled Living in the Presence -- read it to grok more deeply why information about network availability matters so much.http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-14T15:39 |