November 07, 2005
In which we have a photofilesystem
tuxmann has released 1.0 of flickrfs, a FUSE-based representation of flickr, the (social) photo-storage service.
In which we turn old-fashioned
As my ipod has turned into a brick, I am amusing myself by thinking about album names like Ix-Nay on the Hombre (although, for some reason, I thought it was a grifters record) and Sheik Yerbouti. Ad-propos of FZ, the cover of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch also cracks me so consistently up. To wit:
I put a copy of this image, sans title, on the window of a cube I occupied a few years ago. I walked past a few days ago and it was still there, the current inhabitants either blithely unaware or laughing quietly.
In which we stop Catherine the Great from cheating
Amazon's Mechanical Turk intrigues and fascinates me. Cooler (not only because one can make money) than the ESP game built by academic researchers, the Turk challenges the human to write, decipher images, select and compare, and all sorts of menial tasks that cannot quite be automated by a machine -- or perhaps already have, but require human approval to refine their decisions. Already the top results for "Mechanical Turk" are polluted with blogs referring to Amazon's API -- but the fascinating, real story can be found in Tom Standage's book and, of course, in the Wikipedia.