Author Archives: paolo

NeverForgetAttachment: Thunderbird extension needed

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thunderbird_extension_snapshot002.pngHave you ever sent an email writing “in attachment you can find…” and then forgot to attach the file? Have you ever received such an email? I guess so. At least I had, many times. So, I’m invoking the LazyWeb and asking for an extension to the free software mail reader Thunderbird (link not working at the moment, use the cached version). A name for the extension can be NeverForgetAttachment but of course the creator will decide the name. How could the extension work? Version 0.1 will simply look for the words “attach” or “attachment” and, in case they are present and there is no attachment when the user clicks the send button, a small window such as the one you see in this post will popup and asks the user if she wants to attach a file. Following versions can even use some machine learning in order to learn which words (or combination of words) refer to an email with a desired attachment and which don’t and react consequently. This can especially be the case if the author don’t want to enter the relative “attach” word for every language in the world. Ok, I’m waiting for someone to create the extension, could this be you?

The Wired CD: Fight for your right to copy

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The WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.. First example of creative commons cd, I hope many will follow this bright example. You can listen to the songs streaming the related WebJay compilation (once there, just click on “play page”).
Songs are released under 2 creative commons licences:
Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommercial sharing and commercial sampling, but advertising uses are restricted.
Noncommercial Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommerical sharing and noncommercial sampling.
Buy Wired if you want the cd. The front cover says: “Fight for your right to copy”.
UPDATE: I started reading Wired and found this great article: We pledge allegiance to the penguin, and the intellectual property regime for which he stands. One nation, under Linux, with free music and open source software for all. Welcome to Brazil!. Every day I found one more reason to move to Brazil, when I’ll finish my PhD.

Search engine switch

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While the evil company launches its search engine (no link – no pagerank), i finally decided to make the switch to Yahoo! search engine. If you use firefox (you should!), it is as easy as changing the icon in the top-right box (mycroft).
[This blog is 1st results if you search for Paolo, in Yahoo! but of course this is not the only reason I switched ;-) I like to promote some diversity in the search engine arena as well]

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers

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[I’ll write something about my trip in Israel later on, as time permits]
I just found on HubLog an online service I was really waiting for: CiteULike (a prototype service to manage your personal library of academic papers). When you are logged in and visiting a page related to a paper, you can post that paper to your online library using a bookmarklet. In doing so, you can also specify tags, a list of keywords you’d like to associate with this article (a la del.icio.us and flickr) and optional notes. The service is very similar to del.icio.us (simple, tag-powered and social), but precisely tailored for academic papers. You can also see all the papers tagged under a certain tag (for example networks). Cool!
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Travelling to Cyprus and Israel

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I’m at Coopis 2004 right now (in Agia Napa, Cyprus) and next week I’ll move to Jerusalem in order to meet Zvi and other people of the Multiagent Systems Research Group of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I’ll be back in my office on November 9.
I was hoping to do a lot of work during the coopis conference but the wireless network is not working very well and so expect few or no blogging at all.
I almost forgot to say that I’m presenting “Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems” (find it under papers section). Check it out if you are interested in Recommender Systems and Trust.

Repository of category-tagged blog posts: anyone?

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Some colleagues of mine are working on “how people can reach a shared common dictionary/language to denote concepts” (or at least understand each other still using their keywords). See Advertising games. We want to test ideas using real data from the blogosphere. The idea is to detect when 2 bloggers are posting about the same concept/topic but use different names to tag it (the post’s category). For example, I use “trust and reputation”, someone else uses “reputation” but we may speak about the same concept.
The questions:
– There is an aggregated repository of posts with categories?
– If not, Have you any idea about how can I collect this information?
Requirement:
– posts must have a category associated (livejournal and blogger don’t let do this, while MovableType and WordPress yes).
Some ongoing web search about the topic we’re doing can be found at this wiki page, and this too. Thanks for help!

Brain-computer direct interface

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100 electrodes implanted directly into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic man allows him to control computer directly and hence play videogames and check email. Read the article in Nature . I would be interested in reading the explanation of the man on how he learnt to control the computer and how he feels in controlling it. The similar questions are: “how have you learnt to move your finger?” and “how do you feel when you move a finger?”. It is something it is difficult (or impossible?) to explain, it just seems natural. I may guess it is the same for the man and his brain control on the computer. Unluckly the article does not analyze this. (found via BoingBoing)

Enormous P2P Network by Google

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When millions of users will have Desktop.google.com installed, Google will simply release a new version in which the user can check a box and say “Share the files in my disk” (maybe only files in a certain directory). This will create in a second an enormous P2P (peer-to-peer) network, in which you can search for files directly on other users’ disks. What do you think? Make sense?
UPDATE: If I were Google, I let users choose also “share your files only with your friends on Orkut”. In this way Orkut would becoma a uber-useful network (now is a bit pointless), and Google Corporation will have all the worlds users for all the services. And increase what it knows.

What Google knows about you

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Just few days ago I was commenting on new google features and now we have another one: Desktop.google.com. It allows to index and search every file stored in your filesystem, every site in your Internet Explorer cache, every email in your Outlook, every chat/instant message in your AOL. (It is only for Window$ so I have no way to try it.)
This reminded me of a post of Alf Eaton:Things Google knows about you. The list (now increased) is pretty scary.
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