Backporting N3 to 1990  
Monday, May 14, 2007, 04:27 PM - RDF
(X)emacs is an evil evil disease. Despite a great selection of other text-editors, I can never work as comfortably or quickly as with xemacs, and the xemacs keybindings are so deeply embedded in my soul that I've come to realise that I will never forget them, nor can I override them by learning something new. Therefore I bit into the sour apple that is emacs-lisp and made n3-mode for xemacs!



It's crappy, and does syntax highlighting and comment support only. It didn't take as long as I thought since I recycled the regexps from my previous three efforts:


If you want to take part in the glorious double-fun that is xemacs N3 editing:

  • Download n3mode.el into ~/.xemacs/
  • Add the following lines to ~/.xemacs:

(load "~/.xemacs/n3mode.el")
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.n3$" . n3-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(add-hook 'n3-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock)

  • Open an N3 file and enjoy!

Now maybe I can finally get around to editting those N3 files, and stop wasting my time.

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Weird Email  
Friday, May 11, 2007, 09:51 AM - Everything Else
Yesterday I got an odd email to my gmail account:

From: Master Doofus <masterdoofus at the domian of gmail.com>
Subject: Hey gromgull, consider getting a new e-mail address

Apparently, your email address happens to have a really high PageRank
value for a Google search for E-mail addresses, making you more
susceptible spam like this that use lame Perl scripts. Feel free to
reply to this mail. Thanks.


WTF? What do I make of this? Do I trust the anonymous person who identifies himself as Master Doofus? Do I break the holy rules of spam prevention and reply? And most importantly, where can I get my own lame perl script?

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N3 Syntax highlighting for gtksourceview  
Thursday, May 10, 2007, 10:24 AM - RDF
Since finding a decent mode for N3 in xemacs seems impossible, and writing a new mode is non-trivial I decided to face the fact that there is more than one editor out there, and I dug out this N3 language definition I did for gtksourceview, the component uses in gedit and various other gnome applications.



Download the .lang file here and put it in /usr/share/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs or ~/.gnome2/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs. Now the N3 mode is available from the View->Highlight Mode->Markup menu.
To automatically highlight all .n3 files add:

<mime-type type="text/rdf+n3">
<comment>N3</comment>
<glob pattern="*.n3" />
</mime-type>

to ~/.local/share/mime/packages/Override.xml.



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Plotting graphs with R  
Thursday, May 3, 2007, 10:03 AM - PhD
This morning I spent 3 hours, from 8am to 11am, trying to force R into plotting beautiful graphs. To increase the challenge I do all my R work through rpy, since the R command-line drives me crazy. Problems, solutions and lessons learner were as follows (if you've never used R this will look like gibberish):

  • To get square line ends you have to the the lend parameter using par BEFORE you call plot.

  • Getting greek characters and other math notation into labels is rather complicated, and right out goddamn impossible through rpy. In the end I fell back to constructing long R commands as string, then using r(command) to execute them.

  • It is not possible to have diagonal axis labels.

  • At least in my version of R (=2.1.0, 2.4.0 crashes with rpy), the axis command ignores the xaxp set with par when at is not specified. Use axTicks specifying xaxp instead.

In the end I got what I wanted though:



The axis here were generated with:
axis(1,at=c(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0),
labels=c(expression(paste("Aleph")),
expression(paste("KNN ")),
expression(paste("KNN ", gamma, "1")),
expression(paste("KNN ", gamma, "2")),
expression(paste("SLIPPER")),
expression(paste("SLIPPER ", gamma, "1")),
expression(paste("SLIPPER ", gamma, "2"))),las=3, srt=90)


Sub-scripting the number after gamma should also be possible, but I gave up.

Oh and before you say: "why didn't you just use excel/openoffice" - Because where would the wonderful vector-based PDF antialiases goodness be then?


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On bias in public Wikis.  
Wednesday, May 2, 2007, 10:09 AM - Everything Else
Wikipedia is generally quite good at identifying and correcting bias and "non-encyclopaedic" behaviour in it's pages. In fact it goes so far that it's getting annoying at times when you are doing important research.

How much nicer isn't this from the wikitravel guide to hongkong:

A word of caution for Western men: Almost all Thai, Filipino and Indonesian women in Western bars and restaurants on Lockhart Road are prostitutes. They sometimes have a second job as 'waitresses'. Scams involving drugged drinks, inflated bills, and once more personal info is exchanged, blackmailing the men, a sick mother back home in the Philippines needing an urgent, expensive, life-saving surgery, etc. are very common. Don't fall in love with them, only to be ruined economically and personally by them.


Do I sense a slight note of personal bitterness?

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