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JudoGeek Blog

Exhaustion is your friend. 

So this week I have been writing a literature review for my Bsc research project. Not been to bed before 2am all week, but in the end I was pretty happy with what I produced.

Fortunately, whilst I was in Bath back in April, I discovered an amazing piece of software called Zotero ( www.zotero.org ). Zotero to quote their site is:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.


It has a plug-in to Neo Office (open office), which lets me add citations directly, it also builds the bibliography for me and maintains both the citations and the bibliography as you work.

As I worked on the literature review this week, I have been counting my blessings that I discovered this gem of a piece of software! It must have saved me quite seriously 6 or 7 hours work! Seriously! The last assignment I did without it (which was half the size I think) I spent 3 hours doing the referencing!!! So I am totally in love with Zotero!

Do check it out !
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Creating a NoseRub widget in Widsets. 

Hi all,
I have been playing with NoseRub for a while and recently I reinstalled Widsets on my phone, so I thought I'd merge the two together and install a NoseRub Widget on my Widsets install.

NoseRub, is a decentralized social networking platform that I use primarily to aggregate my rss feeds from sites like Plazes, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc. It also aggregates my various feeds like the RSS feed for this blog, my Judo blog and podcast, etc.

Widsets is a widget platform by and for Nokia mobile phones, and other Symbian based phones. With very little effort you can turn pretty much any RSS feed into a widget. You can do this on the phone itself or as I'll demonstrate, through the www.widsets.com website.

I have created a couple of widgets in Widsets, using my NoseRub install to create the RSS feeds. I created one for my items and one for items from my "contacts". The scary thing was that within a day 70 odd people had used the widget. Meaning it was on 70 peoples mobile phones!

Anyway... below is a video showing how to do it and some text explaining it too. Let me know what you think.



First things first, you need a NoseRub installation and a Widsets account, with the client installed on your phone.

Next create a RSS feed in your NoseRub installation. You do this by going into the "Settings" tab and then Feeds. Then click create a feed and follow the prompts, choose if you want a feed of just your stuff or just your contacts, or of course you could grab both.

Once it is created you can copy the link location and use it in Widsets.

So... in Widsets.

Click into "My profile", then on "Create a new widget", give the widget a name and paste in that RSS feed from above. Click Next.

Now choose one of the default icons, or upload your own. Click next.
Click Finish and you are done.

Here is mine:
Add to my Widsets


Widgets in Widsets can be more interactive and I'll probably look at maybe building one that will update my NoseRub location. But I did say I'd try it in Python first. :-)


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A quick catch up post. 

So, the blog has been quiet of late, mainly due to life interfering with bloggage. In fact that is not entirely true, I have blogging daily over at www.judocoach.com/blog where I for the 4th year am blogging my experience at the University of Bath.

This year I was not only a student, but a keynote lecturer.
Fancy huh!
So the slide deck turned out to be 48mb! So I turned it into a PDF (12MB) and finally I posted it up onto Slideshare.

To see all (okay most) of the videos, check my post over at http://www.judocoach.com/blog/index.php ... 326-043928

Anyway... so the upshot of all this is I am having to work hard to get assignments done for the course. Some videos to produce, a booklet, a literature review and a methodology. Phew!

It was interesting to put a slide deck together, and to present on technology to Judo coaches. It seems to have been received well and I hope it results in some positives.

I am back at work now and that is a strain after being off for two weeks, but I am mentally almost back there.

In technology news, Google released AppEngine to the world, world domination is definitely on their cards! It'll be interesting to see how it goes, Python in the cloud, the possibilities are intriguing. vendor lock-in will be an issue, consider reading James blog for more on vendor lock-in. There are a large number of Perl people trying to get Google to support Perl too, which might be cool seeing as I have been doing lots of Perl coding at the moment.

I am supposed to be doing some Python on my mobile too, but I have been busy, oh so busy. I have started writing a mobile client for www.noserub.com now that 0.6a has a location feature. I wonder what else would be useful...?

I should probably write more, but my PS3 calls!


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Tron in cardboard 

okay, yet another goofy video post I know, but you might like this one.
I wish I had the energy, ability and passion to do things this creative.

From: Drawn who got it from Cartoon Brew.
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NoseRub 0.6a and why it matters. 

Tonight, Dirk & Co. made the alpha of NoseRub 0.6a available at www.noserub.com and you should care.

NoseRub is a project i am watching and oneday I will hopefully help.
NoseRub is building a protocol/application for decentralised Social Networks. Where you mater and having the most users does not. And 0.6a cements this nicely.

As well as some improvements (see HERE) primarily 0.6a seems to be adding the abiility to use any url as a contact address, then using microformats and Googles Social Graph API gleam info about your contacts various feeds.

The other thing 0.6a brings and in part this is the biggie, is data portability. (see HERE). This feature in ways shows the difference between FaceBook and NoseRub. With NoseRub you are not tied to one site, you can move all YOUR data to another installation and just carry on. There is even a method to redirect your contacts to where you are today.

I described this in a Judo club context today to someone.
You run a Judo club and decide to use NoseRub. All your members signup and before long all the features and benefits of social networking start to happen. Then Joe Bloggs changes city or starts their own club. No problem with NoseRub, just export your data (himself) from the site and import on the other clubs site. You can even redirect from one site to another (at least thats the theory) and all your contacts will follow you on the new server. Cool!

I can see NoseRub as a protocol for Judo club management software. Let club members join a club, then if they move. No problem, it;s their data, take it with you.

Wouldn't it be nice if say... medical records or dentists records could be moved like that? Change GP and you can take your medical record from one surgery's system and import it into another surgery's system. Or any place where yo end up storing data, it's your data, you should be abe to take it with you right?

I think tomorrow I shall try and update my NoseRub install via the SVN and see how it goes.


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