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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.