Singpolyma

Retreat, Date, Trip

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Those extremely interested in more information on the ‘retreat and date’, which I will be sumarrizing here, may look at my brother’s beautiful writeup. The retreat being referred to would be the Palmview School Annual Retreat. Bible study, snack, food, snack, games, snack, singing, food, fun, snack, snack… maybe I’m exaggerating about the snacks 😉 Aunt Mary and her wonderful acolyte Asheley did the Bible studies (on excellence), my brother did the beautiful musicalness, and my mother did the games, snacks, etc 😉 We did a bonfire, a HUGE bonfire, so that was fun. They all slept outside in tents — not for me, no thanks! A certain someone would have to twist my arm pretty bad to get me to do that (or my parents order me :P) so I slept in my bed like a civilized person. Games included a sort of mini-golf which I totally bombed but had fun at anyway. Food included hamburgers and (wonder of wonders!) hotdogs. Plus we made tie-dyed tees! 😀 *is so happy* Mine came out with an awesome totally multi-colourishious sworl. I shall muchly be wearing cet un 😀

Date, date… ah, yes, date! That was Aunt Mary and Asheley taking Daniel and I out to dinner. We were the chaperones 😉 Think guys chaperoning girls seems backwards? Tough! teehee 😉 it was a lot of fun, and Aunt Mary gave us both a copy of The Prayer of Jabez — I’m mostly done mine already 😀 Really good book.

Trip. Fall. Spat! Wait, uh, no, not that kind of trip. I went on a day-trip with (vous avez eu!) Aunt Mary and Asheley yesterday. They had a meeting to decide the fate of a youth camp they’ve been planning. It was a good Chadian experiance for me, especially right before I leave for good. Beigné (French for doughnuts, but these aren’t quite doughnuts, we just call em that), sugared milk, peanuts, boule, and two glasses of utterly revolting tea. Not the nice red-so-much-sugar-your-teeth-rot-before-you-finish shai, but some sort of herbal coffee bitter less-sugar thing 😛 Ah, well, on survive.

I’m going to NDJ with Dad on Monday for one week, and may or may not be out of contact during that time — I have no idea. Going to have a peek at their computer system et chose comme sa, haha. Have I totally annoyed you with all the French thrown into this post? rofl, sorry, still in semi-french mode from yesterday 😉 I’m sure you’ll all live — if any of you even read this. With Chels grounded and Trev busy I probably just have the occasional visit (which I know I have, but it’s not regular), but anyway, yup, uh huh, yayayayayayaya — lol, you’d have to see the movie 😉

Until I see you or see you not or post or email or chat/IM + write again I shall not have, uh, done any of that… ya, teehee 😀

Virtually Synonymous Tags

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Most of us are aware of the problem. If I tag this post ‘web2.0’ and you monitor Technorati for the tag ‘web20’ then we’re sunk. You’ll never find me. If I tag a webpage on del.icio.us as ‘hacks’ and you monitor the page for ‘hack’, you may never see it. These tags are virtually synonymous, but a computer can’t tell that.

Enter Tagging, a new Ning app designed to solve this very problem. The app stores groups of virtually synonymous tags (or TagGroups) that are defined by the community and provides easy access to them via both XOXO and JSON(P) APIs. With space to clearly define and describe TagGroups and a coComment catch-all discussion system the community solves their own problem by defining for the system what tags mean the same thing.

For more information see the Tagging About Page.

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Slide Shows with XOXO (S5)

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If you combine S5 with XOXO you get a format you can use to build simple slideshows for the internet and that makes sense to microformats parsers. S5 is a simple slideshow system with many features that can pull the data for slides right out of an XOXO block. To use S5 you will have to download the JavaScript and CSS files from the homepage and then build a page with slide content that links in these files. While there is a quite adequate S5-with-XOXO reference, the format will be summarised here for completeness.

Notes
S5 documents must be DOCTYPE XHTML 1.0 Strict, and there are certain <meta> tags that are required. See the specification for more details.

Meta Data
Meta data in S5 is encapsulated in a set of <meta> tags. This means that the data will not be available to XOXO-only processors. The page <title> must be the title of the presentation and the <meta name=”version” content=”S5 1.1″ /> element is also required, along with the tags to include the JavaScript and basic CSS.

There is also a controls/header/footer section that must be present first in the <body> tag before the XOXO data. The code for this section follows:

<div class=”layout”>
<div id=”controls”><!– DO NOT EDIT –></div>
<div id=”currentSlide”><!– DO NOT EDIT –></div>
<div id=”header”>
SLIDESHOW HEADER
</div>
<div id=”footer”>
SLIDESHOW FOOTER
</div>

Where SLIDESHOW HEADER and SLIDESHOW FOOTER are the contents for the header and footer of the slideshow, respectively.

Classes
In order for the S5 code to interface with your data properly the class ‘presentation’ must be present on the main <ol> or <ul> tag. The class ‘xoxo’ is also reccomended in accordance with the XOXO specification.

Nodes
Each root node in the XOXO tree for the slides must have the class ‘slide’. The direct contents of the node (along with any XHTML markup) are considered to be the text (/images etc.) of the slide. If the first element in the node is an <h1> element the contents of that tag are considred the title of the slide. Subnodes are rendered as points in the presentation. If the <ul> or <ol> root tag for the subpoints has the class ‘incremental’ the points will be introduced one at a time. Additionally a <div> element of class ‘handout’ will not be rendered on-screen but only when the presentation is printed.

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Yurnet : When You Don’t Know Where to Look

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Yurnet is a search engine with an interesting model — search for things instead of in places. If you want to search for DVDs, but don’t know what engine to use to do that, you could search Google for an appropriate engine, then search that engine, or just go to Yurnet and pick ‘dvd’.

Yurnet takes awhile to get your head around. That’s because at first it looks like a cheesy metasearch engine. If you’re still thinking search where it seems almost rediculous. Which is faster : going to Google Images and searching for what you want or going to Yurnet, picking Google Images, and searching? The answer is they’re basically the same. After corrospondence back and forth to the site creator, however, I finally came to understand that the real point of Yurnet is search what for when you don’t know what site to search.

That said, the site is rather ugly. The final resolved URL is http://ww2.yurnet.com:8080/ — not exactly something that looks pretty in bookmarks. The drop-down select box is a mélange of capitalization schemes, and the ‘vs’ searches (which really are out of the scope of the site) are listed first, giving an initial illusion that alphabetical order is not preserved. Also, some things are listed as wheres still (ie Google Image). Realistically the box should be cleaned up to use the same capitalization schemes throughout and be only a list of whats in alphabetical order, without engine names and the like getting in the way.

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Going Down

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Often on weekends a thought pops into my head — ‘I should do a personal post on all that’s happening!’. I begin to mentally catalogue what the post will contain so I’m ready. By the time Monday comes and I sit to write… nothing comes. Aint that the way of it? I guess a breif update on the state of affairs in Chad is in order. Elections went well and rebel activity seems to be back to normal. Of course that’s all unpredictable, but everything’s looking fine as of now. I burned a backup of all our data onto DVD the other day, which took forever, but is well worth it to have all our data on a nice small disk 🙂 I’ve done almost no school today. All I have left is my English final and Math stuff. Yup, kinda cool.

We watched The Sound of Music on Saturday — really funny! J’adore ces anciens films! 😉 We also got this new season pack from Uncle Larry… 24. It’s 24 1-hour episodes that each cover 1 hour of time over a whole day. Really well done, and really addicting. They always leave you hanging!

Man it’s hot here! Blah! The time to Chels’ return is approaching, but it still a fair ways off. Of course we’ll get but a breif time to talk and then both will be off to Canada and readjustment scedules. Deputation for her (bleagh!) and random whoknowswhat for me. mmm. *thinks* I should say something else, but my mind has gone blank… maybe I’ll go write a chapter in my book, hehe, I got some inpiration the other day so it should be easier 😉

’til I next do post or chat or whatever avec thou