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

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



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

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

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

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


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

The Koble welcome screen:


A Thing page:


Adding a relation:


Placing Things on the map:


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

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

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



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


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

Updated: fix the page size for the 2005 version.

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Kill the undead  
Wednesday, June 27, 2007, 12:52 PM - Semantic Web
With HP Lovecraft:

Deanimator

I keep meaning to write something about ESWC2007, and the Semantic Scripting Workshop, but things keep getting in the way. The workshop was excellent and it's very inspiring to see all the Semantic Web services that pop up these days, I wont repeat them again, go ask Danny.

Inspired by the hands-on approach of SFSW and also by Knud's fantastic lightweight semantic desktop widgets I have started a little project on my own. I will put details here in due course, for now you can have this:



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New HDR tool for Linux  
Tuesday, May 29, 2007, 05:35 PM - Everything Else
Previosly I've been using a long toolchain consisting of UFRAW, a cinepaint beta-build, qpfstmo and finally Gimp to process my HDR shots. Now finally someone has made a single program for doing both HDR bracketing and tone-mapping in linux!




qtpfsgui is clearly standing on the shoulder of giants, and is building on qpfstmo, but apart from being completely inpronouncable it's an excellent tool. It supports 16 bit TIFFs and all the tone-mappings of qpfstmo (you have to set the exposure values for your TIFFs yourself though)

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