Thursday, September 21, 2006, 08:03 PM
- Everything Else, Coding
Looking through my harddisk trying to free up some space I just came across a folder called "old", which was a copy of my old harddisk, containing three folders "c","d" and "e" one for each partition, the whole thing was still only 3GB. In addition to lots of pictures, letters, etc. that I was sure was lost I found the sources for the very first webpage I made! This was back in the day when we had to make a long-distance phone call to get online (i.e. we had to phone to Oslo), and for some reason I shared my email with the friend who had signed up with the ISP. Maybe we hadn't heard of free webmail. My friend Johan was an early adopter and already had a webpage about the RPG Shatterzone, which amazingly still exists!. He had cool table-based layouts for making nice frames, and taught me everything I needed to know about HTML :)
He's still miles ahead of me and today he runs Styleboost.
So enough talk, without further ado, I give you
VACUUM FIGHTER!
The page mainly speaks for itself I think, although the sentence "I've spent a rather long time developing this X, not that it ever was finished." sounds like something I said last week :)
The download links for the code works, I will have a look at that now, maybe I'll post some highlights later!
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( 3.2 / 128 )Monday, September 4, 2006, 11:34 AM
- PhD
I was reading E.W. Djikstra's EWD1000 today, and came across this quote: If there is one "scientific" discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind. I experience it as a liberating habit: without it, doing the work becomes one thing and writing it down becomes another one, which is often viewed as an unpleasant burden. When working and writing have merged, that burden has been taken away.
and this one
[blah - about something he wrote] .. Had I only written with publication in mind, it would never have seen the light of day. [...] The only way to discover that a neglected or ignored topic is worth writing about is to write about it.
related is probably that I've been spending a lot of time actually writing my thesis these days (I'm not at 39 pages, hurrah!), which is fun because putting thing son paper forces me to think about them and I realise how incomplete some of my initial "research" was...
While writing my thesis I also come across lots of questions that I did not previously consider:
- Does one write a thesis in first person? Or is it still "we did blah", I feel odd writing "I decided X, I discovered Y";
- Will I print my thesis in color? partially?
- How do you chose what symbols to use for formulas/theorems/etc? I'm sure I read about this somewhere before, put the closest I can find now is this Guide to Writing Mathematics;
- how much detail to you include on well known technologies? For instance, I write about multidimensional scaling, the method is from the 50s, surely anyone who cares knows by now? :), on the other hand some details might be useful for a discussion.
...and now it's probably time to get back to *real* work/writing.
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( 3 / 3075 )Tuesday, August 15, 2006, 02:59 PM
- Javascript
Since the start of Nepomuk I've been using bibsonomy for bookmarking and keeping track of citations (My bibsonomy page). It's not quite as slick as del.icio.us, and since the user-base is only a fraction of del.icio.us' the social aspects are probably not as good, but I never found the social bit particularly useful anyway, and the bibtex/citation thing is very cool. <tangent>
(re: the social aspects, it reminds me of something I read pointing out that all the cool tag-cloud, tag-clustering, folksonomy things from del.icio.us, flickr, etc. are not the main purpose of the site, and also not why people using them. People come to keep track of their own links/photos/movies/whatever, and the folksonomies is just a side-effect of this. I would put a link here if I remembered where :)
</tangent>
... Anyway, bibsonomy is nice, but it quickly becomes like a black hole where links go in and never come out. Trying to fix this is of course the bibsonomy tagging extractor in gnowsis (yes,we do del.icio.us and flickr as well), but that's just moving it to another black hole. There is a RSS feed from bibsonomy of course, but I'm not sure what to do with it. Other feeds I follow are converted to email with rss2email, but that's not what I want here. The RSS integration in firefox sucks beyond measure:
well, the links are there, but it's hard to scroll, and no way to filter/search. SO (slowly, slowly to the point), I write my own, modelled slightly after the python sidebar. Here, in all its glory:
It auto-searches as your type and is slightly better than going to the bibsonomy web-site itself, but only slightly. What I really would have liked was way to integrate bibsonomy with quicksilver (like you can with del.icio.us, oh the pains of supporting your fellow researchers), but diving into object-c and xcode to write a new plugin seemed too complicated.
Anyway, there is still a slight problem with the sidebar, searching is only done on the description and title, not the tags... this must almost be a bibsonomy bug though, so i'll whine on the mailinglist.
Finally, should you for some reason want this wonderful sidebar for yourself, click here.
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( 3 / 3153 )Sunday, August 6, 2006, 08:57 PM
- Gnowsis
The last few days has brought three new Gnowsis features. It's getting really fun working on the thing now, most of the basic functionality I want is there, and now I really get inspired to fix small, but annoying bugs that have been there for long, as well as making cool new features. So without further ado, and in reverse order of amount of time it took to hack (click for real images):
The essential Web2.0 feature... THE TAGCLOUD!
This pretty much speaks for itself, the most used concepts in your PIMO, weighted by the number of occurrences (essentially tags).
The Tagging bookmarklet
Instead of spending alot of time fighting with mozilla and zul, we hacked this on up. It works in all browsers, and I still had time left to make the textfield autocomplete on PimoConcepts and get beaten by Leo in Starcraft in the evening.
Synchronization
This is one I been missing for months. Essentially it lets you upload your PIMO to some machine where you have shell access, then other Gnowsis installations you might have can download that PIMO. Later both Gnowsis installations can sync with the one central PIMO, making it easy to keep multiple Gnowsis (Gnowsii?) up to date! The task of doing RDF Diffs was made much easier thanks to
Reto Bachmann-Gmür, and also by the fact that we have no blank nodes in the PIMO. In fact, it was almost trivial. Using SCP from Java was also easy, thanks to JCraft.
Gnowsis is getting so good these days, soon I might have to recommend it to my friends! http://
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( 3.1 / 3282 )Sunday, July 23, 2006, 05:39 PM
- PhD, AI
I finally got around to reading Brooks' intelligence without representation, given to me by Frank ages ago. The paper discusses an interesting architecture of intelligent programs that does not rely on a representation of the external world (etc. read the paper). Which is interesting... BUT more interesting I found the discussion of how many AI researchers deceive themselves by using overly simple scenarios for their experience, either virtual words such as box-world, or even simplified versions of the real world, with matte walls, colour coded object etc. (There is a related, but kind of opposite argument made by Hofstadter, which I wont go into here)
Brooks argues that the only way to develop intelligent systems is
[...] to build completely autonomous mobile agents that co-exist in the world with humans, and re seen by those humans as intelligent beings in their own right.
These claims were made in 1987 and in the last 20 years the internet has brought us a completely new "real" world where many people spend hours every day. We now have a complex, and for any human use practically infinite world of things to interact with.
The internet removed one layer of the difficulties of perception: the need to interpret the not very well understood, noisy, high-bandwidth channels of sound and vision was removed. Instead an intelligent "creature" (to borrow Brooks' terminology) can work on textual documents, whereas still noisy, at least the understanding of natural language seems slightly easier that image understanding.
Perhaps with the advent of the Semantic Web the life of AI researchers has become much easier again. What previously was an unrealistic "abstraction" of the problem, i.e. ignoring the text-parsing and understanding problems, claiming that someone else would solve this and that our work takes the already extracted semantic content as input, has now become quite a reasonable argument.
I suppose what I'm saying at the end of the day is "Thank you Semantic Web people", you have made it possible for me to work on what I grandiosely call an "intelligent" system, without having to solve ALL the problems!
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