Over the last two weeks Ive ported all old neverendingbooks-post from the last 4 years to a nearly readable format. Some tiny problems remain : a few TeX-heavy old posts are still in $…$ format rather than LaTeXrender-compatible (but Ill fix this soon), a few links may turn out to be dead (still have to check out those), TheLibrary-project links do not exist at the moment (have to decide whether to revive the project or to start a similar idea afresh), some other techie-things such as FoaF-stuff will be updated/expanded soon, et. etc. (and still have to port some 20 odd posts).

Anyway, the good news being that we went from about 40 posts since last july to over 310 posts, all open to the internal Search engine. Having all this stuff online is only useful if one can browse through it easily, so I wanted to install a proper up-to-date archive-plugin…

The current theme Redoable has build-in support for the Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18 plugin which would be ideal if I could get it installed… Im not the total newbie in installing WordPress-plugins and Ive read all the documentation and the support-forum and chmodded whathever I felt like chmodding, but still no success… If you know how to kick it into caching the necessary files, please drop a comment!

The next alternative Ive tried was the AWSOM Archive Version 1.2.3 plugin which gave me a pull-down menu just under the title-bar but not much seems to happen when using bloody Safari (Flock was OK though). Maybe Ill give it another go…

UPDATE (jan. 9th) : The AWSOM Archive seems to be working fine with the Redoable theme when custom installed in the footer. So, there is now a pulldown-menu at the bottom of the page.

**UPDATE (jan. 12th) : Ive installed the new version 1.3 of AWSOM Archive and it works from the default position **

At a loss I opted in the end for the simplest (though not the most aesthetic) plugin : Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. This provides a year-month scheme at the top followed by a reverse ordered list of all months and titles of posts and is available as the arXiv neverendingbooks link available also from the sidebar (up, second link). I hope it will help you not to get too lost on this site…

Suggestions for a working-from-the-box WordPress Archive plugin, anyone???

In the ‘subscribe to my brain’ post I promised to blog on how-to get your own

button up and running on your homepage. It seems rather unlikely that I’ll ever keep that promise if I don’t do it right away. So, here we go for a quick tour :

step 1 : set up a rudimentary FoaF-file : read the FoaF post if you dont know what it’s all about. The easiest way to get a simple FoaF-file of your own is to go to the FoaF-a-matic webpage and fill in the details you feel like broadcasting over the web, crucial is your name and email information (for later use) but clearly the more details you fill out and the more Friends you add the more useful your file becomes. Click on the ‘foaf-me’ button and copy the content created. Observe that there is no sign of my email adress, it is encrypted in the mboxsha1sum data. Give this file a name like foaf.rdf or myname.rdf and put it on your webserver to make it accessible. Also copy your mboxsha1sum info for later smushing.

step 2 : subscribe to online services and modify your online-life accordingly : probably you have already a few of these accounts, but if not, take a free subscription just for fun and (hopefully) later usage to the following sites :

• del.icio.us a social bookmarks manager
• citeUlike a service to organise your academic papers
• connotea a reference management service for scientists
• bloglines a web-based personal news aggregator
• 43things a ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ service
• audioscrobbler a database that tracks listening habits and does wonderful things with statistics
• backpackit a ‘be better organized’ service
• flickr an online photo management and sharing application
• technorati a Google-for-weblogs
• upcoming a social event calendar
• webjay a playlist community

So far, I’m addicted to del.icio.us and use citeUlike but hardly any of the others (but I may come back to this later). The great thing about these services is that you get more value-information back if you feed more into the system. For example, if you use del.icio.us as your ‘public’ bookmarks-file you get to know how many other people have bookmarked the same site and you can access their full bookmarks which often is a far more sensible way to get at the information you are after than mindless Googling. So, whereas I was at first a bit opposed to the exhibisionist-character of these services (after all, anyone with web-access can have a look at ‘your’ info), I’ve learned that the ‘social’ feature of these services can be beneficial to get the right information I want. Hence, the hardest part is not to get an account with these services but to adopt your surfing behavior in such a way that you maximize this added value. And, as I mentioned before, I’m doing badly myself but hope that things will improve…

step 3 : turn these accounts into an OPML file : Knowing the URL of your foaf-file and sha1-info (step 1) and your online accounts, go to the FOAF Online Account Description Generator and feed it with your data. You will then get another foaf-file back (save the source in a file such as accounts.rdf and put it on your webserver). Read the Lost Boy’s posts Subscribe to my brain and foaf: OnlineAccount Generator for more background info. Then, use the SubscribeToMyBrain- form to get an OPML-file out of the account.rdf file and your sha1. Save the source as mybrain.opml.

step 4 : add/delete information you want : The above method uses generic schemes to deduce relevant RSS-data from an account name, which works for some services, but doesn’t for all. So, if you happen to know the URL of RSS-feeds for one of these services, you can always add it manually to the OPML-file (or delete data you don’t want to publish…). My own attitude is to make all public web-data available and to leave it to the subscriber to unsubscribe those parts of my brain (s)he is not interested in. I know there are people whoo are mainly interested to find out whether I put another paper online, would tolerate some weblog-posts but have no interest in my musical tast, whereas there are others who would like me to post more on 43things, flickr or upcoming and don’t give a damn about my mathematics… Apart from these online subscriptions, it is also a good idea to include additional RSS-feeds you produce, such as those of your weblog or use my Perl script to have your own arXiv-feeds.

step 5 : make your ‘subscribe to my brain’-button : Now, put the OPML-file on your webserver, put the button

on your homepage and link it to the file. Also, add information on your site, similar to the one I gave in my own subscription post so that your readers know what to do when do want to subscribe to (parts of) your brain. Finally, (and optionally though I’d wellcome it) send me an email with your URL so that I can subscribe (next time you’re in Antwerp I’ll buy you a beer) and for the first few who do so and are working in noncommutative geometry and/or noncommutative algebra, I’ll send a copy of a neverending book. Mind you, this doesn’t apply to local people, I’m already subscribed to their brain on a daily basis…

Freewheeling on your interests may lead to interesting discoveries. Today I wanted to add some meat to my FoaF file and discovered in the vocabulary the foaf:meyersBriggs tag

The foaf:myersBriggs property represents the Myers Briggs (MBTI) approach to personality taxonomy. It is included in FOAF as an example of a property that takes certain constrained values, and to give some additional detail to the FOAF files of those who choose to include it. The foaf:myersBriggs property applies only to the foaf:Person class; wherever you see it, you can infer it is being applied to a person.
The foaf:myersBriggs property is interesting in that it illustrates how FOAF can serve as a carrier for various kinds of information, without necessarily being commited to any associated worldview. Not everyone will find myersBriggs (or star signs, or blood types, or the four humours) a useful perspective on human behaviour and personality. The inclusion of a Myers Briggs property doesn’t indicate that FOAF endorses the underlying theory, any more than the existence of foaf:weblog is an endorsement of soapboxes.

Okay, but how to determine your MB-type (after all there are just 16 such types)? Clearly, you can consult the official Myers-Briggs page. You can also follow the online Test, but by far the quickest way to determine your type is to look up the Myers-Briggs intro. One makes four choices between 2 options (pretty obvious, at least to me). In a few seconds it was clear to me that I had to be an INTJ-personality. But, what does this mean? There is an excellent page The Personality Type Portraits explaining what kind of information is contained in your MB-type : ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers
ESTJ - The Guardians
ISFJ - The Nurturers
ESFJ - The Caregivers
ISTP - The Mechanics
ESTP - The Doers
ESFP - The Performers
ISFP - The Artists
ENTJ - The Executives
INTJ - The Scientists
ENTP - The Visionaries
INTP - The Thinkers
ENFJ - The Givers
INFJ - The Protectors
ENFP - The Inspirers
INFP - The Idealists
This may look like a self-fulfilling phrophecy but I swear I didn’t know any of these types before. Still, let’s have a look how a typical INTJ is supposed to interact with others

Other people may have a difficult time understanding an INTJ. They may see them as aloof and reserved. Indeed, the INTJ is not overly demonstrative of their affections, and is likely to not give as much praise or positive support as others may need or desire. That doesn’t mean that he or she doesn’t truly have affection or regard for others, they simply do not typically feel the need to express it.

sounds familiar? Another eye-opener

When under a great deal of stress, the INTJ may become obsessed with mindless repetitive, Sensate activities, such as over-drinking. They may also tend to become absorbed with minutia and details that they would not normally consider important to their overall goal.

Fortunately, I ended up with a common career for my MB-type…

Clearly, someone who subscribed to your brain shouldn’t have to check the arXiv every morning only to find out that you still haven’t posted the paper s(h)e is expecting of you, based on your recent BrainActivity…

So why not package this into your Brain subscription? It is easy enough to get all posts by a specific author from the archive but, unfortunately, the arXiv doesn’t provide RSS-feeds of this information (at least, not to my knowledge). Still, it is possible to fix this with a tiny Perl-script.

So copy the code and adjust it replacing MyInfo by Yours (or sligthly safer, get the arxivpost.pl file as I had to add a few spaces to get it un-parsed) and safe it somewhere on your system.

So how to put this to use? Btw. I know that all of you know this by heart and that I may have given you the (false, i swear) illusion to be fairly knowledgeable writing a Perl-script in half an hour, but believe me, in two months (and sooner when it’s up to me) I will have completely eradicated all this techie-stuff from MyBrain. Then, it will take me infinitely longer to remember/reconstruct things than it will take me now to blog this here, so please either bear with me or go somewhere more interesting.

You’d better have Perl installed on your system, but then you have to install extra modules from CPAN the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (this is to Perl what CTAN is to TeX for the mathematicians among us). That’s pretty easy if you remember the correct commands. The generic way to do this is by firing up your Terminal and typing things like

 iBookLieven:~ lieven$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
Password:  cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation
(v1.83) ReadLine support enabled  cpan> install Template::Extract

and similarly for the other modules you’ll need, LWP::Simple and XML::RSS. You may be asked questions but just go for the default. If something goes wrong and you get a message that the module failed to install, you have to go for a manual override…

Go to CPAN and do a search on the module’s name. You’ll be given a list op files to download, go for the one you need and download the souce somewhere. Then, again in Terminal do the following routine

• cd to the downloaded and extracted directory
• perl Makefile.PL
• make
• make test
• sudo make install

Even if the test fails with certain errors, just go ahead (it will not matter for the trivial uses we have for these modules) and the last command is Mac OSX only (I’m pretty certain that Linux-fanatics know what to do instead and for Windows-diehards, well….).

Having all modules installed you can execute the file with

perl arxivpost.pl

(assuming you created the Directory in which the program is supposed to safe the arxivXXX.rdf file and assuming you made it writable). That’s it. You now have your own RSS feeds of all your papers on the arXiv which you should make for of YourBrain subscription).

Just one more thing you should do. Make this a cron job. Check at what local time the arXiv puts online the new papers of the day (assume it is 3am) then do a sudo crontab -e and then add a line to the file as

5 3 * * Mon-Fri perl /pathtowhereitis/arxivpost.pl

and your subscribers will only have to wait 5 minutes to know whether you did it…(or not). You can check it out either by subscribing to MyBrain or subscribing to http://www. neverendingbooks.org/FOAF/arxivLLB.rdf.

or rather, I’d like to subscribe to your brain! But I figure you’d allow this (at best) only on a ’share-alike’ basis so let me take the first step. Maybe you already have your newsaggregator pointed to this weblog, but what if you could be able to follow all traces I leave on the web (or at least those you feel like following)? It’s a great idea which started off with a couple of posts. Like John Resig’s Life as RSS

A little while ago I began to realize just how much of my personal information is digitally created every day. This is both scary and enticing (to me). Scary, due to the fact that people can harness this information for evil/marketing. Enticing because I should be able to (theoretically) harness this information to provide a better user experience for the people who care (me and my friends, I assume). So, the other day I sat down and tried to figure out every accessible data medium that I generate and have access to.
… My masterplan: Essentially, an RSS aggregator (makes sense, nothing special) that pulls all of my personal RSS feeds into one place and provides an overall statistical view of the information that it contains. I may even provide some detailed information, save for things in the ‘Personal’ category. What I like about this is the fact that most of this information is completely public (or is possible to make completely public) - they’re all using common/widely available programs or tools. So, stage one: Set up a personal life browser - stage two: Open it up for the world to play with.

soon to be followed upp by Lost Boy’s My Life in RDF and continued by Louche Cannon I want to subscribe to your brain

The other day I was talking to a former colleague and I was trying to explain how I have gradually switched to using an assortment of social content tools as my primary mechanism for finding relevant and authoritative information on the web. With these tools, I can subscribe to an assortment of RSS feeds produced by people who I trust and think of as authorities in their respective subjects. In short, I said, “I can subscribe to their brains”.
Or at least I can in theory! At the moment, for those of non-geekly tendencies, the practicalities of “subscribing to somebody’s brain” are a little daunting. If you have an RSS-aware browser or have installed one of the useful bookmarklets provided by the likes of bloglines, then subscribing to individual RSS feeds is relatively easy. The problem is that I might be interested subscribing to:
- What person X is blogging
- What person X is bookmarking- on several social bookmarking sites (e.g. del.isio.us, CiteULike, Furl)
- What person X is listening to (e.g. AudioScrobbler)
- What person X is taking pictures of (e.g. Flickr)
- What person X’s travel schedule is (e.g. iCal)
- What books X is reading or planning on reading (e.g. Amazon wish lists)
The first problem is finding out what feeds person X provides. Most of the time you have to ask them, or search through the individual services for the person’s name. If you are dealing with a relatively clued-in person, you might be lucky enough to find links to their various feeds off of their home page or in the margins of their blogs. If you are dealing with an uber-geek, then you might find this information encoded in their FOAF file. All that seems to be missing is the button titled “Subscribe to X’s Brain”.

While it is still a Work In Progress (and will continue to be for some time as I’d like to get used to the idea and explore its possibilities) you’ll find a button to ’subscribe to my brain’ on the buttom left. Look out for this : Click on it and you’ll stare at a text-file. Save it to your desktop, fire up your Newsaggregator (which I assume is something like NetNewsWire ). Look under ‘File’ for ‘Import Subscriptions’ and open the saved BrainLeBruynL.opml-file. It will make a folder with name the present date&time but you can always rename the folder to something like ‘Lieven’s brain’… Then you will look at something like
which will give you a pretty good idea of what I was upto just now (posting a few references on Cuntz and Berest to CiteULike while listening to Rebekka Bakken via iTunes. If you’ll open up the folder you get an even clearer picture which tells you that since last time I’ve posted three new references to CiteULike,I listened to at least 10 new songs (Audioscrobbler only remember the last 10 ones) and that there is one new post here! You can also check on my recent bookmarks at del.icio.us and over the next few weeks you may also detect activity in a few other places (and I may add an arXiv scraper just in case you think I’m not posting there anymore). Clearly, it is up to you to unsubscribe to those regions of my brain you don’t care to follow but the overall picture may give you a pretty accurate picture of my present ’state of mind’. In the coming posts I’ll take you through the process of setting up a ’subscribe to my brain’ for yourself and I’ll explore (for myself) some of the possible uses of this scheme. The ultmate aim being to see buttons like appear on your site as well!