Greasemonky: messing with web pages

Thanks to Matt Patey who pointed me to Greasemonkey which offers a Firefox extension that allows you control aspects of page’s design using DHTML.

There is a story on Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web about this.

If this catches on it will return some control over the interface back to the browser in the never ending see-saw between designer and user control over the interface.

TADA talk

Here is a blog entry on a short talk I gave about text analysis and collaboration. StÈfan Sinclair had the neat idea of having students enter notes about the conference into a blog on the Text Analysis Developers Alliance as the conference went along.

My talk began by offering a model for how computing practices change interpretation and the role of text analysis. I then went on to talk about different types of interpretation – between developers, between developers and researchers and between researchers.

Gospel Spectrum

jesusviz.jpg Gospel Spectrum Beta is a New Testament visualization tool that allows you to see the events of Jesus’ life described in the gospels and whether the gospels are in harmony. The vertical lines are verses on an event. The colours are the different gospel writers. Zooming in eventually allows you to see the full text. Quite a nice custom visualization. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.

Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra

“I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moon-walker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter?” (p. 69)

Omon Ra by Russian author, Victor Pelevin is a dark science fiction novel about a young Russian who wants to be a cosmonaut and discovers that the Russian space program is a sham and that supposedly automated moon exploration robots actually have young men like him in them (who never come back.) And there’s more. I’m not sure if it is science fiction or surreal anti-science fiction.

I found the full text of a different translation into English at Lib.ru, see Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. There is a menu which lets you get a text file version.
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