m cameron jones

I get so tired of having to log into the Library website to request books. The worst part of the whole system is having to enter my 14 digit library ID number — TWICE! So, I wrote this bookmarklet which fills in the form fields automatically for me, inputting my ID number and last name. It also preselects “Campus Mail” for delivery and if you are using I-Share, it selects UIUC as your home library.

I made a generator form for it, so you can make your own bookmarklet. The generator runs entirely client-side in Javascript, so I don’t keep your ID number or anything, but you should be warned that the bookmarklet stores your ID number in plain text — meaning if someone got hold of your bookmarks, they’d be able to request books under your account and other devious things.

So, enjoy!

I wrote a bookmarklet which makes it easier to log in to the Library Gateway/Proxy from sites like ACM DL or IEEE Explore or Springer Link. You can also highlight a URL or DOI on these pages and it will generate a UIUC Gateway resolved URL for linking.

UIUC Bookmarklet <– drag this to your bookmarks.

• You can highlight a url like this http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/347642.347715 and then click the bookmark to get a library proxy resolved link
• You can highlight a DOI like this 10.1145/347642.347715 and then click the bookmark to get a library proxy resolved link
• or you can highlight none of the above and just click the bookmarklet to be redirected through the library proxy, back to the same page.

Just returned from Banff a few days ago where I was at the CSCW conference. Mike and I led a workshop on Web Mashups where we explored the implications of web mashups for CSCW. It was a lot of fun. The morning was spent hacking mashups together as a group, the afternoon was a bit more hacking followed by lots of discussion of our observations and reflections on the whole process. Some of the high-level themes that emerged included distinctions between web mashups _as_ CSCW and web mashups _for_ CSCW.

Anyway, there are photos of the workshop and other CSCW/Banff fun in the photos section.

The 27th Annual Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Cameron Jones (SIG-CAM) will take place this Friday, October 27, 2006 at the beautiful Pennsylvania Manor located at 509 W. Pennsylvania Ave. Urbana, IL. SIG-CAM is the premier annual symposium devoted to the celebration of Cameron Jones’s birth and entrance into this world. The symposium will focus on major trends and challenges in beer consumption, with a special theme of ciders and other mulled beverages. Additionally, there will be sessions on non-alcoholic beverages, and a panel on snack foods and tasty treats. We invite interested parties and experts from academia, industry, and government to attend SIG-CAM 2006.

a.k.a.Cameron’s Birthday Party this Friday, October 27, 2006 @ 6:00 PM

Map to the Pennsylvania Manor:

Get Directions to the Pennsylvania Manor

Besides Sharon, this is perhaps the only sweet Cylon — a chocolate one! Baked a Chocolate Cylon Raider cake for my birthday. Here it is.

Here it is in flight, “Look out Starbuck!”

Anyway, happy birthday to me.

here is a photo of the new dog. his current name is “bear”, it may change. i am insisting that we spell his name with lowercase letters to make him totally 1337 and web2.0 compatible.

he was rescued from a family in dubuque, iowa where he was very much unloved. his previous family left him in his crate most of the time and ignored him for most of the first 18 months of his life. they finally decided to return him to the breeder because they felt it was unfair to the dog — in reality the dog was getting depressed and took to chewing his fur off (thus the reason for his shaving) and the people probably didn’t want to deal with it anymore. anyway, the breeder sent out the alarm to the rescue network and i guess my parents were next in line — or closest, or something. anyway, we have him now. he is a very friendly dog and loves any attention he gets.

Hi everyone. I am moving my site over from Joomla — granted there isn’t much there, but I was tired of dealing with the horrible Joomla interface. WordPress has quirks too, but is _much_ simpler and seems to be good enough for my uses. Now that things are easier to update, hopefully, I’ll be posting more often.

My parents got a new dog today. They signed up for a Briard rescue network and got word that there was a Briard in distress in OshKosh, Wisconsin. We had a briard when I was younger, a big black dog named Kailey (sp?). This one isn’t black — more tan/brown colored with a black face. Apparently he is very big (stands about 3 feet at the shoulder my sister tells me). My mom was fishing for name today, and I think “Bear” has stuck. I’ll get pictures tomorrow when I am up in Chicago and post them here.

I recently attended the mashup camp in Mountain View (July 12 & 13). On Wednesday evening I got motivated to create a mashup that I’ve been thinking about for a while and between Wednesday night and Thursday morning I hacked together the first version of Pledge Drive (originally called Public Radio Road-Trip Planner (TrPPR). Pledge Drive is a driving directions site which shows you public radio stations that exist within broadcast range of your route. The radio station antenna information was downloaded from NPR and I used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth application for the mapping and driving directions. I also hacked in a bit for the demo, which is currently disabled, which shows my current GPS location on the map and any public radio stations within earshot.

You can play around with the current version of Pledge Drive at http://cameronjones.com/pledgedrive/

The future development plans for this mashup are to include the turn-by-turn directions and add radio tuning indicators, e.g., “Turn right onto Main St. and tune radio to 580 AM WILL”. Also, I’d like to pull the broadcast schedules off of NPR and sync it with the estimated travel times so you can see what will be playing at each segment of your trip and pick an interesting station. And to connect this service back to the listener-supported dimension of public radio, I’d like to calculate a reasonable donation for the directions based on the amount of time you are in a station’s broadcast range and allow people to donate money to NPR or local affiliates proportionate to the amount of listening they do.

Send me your feedback, it is still an active work in progress.

The Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership at UIUC has named me one of their Graduate Scholars. I submitted a proposal titled “Mashups and Innovation: How do people create and deploy novel applications in minutes?”. The basic gist of the whole thing is to study how mash-ups can be used as a type of end-user innovation, allowing people to create customized technologies. I will be travelling to the Mashup Camp in July to check out what is going on and also to interview some mash-up developers and API providers. Then I am going to put together a workshop on Mash-ups for the CSCW Conference (I just submitted the proposal last Friday). A similar workshop will be help here on campus with more of a focus on mash-ups and the University/entrepreneur.
Stay tuned for more info.