Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

A pretty simple programming task: Find the most-used words in a text and count how often they’re used. (With the goal of later creating a pretty Wordle-like word cloud from this data.) I assumed there would be some existing tool or code, and Roger Howard said NLTK’s FreqDist() was “easy as pie”. So today I…

You have probably heard of Blendle, the promising “iTunes for News” startup from the Netherlands that’s backed by the NYT and Axel Springer. They’re launching in Germany on September 14th. I’ve been a fan of the Blendle idea for a long time: effortlessly buying print articles from a central “online kiosk”, with an equally easy…

(Disclosure: I’m no OpenLDAP expert, just a user. Use the commands below at your own risk. Please let me know if I’m recommending something dumb…) OpenLDAP slapd is popular open source server software that implements the LDAP protocol – you use it to store users, groups and their attributes, and you can use it for…

Friends of ours recently visited the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. They told us the story of the Vasa, a warship that sank almost immediately after setting out for her maiden voyage in 1628. According to Wikipedia: “Richly decorated as a symbol of the king’s ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one…

Dave Winer – Too much linear thinking in news: “I think they [Circa] were on to something. Starting topics, and then adding stories to each topic as the news comes in. A story isn’t something that’s published once and done, it’s more of a process. […] Circa resisted joining the open web. I think that…

Yesterday, we met with a potential customer’s tech and development team who were interested in the backend of our DC-X DAM system. I gave a quick overview of the system architecture, the most important data structures, and our brand new JSON API. Here’s the slides of my presentation (or download a PDF of the presentation):

[Update: This post got some well-deserved pushback. Thanks to Patrick Durusau, Lars Marius Garshol and Jack Park for the feedback – and sorry for the controversial headline. I’ve added “(as a standard)” and did some editing to make clear that people still use Topic Maps.] I’m a fan of Topic Maps – the very well-thought-out…

There’s no widely-accepted standard for DAM data yet Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are the hubs for organizations’ creative content. DAMs need to exchange data with other systems all the time: import creative works and metadata from external content providers, export digital assets and metadata to Web Content Mananagement systems and so on. Sadly, none…

Das folgende Referat habe ich am 5. Mai 2015 bei der Frühjahrstagung des Vereins für Medieninformation und Mediendokumentation (vfm) in Bremen gehalten, zum Thema “Vom Archiv- zum Redaktionssystem” beim Presse-Panel (etwas überarbeitet, entspricht nicht dem genauen Wortlaut). Die anderen beiden Redner waren Christian Wagner, Geschäftsführender Redakteur beim WESER-KURIER (der unser DC-X einsetzt) und André Maerz,…

Workflow doesn’t This blog post is inspired by Roger Howard’s excellent, thought-provoking “Workflow doesn’t” critique of the workflow functionality in today’s Digital Asset Management systems. (I don’t know which systems Roger has worked with. If you want to catch up with the state of DAM workflow engines, here’s some links to get you started: Status-based…