Theoreti.ca – Page 210 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

More on Mindmapping

In a previous blog I wrote about Mind Mapping and software that supports it. This came from a one day workshop. I just got the notes from the workshop and here are some of the mindmapping tools that were mentioned:

VisualMind, Pricing: Basic $69.00usd, Business $149.00usd
Freemind, Free software
MindManager, Pricing: MindManager X5Pro $284.05usd, MindManager X5 $199.00usd (Prices increasing Jan 1st, 2005)
NovaMind Price $103.00cad
Map It, Price $78.00usd
Mindgenius, MindGenius business $189 MindGenius education $97 MindGenius home $53 MindGenius brainbloom $53
Visimap, Price $125.00usd
Openmind, Price $249.00usd

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Trip Report on Face of Text

Vika at Brown posted a series of trip reports on the conference we organized here, Trip report: The Face of Text. It is one of several posts and is the most thorough trip report I think I have ever read. For the conference site, see The Face of Text. This is courtesy of James Chartrand.

Google vs. Microsoft

What’s Next for Google is an indepth article by Charles H. Ferguson from the January 2005 issue of Technology Review (from MIT.) The article looks at Google and how it might respond if Microsoft seriously decides to dominate the search engine business.
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PubSub web tracking

PubSub is a cool site that will track keywords. You subscribe to a set of words and then it tracks those for you and you can read your subscriptions in a news aggregator.
What is particularly impressive is the opening interface which lets you start using without getting an account or anything. As an example of how to get someone started with a service, it is one of the best I have seen. Pity you don’t actually get any results immediately.
How can we do this for humanities research?

How much information? 2003

How Much Information? 2003 is a new version of How Much Information? 2000. They both try to estimate how much information was produced and in what form (from magnetic media to film.) These reports are thorough and fascinating.
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Mac Web Mining

METAfy has a Mac OS X Web Mining tool called > Web Mining Automation Software for MacOS X” href=”http://www.metafy.com/index.html”>Anthracite which, from the screen shots, uses a visual programming paradigm. Looks neat.
I found this on a page on Data Mining Resources that is a Subject Tracer Information Blog. See Deep Web Research Subject Tracer.

In the beginning was the command line, v. 2

The Command Line In 2004 is an annotated version of Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”. Garrett Birkel got permission to update it with annotations.
See my previous entry on the Stephenson original at, grockwel: Research Notes: Stephenson: In the beginning was the command line. This is from Slashdot.

Advice for College Students

Joel on Software – Advice for Computer Science College Students is an essay by a programmer about what computer science students should do when in college. Good common sense written in an amusing voice. I wonder what similar advice for humanities students would be?
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nfg games

NFG Games Nintendo Official Magazine Present – A Mario Sprite History is a cute story about the evolution of the Mario character on the Nintendo game platform. This is from a neat news/blog site I discovered on gaming called nfg.2y.net – Games Division. The author claims it is not news, but more fact, analysis and opinion – in other words longer articles less often.

QR Codes

James, a graduate of our Multimedia program who is working in Japan came by for a visit and showed me his cell phone and the cool things it can do. Besides controlling things like a Karioke player with the IR port and being an MP3 player, it can scan QR Codes which are two-dimensional barcodes. The barcodes are showing up all over – in magazines to provide a coupon or a URL, on business cards so that you can scan in a person’s contact information, and on screens. The scanning software lets you scan multiple 2D barcodes and then can merge the data into one file so you can suck up little programs for your phone. Above all it seems quite robust – both the QR Code system and, for that matter, the regular OCR with the camera that lets you scan English text.
If you want to try it, this QR Code Generator lets you generate the barcodes. The code above is my contact information encoded for the Vodafone scanner. For more on QR Code see QR Code features or qrcode.com. According to their site, there is no licensing fee to use QR Codes, which may explain why it is taking off.
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