wiki how?

tried to write a wikiHow article for an astronomy software tutorial.  check back to see if that can work.

also spent a decent fraction of my time looking into archiving wiki content through mirroring, XML source dumps (damn you Trac), etc.

finally, even though a wiki produces pure web content with simple editing tools, complete source packaging, detailed revision control mechanisms (throw in the social web connections if you like that sort of thing) it gonna be a haul to convince...

meta: CMS

spent most of the day adding facets (but little depth) to my knowledge of software like drupal and wordpress.  all attempts to move from the meta to the prototype were unsuccessful.  #vmwarefail

cross-domain following

followed the VAO team meeting with twitter and twiki.  Tobin (Michigan) gave me a run down on his work studying the structure and kinematics of proto-stellar envelopes.

thanks to the conveniences of the CfA webserver and under some redirection from Fay (MSR) i spent some time learning about cross-domain hosting policies for images that appear in flash or silverlight apps.   Fay moved my data to MSR for now as there is no work around to the way my home institution is exposing our URLs.  i added a todo -- uploading my WWT images to an S3 bucket as that appears to be a common way to serve images granting the necessary cross-domain access to SL/Flash.

literate programming cache

a quick post to capture a few new literate programming threads that I will now uncache.

following a dexy thread lead me to to a vimeo.  apparently the code word is artifact.

yes, googling gets me somewhere on stackoverflow.

six months ago I couldn't find anyone weaving with python.

here is some code. here is some more. here is a list. here is a wiki.

where are some users?

must look up why we all love ReST and how long that will last.

more python and peer review

they go together like bread and honey these days.

after a few hours of *bucks and a traffic ticket,  a 2nd referee report, which repeats verbatim much of what was in the initial review, is off.

I am really starting to worry that if I had to follow Hogg's research blog rules then I would have nothing to write about.

The highlight of my day was submitting a bit to our astropython website and doing some brainstorming on ways to increase astropython reader involvement within the confines of the current blog structure. also: what is the best way to accept user contributed code, store it, tag it, share it?

python and peer review

devoted a questionable amount of time issuing posts to or editing invisible parts of astropython.org. yes, the time average postings to astropython are up due to two of us; still there are few commentors and no new contributors.

then i went back to kindergarten -- cutting figures out of (printed) papers to compare with other figures all as part of a being a journal referee. besides making me print something out, this effort typifies for me the actual barrier in the current publishing paradigm -- papers (sans data) as slim advertisements of research -- to meaningful refereeing: if the closest thing to data i have are cut out paper figures then how exactly am I suppose to provide the high quality / blue ribbon value that journals claim peer-review provides for arbitrating scientific progress?

To oppose "actual" I imply the "imaginary" problem of a referee having too much data to review.

Nevertheless, the review is undone, an editor is likely peeved, and my papers, hypothetically much more tightly written, conceptually woven than the one I'm engaged in review, languish.

all along the data-literature vector did our tangents tangle

today was begun with a catchup up meeting for the Seamless astronomy group that ballooned far beyond its scheduled hour.  the breadth of the discussion was intentional for the benefit of Alberto Pepe, a new postdoc arriving to work with Goodman on some or all Seamless facets.   we will see where he plans to dive in, although I'm hoping for a collaborator on my sharing/citation vector.  my discussion hijacks included more hypothesizing on scholarly attribution/credit sourced in readings like this.

i am less then certain that we achieved much beyond demonstrating at least 2 or 3 of the 9 proven tips which make [sure your meetings] fail.

then I decided to solicit a bit of curry on the VAO mailing lists regarding who is the intended audience for the forthcoming user forum.

ps: I'm not Australian.

Q/A

yet again, the meta stomped the data. I can't see when I'll get back to doing some actual research...

the productive part of the day was spent breaking the concept of a user oriented Q/A forum for astronomy into "task" elements for the powers that be to track.   the unproductive part of the day was having to change a password, which entails retraining my digits through repetition.

Working?

Lets try making this blog into a working research diary.  It is possible that it will now be better loved.

Sorry, Evernote but at the least I will have some hope that my text formatting will work.

Browsing RDF

A tim berners-lee tweet about Semantic Web browsers nudged me to revisit my little project comparing different in browser options.

I am pretty dismayed at the range. I also have to disagree with the master, as I find it hard to conclude the Tabulator UI is anything except an poor example.  Admittedly, I do not know the extent to which the Tabulator "framework," being a long standing project created by the original krew, is the source that powers these other browsers.

Here is a web album of some screen grabs of my browsing my default RDF test case using different in browser options.

RDF Browsing examples