Sunday, January 28, 2007, 08:35 PM
- Everything Else
Wow, over a month since I wrote anything here. I suppose it's because I've not had time for small useless hacks that fit into my idea of what goes on "nothing clever". Instead of hacking I've spent my time playing with my new camera and doing fun things to pictures in gimp. I'm still undecided on how much post-processing of photos is "OK" (to who? the thought police?) I used to regard what came off the memory card as sacred... but shooting in RAW means you can get so many different outcomes for a single shot all of which are tecnically "correct". So I keep coming up with arbitrary rules, like: "adjusting the contrast of the whole image is ok, but selecting only the clouds and doing the same is not". All ridicolous of course. At the end of the day I should gimp I much as I like, it's all about having fun anyway. Still I can't help feeling that gimp'ing is like writing a program to find all primes by doing
sys.stdout.write("1\n")
sys.stdout.write("2\n")
sys.stdout.write("5\n")
sys.stdout.write("7\n")
...
Vice versa I suppose you can argue that pursuing the perfect contrast straight off the camera is like coding in brainfuck, it could be seen as a noble task, but it is completely stupid.
I just realised what I did hack, that I could have posted here:
A Pimo-Overview widget (essentially a tree-view on an ontology with instances and relations) for the Nepomuk/IBM Lotussphere demo. It's not rocket science, but I coded it using Eclipse RCP/SWT/JFace stuff, and it was really quick and easy to get going. In the end I dont think it made it into the demo, but it was a learning experience, and I found that SWT/JFace+Eclipse Visual editor is almost as quick as Delphi for developing GUIs.
I've also worked hard on finalising the clustering experiments for my thesis, and again I find that my previous work was kinda sloppy and has big holes in it. Oh well - I'll post meaningless graphs on here again as soon as I'm done.
Finally, here is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson on the internet to his friend (and illustrator) Ralph Steadman:
"We're fucked up, Ralph. They invented the perfect tool for the New Dumb. They can now flourish in the land of serious stupidity and greed. They can infest the planet with every sick asshole you can dream of and make him sound sane. Now, nay cheap, lying fuck can become President of the United States and sound good. Every mindless little screwhead can pour his sickest thoughts into this new machinery, twist it a degree out of normal and send it back as wisdom. You think we have arrived in the Land of the Living Dead. No, Ralph! We have only just begun!"
(Quoted from The Joke's Over - an overall enjoyable read!)
I'm going write an intelligent and witty comment on this quote, just let me refresh digg... and slashdot ... and fark... and check if anyone replied to my comments on flickr...
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( 3 / 2084 )Sunday, December 17, 2006, 08:37 PM
- Everything Else
My good old friend from aberdeen has launched his new Web2.0 web-site: Loopnote! It's all in Ruby on rails, looks good, and performs really well! Although I must confess I haven't really used it. Take a look for great Web2.0 gradients :)
How about some RDF in there Martin? :)
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( 2.9 / 2475 )Thursday, December 7, 2006, 05:17 PM
- Semantic Desktop
Finally, after several weeks of staring in despair at the Nepomuk OSGI middleware/backbone thingy implementation and intensely hating OSGI, maven, SOAP, and all java programmers in general I have finally got some stuff working! It's now all committed and I've made it work on my laptop as well, just to prove it wasn't a glitch. Here is a screenshot of everything checked out:
This OSGI thing is completely ridicolous... and this is with no real functionality, I dread what it will look like when it actually does something.
... dreaming of a world where I can spend time coding functionality, not being tortured in framework hell...
(This reminds me one of my studens, he was staring at endless jboss exceptions scrolling by, and I walked up and asked how he was doing, and he said "i dont even see jboss any more, all I see is blonde, brunette ... )
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( 3 / 2694 )Friday, November 17, 2006, 12:41 PM
- Java
And more pain! In the last two days I've been trying to deploy Axis2 as an OSGI bundle, and it has proven almost completely impossible.
The reason for this was the general idea that axis2 should be better than axis1 (see, it goes to 11, eh, to 2) and the developers are very excited about it, saying "Axis2 is very much straight forward and friendly to use than it's predecessor.". Now after two days and no hair left I wish I had googled "Axis2 sucks" earlier, cause it gave me this jewel of an article: Axis2 - why bother.
Read it all, but I have to pull out this quote:
[..blah, it sucks..] It really is a gift that keeps on giving. Deployment brings its own special joy sauce to burn your eyes out with and make your bottom cry rivers of brown sadness. Everything is hardcoded to a specific context path, and deploying the simplest hello world service is more likely than not to result in a jbossian stacktracefest.
PS: This post included no sensible or useful information, sorry.
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( 3 / 2991 )Tuesday, October 24, 2006, 10:00 PM
- PhD
I just found I had to include some RDF files in the appendix of my thesis, going with the "normal people shouldn't ever have to see RDF/XML" line I will include it as N3 (which also makes sense since that's how I wrote it). source-highlight helped me typeset beautiful prolog before, but lacks a language definitions for N3. Luckily the definition langauge is simple, and by steal definitions left-right and center this only took 20 miniutes.
I give you: the n3.lang file, example output for html, and for latex here as PDF.
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