http://www.jeremygottwig.com Jeremy Gottwig's Blog en-us Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:15:22 EDT http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=18 So I just finished my first Android application, which I call the Personal Budget Droid. It pretty much does exactly what it sounds like it does: helps you manage your budget. The idea came from my wife, who also helped me with some important aspects of the application. Anyway, the homepage for the project is here . Feel free to download and play. Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22: Entry 18 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=17 Political discussion is something I generally save for online forums or telephone conversations with my mom, but I ran across something today, which really made my blood boil. But first a disclaimer: I am an Obama supporter. Anyway, Hillary Clinton recently compared her effort to seat the Michigan and Florida delegates for the Democratic nomination to the civil rights movement. I'll leave the obvious offensiveness of this suggestion aside for a moment and focus on the irony. Specifically, Hillary Clinton supported the DNC's decision not to seat those delegates. So if she does chose to make such a ludicrous comparison, she should remember that she is partially responsible for revoking their right to vote. Ah, Hillary... I've never seen a more desperate campaign. She'll at least pretend to play by the rules unless they don't benefit her. Once that happens, call in the lawyers. How can anyone take her seriously at this point? She's become a parody of a politician. And to think, at one point I supported her. Wed, 21 May 2008 17: Entry 17 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=16 I'm writing this from my Nokia N810 device,which I'm very impressed with thus far. In fact, the only problem I have with it is the GPS, which seems to be mighty slow and not always accurate. Overall though, I highly recomend the device. And apologies for any misspellings in this post. The keybooard is great, but i'm still getting used to it. Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20: Entry 16 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=15 Ok, this is ironic. I just noticed that in my previous post, I told about how I had just purchased a Nokia product. However, in the post just before that (left months ago), I expressed that I was outraged at Nokia and very unlikely to ever purchase one of their products. Funny how time works. Give me a couple of months and the steam subsides. Well I'll continue being outraged at Apple. Jobs is an arse, and even Microsoft is more open than Apple. But I'll put my outrage over Ogg to bed for now Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17: Entry 15 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=14 It occurs to me that I haven't done anything with this blog for quite some time, so it's worth an update now. I've graduated with my dual MLS/MIS from the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), and I have nothing but good things to say about the experience. The professors and staff were marvelous, and the skills I learned helped me come out immediately with a job. On a more technical front, I've recently purchased the N810 device from Nokia, and I'm really looking forward to its arrival. I'll post a review here. Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11: Entry 14 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=13 Let me take a moment to express my disgust at Apple and Nokia for their decision to come out against the W3C's decision to include Ogg as the main standard for audio and video over the Internet. The inclusion of Ogg would have been significant in that we would, at last, have a standard format by which all providers should deliver content. As it is now, there are countless formats, each one requiring an individual plug-in. The W3C decides to resolve this. Apple and Nokia step in and cause the HTML specs to change. Well I do have a long memory, and this will affect my decision to purchase Nokia products in the future. In fact, I was planning--yes, actually planning--on purchasing a Nokia N95 phone in the next few months. This has changed. I will go with another brand instead. However, Apple won't lose any business from me, because they have a broken moral compass as far as companies go, and I don't buy from them anyway (even though they make good products). Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23: Entry 13 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=12 I'm struck by this article from the Wall Street Journal. It covers the fantastic project One Laptop Per Child and some of the difficulties the project has encountered thanks to the Wintel folks and perpetual fears concerning their market share. The result is that they've actually treated OLPC as a competitor. This is a little outrageous, in my humble opinion. The OLPC project is a non-profit organization and should be treated as such. It's an ethical decision, not a market decision. I'm currently writing this from an Intel based laptop, but stories like this make me wish I had gone AMD. Maybe my next laptop choice will be different. Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19: Entry 12 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=11 During the next day or so, I will post a few academic papers that I've written on a variety of topics. I wrote this first paper for a class called Computerization and Society, which explores topics such as social computing and mass collaboration. This paper looks at Linux Journal and its views about technology and society. Linux Journal and the GPL Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15: Entry 11 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=10 This is actually not the only blog I write for. I'm currently employed at the Indiana University--Bloomington Undergraduate Library, where I'm responsible for the blog. This means that I get to do all the coding and the majority of the entries themselves. The entries range in topics, but I always try and bring the library and library resources into the mix. Take a look! Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23: Entry 10 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=8 Take a look at my portfolio , and you'll find a link to Dadugo . This is a web program that I wrote for my wife to help her organize her dissertation research. We have it running on a Linux server here at home (which is inaccessible to the public). The idea behind Dadugo is that we should categorize images by hierarchies rather than just tags, such as what we see in sites like Flickr. However, using hierarchies is reminiscent of the idea behind library classification: begin broad and then narrow the topic. My metadata on the sample site on the Indiana U. SLIS server is pretty messy, but it works very well when using a stricter, faceted approach, such as what we are using for my wife's research. Dadugo uses Ajax to retrieve the results immediately, with PHP+PostgreSQL running on the server. I've only tested it with Apache, but it may work on Lighttp or IIS as well. I plan to port the program over to MySQL and fix a few bugs before I release it under the GPL. Sat, 10 Nov 2007 22: Entry 8 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=7 I caught this picture on Digg earlier today. The image is meant to break down and annotate beautiful layout of the code itself, ignoring the actual result. Indeed, the example is very nice, but there is one thing I take issue with: metatags. I know, they aren't really talking about content, but I still like to think that HTML we champion should have appropriate metadata, and I also think that many designers today are prone to ignoring this. I'm of the opinion that all pages should include Dublin Core or some other standardized meta-schema. This is especially true for libraries, who often share information through OAI. Granted, even many of my own older pages lack good Dublin Core, but this is a trend I've been working to change for some time now. Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11: Entry 7 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=6 So much to nobody's surprise, Google made an official announcement yesterday regarding this supposed Google phone everyone's been speculating about. Turns out, there is no Google phone at all, just the introduction of a new completely open source mobile framework, headed by Google and with several major cellphone providers as partners. For me, this news is even more encouraging than just hearing about Google's answer to the iPhone. Following the announcement, the OpenMoko lists were all abuzz with all kinds of doom-and-gloom about how this would spell the end of the OpenMoko project, but I'm a little less pessimistic. I worry that once you have the big cell companies in the game, things get troublesome. I'm not so worried about Google, a company which I find to be generally quite friendly to the open source community, but I have to wonder: what do the cell companies stand to gain out of this partnership, and what does it mean for the consumers? OpenMoko is still a safe bet in my books. I'm of the opinion that open source is about diversity, and the marketplace needs competition in order to sharpen both products. Besides, it won't be long until Android applications work on OpenMoko and vice-versa, so in the end, everyone will win. Besides, to some of us, the idea of a smart phone that has no ties to the major cellular providers is quite enticing. Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21: Entry 6 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=5 Yes, I know that opacity isn't allowed, and that it will never allow my CSS to validate. Still, sometimes I break that little rule in order to achieve a particular affect. For example, on this site, I use a bit of opacity on my form elements to allow the background to peer through. One thing to keep in mind is that Internet Explorer 7 uses different opacity tags than other browsers, particularly those related to Mozilla. In Mozilla, you would achieve opacity using: "opacity: .5", but in IE7, you need to send it through a filter. An example of this would be: filter: "alpha(opacity='50')". Just a note. Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16: Entry 5 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=3 I've been following the OpenMoko project for quite some time now, and I'm excited to see that Rasterman, project head of Enlightenment, has officially joined the OpenMoko ranks. This is excellent news. Rasterman is one of these rare programmers who focuses on art and design rather than just the code. Very cool. Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16: Entry 3 http://www.jeremygottwig.com/static.php?d=1 Greetings. Welcome to my blog, which is also the maiden voyage of my Shinto-Blog software. I will be releasing the Shinto-Blog code very soon. The big advantage of this software is that you can drop it into any website, just by placing a single include file into the HTML. Anyway, thanks for visiting. 2007-11-02T01:08:50 Entry 1