captsolo weblog

Merry Christmas to you all!
Wish you a wonderful and peaceful celebration.

Here are a couple of nice things:

• Līga's blog has a nice picture of Pink Elephant sending us best season's greetings. Would be nice to let it (elephant) live in my sidebar. And then there's a nice idea about "Can I Crash?" initiative for bloggers.

• Pēteris shows how you can make festive fireworks right in your office (and don't do this at home!). Check it out what you can do with an ashtray: video and an explosion.

How was your Christmas?

UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux

In-depth explanation of Unicode and UTF-8. Might be handy when I try to fix the encoding of comments which got broken when recovering from a backup. Apparently something went wrong with the encoding of special characters (Latvian, Russian, ...) when the backup was created.

Welcome to the new blogs - both in the field of the Web and Semantic Web and those writing on more general topics.

Semantic Web:

TimBL's blog

Tim Berners-Lee now has a blog on DIG blogs site. His first entry ends with words "So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog". This is a blog you might want to bookmark.

Stefan Decker

Stefan Decker now has a new blog described as a weblog covering semantics in computer science. It was interesting to read an article "The Database Community and the Semantic Web" and see that different areas of computer science have almost no knowledge of each other. Good to see at least some awareness about the Semantic Web now building up within the database community.

Dan Connolly

Dan's blog provides an intense flow of information and first grasped my attention when he mentioned SIOC in the "SKOS, SIOC, and drupal taxonomy" article. Nice to see that DIG blogs now have comments enabled - I wanted to respond to the blog entry mentioned above, but at that time it was not possible.

General:

Pink Elephant

She starts the blog with a simple, yet fundamental question - "why to write a blog?". It is followed by posts on diverse topics, the last one featuring one of the most amazing Swedish architectural creations.

Information

Hyper-focused attention is good when you explore something - it lets you accumulate and process a huge amount of information. But now when I am looking at those 10+ open Mozilla windows with ~5 tabs each plus some IE windows and thinking - what to do with all this information now?

Reminds me of something Līga said recently - "i wish i could move open tabs between Firefox windows".

This would not solve the question what to do with all this information, but still would help to group and manage them. There was a Mozilla extension Multizilla that lets you do this. Is there something like this for the Firefox?

Attention

Luckily, these windows have appeared during a number of days. If that all was just one night, that'd have been way too much. Which again leads to the question of how do we all cope with the information that is out there?

Joi Ito: Continuous Partial Attention - talking about an idea of continuous partical attention by Linda Stone:

" ... at conferences or the multi-modal distance learning projects where you have a video of the speaker, the power point presentation, the chat, the wiki and the back channel going at the same time. ... It CAN be very overwhelming, but I think it's because we are conditioned to think that we need to understand all of the information that is being transmitted.

I think an interesting metaphor might be the difference between loss-less and lossy compression technology. There is so much information being transmitted and it doesn't matter if you [get] everything exactly (or if you are getting exactly the same bits as someone else).

... The trick is to get a picture of what is going on from a perspective that makes sense for you in a format that compresses well for you. ... I think that if we stop trying to "catch it all" which we are conditioned to do, and think more in terms of lossy compression and surfing parallel streams and multi-modes, maybe it is easier. "

Related:

• Responsibility, Accountability, and Follow-Through - a discussion on "43 Folders" list.
• Is my obsession a feature or a bug? - a discussion on "attention deficit disorder" - is it a feature or a bug?

It was a great night. Stayed up late, but feeling good.

Sadly, the first part of the night was not for fun, but rather to finish a paper that we were working on.

But when that was completed felt too good to go to sleep.
And nightly conversations with folks on #joiito can really cheer you up.

stats.tunt.lv statistikas serviss tagad ir kļuvis par maksas pakalpojumu.
Par to mēs uzzinam e-mailā, kas nosūtīts 2 dienas pirms pārmaiņām, kā arī ielogojoties viņu serverī:

captsolo.net/info - statistikas uzskaite ir pārslēgta uz BEZMAKSAS VARIANTU.
Jebkurā laikā paplašinātās statistikas vākšanu var atsākt uz LMT [numurs] vai Tele2 [numurs] ar sekojošu tekstu:

-------------------------
TUNT 100 captsolo
-------------------------

maksa par šo pakalpojumu ir nieka 0.35 Ls/mēnesī

Vēlme atpelnīt laba servisa uzturēšanas izdevumus pati par sevi nav peļama, tomēr ...

Daži jautājumi:

• Vai jūs maksāsiet par šādu servisu laikā, kad Google Analytics ir bez maksas?

• Vai ir korekti pārslēgt klientus uz maksas pakalpojumu bez atbilstoša "skaidrojošā darba", atsūtot vienīgi automātisku brīdinājumu 2 dienas pirms notikuma?
• Vai ir iespējams šo maksu samaksāt, ja atrodaties ārpus Latvijas?
• Ja jūs izlemtu neturpināt servisa lietošanu, vai būtu iespējams saņemt kāda tālāk izmantojamā formā (CSV, XML, ...) līdz šim savākto informāciju par jūsu serveri?

• Download the audio directly (MP3, 8Mb).
  
• ... or get it from the podcast RSS feed
• a transcript is now available at ISWC Podcast [ESW wiki]

w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/" title="W3C - Tim Berners-Lee">Tim Berners-Lee was very kind to participate in a podcast interview about the Semantic Web and future of the Web. He is the inventor of the World Wide Web and one of the people behind the vision of the Semantic Web.

Read more on Wikipedia - Tim Berners-Lee.

It was a very interesting interview and experience - talking with him about the Semantic Web, it's history, present and future. If you want a short intro into the Semantic Web and it's role in the scheme of things, listen to this interview. And tell us what you think!

Thanks, Tim!

Who we are

This podcast was prepared and brought to you by Ina O'Murchu and Uldis Bojārs. The original blog posts for this podcast are located at:

• Semantic Bits [Ina]
• CaptSolo Weblog [Uldis]

Thanks

Thanks to folks at #joiito for help with podcasting related questions and vmarks in particular for help with audio processing.

And big thanks to Ina for having the ISWC 2005 podcasting idea and implementing it.

If you mirror this interview or put it on BitTorrent - please let us know so we can link to it.

Antigravity device patented

A space vehicle ... propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided ...

... comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller ...

Related story on BoingBoing

Whom Do Anti-Virus Companies Work For?

Bruce Schneier has a great editorial on Wired News that asks why anti-virus companies -- who would normally address a rootkit or similar piece of software within hours -- didn't notice Sony's rootkit, which had been in place since mid-2004? Also: why did they initially refuse to patch against it?

Who do these companies work for -- us, or the entertainment industry?

Related story on BoingBoing

Konference (ISWC 2005) bija ļoti traks laiks.

Milzum daudz iespaidu un satiktu cilvēku.

Priecājos, ka Viesturs (Extropy) atbrauca uz šejieni un piedalījās konferencē.

Domu apmaiņa un jaunu kontaktu veidošana arī ir tie spilgtākie iespaidi un lielākais ieguvums. Mums bija tā izdevība nedaudz parunāties ar weba "tēvu" Timu Berneru-Lī - tā ir fantastiska sajūta cik erudīts un ideju pilns cilvēks var būt.

Intervijas audio podcasts drīzumā sekos.

Cenšos tagad tos visus (iespaidus) apkopot, kas nemaz nav viegli. Kad tas būs darīts, uzrakstīšu šeit kādu kopsavilkumu. Iesākumam variet apskatīt dažas bildes (Flickr), drīzumā būs vēl.

Vienam varu piekrist - pat ja Semantiskā weba "sniega pika" vēl nav pati sākusi velties no kalna lejā, nu jau ir ļoti daudz cilvēku, kas to veļ. Un rezultāti liek savi manīt.

Papildus info:

• Semantiskais webs
• Trešdienas semināri MII

The ISWC 2005 conference has ended and now is the time for action!

"Publish the data! Annotate! Be there!" - these are some of the most motivating memes circulating in the air. And Eric Miller, the Activity Lead for the W3C Semantic Web Initiative, was one of the hottest proponents of some action [that fits his title well ].

Here is just a part of what you can and should do:

1) Generate SIOC! [shock]

Grab a WP SIOC plugin and drop it into your WordPress directory. It will instantly start to produce metadata describing your online community site = your blog.

" Danny installed the SIOC plugin and suddenly there's so much more information for the PiggyBank to use! " - EricM

For SIOC Developer discussions go to SIOC Forums or the mailing list.

2) Use PiggyBank!

Install PiggyBank / Use It!

PiggyBank is an exciting application presented at the ISWC 2005. It is a FireFox extension that turns your browser into a "Semantic Web browser", letting you make existing information on the Web more useful.

It can both make a good use of RDF data out there and use the data from regular web pages. You can then combine information from several web sites and use it all together.

3) Put Your Data Online!

Your papers, presentations, photos and videos - put them all online. Then annotate them and let people know.

Put them on the ISWC'2005 Semantic Bank!

Please let me know (just comment!) if you know the URLs or tags of the photos, videos and audio recordings that people took at ISWC 2005. Some photos can be found on Flickr tagged with 'galway' or 'iswc2005', but locating all your cool videos is not that easy unless you tell about them.

It would be especially good to find the audio recordings of keynote presentations - if everybody was recording dances at the Gala Dinner, maybe you also recorded those speeches?

Note: You can now add those links to the ISWC 2005 Media Index wiki page.

Thanks to John who blogged a very good set of ISWC 2005 resources.

Putting the Web back in Semantic Web - keynote presentation by Tim Berners-Lee at the wrap-up ISWC 2005 and start of RuleML 2005 - Galway, November 2005.

Has anyone recorded it?
(audio/video)

ISWC is in full action now and one of the today's events is the Industry Day with participation of blue chip company CEO's and a keynote talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

One of my colleague who was there says - the talk was very good and within a 30 minute timeframe TimBL gave a clear understanding about what the Semantic Web is. The slides are here:

• Semantic Web for the Industry - Tim Berners-Lee, Director, W3C - ISWC 2005 Industry Day

Latv: Rīt, 6.novembrī sāksies Starptautiskā semantiskā weba konference (ISWC 2005).

ISWC 2005 - the 4th Internation Semantic Web Conference will begin tomorrow in Galway. It starts with 2 days of workshops and tutorials, followed by the official conference opening on Tuesday, November 8 and three days of the conference sessions.

Schedules of interest:

• 06.11 - Semantic Desktop Workshop :: programme
• 06.11 - 10.11 - ISWC 2005 Conference :: timetable

More information:

• About ISWC 2005 workshops
• About ISWC 2005 tutorials
• List of papers - Industrial Track
• List of papers - Research/Academic Track

There will also be a special industry-oriented event:

• Information Juggernaut [industry day]

Related posts: ISWC 2005 - Research Papers in RDF [captsolo.net]

This little Perl program converts the list of ISWC 2005 Research track papers into RDF. Hope you find this info useful.

• ISWC-2005 Research Track in RDF
• Screen-scraper for ISWC data

The screen-scraper uses RDF::Simple by Jo Walsh and HTML::TableContentParser. There is space for improvement, especially in how to express the list of papers in RDF. Yet, this will be OK for the first attempt.

P.S. If the tool does not produce any result check if the original HTML page is online.

See also: Knud has created an RDF version of ISWC 2005 schedule.

I have not written lately about the things I have been developing myself, been involved with or that people around me have been doing. With so many things happening around I probably should.

Therefore I will write more on such hot topics as:

• SIOC - Semantically Interlinking Online Communities [ pronounce SIOC as "shock" !]

• SemperWiki - Semantic Personal Wiki

• ISWC 2005 - 4th International Semantic Web Conference

• ... and more ...

ISWC 2005 will start in one week time here in Galway and it is now a very hot preparation time. It will not get any less intensive once the conference starts, but it will get even more interesting.

If there are other things you want to ask or to read about, just ask. Hopefully I will have time to write it all [I am not a professional blogger, you know] and still have time for some beers.

Blogsavvy blog has an article "Multi user blog tools - overall ratings and reviews".

It lists and reviews 6 most popular multi-user blog tools and provides a visually attractive rating summary in terms of ease of use, functionality and future development.

Tools chosen for review are: [Drupal, Elgg, Manila, Movable Type, WordPress MultiUser and pLog].

WordPress Multi User by Donncha O'Caoimh tops the ratings list.

It would also be interesting to see how b2evolution compares with all the other as a multi-blog engine. In general I find b2evolution to have many interesting features while WP is stunning in its simplicity.

There are many, quite polarised opinions on what and how cool is Flock.

There are people saying it is the Next Big Thing (tm) and there are others who say it is not worth the hype. It is probably too early to tell - Flock is still raw.

Atrus writes - Flock is just a bunch of extensions:

" Flock =? theme + foxylicious + flickrfox + Deepest Sender

Granted, Firefox itself is mostly glue between various parts of Gecko and extensions ...
Speaking of Firefox, I'm disappointed by two of the big features for 1.5: <canvas> and SVG. "

Daniel thinks along the same lines:

" Personally, I'd love to be able to lay hands on all of the kick @ss features as regular extensions to firefox as opposed to having to get the Flock browser. "

So it is a sum of extensions. But maybe that is what people need?

Miss Rogue - " An extension? That's what I put in my hair. As a halfling (member of the technically clueless, but love the idea of it), I am a bit afraid of extensions. Give me the package or go away. "

There are valueble things in Flock, but those are not necessarily the ones that are most talked about. One of them is search. Benja comments :

" That the search field searches the recent history (and favorites) was the one thing I really liked about Flock, OTOH. "

That summarises what people are saying about Flock.

P.S. Flock does not work with b2evolution.

Title: "Flock - first impressions"
Originally uploaded by captsolo

First impressions:

• del.icio.us synch works - you can view your bookmarks in Flock and synch both ways
• flickr - there's a "top-bar" where you can enter a username and see his/her Flickr photos
• blogging - it has a blog editor, but it did not work for me

These are the basic integration features. There is also a "shelf" - a window that says "drop stuff here", but it did not seem to work at this point.

Conclusion: it has nice looks, but the "feel" is of a very early beta (as they say on the site) - some things do not work or feel weird. What I did like though were its "guess-work" features that makes some things easier:

• typing "captsolo" in the URL field was enough to make it go to this blog
• when typing in search field, it shows a number of choices from recent history and bookmarks

These last two features are nothing exceptional, but still very satisfying. But all in all it still has to mature.

I'd like to see a deeper integration of Flickr, ability to mark bookmarks private (and avoid synching them to the outside) and to view your contacts' Flickr images in the "top-bar" - and for it all to work well.

Flock - a "social browser" that is so talked about on Slashdot, Wired News and everywhere else has finally seen it's early developers release.

You can download it from the Flock developer's page:

• Download for Windows (7.3MB)
• Download for Mac OSX (9.4MB)
• Download for Linux (7.9MB)

What will be next?
A social semantic browser?

Get some good karma now - it's at US$ 5.50 and rising!
Use it (and what can you use them for?) on #joiito.

... as seen on eBay: 10 karma points on #joiito

Komentārs par tēmu pēdējais Robot Race:

????? ??? ??????????? Linux ? ?????? ?? Java ?????? ?? ????? ?? ???????? ????? 100 ??/?. ?????? ? ??? ???? ???????????? ?????????????? ????, ??? Java ?? ????????.

Pērles autors: Nazgul
Pastāstīja: Xeno

Laimīgais robots: "Tommy"

A couple of nice quotes from today's #swig chat.

Emacs

• 23:29 DanC > hoot... "emacs is a nice operating system, but it lacks a good text editor."
• 23:30 [GNU]> oh... i thought it is a kernel for a newsreader

Dan says the Emacs "OS vs. text editor" quote comes from "Flock Misconceptions and Holy Wars".

Ontologies for Publications

• bengee > for my use cases, mindswap's conference ontology combined with ebiquity and foaf/dc seems to cover most of what I need
• ...
• bengee > in an ideal world you could just pick whatever you want and the machines would to the rest for you...

Wish we were living in an ideal world...

I updated an earlier post on "GMail and Usability" with text about this "feature" and here is the error message itself:

Server Error

Gmail is temporarily unavailable.
Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes.
We're sorry for the inconvenience.

How do you get it?
Easy - save email as a draft and try to print it.
Works every time.

If I followed the "try again" part then I'll be stuck in an infinite loop...

b2evolution Debian package has found it's way to Debian Mentors repository.
You may now start using it.

Thanks to Arnaud Guiton who created it.

b2evolution is a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is distributed under GPL license.

Most importantly to me, it is the blog engine that I am using.

Wikipedia: b2evolution

Vai kāds var pateikt kas notiek ar Latvju Dainu elektronisko versiju?

Zinu, ka sen (kādus 10-15 gadus atpakaļ) tika sākts projekts tautasdziesmu "digitalizēšanai" un jau kādu laiku atpakaļ tika izveidots Virtuālais Dainu Skapis.

Bet tas jau ir noticis fakts. Vai mēs gūstam kāds papildus labumu no tā, ka tagad tautasdziesmas ir pieejamas elektroniskā formā un vai notiek tālāka attīstība, par pamatu izmantojot šos krājumus?

Vai arī projekts ir beidzies un visi guļ tālāk?

Eng: asking a question where the project of digitalising Latvian folk song collections stands now.

Eng: about the project for localisation of MoinMoin Wiki in Latvian language.

Skat. MoinMoin Wiki - Latvian Translation

Kā arī: Projekts "MoinMoin latviešu mēlē"

Šis noteikti ir mans šī mēneša pārsteigums - pavisam nejauši MoinMoin saitā atradu lapu LatvianTranslation, no kuras nosaukuma nav grūti saprast, kas tas ir MoinMoin Wiki latviskošanas projekts.

Galvenais, ka 2 no 3 projekta dalībniekiem ir labi pazīstami, bet klusē takš kā tādi partizāņi.

Latviešu valodas pareizības entuziastiem varētu būt interesanti iepētīt kā šajā projektā ir pārtulkoti būtiskākie termini:

• FrontPage - SākumLapa
• Wiki - Viki (latviešu valodā takš 'W' nav)
• ...

Pamatā visi tulkojumi izskatās jauki un labi.
Vienīgais, ko es nesaprotu, ir šis tulkojums:

• InterWiki - InerWiki (kamdēļ tā?)

Eng: this post is about a Semantic Web seminar and related activities in Latvia.

Šogad LU MII ir sākušies regulāri iknedēļas semināri par semantisko webu.

Mūsu mērķis ir paplašināt šo aktivitāšu pieejamību un ļaut no tam kautko iegūt arī tiem, kas nevar iesaistīties klātienē. Un, protams, sniegt papildus informāciju tiem, kas vēlas piedalīties vai uzzināt ko vairāk.

Sīkāka informācija:

Seminārs notiek katru trešdienu MII 414.telpā (Raiņa bulv. 29) plkst. 18:30 - 20:00.

- SemWeb LV Wiki
Tur var atrast vairāk informācijas gan par pašiem semināriem, gan par semantisko webu vispār.

- SemWeb LV mailing list
Sarakste par semantisko webu un semināriem. Parasti pēc semināriem tur var atrast nelielu atksiati par to, kas notikās un kas būs nākamreiz.

- Semināru konspekti
SemWeb LV semināru konspekti - tiesa, pēdējais konspekts tur vēl nez kādēļ nav parādījies.

Ja ir kādi jautājumi, komentāri, ieteikumi - rakstiet - centīšos atbildēt.

Tas ir labs sākuma punkts - ar reālu iespēju būt pirmajiem Baltijā, kas attīsta šo nozari.

Ir idejas papildus esošajiem sadarbības veidiem (wiki, mailing list) ieviest vēl jaunus, kas ļautu tur piedalīties plašākam cilvēku lokam. Dažas iespējas - forums, blogs, IRC kanāls.

Bet pamata infrastruktūra jau ir - reģistrējieties Wiki un runājiet par to, kas interesē. Wiki ir atsevišķa lapa JautajumiUnAtbildes, kurā var uzdot jautājumu arī nereģistrēti lietotāji (vismaz pagaidām var).

Saistīti raksti: FYI - SemWebLV [laacz.lv]

LETA: Nobela prēmiju ekonomikā piešķir par "spēļu teoriju"

Eng: Nobel prize in Economics gets awarded for research in Game Theory.

Stokholma, 10.okt., LETA--REUTERS. Nobela prēmiju ekonomikā šogad saņems izraēliešu zinātnieks Roberts Aumans un amerikāņu pētnieks Tomass Šellings par "spēļu teorijas analīzi", kas var palīdzēt risināt konfliktus uzņēmējdarbībā un tirdzniecībā, pirmdien paziņoja Zviedrijas Karaliskā zinātņu akadēmija.

"Spēļu teorija" ir zinātne par stratēģiju, kuras mērķis ir noteikt, kādas darbības dažādiem "spēlētājiem" - vai tie būtu tirdzniecības partneri, darba devēji, arodbiedrības, vai pat noziedzīgie grupējumi - ir jāveic, lai nodrošinātu sev labvēlīgāko rezultātu.

Šellings piemēroja spēļu teoriju pasaules drošības sfērai un bruņošanās sacensībai, kas attīstījās kopš pagājušā gadsimta 50.gadiem, savukārt Aumans veica "bezgalīgi atkārtojošos spēļu" analīzi, lai noteiktu, kāds iznākums var būt noturīgs laika gaitā.

"Šo jautājumu izpratne palīdz izskaidrot ekonomiskos konfliktus, tādus kā cenu kari un tirdzniecības kari, un atklāt, kāpēc dažas sabiedrības gūst labākus panākumus, pārvaldot vienus un tos pašus resursus," teikts akadēmijas paziņojumā.

It's probably the easiest thing in the world - go out to the nearest pub ("just for one pint") and you end up meeting people you know and stay there whole night (or until they close pubs in Ireland which is quite early anyway).

I mean - we went to the nearest place which is far from the city center - and yet ran into a bunch of people from FanSci society (NUIG Fantasy & Science Fiction Society). Was fun

NUI Galway website has beed redesigned.
How do you like it now?

Compare with an older version.

How to best integrate two ontologies?

We have developed a SIOC ontology to describe information on online community sites. It is aimed at connecting these sites together and allowing to infer relations between posts on different sites.

But now we have a question - how to integrate it with FOAF?

There are similar classes in both ontologies, e.g., sioc:User and foaf:Person. And there are a number of choices how to do it.

If you are interested and can help, please follow to a rdfweb-dev post "Integrating SIOC and RDF".

More info about SIOC, including links to its forums, mailing list and publications can be found on SIOC Project Page.

Un Dievs man teica:

BBC reports about what George W. Bush has allegedly said in a meeting at a 2003 Jordan summit. Out of the context this sounds strange (funny?) enough so that White House officials denied that Bush said this at all. Yet, people Bush was meeting with claim the opposite.

Mr Shaath said that in a 2003 meeting with Mr Bush, the US president said he was "driven with a mission from God".

"God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did.

"And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I'm gonna do it."

Source: BBC News

?????? ????? ??????????? ???????, ?????? ?????.

??????? ? ???????????? ? ??????? ????:
- ?????, ???? ???? ???? ?? ????? ???? ?????????? ?????, ?????? ?????? - ????? ?? ???...

???????? ??????, ???? ????? ??? ?????????? ????? ? ??? ??????: "????? ?? ???"... ???????? ?????.. ??????? ??? ??????? ???.. ???? ??? ?????, ? ??? ??? ?????????? ?? ?????... ???????????? ? ???? ??? ???????- ???????..

???? ?????? - ???????, ?????? "????? ?? ???", ??????? ???... - ??????? ???????...

????????? ??? ?? ???????????? ??????? ???? ?????? ? ?????? ?????????? ? ??????, ????? ??????? ? ??????..
??? ??????????:
- ???????, ? ??? ??????
?? ??? ??? ????????:
- ?? ???? ??? ???, ?? ????? ???-?? ?????!!!

LateX Parser for MoinMoin Wiki

Lets you write wiki pages in LateX.
Might be handy to use a wiki for writing publications.

Design by Wiki

Using a Wiki for Enterprise Architecture Development

Skinning del.icio.us with Firefox and URIid

How to skin del.icio.us in Firefox using URIid extension and custom userContent.css

TiVo Community - letting users customize how TCF looks to them:

More on skinning the sites. Tries to make this a cross-browser functionality

Skining Apollo + Parotaļāsimies ar Laacz.lv stiliem?

Articles in Latvian about using URIid and userContent.css

And something for free:

CamStudio - freeware program to record screen activity in video

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it's built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

Komentāru autori - lūdzu mieru - komentāri tūlīt būs.

Šobrīd tiek moderēti visi komentāri.
Apnikuši jau spama kalni.
Komentārus pietiek uzrakstīt vienreiz, tie kļūs redzami vēlāk.

Bet ar jaunā b2evo 0.9.1 uzlikšanu, šķiet, spama daudzums ir jūtami samazinājies.
Ja tā, tad moderēšanu varētu ņemt nost.

... un tagad būtu jāapstiprina gaidošos komentārus ...

If you have ever wondered how to get Flickr post photos to b2evolution based blog you know that you won't find b2evo in flickr list of blog engines.

Then this HowTo should help you:

[ Flickr - how to set it up with b2evolution ]

Laacz ir pārgājis uz WordPress.

Bet man tomēr ļoti patika vecais dizains - tas bija viens no elegantākajiem saitiem, ko nācies redzēt. Jaunajam trūkst daļa vecās funkcionalitātes un fonti ar' ir visai nebaudāmi. Bet var jau būt ka visi ir tādi konservatīvi (es ar') un nevar pieņemt jaunumus. Šā vai tā - patīk vecais un viss!

[ Skatāmies kā izskatījās vecais laacz.lv ]

Būs interesanti paskatīties - kas notiks tālāk. Var jau to pašu WP pielāgot tā, ka funkciju un izskata ziņā izskatīsies kā vecais (to lācīša bildi augšā gan derētu atstāt). Bet nu ņemtne tur būs nevāja.

Gan jau laacz ir savi iemesli. Varbūt ka SPP pietrūka kas tāds, kas kļuva vajadzīgs (XMLRPC, ...). Varbūt vienkārši apnika ņemtne. Katrā ziņā interesanti - kāpēc?

P.S. Vēl daži komentētāji izteica biklu cerību ka SPP taps open-sourcots. Dzīvosim - redzēsim. Bet tad it kā nebūtu iemesla tagad migrēt uz WP...

P.P.S. Bet par to slinkumu un vecumu viņam taisnība. Ja tā nebūtu, ko tik nevarētu izdarīt!

Pikachu in Airport
Originally uploaded by captsolo.

Laacz recently posted about photoshopping contest from Worth1K to show what it would be if everyone in real life looked like anime heroes. I think the neatest of all was Pikachu.

In the picture above you can see what planes would be like in a Pikachu world.
Related: Anime bullet train

And more fun stuff:

Catch a glimpse of a safe and sexy protection for your iPod nano:
- iPod nano is stockings [stereo.lu]

FOAF Group Calendar

Calendar of events for FOAF IRC channel (#foaf) members and FOAF and Semantic Web developers.
In hope that this helps to arrange face-to-face meetings, get to know about interesting events, etc.

Inspired by #joiito group calendar

Feel free to add yourself and events you will be at.

The list is not limited to a group of #foaf participants, but encompasses all who are working on the Semantic Web and areas related to it (e.g., social networks). Note: you will need to register on the wiki in order to edit FoafGroupCalendar page.

Congratulations to John Breslin (aka Cloud) on his nomination for the IIA Net Visionary Awards in the "Social Contribution" category.

The voting page is now available online where you can see nominations for this and other categories and vote for your favorites.

Evidently this nomination honors John's long-lasting efforts in the development of boards.ie.
I found it very interesting to read about the Pre-History of boards.ie - it's an inspiring story.

While it is not so well known compared to boards.ie, John and me are now working on SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, which is an interesting development in terms of connecting online communities together.

Karas (anime) Wikipedia page seems to have disappeared. I recall looking at it when visiting tm and watching the fansub of volume 1. Now there's only a Karas disambiguation page pointing nowhere. A pitty because it's an impressive anime.

For information on Karas see:

- The Karas (OAV) on Anime News Network
- Karas Project on Anime-Kraze

Updated with more info:

- Karas @ anidb.info

Thanks, tm! A pitty it's fansubing has stalled. Though I guess that's how it is - fansubing is OK if the stuff is not licensed for release in English yet. But a pitty anyway - as it will delay the moment when we see it here.

There is an unpleasant property on Google Groups - and I felt its effects already twice today.

Threads on Google Groups get "closed" after some time. It means that you can not answer to the group any more, but are limited only to a private e-mail answer. ( It seems like a thread closes if there were no posts in it for a month )

While this may have been intended for a good purpose, its effects are that you get less synergy within a group and you may not share an answer to a question asked earlier on. That's a considerable limitation.

P.S. GMail also has its drawbacks, but those are in the UI mainly - this groups "feature" unfortunately has more impact.

What do you do if your browser freezes with 15+ tabs open in some 4 windows and refuses to come back to its senses?

Browsing through Mozilla history window to find them might be tiresome.

Easy!

1. Write down the titles of open pages - You may only see a small part of the title but do this anyway.

2. Restart browser.

3. Export history as RDF (instructions here).

4. Open RDF file in any text editor, search this file for all title fragments you wrote down and open the URLs in the browser.

5. Bookmarks -> Bookmark this group of tabs - to never loose them again.

Notes:

You could search in Mozilla History, but when in need to locate 15+ URLs it is much easier to do a search in text editor than go back and forward in the History UI search window.

You could also write a script to automate the process or write your own history browsers based on the RDF file. In this case that is not necessary as my goal was to get these tabs back with minimum effort.

About title fragments - 'dowh' may not mean much to me, but when searching in history it provides with one distinct and meaningful match - dowhatimean.net » Blog Archive » RDF and web applications:

WALL4PHP is an implementation of WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library) for PHP.

It allows to make presentation of mobile content independent of hardware capabilities of each particular device.
Its author Laacz has just released a new v1.0 beta 2.

More resources as a followup to an earlier post about "Photoshop Channel Chops" book:

If you can't find the book, which is a real education if you have not used these, you may want to start with perhaps the oldest tips for Photoshop: Kai's Power Tips [1]. These were a forerunner to Kai's power Tools, back in the days of Photoshop 2, I think. They use channel operations extensively. Although it is all VERY out of date, and seems somewhat ordinary compared with the present tools, it will explain the thinking somewhat. Really the best way is to jump right in. They are now called Calculations (Image menu) and they names have changed and new options are now available.

[1] http://www.study.centersti.com/oboi/index-11.htm

From desktoppublishingforum.com

[2] Other books by Bert Monroy

[3] Photoshop Hall of Fame - Bert Monroy

"Photoshop Channel Chops" by David Biedny, Bert Monroy and Nathan Moody is a amazing book.

Unfortunately I am not a happy owner of it.

If you happen to know where it is available in paper or electronic form I'd be grateful if you'd let me know. [But not for those insane prices]

What's so amazing about it is its popularity and its price.

That's an old book (published in 1998), yet it is very highly recommender by Photoshop design gurus: "This book deals with aspects of Photoshop not covered in any other book. It has been heralded as one of the most important volumes on Photoshop that must be included on a Photoshop professional's bookcase."

... and its price. Not in print any more, it is available in the used book market for unbelievably high prices. Check Amazon and you will see "x used & new available from $129.00" with a price of a "Like New" book at $290.00 and a "New" books topping the price range at $400.00 as collectibles.

This prompted guys at desktop publishing forum to suggest happy owners: "And for completeness, let me recommend that all owners of Monroy's "Photoshop Channel Chops" take out additional insurance."

11. septembris

- cilvēki mierinājumu atrod nezkāpēc kaķos. tie kas ir vieni tiecas turēt kaķi. arī ja saimniecībā ir vairāki kustoņi, prieku cilvēks atrod tieši kaķī. suns sargā māju, govs dod pienu, aitas vienkārši izbradā dārzu, bet laime iestājas tikai tad, kad vakarā skatoties televizoru uz vēdera uzguļās kaķis. varētu teikt kaķi dod dzīves jēgu.
- nu diez vai kādam patiktu, ja skatoties televozoru viņam uz vēdera uzgultos govs...

Vaira Vīķe Freiberga, President of Latvia was in quite a powerful company at the luncheon for leaders attending the U.N. World Summit:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan and George W. Bush to her right ...

... and Vladimir Putin to her left.

I wonder what are their table discussions like.

22. augusts

- ja var zīmēt kantainus cilvēciņus, tad var zīmēt arī kantainas govis. govs var būt klucis un tesmenis tad izskatītos pēc apgāzta torņa.
- tad klučiem ir jābūt ar noapaļotiem stūriem. asi stūri izskatās auksti. bet govij jabūt siltai.

mostly posts in this category will be in Latvian so sorry about that...

Can you suggest online shops in Europe that sells products made by Hawking Technologies?

I am looking for a [HWU54D] Hi-Gain USB Wireless-G Adapter.
Unfortunately most locations where you can find it on the web are either USA based online shops (that do not ship internationally) or aggregate pages (e.g., fashion.ie) who point to the same USA based online shops. Could not find any Irish or UK based online shop that sells them.

Hawking Technology's HWU54D, 2.4Ghz Hi-Gain Directional Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter, combines the range performance benefits of a Hi-Gain Antenna, the versatility of a USB Wireless Network Adapter and the speed of 802.11g wireless networking.

Precisely what you'd want to get if in need of an 802.11g USB adapter.

John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book is interesting to read.

In it he analyses claims made by Kiyosaki and tries to find out how much of that is true. If we believe his analysis, Kiyosaki boasts about how much he owns (when he does not), never did 24h real estate buy/sell miracles and his books are full of nonsense.

P.S. I just mistyped title of the book as "Rich Data / Poor Data". Is it a Freudian slip?

An article in Biotechnology Ireland: First Irish supercomputer centre opened. [30-Aug-05]

Ireland's first supercomputing centre - the Irish Centre for High End Computing, (ICHEC) - was opened in Dublin on 1st September 2005 with €2.6m in Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) funding.

Eight third level educational institutions are involved in the centre -- NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), UCD, UCC, NUI Maynooth, Dublin City University and the Tyndall Institute. ( NUI Galway is where DERI Galway is located )

When completed, ICHEC, will address the growing need for computational resources to assist Irish researchers in their work in disciplines as diverse as medical device simulation, marine modelling, bio-informatics, drug discovery, astrophysics and computational chemistry.

'This centre will transform computational science in Ireland, creating facilities which will be on a par with those in the rest of Europe,' said Dr Andrew Shearer of NUI Galway's Department of Information Technology and the Director of ICHEC. 'Computational science is one of the few areas where Ireland can contribute to 'big' science projects.

Main computing power in ICHEC is a distributed memory IBM eServer cluster 1350 (walton) consisting of 948 Opteron@2.4GHz CPUs with total RAM of 2.1 Tb and storage of 20 Tb in a high-performance SAN based around IBM DS4500.

The performance of 4.55 TFlops/s peak and 2.79 TFlops/s max would put it approximately in place #120 in the List of World's TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites.

Just to let you know I am back in Galway.

Time in Latvia was spent well, meeting friends and enjoying the beautiful weather. Was so nice to be in Rīga again. Not much time for blogging though - and now it's time to catch up.

Back in Ireland I can sense local obsession with sports once again - today is the World Cup qualifying soccer match in Dublin between Ireland and France (they've never lost to France on this field) and there's more hurling frenzy for Galway this weekend.

I am on vacation. At last.

Did not think I'll ever be so happy to see the message "Home network found." on the screen of the mobile phone.

Concerning the blog it means a couple of things:

1) Postings may be irregular and on variety of subjects.
2) Comments - there may be delays before comments show up on the blog, as I have to approve them first.
3) Maybe, just maybe there will be some pictures from Riga.

This is one of the first Semantic Web resources in Russian that I've found.

In fact, it is collection of links with associated descriptions in Russian.
Contents of the links are not.

One of the links - Eurolan 2003 Lectures - looks quite interesting.
It lists lectures on the Semantic Web with both presentations and MP3 audio available online.

Maybe these can be useful to fight the lack of Semantic Web tutorials that Danny was recently complaining about.

P.S. You can find more links to Semantic Web tutorials in comments to Danny's post (see above).

P.P.S. Does Danny's blog support trackbacks?
You can find trackback meta-info in the page source code, but I don't think that works.

Now _this_ is funny:

Spec Releashed, Slashdot Commenters Gone Wild

"The funniest thing, though, is that RSS 3 apparently exists, here. I canvassed the web quite thoroughly, or so I thought, before starting this. I didn’t find a thing. Well, luckily enough, that dialect of RSS has been around for 3 years and still no takers. And that’s because it’s an entirely new format, text based rather than XML based. (I wonder if I’ll find this funny if the author demands that I change the name of this site…)"

So he has found Aaron's RSS 3.0.
Poor guy - will have to rename to RSS 4.0.

Slashdot reports that RSS Version 3 Specifications are up for review.
It is the 1st draft of RSS Version 3 Lite, with Full version also planned.

- RSS Version 3 - Project homepage.

I wonder where does this work leads, how does it relate with RSS 1.0 and the newly developed Atom syndication format. And why do we need yet another format anyway?

Specification home page provides some answers:

"This is a derivative work which is meant to replace the 2.0 version."

"The 0.9x class of standards is outdated and underdocumented. The 2.0 class is highly underdocumented, filled with unnecessary features though lacking others which could be useful. The RSS 3 standard is supposed to extensively document the standard, to expand where expansion is needed and to remove unnecessary features."

"A standard of similar name and purpose, entitled with the version number 1.0, was produced - yet it contradicts all other standards, being based on RDF, and thus remains out of the current standard's scope, as is the similar in purpose though unrelated Atom standard."

"An RSS 3 file carries the suffix .rss, though note that feeds may be URLs, either containing parameters or not." - I thought that indicating content by the suffix (and requiring to do so) is an old-time legacy...

It is still unclear why such a standard is needed. The website is nicely designed and they try to put this standard under proper documentation and management. (Can we call it RSS 2.0 + BPR?)

But what is their long-term goal?

To disregard RDF and Atom as "bad technologies" and patch existing RSS 2.0?
It is not in such a bad condition (and people are using it) as to require a new standard.

With aggressive marketing RSS 3 could get going, but there is not a real need for it.
I would vote for Atom and RSS 1.0 (and maybe something new) to be syndication formats that will used in the long term.

Update: most of commenters on Slashdot look at this as not even funny.

They've got interesting timing though - yesterday the Atom Format Internet Draft specification version -11, "The Atom Syndication Format" was approved by the IESG as an IETF Proposed Standard.

JPowerGraph is a Java library for creating directed graphs for both Swing and SWT. It supports graph movement, selection, context menus, tooltips and dynamic edge creation. JPowerGraph has a spring layout algorithm based on that used in TouchGraph.

Mick and Boris have just released the first version of JPowerGraph on the Sourceforge today.

Screenshots - see JPowerGraph running within an Eclipse plugin.

#Joiito MemberMap is a nice web application showing locations of people on the IRC channel.

It is an instance of GuestMap Service - a Google Maps hack that allows people to put pins on the map to show their location and to leave a message (only once though) on a bulletin board. You can also export pin locations to Google Earth.

P.S. It is very simple and therefore very nice.

The only other thing to wish for would be for users to be able to move or remove the pins they've attached. That'd make it a great application to show where people currently are (e.g., when on travel). Currently only administrator, who has created the GuestMap, can remove pins.

Thanks to dantegeek for the #Joiito MemberMap.

The first podcast from space was transmitted directly from the Space Shuttle Discovery by Steve Robinson on 07-Aug-2005.

Steve Robinson, Mission Specialist Number 2 is the same guy who went to the bottom of Discovery to repair it and make it safer for return home. In the podcast he shares his extraordinary experiences and concludes it with words:

At any rate I will close this very brief first podcast from space with a greeting to all Earthlings and a thank you for your interest and support. Whether you support the space program or not, you're learning from it. You're learning from it the very moment you hear this and think about what we're doing.

And I think that learning is what looking over the horizon is all about, and don't forget that learning can be exciting and fun, too, because that's certainly what this mission has been all about.

Related:

It was fascinating to watch the Space Shuttle launch on July 26, follow their mission in space and even more fascinating to see them safely return back home.

Coverage of the lift-off and touchdown here:
- Space Shuttle Launch [ 26.07.2005 ]
- Space Shuttle Discovery - Going Home [ 07.08.2005]
- Discovery - Touchdown !!! [ 09.08.2005]

Some would argue (and rightly so) that it is not really a podcast as it is not enclosed in an RSS feed. My answer - it is a very extraordinary recording with or w/o RSS. You may take a look at comments of this article to see why it does not really matter.

WikiPedia: Stephen Robinson

Why Python does not recognize RDF.RedlandError exception in the following code:

   try:
      parser = RDF.Parser('raptor')

      for s in parser.parse_string_as_stream(data, "http://something"):
         if (s.predicate == seeAlso and s.object.is_resource()):
            result.append(str(s.object.uri))

   except (KeyboardInterrupt, MemoryError):
      raise
   except RDF.RedlandError:
      print " : Caught Redland Exception : " , sys.exc_type
   except Exception:
      print " : Caught Exception :" , sys.exc_type

What is weird - the exception gets caught in "except Exception" clause and is shown as being RDF.RedlandError in the output. Why does Python behave that strange?

 : Caught Exception : RDF.RedlandError

We have touchdown!!!
Welcome home, Discovery!!!

Here's the Discovery touchdown video.

That was a nice and safe landing, by the book.
Congratulations to the crew and all involved in making this mission happen!

8:13 a.m. - Wheels stop. "Happy to be back," Collins said to Capcom Ken Ham after he offered congratulations.

8:12 a.m. - Touchdown! Discovery is rolling out on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base!

8:10 a.m. - Commander Eileen Collins reports she has the runway in sight! Discovery's altitude is 17,000 feet -- 10 miles to touchdown.

8:07 a.m. - Discovery's wings leveling as it approaches the landing site. Now that the orbiter has gone subsonic, Commander Eileen Collins has assumed control. She'll fly Discovery on a 194-degree right overhead turn to align with runway 22.
8:12 a.m. - Touchdown! Discovery is rolling out on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base!

8:10 a.m. - Commander Eileen Collins reports she has the runway in sight! Discovery's altitude is 17,000 feet -- 10 miles to touchdown.

More information:
- Discovery - Landing Now [09-Aug-05]
- Space Shuttle Discovery - Going Home [07-Aug-05]

A snapshot from the Tom Mangan's Spacecraft Tracking page.

Mission Control Houston has given the green light for the first opportunity to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California, at 8:12 EDT (13:12 in Ireland and UK; 15:12 in Latvia).

The crew will perform a three-minute engine burn at 7:06 EDT (12:06 in Ireland and UK; 14:06 in Latvia) that will deorbit Discovery and put it on track to land in California. THAT IS NOW!

More information look here:
- Space Shuttle Discovery - Going Home

Tom Mangan's Spacecraft Tracking page is interesting to look at, especially now when Discovery is landing.

It combines Google Maps with live updates of spatial positions of Discovery, ISS and Hubble. So you would be able to see Discovery's way towards landing. Nice tool, Tom!

Follow the latest events:

Minute-by-Minute Landing Coverage by NASA

- 7:40 EST : Discovery begins its descent into to Earth's atmosphere.

- 7:45 EST : Discovery is beginning its first in a series of four banks that will help dissipate its speed as it plunges through the atmosphere. The first roll is to the left at 74 degrees to horizontal. The orbiter's nose is angled upward 40 degrees.

- 7:56 EST : Traveling 17 times the speed of sound, Discovery is within 1,000 miles of the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.

- 8:02 EST : 10 minutes until touchdown. Discovery is in range of ground tracking and using Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) data. There is one bank remaining in the series of four.

- 7.5 minutes until touchdown...

Steve Strawn has created an array of beautful colorful and dynamic broken glass photos.

Click the image to see more of his creations.
You've got to see them!

Space Shuttle Discovery is on its way home now and is expected to land early Monday morning. The touchdown, weather permitting, will take place at Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral at 04:46 EDT (09:46 in Ireland and UK; 11:46 in Latvia).

They will initiate landing by firing a deorbit burn at 03:40 EDT (08:40 in Ireland and UK; 10:40 in Latvia). The burn lasts three to four minutes and slows the Shuttle enough to begin its descent to Earth.

Landing date/time update

Due to low clouds at the Kennedy Space Center landing site, Mission Control Houston has waved off both landing opportunities for Space Shuttle Discovery today. STS-114 Commander Eileen Collins and the rest of the crew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery will return the orbiter to normal flight operations for another day. The first opportunity is at 05:08 EDT Tuesday (10:08 in Ireland and UK; 12:08 in Latvia).

There are four opportunities to land tomorrow, two at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

For more information see:
- Landing 101
- STS-114 NASA TV Schedule
- Fact Sheet: Landing the Space Shuttle Orbiter

Maura wrote an article "ISS at its best in three years" about Discovery and International Space Station earlier on.

She writes that after Shuttle's crew completed gyroscope replacement and repairs, the ISS now has four out of four working gyroscopes to keep the station in its position, for the first time in last 3 years. Before that they had only 2 working gyroscopes left.

An update to that post: Shuttle's crew have successfully removed protruding gapfillers and now the mission control believes Discovery is in a good shape for safe landing. With them best of luck and safe return home!

Related:
- Space Shuttle Launch
- Shuttle Launch - Notes
- Return to Flight: Multimedia Library

Kāda īriete, sešu bērnu māte no Limerikas, valsts nacionālajā loterijā ir vinnējusi lielāko jackpotu Eiropas loteriju vēsturē - 77 miljonus latu ( 115 miljonus eiro ).

Tiesa, cilvēka dzīvi šāds vinnests var izmainīt pamatīgi. Tu mierīgi dzīvo savu dzīvi, neviens netraucē un pēkšņi tevi aplenc reportieru bari, kuri noteikti vēl labu laiku sekos līdzi kā viņa dzīvo un kā izmanto savu laimestu.

Citāts: "Up to now, Dolores has lived a very happy and contented life among her family, friends and neighbours and it is her sincere desire that she and her family will return to normality as soon as possible."

Skat. BBC: Lottery winner claims £77m cheque

Zinot mūsu ziņu portālu apetīti visā, kas saistīts ar lielām naudas summām, brīnos, ka šī ziņa tur vēl nav apgremota.

If the analysis of SkypeOut rates for EU member states did include rates for calls to mobile phone, we might come to some unexpected conclusions.

E.g., that international calls from mobile phones are cheaper than SkypeOut calls:

O2 in Ireland currently offers pre-pay customers calls to Latvia for 0.19 eur/min (including calls to mobile phones), while SkypeOut rate to Latvian mobile phones is 0.229 eur/min (both rates include VAT).

This comes are a bit of surprise if we take into account that historically international calls from mobile phones are very expensive.

Most of the time this is only true for special promotions though and it does not mean that you should stop using SkypeOut in favor of landlines and mobile phones. But some healthy competition certainly helps.

Luxembourg, July 27, 2005 — To celebrate first SkypeOut anniversary, Skype announced lowered SkypeOut rates to 30+ countries and that 6 new countries and regions have been added to the SkypeOut Global Rate.

Yet, this change leaves the European Union member states divided - in new and old Europe.

SkypeOut Rates for EU member states:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland*, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom - SkypeOut global rate - 0.017 eur/min.

Luxembourg 0.020 eur/min
Czech Rep. 0.023
Estonia    0.023
Hungary    0.024
Finland    0.025

Cyprus     0.048 eur/min
Slovenia   0.052
Slovakia   0.055
Lithuania  0.092

Latvia     0.122 eur/min
Malta      0.145

We can see a clear division here - the global rate covers 13 out of 15 "old" states and only one new member state - Poland. The rest of new EU member states and Luxembourg and Finland are outside the global rate.

Skype are doing a good job in connecting people and that is a good trend. Big telecommunication companies have even higher rates and they should learn and adapt.

But it still leaves a fact that there is such a rate divide - and that a SkypeOut call to the UK would cost only 14% of whan a SkypeOut call to Latvia will.

Note: this analysis includes only regular landline SkypeOut rates.

System Administrator Appreciation Day is today!!!

Congratulations to all the system administrators out there.
Go out, enjoy some drinks and just relax.
Let users do some problem solving themselves.

And thanks to the SysAdmins I have worked together with - they all are very helpful and good colleagues. Time to celebrate for me as well, as these days we all are administrators of our workstations, servers and blogs.

For your enjoyment, the old-time classics of the genre:
- The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH)

Collection of links to remember:

Preocuupations - a weblog by David Smith. Interesting content, found this while looking for info related to IBM Glass Engine.

GridCosm - Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares. ...
This process creates an ever expanding tunnel of images, the newest level a direct result of the previous level which is a result of the previous level... and so on.

God's Little Toys - "Confessions of a cut & paste artist" by William Gibson.

IBM Glass Engine is an interesting concept of music exploration.
It allows you to explore the wonderful music of Philip Glass in various artistic planes.

Cataloguing works of Philip Glass is an ongoing project of IBM Glass Engine and it has been out for some time now.

It came to my attention at the ESWC 2005 workshop "Multimedia and the Semantic Web" where it was mentioned by mc schraefel during her keynote presentation.

Project's self-description: The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

What is so special about Glass Engine?

1) First, it has audio preview cues - quite large fragments of Glass' music that allows to get a feel of every part of his work. There are samples for each track present, it is not just one cue per CD.

2) Second, his work fragments are described based on a number of criteria that you can navigate through, using rulers in the application. There are 'exact' criteria like title of the work and track, work year and track length and 'artistic' criteria such as joy, sorrow or density.

This is what a Semantic Web community calls metadata or information about information [ a music track in our case ]. We can say that the creators of IBM Glass Engine have annotated Philip Glass' music by these criteria.

3) Third, within a single screen the application shows you a complete view of all Philip Glass' work. You get an interesting and exciting experience exploring his music and watching how navigation through one ruler 'realm' affects other rulers that change values according to the piece of music you are currently listening to.

This application may give you a different view how multi-model information can be accessed on a computer - a shift away from a file/folder organisation paradigm. And it allows you to enjoy and explore music during your day.

It might also be a good model for music companies to offer preview before you buy music.

Related:

- Philip Glass on this weblog
- This Is Not a Catalog: Philip Glass’s Works Online on IEEE Xplorer.

The only downside is that this application requires MS Internet Explorer or Apple OS 9, OS X platforms. But it is worthwhile trying out anyway!

By the way - has anyone got it running under Linux and Java VM?
The fact that they say it won't run doesn't mean it is impossible after all.

Main page: Space Shuttle Launch

This page will be updated as the launch process progresses.
Launch is planned at 10:39 EDT / 15:39 BST / 17:39 Latvia time.

14:24 BST - Countdown at T-20 minutes and holding. The countdown clock will stop for 10 minutes and resume at 14:34 BST.

During this countdown hold the crew members verify that they have the right software for the launch and the orbiter's onboard computers are transitioned to a launch configuration. More details on countdown on NASA Countdown 101.

T-20 minutes crew briefing complete.

14:34 BST - Countdown at T-20 and counting.

14:45 BST - Countdown at T-9 and holding for 45 minutes.

14:47 BST - All three Transatlantic Abort Landing (TAL) sites are green on weather. The TAL sites are located at Zaragoza, Spain; Moron, Spain; and Istres, France.

NASA TV now showing WB-57 shuttle chase planes getting ready for takeoff. These jets will carry innovative, on-board video imaging systems, dubbed the WB-57 Ascent Video Experiment, or WAVE project. The system will capture detailed images of how the Space Shuttle behaves as it climbs toward orbit.

14:55 BST - Takeoff of WB-57.

15:24 BST - Shuttle final ecosystem check complete.

Discovery launch is OK to proceed.

15:39 BST - 3..2..1.. Liftoff... of space shuttle Discovery successful !!!
During liftoff it achieves the speed of more than 17'000 mph.

Like 3-2-1, orbiter Discovery has successfully shed its Solid Rocket Boosters and External Tank, and shut down the main engines after reaching space.

Ufff, at last - a safe and successful liftoff!

T+39:30 : The twin Orbital Maneuvering System engines on the tail of Discovery have been fired successfully to propel the shuttle the rest of the way to orbit. The new orbit is 142 by 98 statute miles. The next maneuvering burn is coming up around 4 p.m. EDT to raise the orbit to 191 by 141 miles as the rendezvous continues to reach the station.

See STS-114 mission update thread

The space shuttle Discovery is set for lift-off today, at 10:39 local time (14:39 GMT; 15:39 BST) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That is a little more than an hour from now. Wish them luck!

After the launch they have a 8.5 minute trip up towards the International Space Station.

Related: Space Shuttle Launch Today

Watch Launch Online - on NASA TV page.

Philip Glass creates a surreal experience in his music.

If I had to draw similarity between music and film, Peter Greenaway is a director who shines with surreality of his films.

IMDB: Peter Greenaway

It has been a while since I had seen his films and heard Glass's music.
That's why I am going to immerse into his music now.
[ But I do not have any Greenaway's films here. ]

Recent BoingBoing blog entry titled "Mash-up Friday: Hiphop vs. Philip Glass = Glassbreaks" points to an album [available online in MP3] with HipHop mixed on top of works of Philip Glass.

I wonder how do people like this remix.

While I do like a part of hiphop, this mix just did not impress too much. The hiphop part is dominating too much over wonderful compositions below it. It may also be a bit of an acquired taste as the second time I listened to it, it sounded better.

If there is one thing these pieces reminded me, it is - how wonderful and great the music of Philip Glass is!

They say that GMail is much more useable that many other webmail systems. I can agree that its look & feel is nice, but it has problems, sometimes even characterised by stubborn determination to decide what is better for the users.

1. No actions on the search result set.

Imagine - I have >1000 messages from a mailing list in my inbox.
I need to move these messages to a 'label' and archive them.

The only way I have found I can do this in GMail is - search for all messages from a mailing list and repeat the sequence [ hit 'All' to select all 20 messages on the screen, assign them a label, archive, hit 'Next 20' ] more than 50 times.

It would have been nice if they at least offered to perform a filter on all existing messages. I have created a filter, so I would just run it and be OK. Even MS Outlook allows to do that. But no - you have to do it 20 messages at a time.

2. No shortcut for 'Move to Trash'.

Is it difficult to program? No.
But they just would not do that - you are not meant to delete stuff.
Even if you are absolutely sure you don't need it.

OK, there's the hard way - go to the menu and choose 'Move to Trash'.

But why not provide a shortcut?
Why not allow to perform actions on all matching messages?
I don't know.

3. You can't print draft messages.

This is more of a bug than real annoyance, but it limits your ability to use Gmail to keep to-do lists and other information you will need to update later on.

If you try to print draft messages in Gmail, you'll get an error message like this:

Gmail is temporarily unavailable.
Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. 
We're sorry for the inconvenience.

NASA is targeting Tuesday, July 26 as the earliest possible date to launch the Space Shuttle Discovery on the Return to Flight mission (STS-114). The determination was made during Monday's meeting of the Mission Management Team (MMT) at Kennedy. Engineers are working through a troubleshooting plan to address an issue with a liquid hydrogen low-level fuel sensor circuit.

NASA is still working to launch Discovery by the end of the July window that extends to the 31st.

Related: Space Shuttle Launch Today (which was later postponed)

This day was full of surprises ... and New Yorkers.

Speaking of New Yorkers, it happened twice - by pure accident we met people from NY - Katherine and Jonah - in a robotics art festival ArtBots in Dublin and then by pure accident again we met two more in Galway later this night.

I will tell more about ArtBots in one of next posts.
Just in one word - it was AMAZING!

And yes - the later two were Steve and Elke - our former housemates. They are in Galway now! Not for too long though, so no chance to hang out with them this time. But it was very nice to meet them.

Update: The launch has been postponed.

Reason: an issue with a low-level fuel cutoff sensor onboard the vehicle. The sensor protects an orbiter's main engines by switching them off when the fuel level runs low. Although the tank was fully filled one of the sensors was showing a low level of fuel.

If everything goes well, Space Shuttle Discovery will be launched today.
Discovery is due to lift off from Kennedy Space Center at 1551 EDT (2051 BST; 1951 GMT).

This will be the first since February 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia with seven astronauts was destroyed upon re-entry. Let's hope that this mission is a success and that astronauts return home safe.

More info:
- NASA: Return to flight page
- BBC: Space Shuttle - return to flight

You may witness the launch and its preparations on the NASA Television Online.

Events and precautions around JK Rowling's latest Harry Potter book "Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince" are close to draconic. It makes sense to protect it and there is a lot of attention towards release of the book. But make some more steps in the same direction and you would have armed guards licensed to shoot everyone who gets the book before the right time.

New 'Harry Potter' book was leaked in British Columbia, Canada when a superstore sold by mistake 15 of the new books.

What follows is a bit hard to swallow in a free and democratic society - a B.C. court has ordered people who bought the book to return it immediately AND forbids anyone from discussing the elements contained in the book that they legitimately bought in a store.
See details in this CBC article.

Michael Geist writes about this:

"While that is understandable, the remainder of the court order is a bit harder to take. People have legitimately purchased the book, yet now face violation of a court order if they fail to return it immediately, discuss it, or do anything else with the book. While a court might look skeptically on an attempt to bring an action against a purchaser who fails to return the book, why the court would grant such a broad order that reaches down to the underlying purchasers suggests that this could turn into a real horror story."

It might also be interesting to read comments on Michael Geist's blog.

BBC News has a story 'Keeping Harry under lock and key' about measures aimed to prevent leaks of Harry Potter book. Apparently court orders similar to this are a regular practice in the US:

"Publisher Bloomsbury has also taken out a "John Doe" injunction - a legal order against an as yet unnamed defendant, routinely used in the US - to stop anyone disclosing information about its contents."

P.S. While the publisher tries to keep the book under the lock, all the efforts and now this leak just make the book more popular and raises public and media attention to a new level. (We've got NEWS!) I wonder if the leak is a deliberate act of viral marketing.

via boingboing and slashdot

Galway Film Fleadh starts tonight.
Good news for those of us who love good cinema.

Unfortunately upon looking at its official site I have to start with some critique.

The site is one of those very nicely designed (Flash, etc.), but unuseable sites. The most important to me is the schedule of when and what films are shown.

First problem: you can't see a full, readable schedule with all films for a given day or a whole festival. Instead you have a nice, little "frame" which you have to scroll through to see what's on a given day.

Second problem: needless to say, you can not normally print a full list of films from the nice little thingie mentioned in #1.

Third problem: lack of unique URLs - while browsing the site you see the same web address in the browser all the time. This means you don't have an address for a schedule of any given day or a page for a particular film. And you can not send a link to a friend saying "Look! This is a really good film I'd like to go to".

Creators of this site might learn from a website of a similar international film festival - Arsenals.
Here are some nice links:
- Full schedule of "Arsenāls 2004"
- List of movies - can be interesting to see what's there
- "Life is a miracle" - a single film view.
you can press 'When and Where' to get a schedule highlighting when the movie will be shown. ; some film pages feature movie fragments.

Also nice:
- ability to personalize the site (My Arsenals) and create your own viewing schedule
- ability to rate films and see how others rated them

We could go further and wish for an RSS feed with movie show times, but I guess that's too much to ask for now.

Yet, although it might sound strange (isn't RSS for blogs only?!), RSS can also be used to present information about event time/place information. The benefit is that the information is presented in a computer-readable form and anyone can reuse this information and create a better service.

Latvia: Riga International Airport (RIX) has won a best airport award in its group. The first ACI Europe Best Airport Awards were announced at 15 th ACI EUROPE Annual Congress in Munich (22-24 June).

The winner of the 1-5 million passenger category was Riga International Airport (RIX). The judges felt this airport is a great example of a new EU Member State which has truly grasped the opportunities of Community membership. The judges singled it out for excellent route development, upgrades to infrastructure and innovative forward planning.

Source:
Excellence in airport operations: 1st ACI EUROPE Best Airport Awards (29/06/05) (PDF)

Yeee, It's my namesday today!

Latvian namesdays are a celebration similar to birthdays - one more day and one more reason to have a celebration.

There is an official calendar of names associated with each day and when it is your day, you celebrate. And your friends usually know your name, hence they will know when its your namesday. Yes, there is even a day for those who are not mentioned in the list (call that exception handling)!

It's a good feeling - something makes this day special. And I believe that USA will have some fireworks on this occasion, tonight.

Now, do you have some nice anime pictures to link to from comments?
(as is my birthday tradition to post a nice manga-esque picture here on the blog)

If are interested why the EU software patent issue is important or what you can do to help - follow this link and find out more:

More info about EU software patents

Patent Absurdity - Richard Stallman - ZDNet UK - June 20, 2005

If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted.

This article details the absurdity of widely interpretable software patents. Not only great literature masterpieces would not have been written - imagine if hyperlinks, the foundation of the World Wide Web, were patented. Would we have the web as we know it now?

Irish developers sound patents warning - Ciara O'Brien - June 26, 2005

Organisations IrishDev and KDE.ie, who say they represent more than 20 percent of software developers in Ireland between them, claim that the proposed software patents will stifle competition and innovation in the software industry.

Irish tech group lobbies EU on patents - Business World - June 23, 2005

A group of Irish tech sector representatives has travelled to Brussels to lobby the EU to introduce effective patent protection for software.

The group will meet with Irish MEPs to put forward their case ahead of a crucial vote in the European Parliament on July 6th.

If we look at the Latvian websphere, there is little action regarding the software patents. The software industry association (LIKTA) and electronic media portals (apollo.lv, TVNet, delfi.lv) are not showing any signs of activity. Not for, not against. Ignorant.

Yet there are some people taking action - you can read reports on Aigarius weblog. He is in Brussels and using last moments before the vote to meet with Latvian (and not only Latvian) members of the European Parliament:

I woke up at 5.00 local time without any alarm clocks! That is one hell of an accomplishment.

[...]

At first I was simply walking around and telling everyone how we would like to fix the directive using the "Buzek-Rocard compromise" amendments. After the lunch, Erik came up to me and asked to also collect MEP signatures on these amendments to table them. At first I went to Lansbergis from Lithuania and spend almost an hour convincing him to sign. In the end he was convinced and did the signing.

After that success I called the assistant of Andrejevs and asked if his MEP would have a few minutes to meet and sign the amendments. The assistant replied that Andrejevs liked the amendments and will sign them as soon as he gets back to the office. This one was easy

After that a call came from assistant of Girts Valdis Kristovskis saying that he will meet me at 17.00. I was very glad about getting the previose two signatures, but a bit discuraged by yesterdays talk with Krasts, who is in the same party as Kristovskis. To my surprise Kristovskis didn't mind that his party mate didn't agree with us - after 5-10 minutes of explanations, Kristovskis was ready to sign the amendments. That signature came as a pleasant surprise

All Latvian members of EPP followed Dombrovskis and Piiks and signed the amendments - I consider that a great success, especially as I didn't even have to ask them for that

When I saw this picture in BoingBoing (link), I could not believe my eyes - it looks so unreal and yet it seems to be true. See the full article on Japan Times Online.

The train is painted in a manga-like colors and its retractable cat ears make even more resemblance to a cute creature out of an anime or a manga book. Japan is probably the only place in the world where trains could _really_ look like that.

East Japan Railway Co. on Friday unveiled a new shinkansen in the town of Rifu, Miyagi Prefecture, that will run at a speed of 360 kph, which may make it the world's fastest train.

The train is equipped with a new air-brake system that deploys in the event of an earthquake or other emergency. The retractable cat ear-shaped spoilers that can protrude from the roof are expected to help slow the train more quickly than conventional brakes.

The test runs between Sendai and Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, will be conducted at a maximum speed of 405 kph.

I joined the Web Demo Against Software Patents and replaced front page with a big yellow disclaimer.

These are the last days when you may do something to stop unlimited software patents.

One thing you may do is contact (write, e-mail or call) your country's Members of European Parliament and tell them about your concerns:

Members of European Parliament - from Ireland (2004-2009)

Members of European Parliament - from Latvia (2004-2009)

Galway bloggers - remember that tomorrow is the Galway Blog-In or a face-to-face bloggers meeting.

See more info on the Babblogue Blog:

"Just a reminder: Tomorrow's Galway Blog-In will take place in Jurys Inn, at 2pm.
It's being hosted by the gracious Leptard and myself.

Being a Galway blogger is one of alter egos of this site and I am looking forward to tomorrow's blog-in.

There are other interesting things happening in Galway this weekend as well - there will be an Irish dance event on Saturday (I don't know more details than that - locations mentioned were the Spanish Arch and Salthill) and Salthill Air Show on Sunday.

Other my alter egos: Semantic Web blogger and Latvian blogger. I do wonder sometimes if there are not too many alter egos here. This site started with articles about the Semantic Web, but I found out that there are other interesting and important topics to cover. (And it is always interesting to read in comments what topics are interesting to you and why.)

P.S. The Irish music event on Saturday, June 25th must be a part of the Galway Sessions 2005.
Look here for the event schedule.

Interesanti: pamēģiniet Google meklēt frāzi "Kur svinēt Jāņus".

Izrādās, ka pirmais links, kas parādās ir šeit blogā nesen izteiktais jautājums par Jāņiem Īrijā.
Tā būtu labā ziņa.

Sliktā ziņa: pagaidām nav nevienas atbildes.

Varbūt nevienu neinteresē kur svinēt Jāņus? Bet ja jau cilvēki to lapu atrod pat meklējot kur svinēt Jāņus Latvijā, tad ārzemēs esošajiem latviešiem tas varētu būt vēl aktuālāk.

Meklējumu gaitā konstatēju, ka draugiem.lv forumi nav labs mēdijs, lai uzdotu šādus jautājumus. Spams (t.i., čats) birst tādā ātrumā, ka neko sakarīgu tur aprunāt nevar.

P.S. Komentēt pilnīgi droši var šeit (gadījumā ja SC domā, ka šo rakstu komentēt nevar)

Tā nu sanāk, ka pa Jāņiem es būšu Īrijā.
Un tā diena nāk virsū ar lielu joni.

Jautājums: Kur Īrijā svinēt Jāņus?

Ja KĀ svinēt mēs tā kā zinām, tad atliek noskaidrot kur lai to dara.
Ja kādam no cienījamajiem lasītājiem ir kāds info/idejas šai sakarā, lūdzu padalieties.

Latviešu te ir pietiekami daudz (tiesa, neesmu nemaz tik daudzus saticis), tā kā kautkas noteikti notiks. Varētu pat būt, ka vēstniecība rīko kādu oficiālu pasākumu, bet kurš ta pa Jāņiem dosies uz pilsētu.

P.S. Šķiet, ka latviešu presē pirms gada bija stāstīts kā Jāņus sagaida Īrijā. Bija pieminēti arī viens vai vairāki organizēti (=lieli) pasākumi. Varbūt kāds var iemest linku uz to rakstu?

P.P.S. Es atrodos šeitan (Galway, Ireland).

On June 14 Latvia is commemorating the victims of communist terror of 1941.

It is one the first, but unfortunately not the last of soviet crimes against humanity on the territory of Latvia.

Mass Deportation 14 June 1941

Instructions on how to carry out mass deportations were prepared in the autumn of 1939 for the newly-annexed regions of western Ukraine by the head of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD, General Ivan Serov. They were approved in Moscow and later used in the Baltic States as well. As the USSR Commissar for State Security, Serov signed the orders on 21 January 1941.

In the night between 13 and 14 June, about 15,500 Latvian residents—among them 2400 children younger than ten—were arrested without a court order to be deported to distant regions in the Soviet Union. Targeted were mainly families who had members in leading positions in state and local governments, economy and culture.

People to be deported were awakened in the night and given less than one hour to prepare for the journey. They were allowed to take with them only what they could carry, and everything left behind was confiscated by the state. The unfortunate were herded into already prepared cattle or freight railroad cars, in which they spent weeks and months. Many died on the way, especially infants, the sick, and the elderly. Men, totalling some 8250, were separated from their families, arrested, and sent to GULAG hard labour camps. Women and children were taken to so-called “administrative settlements” as family members of “enemies of the people”

No word of these events was mentioned in Latvia’s Soviet-censored newspapers. Loved ones had no way of knowing what had become of those deported. None of the institutions, including the militia, provided information or help. Scattered along the railroad tracks were farewell notes written by the deported to their families—few of them ever reached their intended recipients.

Link - Soviet mass deportations from Latvia

BBC News - "Irish language recognised by EU"

Ireland's national language is the 21st to be recognised as a EU working language.
Congratulations!

A blog article at the Computational Complexity blog asking if Internet is harming Dagstuhl.

The article tends towards view that being always accessible and connected to the outside is ruining the atmosphere and what Dagstuhl seminars are, but comment authors argue that the opposite view is also true - when you hear a reference to a new paper or idea, you can look it up at once.

ESWC 2005 - 2nd European Semantic Web Conference - Heraklion, Greece, 29.05-01.06.2005 - has come to a finish.

Time to pull together what was interesting there and what people have to say about it.

A photo from ESWC 2005 [click for a larger image]

Compared with last year (when I followed ESWC just by the irc chat on the Semantic Web Interest Group channel #swig) there was less immediate feedback online. Looks like only Libby Miller and me were scribing when possible.

Here are the IRC Scratchpad links:
* 29-Jun-2005 - Workshop "Multimedia and the Semantic Web"
* 30-Jun-2005 (see more in irc transcript) - Workshop "Scripting for the Semantic Web"

P.S. The best online feedback I've seen so far was at the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the (Semantic) Web - there was active scribing on IRC and live IRC chat was fed back to the audience on a second screen in the conference room.

Unfortunately no transcripts from main conference. Maybe there are reports from the conference on participants' blogs, but I have not seen them yet. If know of any, please add them in comments or trackback.

Tags:
- del.icio.us - eswc2005
- flickr.com - eswc2005 (no photos yet)
you may also enjoy photos tagged 'crete'

Short update on current and future events:

1. We have moved and now live in a nice house, which is just a bit smaller than where we were before. At some point I started to worry we will not find one before going to Crete. But all went well and we are happy now.

A side note: If you are looking for an accomodation in Galway, do not go with the agency "Galway Accomodation". I am surprised how they are in business at all with their attitude towards their work and clients and would not trust them my money to them. Similar conclusion also comes from other people who have had contact with them.

2. Going to Crete.
This includes a week at DERI Offsite and another week at the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference.

At least part of this time we might be without Internet connection or with better things to do than to sit in front of a computer. If you do not see many new entries for the next couple of weeks, you know why.

And hope we will have some time to spare to travel around and see this beautiful Greek island.
Now what is there to see?

Cliffs of Moher (Mohēras klintis) are an impressive place in West Ireland - with the height of nearly 200 meters and length of 8 km.

See for yourself (click to see a bigger version):

Though you may not suspect it, you may see some people on the photo above. Here is an enlarged part of it:

Daudz, daudz apsveikumi Laacz

Vairāk neko neteikšu - viņš zinās par ko.
Sagaidīs kad pats uzraksta, tad papildinās.

Valoda, valodiņa:

Apsveikumi - tas ir tad, kad apsveic...
Tomēr interesanti - kā būtu jāloka 'Laacz' datīvā (kam?)

Update:
Redz kur arī smalkāks info Laacz blogā: "Lielās dzīves mazie brīnumi".
Vēlreiz gratulējam!

Testing local LiveJournal alias Sviesta Ciba understanding of RSS feeds.

Sagaidāmais rezultāts - ka Sviesta Ciba parāda testa mailu ar visiem linkiem un citu HTML markupu.

Problēma, kas tiek risināta - SC nesaprot RSS 1.0 feeda <content:encoded> un rāda tikai text-only saturu. Sindicētā feeda barotnes URL SC labot neļauj. Risinājums - redirektēt SC uz RSS 0.92 barotni.

Iepriekšējais tests parādījās SC, bet ar 10 stundu aizkavēšanos.
Piedevām tai reizē, kad SC šo ierakstu beidzot nolasīja, parādījās arī kļūdas ziņojums:

Mafijas sindikāta statuss:
        Iepriekšējā pārbaude: 2005-05-14 14:51:34 (Posting error)
        Nākošā pārbaude: 2005-05-14 15:25:34

Zili dūmi

Nez, kā mega-redirekts strādā?
izmēģinās un ta šo savārstījumu metīs ārā
ja viss ir ok, parādīsies rozā dūmi

Rozā dūmi

Latvia's best pagan/folk metal group Skyforger are on their Ireland tour now:

28.04.2005 - Gweedore Bar       - Derry
29.04.2005 - Voodoo Lounge      - Dublin
30.04.2005 - Rosetta Bar        - Belfast
01.05.2005 - Nancy Spains       - Cork
02.05.2005 - Fred Zeppelins Pub - Cork

It is a good opportunity to see and listen to them live. - If you are in Ireland, that is.
It's a pitty that they will not perform in the west of Ireland - would be very nice to see them in Galway and I think that there'd be enough folks here that would like to hear them.

More: Watch a song clip "Tumsā un Salā" [26Mb AVI] - Live in Parnu (Gothic Studio).
Its title translates as "In Thunder and Frost" and is a part album "Thunderforge".
See album lyrics (in Latvian and English translation) and the making of [the album].
song clip via truemetal.lv.

According to a blog post on bopuc/weblog HP now has a US patent for Semantic File System.

What is claimed is:

1. A data model represents semantic information associated with objects stored in a file system. The data model includes a first object identifier, a second object identifier and a relation identifier. The first object identifier identifies a first object stored in the file system. The second object identifier identifies a second object stored in the file system, wherein the second object is related to the first object. The relation identifier identifies a relationship between the first object and the second object.

6. The data model of claim 1, wherein the relation identifier comprises a property of the first object and the second object comprises a value of the property for the first object.

Basically, that is a patent for RDF applied to a file system - where subject and (optionally) object may identify objects stored in a file system.

Taking into account generalisations in other clauses of the patent, e.g. clause 6, and that "objects stored in the file system" are like any other resource, this is a patent for what has been out there for some time - Resource Description Framework (RDF) - a main building block of the Semantic Web.

Here are some tricks you can perform with your own class loaders:

- search a database instead of a filesystem for classes
- load different classes with the same fully-qualified name
- swap your classes with new versions at runtime
- load classes before you need them

JDK 1.4 + Tomcat Normal Edition + your own XML parser

... your web applications will not be using JDK 1.4 XML parser, but Tomcat's Xerces parser instead.

If you want to use your own XML parser shared across multiple web applications, you could place it in the shared class loader path, but because the common class loader is higher in the delegation chain, Tomcat's parser will be used first.

To solve this problem you could either use ... or move xerces.jar from the common class loader path to the system class loader path, which would make it available to Tomcat but invisible to your application.

More reading:

- ClassLoader JavaDoc
- JavaGeeks papers section - has a few white papers related to class loaders.

From Professional Apache Tomcat book.

Kāpēc ir tā, ka dažbrīd nekas neiet? Nekust no vietas un viss.
Šis gan ir retorisks jautājums - tā ir un viss - "???? ? ??????". Tā, par ko es te rakstīju?

OK, jādara visādas leimas lietas, bet kautkā īsti negribas.

Gribētos, ja tās lietas raiti ietu uz priekšu.

Citādi - uzliku Tomcat lai varētu iepētīt vienu Java servletu. Tas tā kā būtu derīgi, tikai īsti nav laika spēlēties. Mēģinu saprast no kura gala tam servletam ķerties klāt. Tā, viņu vēl "uzbūvēt" (build) vajag. Meklējam Ant. Uzliekam.

Kompilējot servletu Java paziņo, ka viņai diezko nepatīk 'enum', kas tai servletā tiek lietots. Iekš Java 1.5 tā nu vis nevarēšot, saka, lai rakstu '-source 1.4'. OK. Uzrakstu - tagad Java saka, ka ar 1.4 nu gan tā nevarēšot, jo cits 'enum' alter-ego gribot '-source 1.5'. Man tagad viņus abus reizē rakstīt?

OK - būs vien jāuzliek Java 1.4.2.

Paspēlēties ar servletiem un J2EE nebūs slikti - vienīgi tad, kad viss sanāks.
Spēlēties ar PHP Popoon freimworku jau iepatikās - jauka manta.

Ar Java 1.4.2. tā manta laikam kompilēsies. Nākamais jaukums - uz diska beidzās vieta. Kopējam jaukās lietas prom uz citu disku. Lielāko daļu kopējamās vielas, šķiet, aizņem .hack//SIGN.

Jā - to servletu man vajag tikai tāpēc lai 1 reizi palaistu un nokopētu tā darbības rezultātu. Nav diezko cost effective darbošanās, ne?

Varbūt būs turpinājums...

Sunday - nothing is really happening. The morning was nice and full of sunshine, but slept most of it, waking up at 11am.

If you wrote comments on this weblog recently, you'd have noticed that they won't appear at once. Don't be alarmed - they will appear as soon as they are approved. Got tired of the comment spam and added comment moderation.

1. Nebīstaties, ja jūsu komentāri šeit neparādās uzreiz.
Tie parādīsies tiklīdz būs apstiprināti.

Ieviesu moderāciju visiem komentāriem, bet vēl ir jāizdomā kāds 'black' and 'white' noteikumu kopums - kurus komentārus rakstīt uzreiz (gan jau ka no tiem, kas jau ir komentējuši šeit) un kurus pilnīgi droši uzskatīt par spamu.

2. Sviesta cibā šejienes saturs rādās bez linkiem, bildēm un cita smukā markupa.

Ko lai dara, ka no RSS 1.0 feeda Sviesta Ciba paņem <description>, kurā ir vienkārši teksts, bet ignorē <content:encoded>, kurā ir visi HTML tagi un stuff. Varētu vienīgi SC iebarot RSS 0.93 feedu - tur ir viss vienā putrā.

Izskatās vienkārši burvīgi.

Šodien mācīju mājas biedriem zolīti. Sen bija tas laiks, kad ar Master Luke spēlējām zolīti, nācās atcerēties noteikumus. Bet neko - viņiem tīri labi sanāca. Pietiekami dinamiska spēle lai būtu ko darīt vakaros.

Pie reizes apguvu nedaudz viņu spēli "shithead". Pirmo reizi zaudēju, otro reizi zaudēja Deivids. Kautkad aprakstīšu noteikumus [ja atcerēšos].

Viņu - tas ir īru laikan. Lai gan neesu gluži pārliecināts cik plaši ta ir izplatīta. Un kā ir ar zoli? Vai tā ir tīri latviešu spēle vai arī plašāk zināma?

And this girl here certainly enjoys roller-blading.

You can see some more graffiti pics on this boards.ie post.

What would you like to see in Fedora Core 4? - a repository of wishlists for FC4.

A not so random quote:

Fedora Core is really the sum of it's constituent packages. Most of the things I'd ask for are really requests to the developers of those packages, rather than the Fedora Core developers. Anyway, things I'd like to see:

1. Beagle. The Gnome search-for-file utility is pathetic. You should at least be able to search on mime-type, comments and emblems.
2. Someone please fix SMB Browsing authentication in gnome! It's just embarassing when I try to show FC3 off to my Windows lovin' colleagues and I can't even browse a windows network properly.
3. System-config-LDAP
4. ...
5. gDesklets - 'cos floating, semi-transparent clocks matter.
6. Make Totem Work. With MPEGs
7. glorious new System-Config-Packages which is better than synaptic
8. ...

I have a recently installed Linux Fedora Core 3. In order to keep up with software updates and to install software in a consistent way I installed apt-get package manager.

But now I've hit a problem - and hope somebody more knowledgable in Linux can help me.
FC3 has MySQL 3 and PHP4 installed by default.
How to upgrade them to MySQL 4.1 and PHP 5?

And do that using a package manager? Sure, I could download an rpm or compile from sources, but then I would have to deal with all the package dependencies. And that is what package manager is for, isn't it?

While acting more on intuition and trial/error, found a good resource - Fedora Myth(TV)ology how-to - which includes a step-by-step guide for updating your sistem.

The problem is - I followed the steps, installed atrpms-kickstart, then medley-package-config, even changed at-stable to at-bleeding. But nothing helped - apt-get still offers only MySQL 3.23 and PHP 4.3.

Take a look at moztips.com article "Exporting Mozilla Bookmarks and History as RDF / XML".

It contains a JavaScript snippet to export Mozilla Suite (or Firefox) bookmarks and history into RDF/XML. This will gives you some more data to feed RDF applications and personal semantic desktops.

The code to decode Mozilla history file originally came from Mozilla Bug 241438. Quote:

"It is impossible for non-Mozilla programs to extract data from
~/.mozilla/*/*.slt/history.dat because it uses Mork, which is --
and I do not use these words lightly -- the single most braindamaged
file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career.

Please make history.dat contain something sane, like tab-delimited
fields, or XML."

Mork is a scary name. It's just funny to see text like "Please ... utilize an established, open standard format like valid XML for the history file and other places which are using mork." in the last comment - RDF would allow more uses for this data than just some XML tag soup.

The 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISCW 2005) will take place in Galway, Ireland on November 6 –10, 2005.

Submissions due:

Research/Academic Track - April 30, 2005
Industrial Track - April 30, 2005
Posters and Demos - July 22, 2005
Tutorial Proposals - May 6, 2005
Workshop Proposals - March 18, 2005

Semantic Web Challenge
June 1, 2005 Deadline for abstracts
June 15, 2005 Deadline for applications

For more information:
- ISWC 2005 homepage
- - important dates

Update: Workshop list is now online.

Holy Shmoly blog has an article about photo retouching providing some links to photo retouche tutorials.

What other good Photoshop and/or photo retouche tutorials / books are out there?

Šeit var apskatīt ko tik visu nevar izdarīt labs datorgrafiķis ar reālu fotogrāfiju (ar visām tās detaļām un "negludumiem").

Ekstrēmas korekcijas var redzēt šajā piemērā. Šeit jau tiek noņemti visi cilvēcīgie sīkumi un panākta tāda bilde, ka tikpat labi varētu šo sievietes attēlu vienkārši noģenerēt uz datora.

Kā mākslinieks raksta:

" It doesn't seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get. This shows an extreme example of how far an image can be taken. "

Piezīme: lai redzētu sākotnējo bildi šajos piemēros, pārbrauciet ar peles kursoru pāri fotogrāfijai.

No tā var izdarīt 2 secinājumus:

1) nav jēga springt (tiem, kas to dara) par skaistām bildēm žurnālos un reklāmās - tās visas ir pielabotas, nereti līdz nelabumam un nepazīšanai. plastiskā ķiruģija bez iejaukšanās pacientu organismā.

2) pavaicāt sev vai ir vērts censties panākt ideālu fotogrāfiju, ja var nobildēt sūdīgu vai vienkārši kā sanāk un tad Photoshopā pielabot pēc sirds patikas. mani fascinē cik daudz krāsu detaļu mākslinieks ir izvilcis no šīs kapellas bildes. oriģinālā visas krāsas ir nekādas.

Jāmācās Photoshops

Open are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts

Clouds darken the sky
The stars rain down
The constellations stagger
The bones of the hell hounds tremble
The porters are silent
When they see this king
Dawning as a soul

Men fall
Their name is not
Seize thou this king by his arm
Take this king to the sky
That he not die on earth
Among men

He flies who flies
This king flies away from you
Ye mortals
He is not of the earth
He is of the sky

Written as a part of opera "Akhnaten" (by Philip Glass) these words seem the most appropriate now when Pope John Paul II has passed away at the age of 84.

I am not a religious man, but I have a deep respect for him for his accomplishments to shape a better world for all of us. As often happens, you learn more about people when they are not with us any more...

Men fall
Their name does not.

OMG, another sleepy Monday has begun. Why does it always has to be Monday?

Oh, well, not to worry too much about that.
Let's have some fun instead.

Quick update: Don't worry, it is a just a Friday, April 1st. So sit back, relax and enjoy the weekend!

Camden Town, London. It reminds me of the "Pattern Recognition" book by William Gibson.

Or - the other way around - the book was the motivation to go there. Unfortunately I did not find a bookshop which had that book in the neighbourhood. It would have been even more fun to read some parts of it and see where the action took place.

I'll have to get my copy from Latvia or buy a new one...

Like I wrote in the latvian blog post (Londona) already, we are in London now - to relax and explore.

Spent most of the time in Camden town today - walked to it via canal-side. The day was very sunny and nice, so that was time well spent. We haven't got to any galleries or museums though. Maybe tomorrow.

One more day left and then we go home. Until the next time.
Suggestion and ideas of what to do in London are welcome. :-)

What fascinates me is meeting interesting people and seeing interesting places. And there is a lot of that here.

If you arrive in a city and things just are happening around you, if you meet people you know who just happen to be in the same city at same time, then you probably are in London. Or in Riga - I keep on remembering meeting Valdis Krebs in Riga - we just happened to be in the same location at the same time, though we spend most of our time outside Latvia, each in a different country.

Eng: Location update: in the London now.

Esam nokljuvushi Londonaa. Rezultaataa varu teikt, ka esmu bijis 4 no 5 man zinaamajaam Londonas lidostaam: Hiitrovaa, Gatvikaa, Lutonaa un Stenstedaa. Par celjojuma iespaidiem varbuut padaliishos veelaak.

Plaanos:
* riit iekaapt Shivers of Sharing pasaakumaa
* apskatiit vieteejaas "dostoprimechateljnostji"
* un cits stuffs ...

Tad doties maajaas.

P.S. Esam te liidz treshdienai. Ja jums ir ieteikumi ko apskatiit Londonaa, luudzu rakstiet.

Heidi J. C. Ellis has created a Semantic Web Resources page with a list of Semantic Web resources for use in Software Engineering course.

Some reading:
* Indexing and retrieving Semantic Web resources: the RDFStore model - from Asemantics

Useful things:
* Semantic Web RefCard - The UMBC Semantic Web Reference Card is a handy "cheat sheet" for semantic web developers and programmers. The card lists common RDF/RDFS/OWL classes and properties, popular namespaces and terms, ...

Dumš zvēriņš tātad. Es, tas ir.

Gribu smuku softu, ar ko organizēt fotkas un publicēt online.
T.i., gribu, lai fotkas būtu smuki online, pa kategorijām, kādu izlasi publicēt blogā, u.t.t.

Līdzīgu kā Flickr. Tas būtu OK, bet pilnībā savas fotkas uzticēt Flickr negribu - tas tomēr ir citu piedāvās serviss un es negribu atdot kontroli pār maniem datiem citiem.

Savukārt pats uztaisīt tādu lietu es vai nu nemāku vai arī nav laika. Defaultā Gallery mani arī pilnībā neapmierina.

Tad nu tiešām dumji sanāk - tas, ko var dabūt, man nav labs. Savukārt labāku es uztaisīt nevaru. Un rezultātā es nedaru neko. Ja nu vienīgi reizi pa reizei iemetu pa vientuļai fočenei šeitan blogā. Vai deviantArtā, bet tas bija _ļoti_ sen jau.

The Animé Café site features "A Parent's Guide to Anime". It is a comprehensive list of anime movies sorted by parental guidance suggestions.

The films are arranged into 4 categories:

• G rated - for ages 3 and up
• PG rated - for ages 13 and up
• M rated - for mature audiences
• X rated - for adult audiences

Critical note:

As with any subjective judgement (and all judgement is subjective in its nature) there are flaws. Most of the best animes I've seen are in the M-rated section. And quite often it is unclear why animes are placed in one or another category.

E.g., why "Cowboy Be-Bop" is M-rated, but "Trigun" is PG-rated? They are quite similar in terms of maturity of content. Then both "Princess Mononoke" and "Hellsing" are classified as M-rated, though it is hard to mentally fit them both within the same category - "Hellsing" would require much more mature audiences.

And if a review of "Trigun" ends with the text 'However, the series does teach good moral values, nothing that'll really corrupt the kids, since Vash and co. are inherently idealistic.', is this not what all Hayao Miyazaki's films (including "Princess Mononoke") are about - good moral values?

You would also notice that the X-rated category is hidden - while it is listed on the left-hand side menu, it does not appear in the list of categories on the main part of the guide. Is this omission on purpose?

While, as noted above, the guide has its flaws, it is a good checklist to see what films you have seen and what are yet to be seen. I'd go for M-rated category first.

Updates: I've heard that Japanese have their own classification of anime - with detailed gradations of age and sex of the target audience. It would be interesting to see what are the relations between this calssification and the "Parent's Guide to Anime".

More: Search 'anime' on captsolo.net

Lat: Hey, hey! Šodien man ir dzimene!

It's March 19th again and it is my birthday today. The celebration has already begun as we were in the club yesterday and today is a really nice and sunny day here. So the fun continues!

See also posts (with nice anime pics) from other years:
- Let the celebration begin! (2004)
- March 19th - It's Birthday Time (2006)
- March 19th - Birthday Time Again (2007)

And if you're coming from Gaia Online (as many visitors have recently), could you please leave a comment and point me to the page in Gaia that links to this post? Thanks.

Continuing last year's tradition, a photo of a nice anime girl picture included:

Happy Birthday wishes to all people celebrating their birthday today, and especially to those whom I know either virtually or in the real life:
- Baiba - she's still spending her time in the Netherlands I guess
- Crschmidt
- Edd Dumbill
- Kota
- Lelde

Wishes and Amazon wishlist have not changed much from the last year, so I you may as well see the last year's entry. Maybe I am slowly converting to the digital photography, but more on that in another post.

Lat: Komentāri ir šeit

A quick snapshot from St.Patrick's Day parade in Galway, Ireland.

This photo shows the public rather than the parade itself, so you can see the mood that was in the air.
The show was great as well.

Leo Sauermann, who is working on Gnowsis semantic desktop, has an article "True Names Again" on his blog, talking about books, cyberpunk and semantic web.

There is one thing in particular that catched my attention - and that is cyberpunk science fiction books. I absolutely love William Gibson's books, Pattern Recognition being the last I've read, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and here is a quote from Leo's blog:

So I am really, really delighted that *True Names* is now back in print. I note that it is now fashionable to write books "explaining" the Net and the near-term future of our society to the layman -- books such as Negroponte's *Being Digital,* Gate's *The Road Ahead*, or Dertouzos' *What Will Be*. These books are a waste of time. If you would like to explore the implications and likely future of the computer revolution, I would recommend three novels, instead: *True Names* (Vernor Vinge), *Snowcrash* (Neal Stephenson), and *Neuromancer* (William Gibson).

Vinge and Stephenson are not only excellent writers, they are trained, competent computer scientists. *Neuromancer* is the best-written of the three; *Snowcrash* is the funniest and hippest; *True Names* -- well, *True Names* is the source.

-"Olin" Shivers

- see the original review in Amazon -

This can mean only one thing - I *must* read "True Names" by Vernor Vinge.

And - as a side note- it may sound strange - but in recent times I have not seen any new science fiction book that was as good as the scifi classics created some time ago. Has there been a ground-breaking book I do not know of?

Rītdienas plāni:

0. Pamosties
1. Noskatīties Sv.Patrika dienas parādi
2. Doties uz pubu

P.S. Rītdiena sāksies, kad pamodīsies. Tehniski tagad jau ir 17.03, bet vēl mazliet jāpaguļ.

Just a small reminder - it's St.Patricks Day today!
Drink beer and have fun.

Ziņas no šejienes tagad var lasīt un uz tām parakstīties arī Sviesta Cibā:

captsolo_rss - bloga RSS barotne, agregēta iekš SC. Vienīgi bildes nerādās.

Here are the subjects of all posts in the captsolo_rss journal in March, 2005 - ļoti pārskatāmi...

Paldies, laacz.

Lat: Kas ir Tavā somiņā?

Online photo sharing and publishing sites have given rise to interesting uses. These get especially interesting when these sites (i.e., Flickr):

1) grow to a significant size
2) add social networking capability
3) introduce content aggregation (using tags)
4) add capability to annotate photos

One of most attention grabbing so far is the "What's in your bag?" initiative on Flickr.

See what's in Joi's bag (photo by Joi Ito). As many of these photos, this is gadget-packet. Take a look - it has 4 mobile phones, 2 iPods, external Firewire drive and a Mac.

In "What's in your bag?" you can see hundreds of photos from different people, tagged with a tag 'whatsinyourbag' and letting viewers to peek into their bags and see what others are carrying around. Many of these photos have been annotated by adding comments to different items you can see there.

Note #1:
The tags have mutated and to see all the photos related to this topic you may want to look at the following Flickr tags - whatsinyourbag, whatsinmybag and whatisinyourbag.

Note #2:
It would be useful to have more intelligent annotations. Currently Flickr allows you to say 'this rectangle has a text "bla bla bla" attached'. What I'd like to see is some more info like 'this rectangle pictures an object "Mac PC"' and the annotation system to understand that a Mac is a PC and a computer.

So you could ask the annotation search engine "show me all the photos with computers in them" and get Mac, Intel and all other objects which qualify as a computer. Related: [rdfweb-dev] why wordnet is cool...

Very entertaining...

Spam is a big problem these days. Any kind of spam - e-mail / comment / trackback / referer - you name it.

What is interesting, though, is how people react to the spam:

1) do nothing
this shows a badly maintained site

2) deny everything
close comments, disable trackbacks, ...

this works, but basically the spammers have won - they just made you restrict your audience for something where your readers are not guilty. basically, you disable feedback.

Read more! »

Hello, World!
This is a little test.
Could you please send a trackback to this post?

Eng: A new day

Jauna diena. Ārā līst...
Jūtams kontrasts pēc 2 jaukām nedēļām.

Jauna nedēļa ar'.
Par vēlēšanām nerunāsim.

Padzēsu no commentiem ārā kaudzi spama. Īstie komentāri ir pieklusuši, laikam pēdējie raksti nau diez ko interesanti aktīvākajiem lasītājiem.

Meklēju 3.5" hard drive enclosure. Palasoties atsauksmes par Maxtor OneTouch, nolēmu, ka labāk neņemt šādus te risinājumus un paņemt atsevišķi HDD un enclosure (ietvaru).

Te būs mazliet sarakste par tēmu un viens skaists ievars: MaPower MAP-KC31. Izskatās labi, testu rezultāti arī labi. Firma ziņās drīz sola arī TripleX interfeisu - USB 2.0, FireWire 400 un SATA. Jautājums vienīgi - vai man vajag extrēmo diska kasti?

Now that's a very nice use for a military ship

LETA ziņo par ICT tehnoloģiju izmantošanas pētījumu:

Ženēva, 9.marts, LETA. Latvija pēc informācijas un sakaru tehnoloģiju (ICT) izmantošanas ierindojas 56.vietā pasaulē, liecina Pasaules Ekonomikas foruma (WEF) jaunākais pētījums. Salīdzinājumā ar iepriekšējā gada reitingu Latvija ir piedzīvojusi kritumu par 21 vietu.

Igaunija WEF veidotajā reitingā, kurā iekļautas pavisam 104 pasaules valstis, ir ieņēmusi 25.vietu, kas ir augstākā starp jaunajām Eiropas Savienības (ES) valstīm, bet Lietuva reitingā atrodas 43.vietā. Igaunijas situācija, salīdzinot ar iepriekšējo gadu, nav mainījusies, bet Lietuva reitingā ir noslīdējusi par vienu pozīciju.

Agrāk jau rakstīju par Latvijas izdevumiem izpētei un attīstībai, balstoties uz EuroStat datiem. Tur kā Baltijas valstu izdevumi šiem nolūkiem procentos no IKP tika minēti šādi cipari - Igaunija (0.77%), Latvija (0.39%), Lietuva (0.68%).

captsolo weblog: Budžets, izglītība un zinātne Latvijā [25.02.2005]

Izskatās, ka pastāv korelācija starp to cik tiek tērēts izpētei un attīstībai un valsts ICT attīstības līmeni. Varbūt ir kāds minimālais finanšu līmenis, kas nepieciešams, lai attīstības līmenis nekristu uz leju?

Protams, šī saistība var būt arī netieša, bet izpētes un attīstības izdevumu daļa IKP var tīri labi raksturot to, cik daudz vērības šai sfērai pievērš valsts un privātie uzņēmumi.

This Monday the EU Council formally approved the directive on software patents:

eWeek: EU Council Formally Adopts Controversial Patent Proposal

There were procedural irregularities in denying opposing countries a possibility to discuss this directive, but that probably would not be enough to make this decision invalid.

The way how the decision was reached sparked a very cool humoristic ad:

FFII:

An MEP who saw our press release noted that "it certainly appears that the Council presidency took some procedural shortcuts". That is an extremely diplomatic way to put it. The Council Presidency spoke in name of the entire Council (pluralis majestatis as it were) and reversed voting requirements. The rules state that "an A item (formal point) shall be taken off the agenda if a member state so requests or if it might lead to further discussions, unless the Council decides otherwise".

When Denmark asked for that, the Presidency simply announced it did not want to take it off, instead of asking whether there was a majority against taking it off. Therefore, "unless the Council decides otherwise" became "if a majority of the Council wants to go against the Presidency's will, while not even a vote has been called". This might seem like splitting hairs, but in the Council where every sign of opposition is presented to us as something which foreshadows the end of EU decision making as we know it, this is a difference
between night and day.

Eng: Slashdot reports - Google Adds Features and Plugin to Desktop Search

Google Desktop meklētājs ir ieguvis jaunas fīčas un ir oficiāli ārā no beta testēšanas fāzes.

Jaunumi - iespēja meklēt:
* Firefox u.c. uz Mozilla bāzētos browseros
* PDF
* attēlus
* video un audio failus

Ja ar to vien nepietiek - var pieslēgt meklētāja pluginus (šobrīd tie dod iespēju indeksēt arī teksta failu formātus, mIRC un Trillian logus, OpenOffice dokumentus, CHM help failus).

Interesants ir Google pašu Kongulo plugins, kurš ļauj norādīt web serverus, kuru saturu indeksēt un padarīt pieejamus Google Desktop meklētājam.

This plugin is a web spider ("Kongulo" is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify and makes them searchable via GDS.

Kongulo follows links in HTML frame, image and anchor tags. It obeys robots.txt and knows basic and digest HTTP authentication. It can be run continuously, checking for updates to previously crawled pages, and uses the If-Modified-Since HTTP header to minimize transfers when doing so.

You can provide a regexp to limit crawls to e.g. your intranet domain.

This version does not have a graphical user interface and can be run from the command-line only.

Eng: EU directive on the patentability of software was accepted by the EU council today. Observers note they have broken their own regulations and that this shows the council can do whatever they wish.

Šodien ES padomē tika pieņemta ES direktīva par programmatūras patentēšanu.

ZDnet raksta: Opponents are furious that the EU Council has approved the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. The future of software patenting in Europe now lies in the hands of the European Parliament.

ES padome ir tieši tā institūcija, kurā ir pārstāvēta katra ES valsts. Līdz ar to šajā gadījumā atbildību un konkrētu viedokli var prasīt tieši no mūsu valdības. Interesanti arī kāda ir bijusi IT organizāciju, tādu kā LITTA, nostāja un rīcība.

Katrā ziņā Latvija nav no tām valstīm, kuras būtu aktīvi nostājušās pret to, ka programmatūru varēs patentēt. Varbūt patenti šajā direktīvas redakcijā mums būs labi? Un kurš Latvijas ministrs pārstavēja mūs šajā sanāksmē un kādu viedokli viņš pauda?

FFII sniedz vairāk informācijas par šo lietu: Council Presidency Adopts Software Patent Agreement Against Council's Rules

Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member:

It is absolutely unfathomable what happened today. I cannot see how the promoters of the European Constitution can still support it with a straight face. This event shows that something is clearly rotten in the city of Brussels at the Council building. Why on Earth do we still have the rules that state that national parliaments should be taken into account by the Council?

Things would be much easier if we scrapped all those rules and simply wrote down "The Council presidency and Commission can do together whatever they like". There's no need for those pesky democratically elected parliamentarians to interfere with the smooth decision making process of the Council, since its only goal appears to be to please big business and to produce as many texts as the sausage machine can bear.

This is absolutely disgusting.

FFII Open letter: EU Constitution shown to be a Farce (7-Mar-05)

The toolkit, built on the Eclipse IDE includes an OWL editor with helpful features like syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and error-detection. It also currently integrates existing tools like the OWL Validator, Kazuki (OWL to Java code generator), and DumpOnt (Ontology Visualizer).

Having recently installed Eclipse 3 and PHP Eclipse and Oxygen XML Editor plugins, this would make a nice addition to support editing of OWL. Let's give it a try!

Get it here: SWeDE 1.0.2 project page

via: Danny's weblog

This week a Feb 28 / Mar 1 2005 Meeting of the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group took place.

Relevant links:
* SWIG meeting agenda - live on the wiki
* SWIG meeting page on W3C site
* SemWeb IG web scratchpad - 28 Feb 05
* SemWeb IG web scratchpad - 01 Mar 05

SemWeb IG web scratchpad and IRC logs for these days may be especially interesting to get a feeling of what what going on there and where to look for some further information.

Eng: comment and trackback spam strikes again. Will need more anti-spam measures.
I do not want to close commenting, but re. trackbacks - how many of you actually use them?

Komentāros un trackback-os atkal sāk velties spama kalni. Komentārus es centīgi tīru ārā no spama, bet trackback ir piemēslots visai pamatīgi. Būs jāpieņem mēri.

Ko es negribu darīt, tas ir - aizliegt lasītājiem iespēju paust savu viedokli un domas. Tas vienīgi parādītu ka spammeri ir uzvarējuši. Par trackback-u es neesmu tik drošs - cik no jums to izmanto iekdienā?

Eng: I am having fun looking the Oscar Academy Awards 2005 coverage on Sky News. Quite entertaining to watch how the reporters hunt down the stars for interviews... Muttering "c'mon, c'mon, come here!"

Leonardo, we're live on Sky News now.
How are you tonight?

Stilīgi kā reportieri ķer zvaigznes, ko intervēt.
Izskatās labi.

Un galvenais, ka viņiem izdodas.
Par to jau viņiem arī maksā.

Šonakt ir ASV kinoakadēmijas balvas pasniegšanas ceremonija.
[stunda līdz pārraidei]

Skat.: SkyOne Oskaru ceremonijas saits

Vai es skatīšos to? Varbūt - ja nekā cita nebūs ko darīt un vēl būšu nomodā. Bet skatīšos tādēļ, ka nekā cita nav ko skatīties, nevis tāpēc kā tas man kautko nozīmētu. Kautkā rodas sajūta, ka šīs balvas nozīme sāk balēt. Un ka kino ir kas vairāk kā Holivuda.

Arī CNN vaicā - Vai cilvēki skatīsies?
Nevis "cik daudzi", bet vai vispār skatīsies...
Tam gan nav nekāda sakara ar Eiropas un Āzijas kino pēkšņu popularitāti ASV.

Vai kāds var iemest šeit linku vai tekstu nesenajam rakstam mēdijos par Latvijas izdevumiem izglītībai un zinātnei?

Galvenā tēze bija, ka izdevumi šiem mērķiem Latvijā ir ļoti mazi - šķiet, ka otrie mazākie ES.

Izskatās, ka online mēdijos (kuri paliek arvien nožēlojamāki) šī ziņa nav diez ko svarīga. Vismaz man neizdevās to atrast nevienā no 3 populārākajiem ziņu portāliem. Paradoksāli, ja ņem vērā, ka bez pēdējo gadu desmitu zinātnes sasniegumiem online mēdiji vienkārši nepastāvētu.

[ Saprotu gan, ka mēdijiem vajag ko pupulāraku - skandālus, baumas un noziegumus ]

TVNet: Latvijas izdevumi izpētei un attīstībai ir otrie mazākie ES
- update: link found

A blog by Grady Booch - one of the original authors of UML.
Also interesting is the books link - a list of books in his library.

A blog by Alasdair Allan - as he phrases it - much involved with Web & Grid Services and mucking around with Intelligent Agents for a living. Interesting articles.

Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets. Interesting - but many posts seem to be hit by undeleted comment spam. Good thing is the urls in comments don't become links.

Savā blogā Laacz ir savācis kopā link dumpus, sauktus arī par "Around the web in 80 days".
Īpaši interesants ir #3 - ar daudz info par web development un PHP.

* Around the web in 80 days
* Around the web in 80 days #2
* Around the web in 80 days #3 - bing!

Atgādina manu Derīgi linki #1, #2, #3 sēriju - kura gan ir domāta tieši semantiskā weba linkiem un kalpoja kā vienkārša linku novietne lekcijām par semantisko webu.

eng: a good and comprehensive article in Latvian about digital photography

Ciparfotogrāfija - attēla kvalitāte

Šai rakstā ir īsi un skaidri aprakstīti ciparu fotogrāfijas pamati un kā iegūt kvalitatīvu attēlu. Kā autors pareizi atzīmē to, ko daudzi ražotāju mārketinga raksti "piemirst", proti - matricas izšķirtspējai nebūt nav izšķirošā nozīme.

Pārbaudīts praksē: ar 3Mpix kameru var nobildēt lielisku attēlu, savukārt ar 5+Mpix kameru ar sūdīgu optiku - nu... party bildēm varbūt pietiek.

Via: Kaklz home

If anybody has not got a GMail e-mail account yet [however strange that may be], leave a comment below this post (comment page asks for your e-mail, fill it in) and I'll send an invite to your e-mail.

Ja nu kādam vēl nav sava GMail e-pasta konta [dīvaini, vai ne?], ierakstiet savu e-mailu komentāros un varēsiet dabūt ielūgumu.

Although - however nice GMail might be, they are very stubborn when it comes to some particular functions.

You would think every normal e-mail application has an easy way to delete a message? Well - GMail does not. There are shortcuts for every possible things, except for it.

If you look at their help:

Can I use a shortcut to delete messages?

We don’t currently offer a shortcut to delete messages, 
but we’re working on many new features to improve Gmail. 
To suggest a feature, please contact us here.

I can't imagine that this shortcut was so hard to create along all the others. So the only logical conclusion is that GMail team thinks they know better what the user needs and do not trust the user to decide for himself when to delete the messages.

Reminds me of old WordPerfect versions that asked you again and again do you really want to exit.

SIOC (Semantically Interlinking Online Communities) is an ontology for describing discussion forums and posts on topic threads in online community sites.

See SIOC Home Page for more.

Take a look at the SIOC ontology browser there - apparently that is an RDF based, dynamic ontology browser. Might be useful for managing and displaying ontologies. I need to learn more about that...

I was amazed to find a new toolbar at the bottom of my IE browser today. I use it fairly irregularly, probably that's why I did not discover it earlier. (Or maybe Widows automagically installed it just a couple of hours ago).

About Web discussions

The Web Discussions feature enables users to attach comments to a Web page or any document that can be opened with a browser (such as .xls, .doc, .ppt, .gif files, and so on) so that the comments appear with the document but are stored on a discussion server.

The discussions are threaded. Users reviewing your Web page can use the Web Discussions toolbar to view and reply to any discussion. You can then review discussions and incorporate changes to your Web page based on the feedback you receive.

Discuss a whole page or a paragraph

You can discuss the whole page, using general discussions, or insert comments in a particular part of a page, using inline discussions.

Maybe it is something new for Microsoft, but in fact it is the same thing as the Annotea W3C Project.

Annotea is a good project, but what was said earlier still holds true:

[Annotea] Web Annotations

The idea for shared web annotations is a good thing, but I do not see that it has moved much forward. Main problem is that the use of Annotea is not widespread. As Jamie Pitts says: "While I have always had great hopes for web annotation, it is plagued by the classic chicken-egg problem. Getting the success feedback loop going involves building communities with web annotation."

I wonder how the web annotation world will change with the introduction of MS Web Discussions. Hmmm, also interesting how is this implemented by Microsoft. RDF?

Related: Approach to Categorising Information

"The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source" by Bruce Peren.

An article about the Open Source and how it fits well within the capitalistic economy of these days.
(Although the opponents of the open source often are saying its destroying capitalistic society, etc. I guess they say that about many new practices and technologies).

Abstract

Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions.

It's not immediately obvious how Open Source[1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don't understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it's easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy.

Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

Engadget reports that the manufacturer of iRiver MP3 players is using the adult film star Jenna Jameson to advertise its products.

That is an ad for iRiver’s new PMP-100 personal video player (the ad text says “Your refined movie collection just paid off”). Engadget: "Since they can’t exactly annoy Hollywood and promote piracy in their ads, maybe, just maybe, porn is the next best thing".

Also reported on:
- Digital Chosunilbo.
- Gizmodo

See more of Jenna's sexy photos at GorillaMask.net.

From the (at)semantics weblog via Danny's weblog:

Libby Miller strengthes the team at @semantics as partner and Chief Research Officer. She will focus on the research programs and help apply leading edge technologies to our customer solutions.

She has been part of the Semantic Web Communtiy from the begining on a wide range of topics such as such as calendaring, query, vocabulary developement and community building. Libby will continue her pivotal role within the the W3C and RDF communities with the full support of @semantics.

Congratulations, Libby!!!
And congratulations to @semantics!

Mūsu elektroniskie mēdiji atkal izceļas ar absolūti idiotiskiem rakstiem.

Šoreiz tas ir apollo.lv: "Coca-Cola etiķete stimulē smadzeņu aktivitāti"

Ievadā tiek runāts par tējas labvēlīgo ietekmi pret Alcheimera slimību. Tēma par tējas veselīgumu turpinās arī raksta iesākuma daļā.

Piemin nepareizu dzīvesveidu un tālāk pārlec uz krūts vēzi: "Zinātnieki pierādījuši — zāles auglības veicināšanai samazina risku saslimt ar krūts vēzi".

Tad nāk pērle - par to kā raksta nosaukumā censored minētais dzēriens (tas pats, kura viena no pamata sastāvdaļām ir fosforskābe) veicina smadzeņu aktivitāti: "Amerikā populārākajai Coca-Cola etiķetei, kā izrādās, ir milzīga ietekme: divas trešdaļas no testējamajiem atzina, ka izvēlas tieši to." un "tajā pašā laikā pētnieki atklāja, ka Coca-Cola etiķete stimulē ievērojamu aktivitātes palielināšanos tajās smadzeņu daļās, kas atbild par kultūras zināšanām, atmiņu un paštēlu."

Es gan neesmu tik drošs, ka ir jau atklātas konkrētas smadzeņu zonas, kas atbild par kultūras zināšanām. Bet ja nu guru tā raksta... Vispār laba frāze viņiem sanākusi: "Amerikā xxx etiķetei ir milzīga ietekme". Nu labi, atstāsim ameriku amerikāņiem un viņu brendiem...

Bet pats raksts ir haotisks izteikumu savārstījums un var vien pabrīnīties kā kautko tādu vispār publicē. Tas būtu tāpat kā rakstīt: "Pornogrāfijas demonstrēšanai, izrādās ir milzīga ietekme: vairums testējamo atzina, ka viņiem aktivizējas abas smadzeņu puslodes". Nākamais itin loģiskais solis būtu valdības priekšlikums Izglītības ministrijai paredzēt skolu programmās regulāru Coca-Cola etiķešu un pornogrāfijas demonstrēšanu.

Viņi vispār paši apjēdz, ko raksta?

Varbūt uztaisīt arī latvisko blogu?

Šobrīd pamatā viss saturs še ir angliski. Domāju, ka nav jēga tulkot esošos tekstus latviski - tie, kurus interesēs semantiskais webs (tā galvenā, kaut arī ne vienīgā, esošo rakstu tēma), pratīs tos izlasīt arī angliski.

Drīzāk varētu vienkārši "pavārīties" par tēmu, iegāzt dažas idejas, domas un iespaidus.

Daži latviski "sub-blogi" šeit jau ir:

mazais weblogs - kurā small-n-tabby reizēm padalās domās par mārketingu, sviestu un dzīvi.
tiesa - tikai "šad un tad".

tm no-place - attiecīgi ar tm rakstiem un iespaidiem.

Starp citu - itin jauka doma ir Friends of Get With It! blogam - "This is the weblog for all of our friends - ..."
Blogs, kurā visi viņu draugi var kautko uzrakstīt. Savā ziņā pārkāpj pieņēmumu, ka blogs ir tikai viena autora darbs.

Condoleezza Rice, during her Senate confirmation hearing:

"I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the U.S. government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us." - via

More on the subject here - Boxing Condoleezza.

How cynical is this???
Great dividends???
Talking about other people's disaster as an opportunity...
I sincerely hope that's just bad wording.

Added this beauty to my deviantArt gallery.
Has been long time since last photos were added to it.

Todays featured deviation: Spiked by ~eyecandyrayce.

There are many interesting blogs by the Semantic Web hackers and friends. I'll do my best to list some of them here, both for myself and for you to see what I like to check out from time to time:

- John Breslin - also a big fan of anime (see Anime.IE); check out his icon sidebar - he's got quite a lot links there.

Amazon's TOP 10 Animes

- Hannes Gassert - he has just arrived in Galway to work on his master thesis.
there are 2 entries in our blogs very, very similar to each other - this and this one.

- Morten Frederiksen (Binary Relations) - congratulations with a redesigned site (mmm, that Weblog/Planet/Links pane works very nice) and new resolutions! And his faceted photo database is just amazing!

- Danny Ayers - semantic web and lots of cat pictures.
a pitty he is having some problems with a site right now.
good luck in getting it back on its feet! (i almost wrote 'feed')

- crschmidt - see also his Semantic Web Hacking page.

These are the first five.
Will add more some day.

This paper describes Xenon - an RDF stylesheet ontology.

Linksys makes this little device that sits by your TV and stereo and allows to browse photos or listen to music (MP3, WMA) from your PC. There are more Linksys devices to check out.

The Wireless-B Media Adapter connect to your home stereo and television. Then it connects to your home network by Wireless-B (802.11b) wireless networking and you can browse through the digital pictures from your computer by folder, filename, or thumbnail. You can view pictures one at a time, or watch an automatically created slideshow of all the pictures in a given folder. You can also use the remote to browse your MP3 or WMA formatted music collection, choose the music you want, and let this device play it through your stereo system. You can even let music play in the background while you browse your pictures.

It is interesting how the availability of information and the information systems behind them change the way how politics is done now (though the basic roots remain the same). This conference might be interesting:

The 3rd International Conference on Politics and Information Systems:
Technologies and Applications (PISTA '05).
July 14-17, 2005 - Orlando, Florida, USA

via: The Pants Daily Chump

Skype surprises by taking words right out of the mouth.

As I was chatting on Skype (yes, it is my preferred instant messaging tool now) yesterday and thinking about writing an article on it, a lack of multi-user chat came into mind as one of the minuses. Not what you would normally expect from an instant messenger or VoIP software, but a very cool feature. If they have voice conferences, why not IM?

And - literally the next thing I see:

Skype launches Windows Version 1.1

Luxembourg, January 5, 2005 - Today Skype launches v1.1 for Windows and introduces the new Chat feature, allowing Skype users to hold multi-person or forum-style conversations with groups of people. Chat expands the existing one-to-one chatting and other instant message features in previous versions of Skype, and allows groups of up to 50 to communicate.

* download it now!

Just make a wish.
Now I won’t have to repeat news to everybody over and over again.
Just say it in a chat conference.

One less minus to name in the review.
What does it boil down to?

Pluses (+):

* High quality VoIP, free
* Convenient IM interface
* Encryption - both VoIP and IM
* Peer-to-Peer
* Cheap calls to phones worldwide

Minuses (-):

* Contacts can’t be exported
* All data kept on P2P client

The last one (all data on client) is both good for privacy and bad in having side effects:
- have to enter all contacts anew on every computer you use
- irregularities of delivery of IM messages
- irregularities of finding new contacts

When I mean irregularities of delivery of IM messages - the messages are kept on the sender’s PC until the recipient comes online. Both need to be online for the message to be delivered.

It’s cool how users on Skype forums have a “Skype Me” icon next to usual “Profile", “PM", … icons. You can actually press it and voice call to the author of the post.

Forecasts say today and this night this will be the biggest storm here in 100 years, with gusts of wind up to 160 kmph. During daytime I had a feeling it's gonna blast the roof off the building we were in, but it was not _that_ bad in the end.

Now - is the biggest storm over or still ahead?
That's how it looked some hours before (via):

... looked at the picture above and it resembles a fractal so much. like a spiral in a magnified view of a Mandelbrot set.