Sunday, November 27, 2005

Intellectual property bird flu gets interesting. Forbes: "Taiwan has decided to go ahead with production of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu for use against bird flu despite its failure to obtain a license from Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche." So, the only company that can save the world from the perilous avian pandemic, is Roche? And a license is required .... I thought the RIAA was scary. [Adam Curry's Weblog] 8:39:17 PM    comment

search-based RSS as a project research tool Monitor This. The Monitor This tool provides an easy way to track key search terms across multiple search engines with a news reader. It's necessary to use a news aggregator/reader that will import opml files (not all do, especially the simpler, more popular readers such as RSS Mad).[note: ok in Bloglines -- BL] "With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the 'make monitor.opml' button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format.... Select all, copy and paste it into a new file ( monitor.opml) and import it to your feed reader." The Monitor This script was created by Alp Uckans and is freely available, "Copyleft, no rights reserved." The Monitor This script includes all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Technorati--of course searching 22 engines at once from within a news reader is imcomparably easier than making 22 different searches by visiting each search engine's web address. I use a similar service called GoogleAlert to track information related to "learning objects," "instructional repositories," and "higher education instructional resources" for this EduResources Weblog but Monitor This provides a cross-checking screen to try to better ensure that valuable resources aren't missed. ______JH [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 8:36:17 PM    comment

blog tech Another OPML server.... By day this last week I've been writing microcontent schemas... by night I've been hacking together some Python code to perform more or less what Dave Winer's OPML Community Server does, only on Linux, etc. I've set the software up to run on opml.myelin.co.nz, so you can create a blog there by changing your community in your OPML Editor to opml.myelin.co.nz and registering, then blogging as usual. You should see your name appear in the yellow box on the front page once you have registered. One bug at the moment is that it doesn't seem to let you upload binary files, so don't panic if you get stuck with the default header graphic. At the moment it looks like this is a problem with the OPML Editor - it's sending JPEGs as XML-RPC strings rather than as binary objects. I'll post a note here and on my OPML blog when this is fixed. This was really an experiment to write a web app that works properly under SCGI. The Topic Exchange uses SCGI, but in a pretty messy way (forking once per connection and reloading all the Python code each time), because it started out as CGI and depends on certain global variables not being set on startup. Yuck... but I've never got around to fixing it up, so like that it stays. opmlbox (the current name for this community server clone thing), on the other hand, does everything "the right way", keeping everything in class variables. It also loads and compiles the whole app on startup, so there's no per-request compiling to do. This means I need to restart the server process to get it to recompile any scripts, but it makes it much quicker than the Topic Exchange code. It should be interesting to see how it scales, as I don't have much free memory on my server... looks like it only takes up 2-3 megs at the moment, so if it stays that way there shouldn't be any problem. Comment [Second p0st] 8:53:25 AM    comment