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Tag: GMD

yahoo pipes on iTouch

Published January 24, 2008 by lieven

The next thing on my tech-to-do-list : learn all about Yahoo Pipes :

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used:
– create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them.
– geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
– remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
– build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
– power widgets/badges on your web site.
– consume the output of any Pipe in RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

I’ve posted before on setting up your own lifestream, or your own planet, or scraping feeds, or subscribing to my brain, or … whatever. The good news is : all these ideas are now superseded by Pipes!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor. Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on our server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

This is the essential message to get : yahoo-pipes allows you to remix the web, filtering out all noise! And the good news is

  1. There are plenty of public pipes around to get you going, and
  2. Pipes has an iTouch-friendly interface (see above left). All you have to do is to Safari to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com and use them.

Here are a few public-pipes you can use out of the box!

  • iPhone / iPod Touch: The Most Comprehensive Feed Ever!, doing what it promises : giving you the best iTouch-posts without having to roam for them.
  • JSON Geocoder, returning lat/lon/address info from the the given address.
  • Uber Blog Search, Search all the blogosphere with one query. Hits Google, Ask, Technorati, and icerocket then returns the unique results. Below the web-interface giving the results for ‘noncommutative’…

and finally, one of my favorites, implementing to some extend the Lifestream-idea (iTouch-interface above left)

  • lifefeed – virable, Easily Aggregate your social whereabouts great for blogs profiles and more! Aggregates Your Feeds From: -Digg -Last.fm -Twitter -Flickr -Del.icio.us and your very own blog Adopt and Improve, enjoy!

I’ll promise to spend some time soon to set up my very own pipes and make them available…

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GMD

Published April 14, 2005 by lieven

I’m always
extremely slow to pick up a trend (let alone a hype), in mathematics as
well as in real life. It took me over a year to know of the existence of
_blogs_ and to realize that they were a much easier way to
maintain a webpage than manually modifying HTML-pages. But, eventually I
sometimes get there, usually with the help of the mac-dev-center. So, once again,
I read their gettings things done with your mac article long after it was
posted and completely unaware of the Getting Things Done (or GTD) hype.

At first, it just
sounds as one of those boring managament-nonsense-peptalk things (and
probably that is precisely what it generically is). Or what do you think
about the following resume from Getting
started with ‘Getting things done’ :

  1. identify all the
    stuff in your life that isnÕt in the right place (close all open
    loops)
  2. get rid of the stuff that isnÕt yours or you donÕt
    need right now
  3. create a right place that you trust and that
    supports your working style and values
  4. put your stuff in the
    right place, consistently
  5. do your stuff in a way that honors
    your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
  6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

But in fact there is
also some interesting material around at the 43 folders website which bring this
management-talk closer to home such as the How does a
nerd hack GTD? post.

Also of interest are his findings after
a year working with the GTD setup. These are contained in three posts :
A Year
of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff, followed by A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At to
end with A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 3, The Future of GTD?. If these three
postings don’t get you intrigued, nothing else will.

So, is
there something like _GMD : Getting Mathematics Done_? Clearly, I
don’t mean getting theorems proved, that’s a thing of a few seconds of
inspiration and months to fill in the gaps. But, perhaps all this GTD
and the software mentioned can be of some help to manage the
everyday-workflow of mathematicians, such as checking the arXiv and the
web, maintaining an email-, pdf- and BiBTeX-database, drafting papers,
books and courses etc.

In the next few weeks I’ll try out some
of the tricks. Probably another way to state this is the question “which
Apps will survive Tiger?” Now that it is official that Tiger (that is, Mac
10.4 to non-apple eaters) will be released by the end of the month it is
time to rethink which of the tools I really like to keep and which is
just useless garbage I picked up along the road. For example, around
this time last year I had a Perl
phase and bought half a meter or so of O’Reilly Perl-books. And yes
I did write a few simple scripts, some useful such as my own arXiv RSS-feeds,
some not so useful as a web-spider I wrote to check on changes in the
list of hamepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and
geometry. A year later I realize I’ll never become a Perl Monk. So from now on I want to
make my computer-life as useful and easy as possible, relying on wizards
to provide me with cool software to use and help me enjoy mathematics
even more. I’ll keep you posted how my GMD-adventure goes.

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