Which makes sense, because I put it there. The giant floating gold-foil-wrapped Easter bunnies, on the other hand, make no sense at all.

Augmented reality is very weird.

I’ve been playing with Layar‘s Hoppala Augmentation service (with a hat tip to Fiacre O’Duinn at Library Bazaar). Via the web interface I placed an object in an augmented reality layer: an Easter egg in the demo “Hoppala goes Easter” layer. Then I installed the iPhone app, found the right layer (search “Easter”), and strolled through the Quad on my way to the LRT. It looked like this:

It was distinctly bizarre to look through the little window into an alternate world where this huge red egg floated along the path beside me. Freaksville. And people give you odd looks when you walk around the Quad holding your phone out at eye level. When you explain, though, that you’re watching the giant floating Easter egg, and that the floating chocolate bunnies aren’t your fault, people leave you alone.

This was my first experience using an augmented reality app with live GPS positioning. I must say, it’s disappointing in an entirely predictable way. GPS on a phone is rough, and the accuracy of your position changes from moment to moment. That means the egg moves around a lot as you walk, and its position in the middle of the Quad is only approximate, because the app’s sense of your position is only approximate. When building an augmented reality application, you’ll have to take into account that your users may not see your stuff exactly where you want them to, and your stuff might shift unexpectedly instead of smoothly panning and zooming to match the viewer’s movements. I’ll have to give up my fantasy of neatly overlaying an historical image over the corresponding contemporary view, like this set from the National Library of Ireland, where the juxtaposition of past and present is so immediate it makes your heart ache. Or maybe there are ways for the app to work around the limitations of a phone’s GPS.

Anyway, if you’re around U of A and you have an iPhone or Android phone, go to the Quad and check out the egg. And the bunnies. Maybe they do something if you click them. Do you think I should click one? Maybe I should go back and click one.

Got me one of those Menotek floppy bluetooth keyboards, now that the iPhone supports it (in iOS4; kitteh not included). It takes some getting used to: I keep doubling letters. The iPhone’s autocorrection helps. We’ll see if this can be as useful as the old Palm folding keyboard, which was a wonderful keyboard; I could have transcribed War and Peace on it.

The University of Alberta added WorldCat Local to its web offerings a while ago, but for my own library use I’ve gone on using our old OPAC by default, for no other reasons than familiarity and inertia. Now, though, I’ve found a solid advantage that WorldCat Local offers to my personal workflow: fixed record-level URLs.

I was trying to solve the age-old problem of capturing a call number so that it will be easy to consult when I get to the stacks to pick up the book. The OPAC record is on the screen of my workstation, my iPhone is on my belt: how to bridge the gap? Emailing it to myself is tedious, copying and pasting into a note and then syncing even more so. Taking a picture with the iPhone’s camera may get the call number but it’s hard to include enough of the citation to show which item this is, if I’m fetching more than one.

The solution I want, which was inspired by a tweet by Lorcan Dempsey, is a QR code that gives me the URL of the record. That way when I need it I’ll have the full citation, the call number, everything. QR codes don’t appear in WorldCat Local or in the OPAC (like Huddersfield), but there’s Greasemonkey for that, specifically the “QR Code for Everything!” script (and probably others, I didn’t explore). I can pop up a QR code for any page I visit in Firefox on my workstation, grab it into the iPhone using the free i-nigma app (or one of the other QR-reading apps) to snap a picture of the QR code, and then easily consult the full record in the stacks.

The only problem with my default behavior is that the OPAC uses a session URL, which is meaningless once the session expires or when accessed from another device, so capturing it does me no good. WorldCat Local gives me a URL that doesn’t depend on the current session. That’s what I need: a cool URI that doesn’t change, at least across two devices and within the time-frame of my interest in a given book. I suppose I could customize the Greasemonkey script to use the OPAC’s permalink service before it generates the QR code, or we could enhance our unAPI service to provide a QR code as one of the options, but hell, WorldCat Local just works for this.

I wanted to embed a SIMILE Timeline into a WordPress posting, and it took longer than I expected to find a convenient way to do this without editing templates and such. There’s a nice plugin that does timelines for postings (WP SIMILE Timeline), but it doesn’t work for arbitrary timelines unconnected with the content of the blog itself. So, here’s a summary of a quick solution.

The requirement is to add some extra Javascript to a single posting (not for every posting, since that’s a fair amount of script to download needlessly), and to add onLoad and onResize handlers to the body tag. The easy solution: install the HiFi plugin, which does “Head & Foot Injection”. It allows you to specify some links you want to in the HTML head section, or at the end of the body section. It gives you a menu like this:

Those links will end up in the head for this posting.

The links are to the Timeline library, a local js file containing the configuration for the timeline we’re posting, and maybe a link to the css for that timeline. The local Javascript contains a call to a local XML file containing the events we ant to plot:

tl.loadXML("wp-content/2010/03/timeline-monet.xml", function(xml, url) {
    eventSource.loadXML(xml, url);
});

For convenience, I uploaded the js and xml as media files in the WordPress dashboard; but it threw an error when it tried to save the xml, so I uploaded that manually. I use the year/month directory structure for my uploads (Settings / Miscellaneous / “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”), so the uploaded timeline files end up in wp-content/2010/03.

The local Javascript contains functions onLoad and onResize, as in the Timeline examples. To get those to fire at the appropriate times, the Javascript ends by attaching them to the window’s onload and onresize events:

window.onload = onLoad;
window.onresize = onResize;

Adding those two lines was the only change I had to make to the SIMILE sample code.

Finally, the posting itself needs a div with the appropriate id:

<div id="tl" style="height: 300px;"></div>

And that’s it. Here’s a demo, using the “Life of Monet” example from the SIMILE Timeline site.

I pledged to do an Ada Lovelace Day posting last year, but things got busy and I missed it. This year is following the same pattern, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss it again, no matter how rough the resulting post has to be to get up before midnight.

Since the organizers of Ada Lovelace Day encourage participants to cast a wide net among women working in science and technology, I’m going to write about my grandmother Frances Williams Binkley (1899-1962). With her husband, Robert C. Binkley, she pioneered the use of microfilm for documentary reproduction in the 1930s.

Frances was born and grew up in Idaho (though she passed her first birthday in the silver town of Sandon, BC, so she’s an honorary Canadian as well). Her father was a bookkeeper. Having done well in high school, and with an ambition to be a journalist, she went to Leland Stanford Junior University in Oct. 1919. She was in the same incoming class as John Steinbeck, whom she knew socially. She took economics and history, and spent a summer at the marine research station. She was drawn into her future husband’s social circle through her work as a receptionist at the Hoover War Library (where he was employed as a reference librarian while working on his dissertation) and her membership in the History Club, and they were married in 1924. As far as I know her first camera was a Christmas present from Bob in 1926.

When Bob finished his dissertation he accepted a job at Washington Square College of NYU, and the two of them drove across the country in a Model T in the summer of 1927. They lived in the West Village for the next two years, and seem to have enjoyed the cosmopolitan delights of Prohibition-era Manhattan to the fullest. They both wanted to be writers, and attempted during this period to break into print with stories and articles, with moderate success. Their breakthrough came in 1929 with the publication of their joint book “What is Right with Marriage,” a contribution to the lively 1920s debate on modern marriage. This led to a certain amount of publicity, and the opportunity to write book reviews for the Saturday Review.

Bob’s advocacy of research into the problem of perishable paper, however, pulled them in a new direction. He had started working on this at Stanford, where his dissertation work required the use of newspapers from the First World War that were already crumbling due to their acidic wood pulp paper. He published an article in Scientific American in 1928, which led to the opportunity to attend the World Bibliographic Congress in Italy. This was the first conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Bob and Frances accordingly spent the summer of 1929 in Rome. On their return, Bob was able to parlay his expertise in this area into an appointment as secretary of the newly-formed Joint Committee on Materials for Research. Within a year he was the chair. Now settled at Western Reserve University, he had funding and support to pursue various initiatives for the preservation and dissemination of historical materials. Frances was his partner in much of the work.

One of the first initiatives was a major microfilming project in early 1933. In preparation for a documentary history of America’s participation in the peace conference at Versailles, the Joint Committee funded the microfilming (on “filmslides” – the term “microfilm” wouldn’t be coined until a couple of years later) of the papers of John Foster Dulles at Columbia and of Colonel House at Yale. As far as I have found, this was only the second large-scale microfilm project in the North American library world (after the Library of Congress’s “Project A” in the late 1920s, which reproduced historical materials from European libraries relevant to American history). One aspect they wished to explore was the suitability of different films for reading by projection, as opposed to enlarging on paper. They had been experimenting for some time, involving Frances’s father William Irvin Williams in the work as well. Bob wrote to James Brown Scott in early January:

I shall, within the next few days, get some copying done at New Haven and in New York. Mrs. Binkley is my camera technologist and since we can secure her services for nothing, I am asking her to do the photographing. I have not purchased the photographic apparatus because a new model is to be out in the spring, one that would be much better for us and I can use my own personal equipment in the meantime. This means that the draft upon your funds will be very low at this stage, nothing more than travelling expenses to New Haven and New York for Mrs. Binkley and myself, and cost of films and developing.

As it turned out, Frances managed the copying in New York while Bob traveled to Yale. She wrote to Bob some time in January:

The film was on my desk the morning after I telegraphed — much quicker work than our first experience in getting film! Eastman here ask 6 1/2 cents — I couldn’t be bothered!

I have finished the copying & will go hard in the morning for a few re-takes & packing up. I shall leave some of the film (most of it, in fact) with the Fine Grain to mail home to me. Most of the work will be fine for projecting, but the illumination has not been good & there may be trouble with the enlargements.

The work went well and the House and Dulles papers were done by the end of January. Bob wrote to a friend at WRU:

The family morale is standing at a high level. Frances and Mr. Williams are becoming the photographic technicians and learning a whole bag of tricks which I begin to think seriously we must teach to the Graduate students. Frances went down with me to Yale and New York and together we photographed about 10,000 pages at Yale (House Papers), and 3,000 at New York. (Dulles Papers.)

After this first phase, they ordered a custom camera from Yale University Library’s photographic technician Ludwig (to be paid for by the Carnegie Endowment), and carried on to the second phase of the work. They were now confident that their work was a model others would follow, and started working on documentation of their techniques. Bob wrote to Scott in April:

I believe the filmslide technique gives us an opportunity to do this job with unprecedented thoroughness and efficiency, and to make of it an example of new methods. We can set up a system which will make most work of this type look like palaeographic copying alongside of photostats. As you know, I am studying the technical side for the Joint Committee, and Mrs. Binkley is writing a handbook or scholars’ guide. As long as she is working on that handbook this Peace Conference project gets her services for nothing because it is her guinea pig.

They applied these technologies in their home life as well. In August Frances composed a three-page acquisitions policy for their home library, which included copying certain categories of materials using the photographic equipment in the house. Among the surviving rolls of film are copies of the 19th-century papers of Frances’s Williams and Wheatley ancestors, for example.

After the success of this project, Bob was able to create a position on the payroll of the Joint Committee to do the work that Frances had been doing for just expenses. Having stretched the rules of nepotism about as far as they would go, Frances felt she could not take a salaried position from a committee that her husband chaired, so she dropped out of the day-to-day work. She continued to collaborate with Bob and develop her own expertise in photography. She published a couple of articles in trade journals on documentary photography, and contributed a chapter on “Copying Books and Manuscripts” to the 1937 Leica manual.

She also developed an interest in portrait photography. When she and Bob were living in New York City again while he taught for a year at Columbia in 1937-38, she studied photography with Rabinovitch. On their return to Cleveland she started to build a reputation as a portrait photographer. She won prizes in local competitions and had several clients.

Her life was thrown into confusion by Bob’s sudden death in April, 1940. With two young sons and her retired parents dependent on her, she needed to find work. She was disappointed that her contacts in the library and academic world did not enable her to find a position where she could continue the work for which Bob was much better known than she was. She took a B.Sc. in Library Science in 1940-41 (WRU waived the tuition in honor of Bob), and landed a job as Social Science Librarian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She worked there for the rest of her life. During this time she did her masters in history, using local history techniques that Bob had championed. Money was always tight, though, and she gave up photography, putting her energies into gardening instead. My father remembers driving with her to Denver to sell her Leica.

In collaboration with Bob, Frances contributed to the development of a new discipline in the area of documentary photography. She was content, it seems, to work in Bob’s shadow; there’s no indication of any resentment towards him, and they seem to have worked as full partners in their joint projects. She was, however, too self-effacing to become well known in the profession. John Steinbeck mentioned her and Bob in a letter to a friend in 1929: he evidently didn’t care for Bob, but felt that Frances was much smarter than people gave her credit for. Once she was on her own she built a new career, saw her two sons through to their Ph.D.s, and led her library through twenty years of growth.

This is a test of Wavr, the WordPress plugin for embedding Google Waves. You may not see anything if you don’t have a Wave account. It’s now working for me at least. (Two tricks were needed: make the wave public, and un-urlencode the + in the Wave id).

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+0tVPqpaUA" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/"]

If you have a Wave account, the grey box above is editable just like at the Wave site: you can add to the Wave by clicking on the bottom border of the current wave, or use the down-arrow at the right to select edit options. Wave itself is at https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252B0tVPqpaUA.1 ; I assume you can add yourself to it there. You should then be able to see live updates when you edit the Wave either in your Wave home page or here.

I’m noticing more and more things I can’t do on the web because of where I am. First it was Google’s hypercautious imposition of snippet view for items that are clearly in the public domain both in the US and in Canada, and Major League Baseball’s refusal to sell me access to online video of Toronto Blue Jays games because I’m in their blackout zone (which covers all of Canada). Then, during the presidential election, I found that that any link to a Daily Show sketch on an American blog was broken, because the Comedy Network has the rights in Canada: so I have to click over there and try and find the right bit (when will OpenURLs cover political satire?). Then I started to hear about Hulu – which you can’t get in Canada. Now Last.fm is going to start charging for access if you live outside the US, UK and Germany.

It appears that DRM isn’t just an individual problem; it also depends on the size of the market and the characteristics of the jurisdiction within which you live. The web does a lot to bring us together on an equal footing, but the purveyors of commercial content have figured out how to break up the market again.

Medieval News: ‘Vampire’ Skeleton found in Venice

…

Matteo Borrini of Florence University said he and his team discovered the skeleton of a woman dating to the Middle Ages whose skull had been impaled through the mouth with a brick – a traditional method of ensuring undead bloodsuckers could no longer feed.

…

The woman’s skeleton was found in mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 – in which the artist Titian also died – on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.

…

So let’s get one thing straight: if she was a medieval vampire, then Titian was a medieval painter. Harrumph.

So I tried Cuil again the other day, after not paying any attention to it since the flurry of publicity around its launch last summer. Remember, one of its selling points was that it indexes more stuff than Google. The results are weird: I tried a search for my grandfather, Robert C. Binkley, who published a few books in the ’30s and has some moderate web presence these days. I got … OPAC records. Pages and pages of them. And nothing else. Google comes up with a range of materials and sites, and you have click through a couple of layers before you get to any library sites. Admittedly Cuil does better with a better-known author, but still — what’s with this? Is Cuil specifically targeting libraries?

A couple of months ago I stumbled onto the CHDK project: the Canon Hackers Development Kit. Someone reverse-engineered a firmware upgrade for a Canon digital camera and figured out how to build enhanced firmware add-ons. The project has grown to encompass a large number of Canon models, and the code is GPL‘ed. The result is a camera you can script (in BASIC, no less).

I got interested in kite aerial photography last summer and bought a FlyCamOne2, which takes some fun pix (like this set from RIRI in Charlottetown) but with 0.3 megapixels, it leaves you wanting more. I’ve wanted to loft a decent camera and get shots worthy of inclusion in the KAP Pool on Flickr (where you’ll find some astounding images). The problem is to get the camera to shoot continuously at suitable intervals for a long period (so you don’t have spend big bucks on a remote control rig). The FlyCamOne2 will shoot every 4 seconds until it fills its SD card or the battery dies. With CHDK, you have control over all the parameters of the camera: as well as shooting at intervals you can zoom, change the aperture and exposure, and so on.

I’ve tried it once, last weekend, in the snow of the schoolyard down the street. The results are miles ahead of anything I got with the FlyCamOne2. My current script is a simple adaptation of a couple of scripts on the wiki: an intervalometer coupled with a zoom control script. Every few seconds it takes a shot, zooms in half way, takes another shot, zooms in all the way, and takes a third shot, then zooms out and waits for the next iteration. The zoom shots mostly didn’t turn out well, but that was at least partly due to the wild winds which made the kite too unstable. A good steady wind would probably get better results, and a larger kite wouldn’t hurt. The next step will be to make it to bracket the exposure (i.e. take three rapid shots, with one a little over- and one a little under-exposed), since the camera’s guess at the right exposure when looking straight down at a field of sunlit snow may not be optimal.

Then, how about making an occasional video? The FlyCamOne2 does video, like this one from Access 2008 in Hamilton, but to switch from shooting to filming you have to haul the kite down and reset the camera, then send it up again. The CHDK script could have a longer loop and take a minute of video every five minutes or so; and maybe a longer video at the beginning to catch the ascent, which is always the most videogenic part of the flight (barring unplanned descents involving trees, helicopters, etc.).

What’s Canon’s response to all this? Well, using unauthorized firmware will void your warranty, so nyah, but it’s not clear that CHDK falls in that category, since it’s a firmware add-on and doesn’t actually overwrite the camera’s firmware (it’s loaded from the SD card at run time). It would be interesting for a journalist with the right access to investigate the response of manufacturers of consumer products that develop an unintended open-source community, like the Linksys NSLU2 NAS storage device or the WRT54G router. (Are there others out there?). Certainly, I’m going to be a loyal Canon customer as long as CHDK works and no other cameras have such a feature, and I’m going to be very bitter if Canon pulls the plug.

BTW the first reference to CHDK I ran across was on the XKCD blag. That explains the references to kite photography in a couple of the comics.