The Ultimate Acheivement  
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 09:43 AM - Everything Else
You offer the Amulet of Yendor to Susanowo...--More--
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Susanowo rings out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--


Ha! You didn't expect that after the last post! Anyway, Nethack provided a much needed distraction from long hours working on the thesis, and I've now finally beat the bastard. NOW I can finish the PhD, but as colleague Benjamin said: "Why? Just tell your Prof that you finished Nethack. It's equivalent." :)

Anyway, the whole game summary is here.
Some highlights:


Grimnes the Kuge St:18/40 Dx:18 Co:18 In:16 Wi:18 Ch:15 Chaotic
Astral Plane $:1379 HP:211(211) Pw:145(145) AC:-24 Xp:26/60060315

Your inventory
Amulets
d - an uncursed amulet of life saving (being worn)
i - an uncursed amulet of life saving
Weapons
a - a rustproof +6 katana (wielded in other hand)
u - the rustproof +6 Excalibur (weapon in hand)
Armor
b - an uncursed greased +5 silver dragon scale mail (being worn)
k - a blessed rusty +2 dwarvish iron helm
p - a blessed fireproof +5 T-shirt (being worn)
w - a blessed +4 cloak of magic resistance (being worn)
A - a cursed -1 helm of opposite alignment (being worn)
P - a blessed fireproof +5 pair of speed boots (being worn)
V - a blessed +4 pair of levitation boots
Y - a blessed +3 pair of yugake (being worn)
[...]

Vanquished creatures
Asmodeus
Baalzebub
Dispater
Orcus
Juiblex
The Wizard of Yendor (6 times)
Death
Famine (twice)


Genocided species: h, ;, L, Rust Monster, Disenchanter, E (although that didn't work as expected)

Voluntary challenges
You genocided 20 types of monsters
You polymorphed 150 items
You never changed form
You used 5 wishes
You did not wish for any artifacts

Sayonara grimnes the Demigoddess...
You went to your reward with 3855742 points,
[...]
and 1379 pieces of gold, after 54466 moves.
Killer: ascended
You were level 26 with a maximum of 211 hit points when you ascended.


Only thing that makes me feel like I cheated is that I was lawful the whole game and changed to chaotic at the last turn to save me a meeting with pestilence.

Next time I'll do it as a Wizard!

(Apologies if you have never seen or heard of nethack, then this will appear like completely random ramblings :)

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quiet before the storm  
Wednesday, September 12, 2007, 06:36 PM - PhD
Running like crazy for the final sprint of the PhD thesis at the moment, so no time to do anything fun to write about here, or to write here for that matter.

In a extremely motivated moment I googled "finishing a phd is impossible" and found this:

A gradiate school survival guide

It is useful and funny overall, and includes several good quotes, like this one:

The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
1) Write down the problem.
2) Think very hard.
3) Write down the solution.

I wish I had thought of that.

Also included is the oh-so-very appropriately for my planning-to-learn thesis:

"Failing to plan is planning to fail."


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Back from 10 days holiday  
Wednesday, August 1, 2007, 01:08 PM - Everything Else
I'm amazed how easy it was to drift away from the online world while I was in Norway, I had no nervous twitched about letting my unread email climb, not letting facebook notifications slip by or not checking flickr comments continuously.

BUT: Now I'm back. I see that six people who are not me have signed up to Koble! Yet I have not received any of my automated stack-trace emails from when things go wrong - yay! (I have also not received any comments, but that's to be expected)



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Koble!  
Thursday, July 19, 2007, 04:53 PM - Semantic Desktop
At ESWC I was getting a bit frustrated, because I saw many cool new technologies, projects, people and things, but my Gnowsis was broken so I had nowhere to write it down. Really this should of course have been a job for Nepomuk, but the Nepomuk prototype is not yet at a stage where I feel comfortable trusting my data to it :)

So, with plenty of hacking time on the train and while listening to talk at ESWC I started hacking something to keep track of my world. A few things were clear about my new hackish solution:

  • It would be written in Python :)
  • It would be a web-app, for two reasons:
    • I never liked having Gnowsis being only local, I change computers often and want to take the data with me.
    • Developing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript is so much easier than any GUI toolkit.
  • Web-app meant I could forget a few things:
    • No Aperture (local file integration) :(
    • No application plugins :(
  • BUT I also gained:
    • No cross-platform trouble
    • I could use Linux Commandline tools, like pdftotext or imagemagick
  • I would concentrate on a few features and do them quickly and then leave it alone forever.

When I got home I had some basic functionality ready, and I tried hard to put the thing away to concentrate on my PhD, but it kept coming back. Now, a month and a bit later it's at a stage where I can show it to the world. So! I give you:


Since pictures speak louder than words here are a couple of screenshots (click for larger view):

The Koble welcome screen:


A Thing page:


Adding a relation:


Placing Things on the map:


Even louder than pictures speaks action though, and
Koble is open and you can try it today! Registration requires at least an OpenID account, but preferably a FOAF account linking to your OpenID. Read a bit more about Koble here, or about the FOAF+OpenID accounts.
It is still a bit buggy, and probably always will be. As a guide I have been using it for the past week, and I do trust my data to it :)

PS: Oh, and I just realised it's not quite clear, the URL is http://koble.net :)

PSS: It's of course open-source, you can look at the mess that is the source-code here: http://koble.opendfki.de/ and look at some tickets for some planned features here: http://koble.opendfki.de/report/9



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SVG version of Semantic Web stack  
Tuesday, July 3, 2007, 01:12 PM - Semantic Web
A little while ago I needed nice versions of the Semantic Web stack(s) (Timbl used an updated version in some 2005 slides) to put in my thesis, and I knocked them up in Inkscape. Today I needed them again, and realised I never put them online, so here you go:


These are of course copyright/whatever to Timbl (maybe his slides are CC?) and you should cite him if you use them.

Updated: fix the page size for the 2005 version.

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