Category Archives: Image Description

Learning WebGL on your iPhone: Radial Blur in GLSL

A misleading title perhaps, since WebGL isn’t generally available to iOS platform developers. Hacks aside, if you’re learning WebGL and have an iPhone it is still a very educational environment. WebGL essentially wraps OpenGL ES in a modern Web browser environment. You can feed data in and out as textures associated with browser canvas areas, […]

Building R’s RGL library for OSX Snow Leopard

RGL is needed for nice interactive 3d plots in R, but a pain to find out how to build on a modern OSX machine. “The rgl package is a visualization device system for R, using OpenGL as the rendering backend. An rgl device at its core is a real-time 3D engine written in C++. It provides […]

Video Linking: Archives and Encyclopedias

This is a quick visual teaser for some archive.org-related work I’m doing with NoTube colleagues, and a collaboration with Kingsley Idehen on navigating it. In NoTube we are trying to match people and TV content by using rich linked data representations of both. I love Archive.org and with their help have crawled an experimental subset […]

NISO/CLIR/RLG – Technical Metadata Elements for Images Workshop (18-19th April 1999)

Maybe this is a record for delayed blogging. Nine and a half years late, here’s a writeup I found (on a corpsed hard-drive) of an image metadata workshop held by NISO, in Washington. I wrote it up for the JISC JIDI project at ILRT, who funded my trip. I’m sure they won’t mind it being […]

Waving not Drowning? groups as buddylist filters

I’ve lately started writing up and prototyping around a use-case for the “Group” construct in FOAF and for medium-sized, partially private data aggregators like SparqlPress. I think we can do something interesting to deal with the social pressure and information load people are experiencing on sites like Flickr and Twitter. Often people have rather large […]

MySpace open data oopsie

Latest megasite privacy screwup, this time from MySpace who appear to have allowed users to consider photos “private” when associated with a private profile, while (as far as I can make out) have the URLs visible of guessable. Whoopsadaisy.  Predictably enough someone has crawled and shared many of the images. Wired reports that the site […]

Flickr (Yahoo) upcoming support for OpenID

According to Simon Willison, Flickr look set to support OpenID by allowing your photostream URL (eg. for me, http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/) to serve as an OpenID, ie. something you can type wherever you see “login using OpenID” and be bounced to Flickr/Yahoo to provide credentials instead of remembering yet another password. This is rather good news. For […]

Imagemap magic

I’ve always found HTML imagemaps to be a curiously neglected technology. They seem somehow to evoke the Web of the mid-to-late 90s, to be terribly ‘1.0’. But there’s glue in the old horse yet… A client-side HTML imagemap lets you associate links (and via Javascript, behaviour) with regions of an image. As such, they’re a […]

HTML Imagemap authoring tool for MacOSX?

I’ve searched around in vain for one. I want to annotate my FOAF spec diagram with mouseover text and links into the documentation. Most of the tools I find are a decade or more old, or pay-to-play. I remember the Gimp image editor can do imagemaps, but it crashes on startup on my MacBook. I […]

FOAF diagram (day 2)

FOAF diagram (day 2) Originally uploaded by danbri Another revision, after feedback from Ivan. The original had “Thing” in italics (a convention I tried before adding in doap: dc: and sioc: references), to indicate it was from another namespace. I’ve now made that heritage explicit (although I suspect it might confuse, the idea is pretty […]

FOAF spec diagram

experimental foafspec diagram Originally uploaded by danbri I’ve been trying to capture the core terms of FOAF in a diagram. Here’s version two. Notes: there are a few terms I’ve missed out, to avoid massive clutter: workInfoHomepage, geekcode, myersBriggs, currentProject, pastProject, dnaChecksum, membershipClass, sha1, fundedBy, theme, Online*XyzAccount, logo, phone. These are all underspecified, underused, or […]

Symbol languages and the Semantic Web

OK so I just stumbled upon this… …via Jonathan Chetwynd’s ever-inventive and SVG-happy Peepo.com. The “Car Bomb in Baghdad” story is from a site created by Widgit Software, and explains itself as follows: Symbolworld has been set up to provide a web site with material suitable for symbol readers of all ages. The internet is […]

Google Earth touring via KML

While I’m writing up old hacks, here’s one that I really enjoyed, even if it was a bit clunky. A couple of years ago Mikel Maron implemented (on my urging in irc.oftc.net #geo IRC :) a PHP-based Google Earth touring service, which interconnects a “tour guide” user with “tourists”. This site facilitates collaborative, realtime exploration […]