Webtop Mania: February 2008

Feb

23

BlogBard Radio Station

The elite bloggers shared their latest findings: Blogbard, and BlogRadioTalk! What a bunch of cool apps!

The first one, Blogbard, is all about providing text-2-voice to RSS feeds. I tried it with this blog, and a couple more, and I found it really cool! The voice matches quite well with the text, and, you get to improve your own punctuation with time. How about that?

I do have only one wish: make the voice 2 text for more languages! So far, it works only for english. But, I'd love to see some portuguese (pt AND br), and some french, soon. In the meantime, please enjoy! Here's this site with voice!

The second cool app is blogtalkradio. Users simply make a call, provide some speech, end the call, period. Then they can listen to their recorded voice in an instant podcast from an RSS feed at http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/phonenumber. So simple! Truly great! Wishlist: Make this app in Portugal.

So there you go; two great apps showing a new generation of applications build on top of RSS feeds. Indeed, as the semantic web thrives on (RSS, Microformats, opml, and others), and new disruptive web-enabled devices, such as iPhones, Chumbys, and what not, start to appear, smart people, all over the world, immediately build new trends on top of them.

Hence, a new disruptive trend has just kickstarted: the rss to voice and the voice to rss. For your blog, and, for your iPhone! Boy, the web doesn't stops. Look at it go, wow!

I'd just would like to make a comment to all portuguese startupers and entrepreneurs: creating a version of both of these for the portuguese market could work. Maybe, with a slowstart first, but it will eventually thrive... Think about it. Please.

Posted 23rd February 2008 by Guillaume Riflet

Labels: podcast radio rss voice to text

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Feb

18

Organizing a trip with friends the wiki-way

For the new year's eve, I went with my wife, my friends and friends of my friends to a friend's grand-parents house in rural Portugal. We started planning early, however, although gmail makes a great job at organizing threads, we quickly had scattered data all over the mails thread (we were like over 15 people). This wasn't coordination (disclosure: I've seen wikis in plain english more than fifteen times on the commoncraft show ;) ). So, I decided to create a wiki at jottit to organize the trip. I like jottit because it's soo simple, but any wiki should do the trick. But I always keep in mind that simplicity in the wiki markup is crucial if I want for my friends to contribute (nearly no one was a programmer. In fact, most of us were from physics).

I started the main page with a quick how-to video, a list of people and the days they would attend, etc... Later, I also embedded a map in a page with directions for the place and a page to organize lifts, so we wouldn't bring too many cars (more than necessary). I got the place in the map wrong, but my friend providing the house corrected that quickly in the next version.

Also, another thing that was unthinkable, if it were not for the wiki, was to provide a complete menu of collaborative meals, where each one could enlist and contribute to the meal, by bringing tools and ingredients. We got menus for every meal, and it worked out alright, it was fun, it tasted good (I made a french ratatouille), and no redundant stuff was brought, and nothing really important missed. The only left-overs we had were bottles of portuguese wine (nice) and some vodka (yuk).

Finally, the most enjoyable thing is, probably, the wiki that's left for later souvenir of the good times we had. We put there afterwards our photos and even some videos! And last, but not least, we added a very useful lost&found section ;)
What a great experience! I really recommend a wiki for planning better trips with friends.

Posted 18th February 2008 by Guillaume Riflet

Labels: jottit wiki

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Feb

17

Mathtex bookmarklet
As a grad-student, I'd often like to communicate my thoughts with mathematical expressions. However, writing mathematics in html is not easy. Sure there's mathml, an xml-markup. But where's the interface? And who will actually learn it?

From a practical approach, grad students are often familiarized with latex markup, the de-facto standard for writing beautiful mathematical code. Thus, I'd like to embed latex markup within html code and then obtain in return a beautiful mathematical expression. With the help from a friend, I've finally found how! Here's an example:

$e^{i \, \pi}\;+\;1\;=\;0$

Wow! It's the famous math poem found by Euler, known as Euler's identity. It embodies the irrational numbers and trigonometry (the pi number), the complex numbers (imaginary unity), the integers and the booleans (0 and 1), the reals (the Neper symbol), the sum, the product, the equality and the equation. What else needs to be said?

But wait, what you really want to know is, how did I managed to embed that equation in this blog? Easy: I use MathTex and some custom javascript. MathTex is a cool web service that produces the image containing the equation to your input code. So, with some simple javascript, I concocted a bookmarklet that performs the sorcery :)
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javascript:
popw='';
y=window;
str=prompt("Type your tex:","%s");
if(str){
popw=window.open(
'http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mathtex.cgi?'+escape(str),
'latexbox',
'width=300,height=200'
);
popw.focus();
if (!document.all) T = setTimeout('popw.focus()',50)
}
void(0);
Here's a live demo:

Latex input:

e^{i\pi}+1=0
render

And here's the bookmarklet for you to drag and drop to your bookmarks toolbar.
Posted 17th February 2008 by Guillaume Riflet

Labels: bookmarklet javascript latex mashup mathtex

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Webtop Mania

BlogBard Radio Station

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Organizing a trip with friends the wiki-way

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Mathtex bookmarklet

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