This Wired article reads like something straight from a William Gibson novel: Michael Chorost lost his ability to hear in 2001. A cochlear implant, a small computer installed in his skull, allows him to understand human voices again, but is not sophisticated enough to decode complex sounds. Now, Michael is on a quest for an […]
Funny Halo in-game video: The Warthog Jump. What happens when you blow up a car sitting on top of a pile of grenades? Great choice of music, too. (via BoingBoing)
Sparklines are small word-sized graphics that communicate lots of numbers in a small space. Here’s an example: Jena downloads are usually around 80 per day during the week, with slightly less on the weekends. After the 2.3 release on 12 Oct, they briefly rose to about 200 for a few days, then stabilized again […]
Time Magazine has a great discussion with some of my favourite writers and thinkers about trends for the future. Some choice quotes: Malcolm Gladwell: One of the most striking things in observing the evolution of American society is the rise of travel. If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, […]
Some stuff that isn’t in SPARQL, but should be. I’ve two use cases in mind: building AJAX applications on top of a SPARQL store, and enabling discovery of the stuff that is in a SPARQL store you don’t know yet. Expressions in SELECT: I want to be able to say SELECT DISTINCT LANG(?object) or SELECT DISTINCT […]
Student job offer (in German) The job is in the Semantic Web for Pathology project. I’ve previously written about it (in German).
A couple of days ago, I came across this fine paper by Keir Mierle et al. from U of Toronto: Mining Student CVS Repositories for Performance Indicators They examined the CVS repositories that their students used for assignments, extracted all sorts of numbers by analysing access patterns and code metrics, and correlated the numbers with the grades […]
Here’s what I dreamed last night. (True!) This is a scene from a James Bond movie. One of the old ones, starring, maybe, Roger Moore as 007 and Gert Fröbe as the Goldfinger-like villain. This is towards the middle of the movie. Mr Villain has invited our charismatic top spy to his luxury boat and just […]
TriG is a Turtle-based serialization syntax for RDF datasets. The only implementation I know of is in NG4J. An example: @prefix rdf: . @prefix dc: . @prefix foaf: . { dc:publisher “Bob” . dc:publisher “Alice” . } { [] foaf:name “Bob”; foaf:mbox . } […]
Every SourceForge project has a statistics page with the number of daily page views and downloads (example). Last year, I built a little screenscraper (page in German) that converted any project’s stats page into an RSS feed. But earlier this year, their statistics system frapped out and wasn’t since heard of. But now it’s fixed, and […]
The Jena Model Editor is a Swing-based GUI window that provides a simple Turtle (N3)-based editor and inspector for Jena models. It’s useful for developing GUI applications that store their data in Jena models. Want to know what statements one of your models currently contains without sprinkling System.out.println calls through your code? Want to add […]
Danny Ayers reveals the secret: How to find inner peace and feel great. And it’s much simpler than I had thought.
Some more VIM goodies that have accumulated in mv .vimrc over the years: Switch between :split and :vsplit windows using CTRL+hjkl: map <c -J> </c><c -W>j</c><c -W>_ map </c><c -K> </c><c -W>k</c><c -W>_ map </c><c -H> </c><c -W>h</c><c -W>_ map </c><c -L> </c><c -W>l</c><c -W>_ set wmh=0 Nicer color scheme: brighter comments, more contrast for search highlight. Intended for systems that use […]
This little VIM script enables autocompletion with the tab key. All words in the current file will be used as possible completions. No cross-file autocompletion yet. Put this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist: ” Autocompletion with <tab> function InsertTabWrapper() […]
Jena 2.3 is released. New/improved stuff: Out-of-the-box SPARQL support (via ARQ, which is now included in the Jena download) Faster queries on in-memory graphs Faster parsing of RDF/XML Neat! Good to see that the Jena releases are rolling out a bit faster now. Jena 2.2 is just six months old, compared to the eightteen-month-wait between 2.0 and 2.1.
To change the VIM tab settings for some file types, you can put something like this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist: ” Default tab behaviour: Use spaces instead of tabs, a tab is 4 spaces set expandtab set shiftwidth=4 set tabstop=4 ” But tab should […]
How to switch off all kinds of auto-indentation in VIM. Put this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist: ” Switch off all auto-indenting set nocindent set nosmartindent set noautoindent set indentexpr= filetype indent off filetype plugin indent off The first line is a comment; the rest switches off all […]