The Calais Web Service
The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic
metadata to the content you submit - in well under a second. Using
natural language processing, machine learning and other methods,
Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people,
places, organizations, etc.), facts (person 'x' works for company
'y'), and events (person 'z' was appointed chairman of company 'y'
on date 'x'). The metadata results are stored centrally and
returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by
a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). Using the Calais GUID, any
downstream consumer is able to retrieve this metadata via a simple
call to Calais. This metadata gives you the ability to build maps
(or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to
places to products to events to geographies to … whatever. You can
use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual
syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured
folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds or analyze content
to see if it contains what you care about. And, you can share those
maps with anyone else in the content ecosystem.
Coding Horror: Rainbow Hash Cracking
Jeff Atwood writes on his blog Coding Horror about a password
cracking technique that uses rainbow tables. The premise is simple, taking
advantage of the time-memory tradeoff of storing massive amounts of
pre-computed hashes in memory.
The multi-platform password cracker Ophcrack is incredibly
fast. How fast? It can crack the password "Fgpyyih804423"
in 160 seconds. Most people would consider that password
fairly secure. The
Microsoft password strength checker rates it "strong". The Geekwisdom
password strength meter rates it "mediocre".
Coding
Horror: Rainbow Hash Cracking
Y Combinator Demo Day Showcases Some Great Apps
Y Combinator is a
VC-slash-Incubator organization that seems to be producing some
interesting companies (with a definite leaning toward Flash based
technologies). They recently held a demo day to showcase some of
their apps. The following ones caught my attention for the reasons
described.
I have been using
anywhere.fm for a couple of weeks now and
really like it. Although I have a bit of an aversion to Flash apps
hosted in web browsers this actually seems like a great
implementation. That said, it wouldn't be that hard to pull off as
an Ajax app. My company's next product code-named m*******t will do
some similar things and with a much better interface :) For now,
you can create an account at
http://www.anywhere.fm, upload
your music collection, the stream it from any other Flash enabled
browser. From a SoNet perspective you can stream, but not download,
your friends music collection too.
Another product out of the Y Combinator world is
Versionate.
While it is yet-another-wiki-as-a-hosted-service it is dead easy to
setup and use. I think one of its biggest attractions to me is that
is has so few features. If you need a feature-rich and robust wiki
solution then look elsewhere. However, if you are looking for
something easy to setup that loads quickly and allows you to
capture a thought mid-stream then this is well worth the
consideration. We have a very informal (aka non-existent)
documentation process where I work. I am finding versionate
invaluable in capturing, storing and organizing critical
information.
I just came across fauxto this evening so I have not had any
opportunity to use it yet. According to the claims it offers a lot
of the functionality of Adobe's Photoshop in a web delivered Flash
app. Since my forte is in server-side development I can not justify
the license for Photoshop. However I do find myself having to do
basic image manipulation from time-to--time and it is almost always
for low/non paying charity gigs where I can not leverage the
kick-ass front-end skills of some of my designer friends. I'm
looking forward to trying out fauxto in the coming days. If you are
interested in learning more about
Y Combinator
then check out the link. If you think you have a great idea that is
worthy of their financing then take a look at
www.ycombinator.com/w2008.html where they talk
about their application process and deadline for next round of
financing and assistance.
Y Combinator Demo Day: The Summer Startups
Visual Studio Shell to bring configurable IDE to developers
It looks like Microsoft is starting to get worried about OSS
IDEs such as Eclipse. The article here indicates that Microsoft is
readying a stripped down shell to ship with Orcas that can be used
freely by anyone to host their own languages and tools.
Visual Studio Shell to bring configurable IDE to developers
dotMac Webmail implements hCard
From the microformats
blog comes this interesting article. While microformats have an
interesting appeal I have not yet seen a real-world use of them
yet. Perhaps it will take something like Webmail to kickstart them?
So far I have not bothered spending the time to implement hCard in
some of my current development. Maybe it's time to start rethinking
that?
http://microformats.org/blog/2006/10/31/dotmac-webmail-implements-hcard/
Higher-Order JavaScript
A document by Sean M.
Burke that introduces some interesting new concepts in JavaScript.
I like his version of a print format function and example of
functions passed as parameters to other functions for callback
purposes.
Higher-Order
JavaScript