captsolo weblog

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?