http://beckr.org Just another WordPress weblog Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:21:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Now for a really easy way to be notified when an URL goes down: email=$(/bin/cat <<! From: URL Monitor <urlmonitor@localhost> 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 <URL to check> <email address>. http://beckr.org/2008/08/17/simple-url-downtime-alert-with-bash-curl-and-sendmail/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2008/07/27/talking-about-interfaces-to-the-semantic-web/ http://beckr.org/2008/05/16/launching-two-startups-in-two-days-with-140-people/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2008/04/23/dbpedia-mobile-ldow2008/ 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: http://beckr.org/2007/11/15/slideflow/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2007/10/12/flickr%e2%84%a2-wrappr/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2007/10/11/animated-fortunes-on-facebook/ 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. http://beckr.org/2007/08/19/28482-lines-of-code-just-went-to-sourceforge-spamintelligence-released-under-the-gpl/ http://beckr.org/2007/07/23/more-details-about-fridays-internet-crash/ 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) http://beckr.org/2007/05/04/new-microsoftyahoo-logo/