The window of shame  
Thursday, April 26, 2007, 02:01 PM
Time waster 1: Flash Elements TD (from Chris)

Time waster 2: Boomshine (you need the music to really appreciate it!)

(Title from here)

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Semantic Desktop Invaders  
Friday, April 20, 2007, 10:09 AM - Semantic Desktop
Last week was the Semantic Desktop hands-on workshop in Berlin, and Leo's video really says almost everything. I found the format of the workshop (morning talks, afternoon free time) really nice, as I can't really pay attention for a whole day.

On the train to Berlin I had lots of laptop battery and I tried to brain-storm something quick and dirty I could hack up using machine-learning, I wasn't very successful.
HOWEVER, I remembered an interesting idea by (I think) DJ McCloskey at the IBM language-ware labs: The email radar! Imagine the motion detector from Aliens, but showing the unread/unprocessed emails in your inbox. More important emails/tasks appear as bigger dots, this would give you instant overview of your day and how stressed you should be. Or alternatively, when you should just give in and lie down to die. Then the idea spirals out of control a bit and you can imagine "ENEMY DESTROYED!" sound effects and explosions when you mark something as done or file away the email.

From this the idea of Semantic Space Invaders! was born:



Fly backwards in time and destroy your flickr-photos!

My original idea was that this could combine your various RSS feeds to let you destroy your activities over the last few weeks, however, technical difficulties meant that only flickr was supported (parsed really badly so it might break). Also, it's harder to come up with nice icons for other RSS feeds, although I was briefly thinking about finding a service for creating web-thumbnails.
Another nice feature that I would implement if I had infinite time is to auto-compress the timeline in periods where there is no activity.

Like last years rdfroom this is written in python using pygame.

download here

(Oh and btw, yes, this IS completely pointless, but it only took me a 2-3 hours :)

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Web 0.2  
Thursday, April 12, 2007, 10:30 AM - Python
Currently I am in Berlin at the Semantic Desktop Hands-On Workshop and I was working on a toy that I started on the train. No details now, it will appear here when finished (i.e. when 10% complete and I can get a screenshot).

For this toy I needed to get titles, publication dates and thumbnails of flickr photos. Flickr is amazingly open so this should be easy! Here we go:

  • Since this is a SEMANTIC workshop I will do this through RSS (which is kinda semantic...) and this makes it easy to work with any photostream from flickr (personal, contacts, tags, etc.). So I download the universal feed parser, it parses the feed, but loses the thumbnail and image elements. Bugger. Struggle for 20-30 min to make sure it's not my fault, but no, they are indeed gone.

  • Option 2: Find a flickr python API! Setup an API key, and try to make the FlickrAPI request authorisation, it needs a browser, leave it empty and it tries lynx. I only have links. I do this from the interactive python prompt and the flickrapi calls sys.exit when things go wrong. Great! Try links - it wont let me login, the meta-refresh always brings me back to the login page. What is the command to launch firefox on commandline in MacOSX? (prob. /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox) - never mind. I give up - and revert to RSS.

  • Option 3: write my own rss "parser". "Parser" in the loosest sense here, no XML, just reg-exp the lines, relying on the order of RSS elements in the flickr rss feeds. This works nearly, till I get to parsing the publication dates. The date is given in some RFC format, i.e.: "Mon, 9 Apr 2007 04:07:19 -0800". Python has strftime and strptime to format and parse respectively. The format string for this is "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z" - however, %z (for the timezone offset) is not mentioned on the module documentation page, but it seems to work for strftime. However, parsing gives me:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/_strptime.py", line 286, in strptime
format_regex = time_re.compile(format)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/_strptime.py", line 264, in compile
return re_compile(self.pattern(format), IGNORECASE)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/_strptime.py", line 256, in pattern
processed_format = "%s%s%s" % (processed_format,
KeyError: 'z'


Sigh...


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printable 13x13 go board  
Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 10:56 AM - Everything Else
I was looking for a printable 13x13 go board to teach some beginners. I thought this would already exist since there are many 9x9 boards available, but no. 13x13 does of course require an A3 printer (although we made them before but cutting up several 9x9 boards and taping them together). A bit of messing about in inkscape and 10 minutes later:


Put here so that the next person who looks can find it on google.

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pigeon-holing  
Monday, March 19, 2007, 02:19 PM - Everything Else
While working hard on my phd just now I was looking through the mp3 collection at some unnamed company. This is the most convincing argument for proper meta-data I've seen in a while, we have some 20k tracks divided into folders, we have classics like:

  • Metal
  • Metall
  • Pop
  • Pop&Rock
  • Rock
  • unsorted

etc. all chaos, but the best is the sub-folder called "multimedia" offering the following classification:

  • a-z
  • albem (albums)
  • deutsche (german)
  • lustiges (funny)
  • themes

where EVERY category can overlap. This is even better than the those animals that from a long way off look like flies.

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