Ubuntu 8.10 Upgrade: (re)Enabling Wireless Access

During both an upgrade install (from 8.04 on a Dell x100) and a fresh install (on a Dell D600), my wireless networking vanished. There may be several solutions for this, but the one that has worked for me (so far) is the one I found on the UbuntuForum, by Moly. I haven't tried something similar on my Macbook ... yet ...

Re: kwlan disabled my eth0 and eth1 ports; how to reenable?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=96538

Moly reports

I seem to have fixed it. I went to /etc/network/interfaces and found Code:


# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

So I uncommented out the last line, and added Code:


# The wireless network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

and then I restarted the network with Code:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Dear Professor, Can we chat ...

In a survey released by CDW-G, 39 percent of college students say they want regular online chats with faculty. The students are likely to be disappointed, according to the report. Only 23 percent of IT staff surveyed aid their campus offered that kind of electronic faculty-student contact. Faculty, however, have found work arounds ... a diverse mix of tools supports communication -- more at http://tinyurl.com/4mxveu

Cartoon from http://www.inkcinct.com.au/Web/CARTOONS/2006/2006-553-Genghis-Khan-teaching.jpg

Visualizing Text with Wordle

This morning I was inspired to do a bit of word cloud exploration ...

I was prompted by a general tweet from Kevin Lim about "making beautiful word clouds using wordle.net. He had constructed a word cloud based on his del.icio.us entries ...

Kevin, in turn, was prompted by Henry Farrell's posting of his text cloud based on his book “The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation” ...

Henry was reacting to Steven Poole's posting of the word cloud based on "Unspeak" ...

So, what does it all mean?

At the simplest level, a "word cloud" ("text cloud", "tag cloud" in the case of a blog) displays words whose font size is proportional to that word's frequency of occurrence in the analyzed text. It's a graphical concordance.

The placement of the graphemes, however, is not so rigid. Some clouds display the words according to size (boring :)), some alphabetically (not as boring), and some use algorithms that are not always published (interesting, since one is left to guess the algorithm).

The process can be made more analytical and comparative ... the IBM's Many Eyes project can compare two text clouds (recent examples were campaign speaches by Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama ... expect more of this genre this fall).

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Henry Farrell, Wordle, http://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/21/wordle/

Kevin Lim, Wordle: Make beautiful textclouds…, http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=2285

Many Eyes, http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home

Steven Pool, Can Freedom Possible, http://unspeak.net/can-freedom-possible/

Wordle, http://wordle.net/

Understanding the Technologies behind Google ranking

In a post to the googgleblog, Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking, Amit Singhai, Google Fellow, writes:

As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See "Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.

Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.

Official continue reading ...

Joi Ito explains the Creative Commons to Loic Le Meur

Joi Ito explains the Creative Commons to Loic Le Meur

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Note: July 21. While correcting a typo in the title of this post, I discovered some link rot. The video is no longer available. Youtube reports "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." That's the only information - as if there were only one term of use.

I originally found it on Joi Ito's own blog at http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/04/17/chat-with-loic.html ... so at least one of the parties in the interview was agreeable to it's being posted. He and Loic were discussing "old" and "new" media at Cannes in April.

On the blog (and on other references to the post), there were no production credits (as one would find on an AP or Reuters photograph). From what I recall, it seemed to be produced by a handheld camera, though probably not a keitai camera.

Loic's blog entry Joi Ito explains Creative Commons in Seesmic du Jour 124 links to the same [yanked] video.

A google search for [Joi Ito chats with Loic Le Meur about the Creative Commons] finds an edited version of this video at one of Loic Le Meur's podcast site -- as Seesmic du Jour 124: Joi Ito in Cannes, which opens at blip.tv .

Wonder what the story is. How did this get pulled ? Is all of Cannes copyrighted ? Who complained ? Was Youtube hacked ? Curious minds want to know.

Tagged in Motion

Hamburg artist DAIM sprays graffiti into the empty space in a large hall. Three cameras capture his position and movements as he paints with a virtual spray can. The assimilated data is shown to him in real time in a pair of video glasses — as free-floating 3D graffiti in space. His extended reality becomes a three-dimensional canvas, on which something completely new is created: street art of the next generation!

From Jung von Matt, Hamburg,Germany at nextwall.com

Text Clouds and Workshop Evaluations

Often we are faced with evaluating comments, suggestions, and survey questions frequently taken from small groups. Other than just reading the comments and sifting through them mentally, is there any (easy) way to get a view of "what they all mean?"

Last week, Kevin Lim mashed up web 2.0 style tagging with a small survey and came up with a text cloud visualization of "Workshop Participants Expectations: Facebook Strategies for the Classroom" for a workshop he led at the University of Buffalo [1], [2], [3]. Despited the non-linear, non-narrative presentation, one gets the sense that a theme is evolving.

A google search quickly came up with a series of "cut and paste" tools for creating these text clouds as well as a short article suggesting other explorations -- including turning one's Ph.D. thesis into a text cloud.

Tags: Text Analysis Visualization

[1] Kevin Lim, February 21, 2008. Workshop Participants Expectations: Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/2282511064/

[2] Kevin Lim, February 22, 2008. Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/sets/72157603961197338/

[3] Kevin Lim, February 20, 2008. Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28579140444

[2] http://tagcrowd.com/

[3] http://tocloud.com/

[4] Joe Lamantia, Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?, March 15, 2007. http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/tag_clouds/text_clouds_a_new_form_of_tag_cloud.html