Steve Cassidy

Here’s an excellent video talking about text, hypertext, touching on the internals of HTML and XML and how Web 2.0 has changed the role of the reader. The web is using us, to tag, classify and label the stuff we write so that we can find it.

One of the annoying things that needs doing when organising a conference is to produce the proceedings. These days that means generating a CDROM filled with PDF files and the main problem with that is adding proper identifiers to the PDF. In the old days of print, every paper had page numbers and consequently we expect to be able to cite page numbers in a conference proceedings. In Australia, the government expects us to submit page numbers for each conference paper as part of the annual audit of research activity. Hence the need to add page numbers to soft-copy PDF versions of papers.

Of course one can probably do this manually with various Adobe products but that doesn’t help lower stress levels close to the conference when you have to insert a new paper and recalculate the page numbers. Hence the search for tools to do this automatically. This note is really just a placeholder for things I find on the road to building the SST2004 proceedings. Perhaps it will be useful to others too.

The general problem is known as PDF merge or PDF stamping, Google will tell you who the big players are.

acl02stamp promises to “Stamp bibliographic citations (including automatically-determined page numbers) onto a sequence of academic papers in PDF format.”. I’ve asked the author for a copy.

The iText Java PDF library provides an API in Java for generating PDF and can do stamping by virtue of being able to read existing PDF files and add them to it’s output.

Update Thanks to Jason Eisner, author of acl02stamp, I now know about the Perl Text::PDF module which provides an PDF generation API for Perl and includes a simple script pdfstamp.plx to achieve exactly what is needed. Jason’s acl02 script wraps this to integrate it with the ACL conference tools for generating tables of contents etc. For reference, the Debian package libtext-pdf-perl is all that’s needed.

Here’s an interesting test to while away a few minutes. According to the The Political Compass I’m a Leftist Libertarian, just like Ghandi, Mandela and the Dali Lama and diametrically opposite George W.: surprise surprise!

The world is moving quickly towards defining a path language for RDF and maybe for other more general directed graphs. Here’s a few references:

• Pondering RDFPath which reviews a few proposals
• This thread on www-rdf-rules which is where the above reference comes from, contains a bunch of other references and some encouragement.
• A reference to my Extreme paper noting that IsaViz (an RDF visualisation/authoring tool) is an interesting use case for a graph path language.
• Simon St Laurent talks about the need to work directly with graphs instead of forcing data into trees.
• Treehugger is a Saxon extension to allow XPath expressions to be evaluated over RDF data. Another example of pretending the RDF is a tree, as in Normal Walsh’s RDFTwig.
• RDFT and RDF Templating proposal that includes a NodePath expression language, eg:

  resource()/resource('http://ex.example.com/name')/literal()

While it’s nice being the number two ‘Steve Cassidy’ on Google (above the porn star but below the voiceover artist!) being well indexed can have it’s down side. I recently noticed an odd Google search bringing traffic to CANTCL — the phrase “problem opening zip file” turns up CANTCL as the number one hit! If you check the cached page (valid as of 25 Sept 03) it shows that Google came crawling while CANTCL was having trouble with one of the zip files in the archive. The shame, my bug (now fixed) is preserved forever.

PS. let’s see what kind of traffic the above mention of the ‘other’ Steve Cassidy brings to this site…stay tuned :-)

Robert Barta at Bond Uni has a paper on XTMPath, Manipulating Topic Map Data Structures which I should look at a little further. I enjoyed talking with Robert at the AusWeb conference this year, he seems to be one of the few people working on Topic Maps in Australia, unlike in Europe and the US where it seems that they’re taking over the world (at least that’s the impression I got at Extreme Markup.

Then there’s also TMPath which is aiming at a similar place. Better get my skates on if my proposal is to be a contender.

Mark Pilgrim describes his implementation of a REST API for Atom, the RSS successor being developed by various folk. This appeals to my URL designer sensibilities and includes a nice example of how to use XML document responses containing URIs as part of an interface.

An interesting proposal in the document is a method of using a variation on HTTP digest authentification as part of the API. His method guards against replay attacks and avoids sending cleartext passwords over the net. It’s a neat idea which could be usefully copied for CANTCL

We’re setting up a teleconferencing facility in order to collect data and experiment within our meeting room project. One of the problems is that we want to record the audio and video streams in as high quality as possible as well as sending them down the line compressed to run the teleconference.

I came across this page on IPAQ video conferencing at Motorola labs: an IPAQ running Linux doing video/audio conferencing over wireless networks.

A Working group in W3C is busy worrying about how to store and manage calendar data in RDF including converting the de-facto standard iCalendar format into RDF. This report describes the current state of play and lists lots of resources and code to deal lwith this data.

Since I bought my Dell Axim I’ve been looking for audio recording and playback products, since the supplied Windows Media software is pretty basic. Because of being interested in speech technology I’m keen to play around with recording audio on these kinds of devices but the built-in microphone is pretty basic so quality is never going to be high.

Enter Core Sound with a CF Card which takes S/PDIF audio inputs and does high quality recording to memory cards. Potentially neat but still lots of gear to carry around (it needs a mic pre-amp as well as external mics etc.) The page is also interesting as it points to some Pocket PC Audio software apps which do more than the basic job of recording digital audio.

Combine the CF Audio card with one of these to get a reasonably compact 20 bit 44.1kHz two channel recording setup.