I’m starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads — summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter posts, etc.), but since I know not everyone is using those services, it might be useful to post the best-of-the-selected here once a week. Why Thursday? Somewhere long ago I read that Thursday at 11am is the best time to put a post on a blog because Thursday lunch through Friday are the most active time for readers. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but lacking any evidence to the contrary, Thursday morning will do fine. (Obviously I’m a little late on this first one, but I’ll try to do better next time. Or not — maybe this will be a one-off weekly thing.)

MagCloud — On-demand printing of magazines

MagCloud, the revolutionary new self-publishing web service from HP, is changing the way ideas, stories, and images find their way into peoples’ hands in a printed magazine format. Whether you are a novice or experienced publisher, MagCloud offers you a way to create commercial quality magazines, printed on demand with no upfront costs or minimum print runs. MagCloud is creating new ways to bring consumers and publishers together in a web-based marketplace where choice, flexibility and print on demand are the cornerstones of the community.

Could be useful for short-run, professional printing. I learned about this via a conference call with the editorial board of the NISO International Standards Quarterly.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation (TED Talk)

TED’s Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter …

TED curator Chris Anderson takes the stage to talk about what he has seen as the impact of putting TED talks on the net specifically as well as the general case for the impact of services like YouTube on worldwide culture. This is definitely gets one thinking about the power of the visual medium. Closer to home, it also should get one thinking about assisting library patrons in creating and curating this content, no?

Plain English

Every field has its own jargon that’s meaningless to everyone else. Sometimes you want to translate a given -ese into lay terms while preserving the original text. Plain English is designed to facilitate this. The premise is straightforward: The original text is highlighted in yellow. When you click on a phrase, it toggles to the re-written simpler version, in gray. Buttons at the top allow you to toggle the whole thing at once. The words are stored in a simple JSON file.

From the laboratory of Slate Magazine comes this technique for toggling between one set of words and its translated form. I first found this on the NPR Planet Money blog in a post titled The Fed, Translated Into English. They used it to “translate” Fed-speak (e.g. the very dense statements released by the U.S. Federal Reserve) into more common language.

Google New

The one place to find everything new from Google.

Found via Jason Griffey’s post on his American Libraries Perpetual Beta blog. I noted there my frustration that Google New didn’t have an RSS feed to make this list of new things more machine-actionable. I still think that this missing feed functionality is strange, and if I get a chance at some point I’ll try to feed the page through Yahoo! Pipes to make one.

Rising Into the Public Domain: The Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) at the University of Michigan

Interview with John Wilkin, Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology and Executive Director, HathiTrust and Principal Investigator for CRMS

Interesting insight into how the University of Michigan is tackling the 1923-1963 orphan works problem. (Found via James Grimmelmann)

$1000 bounty offered for JPEG2000 support in Firefox

We’ve waited long enough. Apparently Firefox needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the early 2000′s. I have a financial interest in seeing this implemented, so I’m going to step up.

I’m going to offer a $1000 bounty for native JPEG2000 support in Firefox, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Comment #155 on this feature request has someone putting up real money to have a developer integrate JPEG2000 into the Firefox browser. The ensuing discussion gives a glimpse into how hard and how easy it could be.

White House Issues IPv6 Directive

Network World reports: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has issued a directive requiring all U.S. government agencies to upgrade their public-facing Web sites and services by Sept. 30, 2012 to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. Kundra’s memo mandates that agencies use native IPv6 instead of transition mechanisms that translate between IPv6 and the current standard, which is known as IPv4.

You may not have heard this, but we’re running out of IP addresses. An IP address is the thing computers use to find each other on the net (and not to be confused with domain name system (DNS) addresses — the human friendly things that we put on our business cards and advertisements). In the current version of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), we only have about 4 billion addresses and we’ve used up 95% of them. There has been a big press this year to move to the next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) that will give us 340 billion billion billion billion addresses (or roughly 50 billion billion billion addresses for each person alive in 2012 when the 4 billion addresses of the existing Internet Protocol run out). The entry of the federal government into the push for IPv6 is expected to accelerate adoption of the new standard.

FriendFeed went live yesterday with changes to the user interface and back-end systems. The changes were moderately positive, taken as a whole, but there are aspects of the new user interface that I don’t like — the color scheme, the removal of the service icons, and the (over)-use of whitespace. Fortunately, with Firefox plus a few extensions as my primary browser, I’m able to tweak the interface to be closer to my liking. If your tastes resemble mine, I both feel sorry for you and want to help you improve your view of FriendFeed.

FriendFeed interface before and after changes via Greasemonkey and Stylish

The primary tool to help with the user interface changes, in addition to using Firefox, is the Greasemonkey extension. After installing this extension, you can use “scripts” to tell the browser to change the HTML markup of any arbitrary web page as it is being loaded. A secondary tool is the Stylish extension. Stylish does to a pages CSS code what Greasemonkey does to the HTML — it overrides the page author’s styles and substitutes your own. Stylish is actually optional because you can use Greasemonkey to load a form of Stylish scripts to accomplish the same outcome. (Some Greasemonkey scripts also work in the Opera browser; I haven’t tried the scripts listed here, so your mileage may vary.)

The first thing we want to do is bring back the service icons. These are the 16×16 pixel graphics that show the source of the entry in the FriendFeed stream. I haven’t heard a good explanation from the FriendFeed developers as to why they took this out, but I find it to be a key factor in how I scan through the FriendFeed stream. Fortunately, Chris Peoples wrote a Greasemonkey script to bring them back. Simply install the script and reload the FriendFeed page; the service icons will be back for public entries. (As Chris notes, it doesn’t work on private feed entries.)

The second thing we want to do is clean up the color scheme: remove the grey background, de-emphasis the functional areas on the right, and rebalance the font sizes. AJ Batac wrote a Stylish script that does that and more. You can load this script into Stylish or apply the Greasemonkey version; as far as I know, they are equivalent. In addition to the color schemes, this script adds new functionality: highlighting friend comments in a light yellow background and highlighting your comments with a light blue background. The latter is particularly useful for rescanning a conversation where you have made a comment; the light blue background tells you exactly where your comment is in the conversation and the new comments that followed.

There is a third script that removes the large avatars that came with the new interface design. Personally, the avatar graphics don’t bother me, but if you want to remove those, you have that option, too.

Earlier this year I posted a summary of planned JPEG2000 activity in the Google Summer of Code. As you may recall, there were two project: one mentored by the Mozilla Foundation and another by FFmpeg. This post is a summary of the results of the efforts of the GSoC students.

JPEG2000 in Firefox

I was able to successfully create XPIs for the three major platforms that enable in-line decoding of JP2 images. [This week] I have updated trunk (Firefox 3) builds for Windows and OS X posted to http://eschew.org/test/jp2/xpi/, and will make Linux and Firefox 2 builds in the next few days (hold me to it!). Once I have the major platforms covered, I’m going to submit the extensions to addons.mozilla.org.

We also talked about the chicken-and-egg problem of getting JPEG2000 support into the core browser code. The crux of the problem can be summarized as “why include J2K support in the core browser when it is hardly used?” followed closely by “why use J2K when users would have to install extra software to see the images?”

I think, down the road, a list of major users of JP2 would be helpful, but the folks who work on Mozilla full-time are caught up with the transition from the 1.9 version of the the core code (Gecko), to version 2.0, a fairly major task. Once the dust from that has settled down, I think Stuart Parmenter would be much more receptive to the idea of adding an image decoder to Gecko. Until then, I doubt it would hurt, but I also suspect it would fall on deaf ears.

[ Update 20071101T0859 : Ben posted a message on his blog with the details of building the JP2 renderer for Firefox using the source code. Thanks, Ben! ]

Congratulations to Ben for taking the JPEG2000 integration into Firefox this far. I believe your work will have long-lasting impact.

JPEG2000 in FFmpeg

Kamils jpeg 2000 encoder and decoder, arent in good shape yet (only 2 out of 50 encoded images can be decoded by jasper, only 2 of 23 reference jpeg2k files can be decoded by kamils decoder), but then please dont forget that writing an encoder and decoder at the same time is harder then just one of the 2

Hopefully Kamil will be able to continue his work and bring JPEG2000 to FFmpeg.

OhioLINK is not participating in the Google Summer of Code this year (too many other things going on for our staff to be effective mentors), which is why it is refreshing to see work on the wider adoption of JPEG2000 — one of our core goals — continue on other fronts. Among this year’s 900 projects accepted by mentors are two that involve J2K. All of this is welcome news, coming in the same month that Adobe is questioning the need for JPEG2000 support in Photoshop. My public gratitude goes out to Google for their third year of offering financial and logistical support to their Summer of Code program.

JPEG2000 in Firefox

JPEG2000 in FFMPEG

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.third-bit.com/soc2007.html on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://code.google.com/soc/ffmpeg/appinfo.html?csaid=1CBF43B104682F6 on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://code.google.com/soc/mozilla/appinfo.html?csaid=C7B9CCBBF96648B3 on January 20th, 2011.