For various reasons (none of them at all dramatic or exciting but every one requiring some thought), I have moved to a new blogging space. I will be elaborating more on this decision as time goes on, but in case you are reading this, I will no longer be posting here. Comments will also be shut off soon. I will leave the archives up and available here, since I am not going to bother trying to drag all the content with me. This has been a fun beginning, which I look forward to continuing at my new blog.

Steve sent me a link the other day to the page of a faculty member in Computer Science here at UVM. Josh Bongard is doing some pretty cool stuff, and posing some interesting questions:

Imagine a robot-making machine is sent to Mars, and settles on Meridiani Planum. The machine detects that the ground is littered with boulders between 10 centimeters and 1 meter high. Should the machine build a robot with wheels or legs? If the robot should be able to not only observe its surrounding, but also manipulate objects (like drilling into rocks), how many manipulators should it have? What should the manipulators look like? Determining what the most appropriate kind of robot is for a particular task is tricky.

He goes on to describe how he tries to answer some of those questions:

I implemented a system, called Artificial Ontogeny, that ‘grows’ a virtual egg into a fully formed virtual adult robot. The adult robot is then evaluated against the task. This approach then combines biological growth with biological evolution; an individual robot can learn and adapt to its virtual surroundings over its lifetime, while the robot population evolves over generations similar to how organisms grow and adapt to their surroundings, while species adapt over evolutionary time.

Kind of sets the imagination wandering, doesn’t it? Cool stuff, and right in our backyard!

Wow. Since I’ve just recently crested a ridge in a mountain of project work (only to see that I’m halfway there), I’ve taken a swing at cleaning and archiving my inbox.

Among the messages was one that I must have missed. It included a link to the DIL (DIL being short for Digital Initiatives Librarian), a blog documenting the work being done at our nascent Center for Digital Initiatives. Exciting stuff, and it’s always fun to find a new member of the UVM blogosphere.

Just a quick note - as I glanced at the front page of the Burlington Free Press today, I thought I saw a friendly face, and had to look closer. Indeed, on page one was a great shot of Charlie in action in the classroom. You can read the article and see the photos online on the BFP’s site.

It looks like the recording time limit over at Odeo finally got raised above 3 minutes, to allow for a full hour of recording. I’ve mentioned this service before, but the restriction on recording length made it impractical for many applications. I’m not sure when this happened (couldn’t find any reference to it), but I was pleased when I recently logged in to see this change.

Odeo removes a number of barriers for those looking to publish audio online. It goes beyond what is offered by the typical blog/enclosures publishing method in a few distinct areas.

• It provides a simple recording interface.
• It allows for organization of your media.
• Hosting and storage is taken care of.

Today I’ll talk about these points, and then suggest some possible applications of this service.

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Ta Da! Complete with an RSS feed and an iCal/Mozilla calendar compatible file on the events page. Thanks to Rob and Inés for all the hard work in pulling this together!

The release of MT 3.2 brought with it a new plugin that let’s you easily choose and apply various themes to your blog. With help from Mike Austin and the folks from TSG, we’ve installed the StyleCatcher plugin. Here’s how to set it up.

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Zoomify is a pretty slick application that allows you to serve “fast, high-res images in flash”. These images can be zoomed in upon, and if you have the “Enterprise” version as we do, the images can be “annotated” with circles, arrows, labels, and more.

Recently I noticed that Wes, in a fantastic example of synergy in action, got Python upgraded on zoo so that it’s now possible to convert images into the necessary format from within a UNIX environment. This opens up some options that we hadn’t had before, such as being able to process images uploaded via a web interface, and provide web initiated batch processing of images.

Today we’ll look at how to get images converted to the “Zoomify” format, using a free, open source Python script. In short, we’ll be covering:

• Installing the ZoomifyImage package
• Using a PHP “wrapper” with ZoomifyImage to convert a directory of images

• Using a PHP script to easily inspect the processed images

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In an effort to increase the amount of ideas and information I post to this space, I’ve recently begun re-arranging and re-designing it. Here is a brief list of what I’ve started to do, and what still needs doing.

• Added a “Feeds” section, with various methods for syndication of content from here and elsewhere.
• Edited the “About” page to reflect more strongly on the content and the organization of the site, rather than just a blurb about me.
• Re-arranged the home page, and added a new category. Hopefully this will let the most important and most updated material be displayed up front.
• Begun a visual redesign, a saga that shall continue…

That’s the most of it. Here’s a brief To-Do list:

• move some of the older, static content onto my root /~jhenry/ page, such as often used uvm resources, a link to my calendar, the uvm blogroll, etc.
• Continue the visual design saga … I’d like to make the three sections on the home page be more well defined, visually. The banner also needs a little help.
• Update the about page to have a list of plugins and tools used, such as wordpress 2.0, the k2 theme, etc.
• Define a regular posting schedule, to keep the drafts from outnumbering the material on the home page

During this process, the realization set in that such a redesign will never cease, and I’m going to end up continuously reshuffling and tweaking, with the occasional rebuild. I think this is a Good Thing, as it forces me to think about how I present, store, and choose the information that I put here.

Today we released the UVM blogroll. It’s pretty basic in terms of functionality (see to-do list below), but includes the ability for authenticated (UVM NetID required) users to add their blogs to the list, as well as add link to a web feed for their blog. It also generates an opml feed, so those inclined can import it into their readers.

It could use improvement, however. Some next steps:

• Let users edit/remove the links that they added (part of me now wonders if we shouldn’t have just set up a WP install for this purpose alone, and let authenticated users register and add links as authors).
• The pages could use a better explanation of rss and web feeds, and how to use them
• Add feed icon links to the list of links on blog.uvm.edu
• Link to xml/opml on blog.uvm.edu
• Post a winter photo on blog.uvm.edu (thanks to Holly for doing it and Charlie for the picture)
• It might be fun one day to set up one of those plugins to pull and display random posts somewhere …

Thanks to John for getting the code started.