beckr.org | Christian Becker

Simple URL downtime alert with bash, curl and sendmail

chris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:02:00 +0000

Now for a really easy way to be notified when an URL goes down:

email=$(/bin/cat < From: URL Monitor To: $2 Subject: $1 is down! !) /usr/bin/curl -f $1 || echo "$email" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

Just put it in your crontab as urlmonitor.sh .

Talking About Interfaces to the Semantic Web

chris — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:42:47 +0000

I recently had a guest appearance at the Semantic Web Gang podcast. Together with MIT’s David Karger and the regular “gang members”, we discussed interfaces to the Semantic Web. The discussion was really intense at points as the participants had very differentiated standpoints.
It was largely agreed that visualization is a key factor to show the benefits of the Semantic Web and to foster industry adoption. Some key discussions: Should we worry about applications first, or step back and consider visualization at this early stage? How many forms of visualizations are there for one ‘thing’? Who builds them? Where do you get data from? Should users worry about that? How are queries expressed?
The participants also agreed that there will be an industry of people that build visualization widgets for specific things, which I thought is a really interesting scenario.
I talked a bit about Marbles and DBpedia Mobile and pleaded for open environments where data published by anyone can be taken into account. (Podcast)

Launching two startups in two days, with 140 people

chris — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:32:25 +0000

I’m really excited to participate in StartupWeekend in Hamburg tomorrow, where 140 people will come together to build two web startups. The whole progress is crowdsourced - attendees are invited to pitch ideas, then two ideas are selected and developed over two days in teams that cover business and finance, programming, graphics, marketing and legal aspects.
At the end of the weekend, everybody becomes a shareholder in the companies, and management will be elected, which will receive a little seed funding to hopefully get off the ground. I’m moderately skeptical if this will work, but can’t wait to find out! Now on to contemplate about startup ideas…

Update (05/19): Hey, my idea made it into the top 5! These are the two final projects:

indawo.de, a platform that helps event organizers to find suitable locations - for both corporate and private events such as weddings.
lockerlernen.de, a community for tutorial videos targeted at pupils, where I took care of the video portion.

In the final meeting, indawo.de was chosen as the project that will be incorporated with a 60:40 vote, and everybody that attended is now a shareholder. lockerlernen.de was not short of praise and the team members are looking to incorporate it as well.
Programmers and graphic designers were incredibly scarce, so the implementations are at a very early demo stage. Most attendees are now back at their day jobs, but each project has a committed core group that will hopefully drive these projects forward in the nexts months.

I learnt a lot about crowdsourcing today. While I often felt that the sheer number people was slowing things down considerably and there were many disagreements, we ended up with two ideas that I can see surviving. Thanks a to the organizers Cem and Jason for pulling this off!

Read more feedback here, and Flickr evidence here!

DBpedia Mobile @ LDOW2008

chris — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:37:25 +0000

I’m in Beijing for WWW2008 where I just presented my diploma thesis, DBpedia Mobile at the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) Workshop.
Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map containing information about nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Geographic locations are currently available for 300,000 of DBpedia’s 2.18 million “things”.
Starting from the map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into DBpedia and other interlinked datasets such as GeoNames, Revyu, EuroStat and Flickr.
I will write a bit more about it when I get a chance, but for now here are the slides:

More information:

Website: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/DBpediaMobile
Slides Paper

Update: Another Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb!

Slideflow

chris — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:49:47 +0000

I’ve been pretty busy putting together a webcast interface for Leica Microsystems featuring Cover Flow in AJAX. We thought that it was so cool that we released the latter under Creative Commons.

Main screen:

Help overlay:

Live demo built with Slideflow:

flickr™ wrappr

chris — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:27:44 +0000

DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia and publishes it as RDF. This allows for incredible queries against Wikipedia data, such as Soccer player with tricot nr. 11, playing for a club having a stadium with >40.000 seats, born in a country with >10M inhabitants.
I recently added support for geo-coordinates to DBpedia and built the flickr™ wrappr, a proof-of-concept work that provides photos for a given Wikipedia article using geo-coordinates and multilingual labels. The benefit: It is a fairly efficient and accurate way for a machine to find a picture of something. It is now part of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project.

I really like the pictures it finds for the Eiffel Tower:

Update (04/10/2008): ReadWriteWeb says "This is pure geek hotness", and Tim Berners-Lee says “This is a neat addition”!
Update: Mashup of the day at ProgrammableWeb (10/17/2007) and at Mashup Awards (01/10/2008)!

Animated Fortunes on Facebook

chris — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:23:47 +0000

Seemingly, a lot of money can be made with rather useless Facebook applications these days. So I set out to see what it would take to attain exponential growth rates and did a Flash port of a Fortune Cookie site I wrote in JavaScript back in 2003. The application did grow exponentially in the first days, but now its growth is rather linear with 8,300 users as of today, and 100 new users per day. Altura Ventures, who invests in Facebook applications, estimates that this is worth $2,400 already. Can you believe it?
Its home on Facebook is here, and here’s a preview:

Update: Currently broken due to the highest-voted bug on Facebook.

28,482 lines of code just went to SourceForge: SpamIntelligence released under the GPL

chris — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:02:49 +0000

I finally found the time to put my Outlook-based spam filter SpamIntelligence on SourceForge. It contains many C++ classes to Outlook’s kludgy MAPI interfaces, so it should be really useful for anybody developing an Outlook plugin. I am discontinuing its development since I’m moving away from Windows development.

More Details about Friday’s Internet Crash

chris — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:26:28 +0000

New Microsoft/Yahoo! Logo?

chris — Fri, 04 May 2007 23:35:44 +0000

It looks like Microsoft may soon own Yahoo!. But how in the world are they going to combine their brands?

Solution 1:

Solution 2:

(Microsoft! logo courtesy of logo54.com)