Tuesday, May 9, 2006, 12:36 PM
- Everything Else
So my scheduling life is nearly complete, I have all my calendars available everywhere and I have the quick add extension for adding events at anytime. Now for the problems:
- Quick Add ONLY adds to my default calendar, I want to be able to enter: "DFKI: Gnowsis Meeting 15pm" and have it added to my DFKI calendar.
- The "German Holiday" from google sucks - it doesn't have any of the days I want (AND the description says 2005). Also, I cannot get google to read this
- Adding the calendars from google-calendar to ical works fine, BUT they are read only - why can't I use webdav and edit them with my google username/password?
- Now, most importantly: Quick add is great, and close to perfection, but i've not booked a ryanair flight, and I get this in an email:
From Hahn Frankfurt(HHN) to Torp Oslo(TRF)
Sat, 03Jun06 Flight FR9822 Depart HHN at 07:05 and arrive TRF at 09:00
putting this into quick-add as is gives me an event TODAY. Not good. Insert some spaces and make it "03 Jun 06" gets the date right, but ignores the time - and the year, leaving these in the description and creates an all day event.
Having tried 10s of different formats I finally get the right thing to happen by changing "Depart HHN at 07:05 and arrive TRF at 09:00" to 7:05-9:00 and moving it in front of the date. That is, unfortunately, more hassle than entering the event by hand.
(Doing all this I noticed another feature that would have been nice: if I could click the "your event has been created" message and go straight to that event)
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( 3 / 3879 )Saturday, May 6, 2006, 06:10 PM
- CaseMod
;)
The start of this project was finding this old "portable" potentiometer which the chemistry department in Aberdeen threw out (at least I hope they meant to - otherwise I stole it). The portable'ness of the thing meant you could lift it, and it had room for 4 single A batteries, however it weighed a ton. Among the other interesting features this box was "open-source", i.e. the wiring diagram and printing instructions was printed on the inside of the cover.
;)
With a mix of brute-force, power-tools, manual sawing and a lot of un-screwing I got most of the original components out, with only a few months waiting while I ordered imperial alan-keys on ebay and had them shipped to a friend in the uk who then forgot to send them to me for a long time. Getting all the old junk out made room inside for my VIA EPIA ML6000 fanless Mini-itx motherboard, and the tiny AC-DC converter.
;)
The goal of this whole operation was to create a silent PC that could always be on, and could keep all my mp3s and movies, it was therefore necessary to put two 250gb harddisks in as well. Luckily the harddisks just about fit in, although there isn't much room for the IDE cables, I think I shall try to cut off the second connector on an ide cable now to see if it still works. I also hope the harddisks wont get too hot, I was really hoping to keep the whole setup fanless, if it fails I can always have a half-speed fan at the back though, the old battery compartment leaves a hole for ventilation.
;)
The other problems was that the power-supply had only 1 harddisk/cdrom power connector (i.e. the 12v 4-pin things), which I found odd since it said that the 80W ac-dc adaptor said it could power a HD and a full-size CDROM. Since I wanted this to work today there was no time to order a splitter, so I cut off a bit of an old normal size power-supply, and compensated for the lack of a female plug (well, the plastic bit is female, the pins male) with creative soldering and four nails. Finishing it it looked slightly like a torture instruments... alas 12V is gonna make anyone scream though.
;)
Finally, I installed debian, i thought i may have some problems with the strange hardware, but everything worked straight out of the box and the whole process took less than 30 minutes. Then I apt-got samba and was listening to my mp3s from my laptop in less than 1 hour! (if it wasn't for MacOSX than http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthrea ... )
;)
Now all I need is a sensible backup solution. Burning DVDs is really not an option. Anyone?
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( 3 / 3876 )Tuesday, April 4, 2006, 11:32 PM
- PhD, Machine Learning
Since 3 is a magic number I'd really like to have 3 different learning algorithms used Smeagol. Currently I have ILP and HAC-clustering, both applied in several different ways. Sequence/Basket analysis seems like a good candidate for third algorithm, since it's the only area of ML not covered yet. (ILP covering classification and more...) Sequence analysis would of course require a time dimension the the data, which i'd really rather not get into, AND it was probably covered pretty well by Heather Maclaren.
Basket analysis is left, and my first attempt was quickly hacked up using Orange. The things in my baskets are predicate-value pairs, and each person becomes a basket on their own. I tried this on several data-sets i had lying around, here are some quick and dirty results:
A small subset of my IMDB Data (3534 triples) gave me:
rdf#type IMDB#Movie -> IMDB#languages English
and
rdf#type IMDB#Movie -> IMDB#country_USA
My email from the last 5 years as crawler by aperture (127615 triples) gave me the fascinating rule:
aperture:mimeType message/rfc822 -> rdf#type imap/Message
A subset of some old FOAF crawl stolen from JibberJim years ago gave me:
jim#isKnownBy norman.walsh#norman-walsh -> rdf#type foaf/Person
yes - fascinating indeed. I also found the Norman Walsh rule using ILP years ago, at least running this one was pretty fast.
I'm not sure what to conclude from this - none of the rules are groundbreaking OR that interesting. Maybe I can tweak the way items are represented, using just values or just predicates for example. I'll see tomorrow.
I also had a brain-storming session with myself and some gin'n'tonic today, and if I don't finish this PhD it's because the table wasn't big enough:
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( 3 / 2165 )Friday, March 31, 2006, 08:16 PM
- Python
Some friends using Windows only asked me about RDFRoom (Yes! Really!), and I was about to tell them than unless they spent a while installing python, pygame, rdflib, it wasn't gonna happen, but I thought I'll google first. Dada! Enter py2exe! After I spent a bit of time installing python, pygame, rdflib on my vmware image, wrote a 6 line setup.py and ran py2exe (Then fiddled with packaging the right rdflib packages, damn plugin-architecture), I had a RDFRoom.exe which would run without installing any other packages. Amazing. Download RDFRoom.zip for windows NOW! :D
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( 3 / 4226 )Thursday, March 30, 2006, 11:53 PM
- RDF, Python
Too late to be verbose now, but after being encouraged by Danny last week, I've spent long evening hacking together this crappy demo. The webpage has all the info you need (including downloads), and the screenshot here should tickle your senses enough to click that link. If you like RDF that is. And you like old-fashioned computer games. And if you're bored. 
Some notes:
- Look at some RDF DATA, schemas dont work well just now.
- Yes i know the fire effect is badly aligned.
- You need data with rdfs:seeAlso links to get doors.
That's it for now, I refuse to waste any more time on this useless nonsense!
(Oh, and I submitted this to the ESWC Semantic Web Scripting Challenge :-)
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