but it only makes you feel dirtier...  
Monday, February 19, 2007, 02:06 PM - Coding
In Nepomuk we have many many problems trying to use fairly simple types over SOAP, like HastTable<String, List<String>> etc... all things that worked well using XMLRPC. After lots of back and forth and changing from axis to xfire, and generating wsdls from code or vice versa etc. I'm not fairly certain that SOAP is a completely useless overcomplicated piece of dung, and I found this very entertaining conversation that proves it:

s-stands-for-simple

Back to writing messages to files in /tmp for communication...

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None of us are as stupid as all of us  
Sunday, February 11, 2007, 11:00 AM - Everything Else, Semantic Desktop
Joel writes
...the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team ... What kills me is the teams who get into the bad habit of holding meetings every time they need to figure out how something is going to work. Did you ever try to write poetry in a committee meeting? It’s like a bunch of fat construction guys trying to write an opera while sitting on the couch watching Baywatch. The more fat construction guys you add to the couch, the less likely you are to get opera out of it.


Maybe this is what happens in Nepomuk? Maybe this explains why the RDFApi taskforce spent 9 months coming up with a list of methods that feels like any of us could have scribbled them down in an afternoon (And tf-rdfapi even missed out a few). Similarily, we spent all last week finding core functionalities of Nepomuk, which boiled down to a list of extremely general and obvious things like "search", which again, we could have written down over lunch. (or maybe Tuot was right, maybe it only seems that way because I've been breathing the semantic desktop for a year)

Related is perhaps the color of the bikeshed.



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The WWWW  
Wednesday, February 7, 2007, 03:26 PM - Semantic Web
Conversation with Cedric:

G: what innovation does RDF add to the desktop? You can import/export FOAF from messenger clients and social networking sites, etc., but this is only convenient, it doesn't change your life.

C: Yes, it's not a silver bullet. Not the silvet bullet we need to kill the Were Wolf... the World Wide Were Wolf!

G: The Wicked World Wide Were Wolf!

C: The Wicked World Wide Were Wolf Wiki!

etc. ...

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"Real" photos and HST (with no relation)  
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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Loopnote launches!  
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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