Ian's personal blog

Moving

2009-08-01T13:12:00.001Z

Hello all....

Moving my blogging activity to http://ianibbo.me and trying to be more regular about it and improve the overall quality :S wish me luck :D

Google YouTube (and other) API's - maven2 artifacts

2009-04-12T12:10:00.004Z

Been playing with the google java API's for youtube as a part of the Sheffield virtual classroom project. I was shocked to find there weren't any maven artifacts for the jars. Here's the commands to take the distributed jars and cram them into your local maven2 repo.

Download the zip package from googlecode at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/downloads/list

then cd to the lib directory and run


mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=base -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-base-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=blogger -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-blogger-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=blogger-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-blogger-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=books -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-books-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=books-meta -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-books-meta-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=calendar -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-calendar-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=calendar-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-calendar-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=client -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-client-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=client-meta -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-client-meta-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=codesearch -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-codesearch-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=codesearch-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-codesearch-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=contacts -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-contacts-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=contacts-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-contacts-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=core -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-core-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=docs -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-docs-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=docs-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-docs-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=finance -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-finance-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=finance-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-finance-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=health -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-health-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=health-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-health-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=media -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-media-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=photos -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-photos-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=photos-meta -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-photos-meta-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=spreadsheet -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-spreadsheet-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=spreadsheet-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-spreadsheet-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=youtube -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-youtube-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=youtube-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-youtube-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true

Twestival - Sheffield bad news :(

2009-02-04T14:24:00.002Z

Dear all.....

The twestival sheffield organisers have met today and we've expressed a pretty unanimous concern that the event might not reach all our expectations. Due to many different reasons we've decided that rather put on a half-assed event and risk undoing the many months of hard work we've put into organising great community events in and around sheffield, we would be better to take a step back and look to next year.

So it's with huge sadness that we have to say goodbye to our efforts to make twestival sheffield happen this year. If anyone else has the burning desire to pick up the mantle then we can happily transfer whatever knowledge and contacts we have. At this stage, the event simply wasn't coming together as we had hoped.

Apologies for the huge dissapointment, but on the upside many of our friends and neighbors in the north are hosting their own twestival events and have made kind offers to welcome all. Please see the twestival site for details.

Please also bear in mind that there is a huge calendar of community tech/geek events coming up in sheffield over the next year. For details come along to the monthly sheffield geekup or follow @sheffieldgeeks on twitter.

With a little sadness, some relief, and enthusiasm for a year full of events,
Ian.

Barcamp Sheffield BashMash-1 archer project meeting notes

2009-01-26T18:51:00.005Z

My notes from the #mashbash meeting 1 with the sheffield archer project.

Cathederal Archer Project Ltd

Meeting between Archer Project and Barcamp Sheffield #bashmash organisers, 21st Jan 2009

Present:
Jag Gill
Ian Ibbotson
Chris Murray
Tim Renshaw
Tracey Viner

The Archer Project (CAP, or more formally the “Cathederal Archer Project Ltd”, see http://www.sheffield-cathedral.co.uk/links.asp?articleID=50) is a not for profit project based out of sheffield cathederal who offer food and a base for the homless in sheffield as we attempt to break the cycle of deprivation.

Barcamp sheffield is an annual event hosted by the sheffield geek community -headed up jag- looking to apply local talent and technical knowledge to short focussed projects that will benefit the city and it's people. These projects are being run under the #bashmash tag.

On Wed 21st jan CAP and #bashmash had an initial get-together to discuss what form a #bashmash project based around a new online CAP presence might take. The following are notes.

An initial concern was described that although the archer project is fundamentally supported by the cathederal, some people may be put off by the closeness of the CAP branding to the cathederal branding. The team brainstormed some initial requirements
Website design, inkeeping with the cathederal branding, yet noticably different
Hosting
Some form of Viral Marketing to promote the site
SEO to get the CAP site up rankings
Interactivity
We discussed the options for embedded twitter feeds to add a dynamic quality, EG, # of meals served today, daily weather reports, interim statistics such as # of homless at last count.
Discussed the need for walled garden interactivity, so user contributed materials do not negatively impact on the “Brochure site” aspect.
Use of photo-blogging

Some of the primary requirements of the web-site we came up with
Support CAP in funding applications, essentially have a component which is a stylish and professional brochure site describing the work of CAP
Provide a place for the CAP team to show evidence of their work (Again supporting funding applications)
Provide information to help link up with other support agencies / support other agencies / demostrate how CAP can help.
Provide a place for the homless in sheffield to meet the world essentially putting a human face on the issues facing the city.
Provide a place to electronically publish the CAP news letter. Resources for the paper based news-letter are sparse, the site based news may not be bound by these constraints, although the need for content is primary.
Provide a place to announce and promote CAP campaigns. Specifically
Big Sleep Out
Harvest Festival
Christmas Appeal
Sheffield Sharks appeal
Provide a link to “Just Giving” / have space for e-commerce / e-giving applications

Some random thoughts which came up
What happened to the old SIF sheffield information forum. Is there any way to start to tie together #bashmash projects into a wider information network
Contact with the crisis marketing manager
We need early access to logs for key supporters
It would be great to have a Facebook app
Could we link up with Weatherwatch to have a dynamic alert
Could we get kids to build arduino based thermometers in #geekupsheff-kids to raise awareness?
How can we contribute to the wider sheffield community
Links to sheffield First Step Trust? Sheffield Advice Link? Other projects?
Links with silentsheffield.org
Links with homeless assessment service
Homeless Link Network
Links with Drug Action Teams
Links with Tunring Point
Links with Sheffield Theatres
An information resource for homelessness – articles?
We could mash up thinks like the #meals statistics using google forms, RSS and yahoo pipes to form a feed to the webapp.
Could we use some microformats for opening times etc to share data with other sheffield orgs? Semantic geeky project thoughts here.
GPS tracking units to see where people go/how often they get moved along?

The project has volunteers who could be recruited in to update stats / tweet information / write articles and postings.

We discussed technology choices, and unless requirements change, are happy that we could implement the following infrastructure
Wordpress as a primary hosting environment
Hosting provided for a minimum of n years provided by #bashmash
Google Analytics and statpress for stats
The #bashmash project will focus around usability and graphical design
There will be space for other contributed projects such as twitter feeds and facebook applications, this should provide opportinities for all who are interested to get involved, around the core design and implementation team.

Initial thoughts about the day
It would be nice to see mock-ups (HTML, Graphics) as early as possible in the day.
Tracy will act as on-site customer to give feedback on designs and usability
Should we use a design methodology / process on the day?
Handover and sign/off / go live

Closing thoughts
The #bashmash day needs to have a sustainability plan as an output
We need to give some thoughts to Critical Success Factors
Publishing Measurements is both good and bad as it supports funding, provided the stats look good and are maintained.

(My) Overall feelings, the primary customers (The CAP team) need to a site to support their funding applications, and their service users. These two groups have different, but equally important requirements. There is a desire to stay within the broad theme of the cathederal, yet be distinct.

Outstanding
Sort a venue
Get volunteers – Jag is handling this
Sort out the process

Extra information

Possible sections
Home
Who We Are / What We Do
Donation (Link to just giving)
Volunteering
New/Newsletter – upload press cuttings, newsletter PDF's
Events
Supporters
CAP Health
CAP Catering
CAP Gardening
CAP Education
CAP Activities
Contact Us
Links to useful sites – HomlessLink, Crisis, Shelter, etc
CAP Staff/Board
Examples of clients / work in progress
Questions – show church support without it taking over

Themes for the site (We would like the design to reflect these feelings)
Trust
Warm
Open
Friendly
Respected
Opportunity
City Centre
Community
Caring

Other – Mailshot, newsletters, social networking... Other? Got some sample pages
Will scan the sample pages and my notes pages / diagrams and attach asap.

Calendar of Geeky events in and around sheffield

2009-01-19T18:55:00.003Z

Here's a calendar I'm maintaining with various geeky events. Please feel free to send stuff to me on any of the usual channels, or get in touch to get permission to add events yourself.

Linux / Garmin GPS60 / JOSM / Openstreetmap quick howto

2008-12-28T12:08:00.011Z

Here's a quick very specific workflow for anyone wanting to get data out of a garmin GPS60 and into JOSM for editing, it's actually pretty trivial, but I had to dig around a bit. The commands will probably work for other USB garmin units...

1) Look at openstreetmap and find a spot on the map where you know there are missing features

Here's loxley valley, I know that there's a footpath going from the upper half of Myers Grove Lane, down past the Robin Hood Pub, over the river loxley and up the other side of the valley, and it's not on openstreetmap.com. Sweet!

2) Turn on your GPS and go walking, taking waypoint notes along the way :)

The best bit ;)

3) Go home and boot up your fave distro and install gpsbabel (apt-get install gpsbabel for me)

4) Download your trace data (Where you walked, I had to do this as root for dev permissions)

root@bhor:~# gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F my_track.gpx

5) Download your waypoint data (Your, um, waypoints, I had to do this as root for dev permissions)

root@bhor:~# gpsbabel -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F my_waypoints.gpx

6) Load into JOSM and edit / save / upload

When you're done, you can see your trace and waypoint data.

7) Click "File" -> "Download from OSM" to pull down all the openstreetmap data for the area you've walked over

8) Add features corresponding to your trace and waypoints. In my case, a new footpath, a couple of new postboxes, a bridge, 2 schools and a community ctr (and a slight fix to the path of the river loxley so it actually flows under what I know to be a bridge. (I hope thats the right thing to do :S)). Upload your changes to openstreetmap.com

9) Enjoy your work on openstreetmap.com

- Will add the photo just as soon as the OSM render is complete :)

10) Don't forget to upload your postcode coordinates to freethepostcode.org!

Quotes

2008-11-17T12:41:00.004Z

Read this today and it resonated with me for some reason, worth a read.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt

Christmas parties, martial arts and "Stuff"

2008-11-05T19:00:00.015Z

As it's my personal blog.....

Every once in a while someone brings this old chestnut up, and I thought it was probably about time I aired my recollection....

A few years ago we were out on a pretty serious "Northern" christmas party which had kicked off at lunchtime and gone on well into the evening. The attendees were from a wide variety of backgrounds: our own company, a company we were working with lots at the time, and associated friends and customers of both groups. As the day wore on, one of the party became increasingly agitated. This was, as is always the case, a perfectly nice person who was carrying a bit too much personal baggage at the time and had too much to drink. I can say this, because I can become a morose so-and-so after a few beers, and alcohol affects different people in different ways. Alas, in this case, the beer manifested itself in outward aggression. Initially, this exposed itself as simply trying to pick a fight with two separate people. When it became apparent that nobody was going to give into that kind of thing the mood changed somewhat and we'd gone from slightly charged to grabbing someone (Not me I hasten to add, I only got involved at this point) by the throat with one hand and grabbing a bottle with the other. What followed can only be described as a brief scuffle which ended with my holding onto this person and exchanging a few words. After a few moments I let go and everything was fine. Apologies were exchanged and all was well with the world. No fists were involved, no mention of operating systems (Was made all day long actually), and no real drama.

Some people I know have a huge lack of understanding of the martial arts, and I wanted to take this opportunity to say how proud I am, of the people I train with, in the past and now, and in fact of who I am, and my actions generally. I might be romanticizing a little here.... Firstly, when it came to it, the guy probably wouldn't have glassed anyone. Just after picking up the bottle he might have thought, WTF am I doing, and then let it go. I have to say I think there was a substantial amount of red mist by that point and I don't know what would have happened if he'd been left to get along with it. The way I see it tho, two people were protected that night, especially the aggressor. Besides the obvious criminal implications of what might have transpired, I can't imagine the employers involved could have allowed anyone with a violent crime behind them to continue working in an educational setting.

Whilst I'm on a roll.... Here's a story seldom told before

Many years before, in between my hapkido and taekwondo days I was walking through town, and heading towards the then underpass under arundel gate in the town center. As I walked towards the steps a couple in front of me got to the top of the steps and turned away, opting instead for crossing the road. Hmm... So I headed towards the steps and rounding the corner found four young males standing over a motionless body. It did, in fact, look like a pretty serious mugging. Nowthen, the reason I got into MA in the first place is that my mouth sometimes runs on its own and gets me into potentially silly situations. So I asked what was going on (Well, sorta). It later was explained to me that this is what had really happened........

These five chaps had been to a funeral and gone out to send their friend off in style. In the late afternoon they stopped for burgers on the moor and headed to the next pub. At the top of the steps, one of the five had taken a tumble, bashed his head and was in fact choking quite properly on his half swallowed McDonalds (I was already a veggie by thiis point, but it only re-enforces my conviction ;)). When I got to the bottom of the steps the chap was a beautiful shade of blue, and his mates were in a frenzy. A couple of pats on the back and a little encouragement got him going again, and although still out of it, alive and well at least.

Ok, it's nothing that anyone else wouldn't have done. However, firstly, I'd obtained my first aid qualifications as a direct result of my MA training. At some point, anyone who's serious about training realises that bad things can happen, either in training, or in real life, and if you're serious about protecting yourself and others, you better know what you're doing when it comes to helping people. Secondly, although I would have shouted from the top of those stairs anyway, I was able to do it with some confidence and authority.

So I get a bit disappointed when people make fun of these situations. To my count, my MA training has probably directly saved 1 life, and possibly stopped two serious injuries and two people from trouble with the authorities, as well as minor "Conversations" where someone was sent on their way happy. I've simply walked away from just as many when possible. I've never yet hurt anyone, and I've stood up to people who actually wanted to do me harm, and allowed them to continue along with a different perspective. I don't know what other people would do in the same situations, but I'm pretty happy being self-reliant and knowing I can depend on myself to do the good stuff, and the bad stuff as needed. I'm proud of these achievements, even if people trivialise and caricature them just for effect.

As they say... Talk if you will, walk away if you can, run if you must, but if all else fails; defend yourself

Bah.. End rant.

Lucky Guy!

2008-06-10T16:08:00.002Z

Certainly in the category of personal posts.... :)

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday, if you can call it that. Sat in the board room of one of our partner organisations with 7 others preparing for a project interview. Suddenly for a second I found myself having one of those reflective out-of-body moments where I stood back and listened to what was going on....

Exactly when did I become someone contributing to senior management meetings in a meaningful way? Here we were, chatting away and discussing strategy. Damn it, it's just not right. I used to have a proper reputation as a pain in the ass developer, where did that guy go? In truth he's still here, but what I realised is that many of the other people in the room I've known for a long long time, all my working life in fact in some cases. And the funniest thing was as each of those people spoke I found myself having the most profound feeling of "I can learn something here". And mostly that was from people who used to be as much of a pain in the ass as I was (am).

All this made me think it's pretty amazing to have stayed so close to one industry and maintain such close relationships with people throughout ones entire working life (to date anyway). I can only hope that my contributions to the group is equal to that of my peers. I'm sure part of the reason for this is Sheffield is closer to being a village than a city. All the same tho, to have maintained friendships and working relationships through the ups and downs of growing our professional lives, and the many and assorted businesses we work in, really is quite amazing and, to me at least, a fine example of what can be achieved with a bit of perspective, persistence and willingness to work at things.

Dirty Dirty Hacks : Cheapo SQL Tuning for Hibernate Generated Queries

2008-04-08T18:35:00.002Z

Today I've had a nightmare trying to figure out why a particular hibernate app was performing like a dog. After an hour of just looking at the logs and finding all the obvious points where the app was struggling it occurred to me that I needed something more exhaustive. Fortunately, having insisted on a high level of coverage for the use cases in the unit tests I'm confident that our unit tests exercise the SQL fully. Hmm interesting. What follows is representative of the pure joy of the unix operating system (Without the dodgy 70's black and white photos!).

So, turn on hibernate SQL logging, you get a mix of logging and SQL, so (We use maven as configuration managemnt)


mvn clean package | grep "Hibernate: select"

Just pulls out the select SQL. Cool, 8.5k bits of SQL from the unit tests, thats a lot.


mvn clean package | grep "Hibernate: select" | sort -u

ooh sort and only output unique lines, down to ~350 statements

Right, the statements have bind variables in them and I want to pipe the statements into MySQL's explain feature, time for a quick script:


#!

# For each statement

while read line; do

  # Chop off the start of the line, replace all the ?'s with "" (Because explain plan doesn't care)

  sql=`echo $line | sed 's/^Hibernate: //' | sed 's/\?/""/g'`

  # For my sanity

  echo evaluating SQL:  $sql

mysql -u USER -pPASS DB <  explain $sql

!!!

  echo

done

Cool, take each statement and run it through MySQL Explain Plan. Final phase


mvn clean package | grep "Hibernate: select" | sort -u | perf_script.sh > analysys.txt

Leaves me with a file like

evaluating SQL: select authorityh0_.ID as ID162_, authorityh0_.DESCRIPTION as DESCRIPT2_162_, authorityh0_.TITLE as TITLE162_, authorityh0_.URL as URL162_ from IN_AUTHORITY authorityh0_ where authorityh0_.TITLE="0"
id select_type table type possible_keys key key_len ref rows Extra
1 SIMPLE authorityh0_ ALL NULL NULL NULL NULL 2 Using where

OK, it doesn't automate the hard part, looking at the plan, but at least it makes the job a damn sight easier. Well, it does for me at least.

*peace* e.

Fun with gnuplot

2008-03-18T16:07:00.004Z

*Disclaimer : I'm a computer geek, not a scientist, the science is probably wrong, but I hope it's clear enough for you to draw a graph that means something*

Like the geek other half of first year biomedical students everywhere (Yeah there must be loads of em) I find i spend far too much time trying to get excel to do best fit lines on data series. And then, after all that hard work, and extracting the straight line formula, plugging in the unknown and getting the value out, what does your beloved do? Use the word drawing toolbox to hand paint a line onto the graph because excel can't do the 1 thing you really want which is a graphical representation of how you arrived at a particular value.

I'm no scientist (By a long way, I daren't even experiment on my own head) but I do know that generally, for solutions of unknown strength you can take a series of samples of known strength, run those samples through some analysis process such as spectrophotometry and then calculate your unknown using the same process. I'm also not the worlds biggest fan of office, and felt slightly let down by OpenOffice capabilities in this area too. Of course I needn't.. like all open source tasks, it's a question of right tool for the right job. instead of spending 3 weeks trying to make excel do something it can't I should have invested an hour in gnuplot. Here's the output of my lunchtime play.

I've got a file called exp_1.dat of space separated values:

1 1
2 2
3 5
4 6
5 30
6 29
7 28
8 27
11 3
22 23
25 27
26 40
27 30

The values are deliberately iffy so I can see the effects of some different operations on the graph. Specifically, the trend of values from 5 to 8 are a descending line opposing the general upward trend of the series. This is to test those occasions where you want to omit the acceleration and deceleration phase.

And here's my script.. it runs as is under linux when gnuplot is installed, i understand there is a windows runtime environment for gnuplot too.

---- Start ----
#!/usr/bin/gnuplot
# My first attempt at a plot that just fits an straight line to the entire set of points
# in the source data file. Best fit, but with just a specific sub-range of data, testing
# best fitting when excluding accelleration and decelleration phases of a reaction.

reset

# Manually force x and y range, can omit, just for clarity here
set origin 0,0
set xrange [0:40]
set yrange [0:40]

# plot of size 800x600
set terminal svg size 800,600

set output 'graph2.svg'

# Our first best fit line, for all data values
b = 0.0
m = 0.0
f(x) = m*x + b
fit f(x) 'exp_1.dat' via b, m

# Fitting only x values between 5 and 8, in practise we look at the values and decide
# where the acceleration and deceleration phases start and end
b2 = 0.0
m2 = 0.0
f2(x) = m2*x + b2
fit [5:8] f2(x) 'exp_1.dat' via b2, m2

# Here is where we'd do a bit of math to re-write y=mx+b the values for b2 and m2
# and plug in our required y value in order to arrive at
# Our test input value is 17
iy = 17
ix = ( iy - b2 ) / m2

# Some output
top_title = sprintf("Test best fit for subset outside acceleration and deceleration");
set title top_title
set timestamp "Last updated: %d/%m/%Y, %H:%M" top

t = sprintf("%1.3fx+%1.3f",m,b)
set label t at 20,16

t2 = sprintf("%1.3fx+%1.3f",m2,b2)
set label t2 at 5,13

set xlabel "My X Label"
set ylabel "My Y Label"

set key left
set grid

# Draw some nice lines from our unknown sample to the calculated absorbtion
set arrow 1 from -1,iy to ix,iy nohead
set arrow 2 from ix,iy to ix,0
# Add A pretty label
a = sprintf("Absorbtion at %f = %f",iy,ix)
set label a at ix+3, 3

# Draw it!
plot 'exp_1.dat' title "Source Data", f(x) title "Best Fit 1" , f2(x) title "Best Fit 2"

---- End ----

The net result is to the right. The script as is outputs SVG, scalable vector graphics, but for display on the blog I had to output as a gif. The SVG is (To me) much nicer looking and it has the advantage of being, well, scalable. Even better, the script is relatively generic, so any data series can be plugged in and all the user needs to do is set the unknown sample measurement in y1 and it will auto draw a line and point out the required x value. Really quite neat, and best of all, can be incorporated into an automated process.

Well I don't know if it's useful, but it beats real work.

More crap from facebook

2008-02-20T23:07:00.002Z

Ok, firstly, facebook.. yes, the apps are poorly behaved, but, and I'm sorry to say this, the architecture and the implementation environment really do encourage this sort of thing, and half the problems with facebook aren't the apps, it's PHP. Yes it's lovely and easy to use, but it's incredibly hard to secure.

Having said that...

Others see you as sensible, cautious, careful and practical. They see you as clever, gifted, or talented, but modest. Not a person who makes friends too quickly or easily, but someone who's extremely loyal to friends you do make and who expect the same loyalty in return. Those who really get to know you realize it takes a lot to shake your trust in your friends, but equally that it takes you a long time to get over it if that trust is ever broken.

More nonsense that I hope turned out to be more or less on the button :)

Irony...

2007-11-28T12:37:00.000Z

As stated elsewhere, I don't think there's anything to any astrology beyond being an an inspiration to cause people to be a little introspective, and to project their own thoughts onto what are usually either 50/50 statements to go one way or the other, or reasonably safe moral certainties. Amongst the tons of spam I filter every day, this little gem popped it's head up

It may be tough to get past a breech of trust today, especially if someone close has disappointed you. Nevertheless, you may have to forgive him or her, no matter how hard this is to do. Don't let your sensitivity get in the way; swallow your fear, move past your old hurts, and accept that you aren't responsible for fixing all the wounded people in your life.

So, I would suggest this falls into the moral certainty category, but it's a good thought, and trust is a theme close to my centre, so, even though the method is nonsense, the effect is real.

Peace out kids!

27th of november and all's well, nothing of interest here.

2007-11-27T16:32:00.000Z

Which is to say... I'm compiling jzkit3, which incidentally is going to be the most stonking thing to hit the open source library world in years, and generally avoiding work..... In the course of this afternoons full build and regression test, I've listened to two lectures on quantum spin by Richard Feynmann, blundered around facebook, mucked about with my fedora internet desktop and generally made a pain of myself in the office, and discovered death cab for cutie. Ooh I also wrote some technical questions to ask in the latest round of recruitment, had a browse of some blogs I read, and am saddened to discover that some of my faves have gone away. Such is the nature of the old interweb I guess. So thats it, I'm either out of interesting things to do for the day, or the things left to do need more brain power than I have left....... whats left to do but write to the future me by piling yet more crap on the internet :)

ooh it's training tonight, which I'm just enjoying so much at the moment that it hurts (No, really, it actually does, but only in a good way). Usually by this time of year I'm into raw willpower mode to keep myself going until the long winter evenings lift, but for some reason things seems well with the world, and most things seem to be unfolding as they should. In academic land my new hobby is trying to get to grips with bioinformatics.. the latter part isn't so bad, the former is a nightmare for me... praise be for Genetics for Dummies, and for the OU :).

Anyways, thankyou whoever you are (*slaps self for marillion reference*)

Peace out,
e.

Open Office for Uni Courses - SHU Biomedical Science

2007-11-08T12:40:00.000Z

Hmm... not sure if this post really belongs here or on my work blog.. I think here.

I had a teeny run in with a Uni recently when it was suggested that Microsoft Word and Excel must be used for production of various assignments. I'm wasn't suggesting that the eventual hand-in couldn't be a .xls or a .doc but purely that mandating the tool wasn't a legitimate thing to do, and indeed that I felt it was ethically very shaky position for a uni to adopt, particularly given recent EU rulings. Anyway, long story short, the official party line is that students can use whatever tools they like, provided that they hand in something that can be opened in word or excel. Peachy!

We all know the truth tho, sometimes, OOo does have subtly different menu structures and features to different versions of the MS tools (Just as different versions of the MS tools themselves do) and sometimes, documents don't open in different versions of office as they do in OOo. I offered to update the Excel for Biomedical Sciences workbook with annotations for OOo, an offer which met with stony silence, go figure. But the problem remains, how do we organise it so that Biomedical, and other science students generally, can use OOo toolset and be confident that the output will be acceptable in it's .doc and .xsl forms, and that it's easy to find out how to perform a function that is located in a different area to the MS Office toolset.

So, in the interests of being community spirited, I'm going to try and use the following delicious tags SHUBioMedSci and OOo whenever I find a resource about using OOo for Bio Medical Science at Sheffield Hallam, yielding the following Search for SHUBioMedSci AND OOo which will hopefully return useful resources to anyone interested.

Peace and Love,
e.

Doncaster Balloon Festival - TKD Demo

2007-11-06T15:48:00.001Z

Testing vid upload to youtube, an old vid of Mr Graham Churchill and I from a while ago.

Nuts, Gradings and Conferences

2007-09-05T08:58:00.000Z

Time for one of those gruesome personal postings I feel...

It's been a busy old week all told. On monday I was lucky enough to meet some of the lovely NHS staff at the Hallamshire Hospital walk in centre, and then a lovely couple of paramedics, and then the amazing staff in the Northern General A&E ward. You're all F*****g amazing, lovely people with amazing professionalism and committment, and doing an incredibly hard job in very difficult circumstances. The cause of all this trouble? Well I was unlucky enough to somehow get some nuts in my lunch. Alas, my baaad habit of having far too many chillis in dinner somewhat disguised the taste so the first I knew about it was the unfortunate swelling lip feeling you get. It was a truly unusual experience, as I only really felt slightly unwell, and wandered up to the walk-in centre just to see if they might be able to give me something a bit stronger for the reaction. Initially, they said it was fine and just to watch it. However, some hour or so later, as I was walking back into town a full on reaction set in, so I popped back up to the walk-in centre where they sorted me right out. For some unknown reason, my oxygen saturation levels weren't returning to normal, and I had a quck whiz up to the hallamshire with a couple of lovely paramedics, who did a great job of keeping me more or less awake enough to enjoy screaming through the rush hour traffic :) So that was enough excitement for one day :)

And Tuseday was my second GJR grading, which was HAAARD! but ultimately very enjoyable and rewarding. Watching Glen and his grading was amazing, especially the kata, but everyone really shone, and put in the effort called for on an occaision like that. Beers all round in the pub afterwards, and that great feeling of being a part of something you only get when pushed so hard you have to produce your best stuff. I can only hope my performance wasn't enhanced by the frightnening volume of steroids I'd had the day before ;)

Today.. well thats my first day at ALT-C. Should have been here yesterday, but wasn't feeling 100% after mondays activities. The conference is pretty enjoyable. I'm mainly here for the folksonomies vs controled vocabs and repositories presentations. Quite a nice atmos at the conference. Some interesting LOM/XML things going on, and some ePortfolio presentations that I really should track, although the more I get into that the more it seems like jena/RDF is a much better tool for it. Not bumped into any of the SAKAI people from the Austin conference, which is a pity, was hoping to catch up with some of them.. time yet I guess.

New Blog!

2007-08-20T11:02:00.000Z

Finally decided that this blog was getting too schitzo torn between pseudo work and pseudo personal stuff, so from now on, all the work stuff has moved out to My Work Blog. That means you'll probably find less tech stuff here from now on :)

Sheffield and South Yorkshire eRider Meetup?

2007-07-01T20:01:00.000Z

Ok.. I have a teeny problem with Meetup.com... They want you to pay for the group in advance before anyone has signed up to it, and there must be loads of other tools for managing a community of people :).

So here's a starter for ten: Assuming your an eRider, an e-Rider, an IT professional, an enthusiastic geek, involved with Circuit Riding in any way shape or form, interested in volunteering IT based time and skill to the VCS or third sector, and in Sheffield or South Yorkshire then I'm hoping that you've put those words into google, and, unlike me, come up with a link to this blog entry instead of the usual detritus google serves up.

I'd be really interested in getting together with any other people involved in volunteering IT skills in and around Sheffield and south Yorkshire. Right now, there isn't a meetup group, and the eRiders.net frappr map for the area only lists three people involved in and around sheffield.. there must be more of us? Anyway, I thought it might be fun to get together and chat / discuss stories and strategies. If there's any interest, maybe we could get a crossover meeting with the sheflug linux user group, or just have a beer. On a more practical note... there are a number of projects launching around Sheffield at the moment that I reckon the local eRider community could have a real positive impact on, and I'd be interested in talking those through with anyone who's interested.

Add a comment to this post, or drop me a mail ianibbo - at - yahoo - dot - com.

Ok.. in an uncharacteristic act of faith ;) I paid the $72 and set up a meetup account... See http://volunteerism.meetup.com/150/ please come and I'll buy you -a- beer :D

Amazing!

2007-06-16T13:09:00.001Z

Had to blog this.. it speaks for itself. Just watch, needs no introduction: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

SWG - Semantic Web Gateway Project

2007-06-09T10:19:00.000Z

Today a group of us (open source developers in sheffield) got together to discuss some components they all have, some problems that seem to exist with open data, and what might be done about it. Specifically, we were discussing issues with extracting the planning alerts data from Sheffield council web site in order to provide a feed into the planning alerts database (http://www.planningalerts.com/). This led onto wider ranging discussions about what other data could be scraped from council sites, about the management and preservation of that data, and about best mechanisms for sharing and alerting based on that data.

From there things got quite abstract, as we identified other domains and projects that could benefit from a drop in component or service that bridged the gap between existing (Lets say Web 1.0) data silos and newer semantic web applications.

The SWG or Semantic Web Gateway Project is an attempt to abstract out the functions of a wide range of screen scrapers and other data extraction tools out there and bring them all together in a common management environment. Having collected them together in one place, have those agents will spit out RDF into a jena repository fronted by OAI and SRW services.

SVN repository and other stuff to follow soon.

Upcoming changes to the LOM Repository / Online Learning Portal Project

2007-06-04T16:05:00.001Z

The learning resource portal is being revamped! There's lots of meat and potato changes needed to support the reporting of eLearning credits and the authoring of learning object metadata and loads of other cool stuff (Including an ajax based alternative to the fat swing based tagging tool, and a whole new revision of the tagging tool itself). However..... we've also got our eye in on a load of not so mainline developments to try and re-engage the community around the sharing of learning resources generally.... Here's some of the things on the list for the upcoming iterations...

* the portal itself will become a branded application of a generic learning object repository system. This will allow the core system for sharing learning resources to be branded in different ways for different communities. The current portal will continue to support it's target audience of teachers and learners, but because the underlying learning object metadata is generally applicable it will be possible to upload things like sound recordings of lecture notes, e-reserve materials, lecture notes, useful images and animations, lesson plans.. basically anything that a particular learning community wants to share. We can arrange repositories vertically, for example by domain/subject/keystage or horizontally, for example by media/medium or other useful aggregations.

* User tagging: One of the most exciting aspects of the new generic Repository - end user tagging and similarity detection. If you tag a resource, we'll be able to detect similarities with other profiles using the SVD algorithms we've been playing with, sorta like last.fm for learning resources. This kinda goes hand in hand with the user reviews that are coming as a part of the next release. Learners, Teachers and pretty much anyone who wants to can tag and share info in this way. We may toy with automatically exporting resources based on national curriculum specifiers (More generically controlled vocabs) to delicious tags using those tags, to try and capture more users into the portal itself. One of the best things about this is that we hope to be able to take trivial tagging, ID3 for example, and compliance test it to be able to create minimal lom documents. This means you could take a whole bunch of ID3 tagged mp3 lecture recordings, and expose them as, for example, JISC IE Conformant learning objects (More on content packages later).

* Simple tagging interface.. Yeah lom is cool, but not everyone wants to create huge lom documents, so the new online tagging interfaces will mean that people can catalog and upload learning objects without needing a doctorate in metadata and semantic ontologies. For now we've left out auto extraction of id3 tags from mp3's but it's on the cards in the near future.
* More web services - The new col portal already exposes all it's search functions as SRW/SRU based web services, we'll be exposing the tagging and other metadata functions for people to intergate their own applications with... we'll be swallowing our own medicine, with version four of the stand-alone tagging tool being able to consume XML LOM objects downloaded from portal, and then re-upload them in a round trip.

* Cross searching... well.. actually the app already does this, but we'll be creating a federated portal that can cross aggregate specific learning object Repositories, so we have our schools repository, but it would be nice to cross search some FE and HE repos too. We've also had interest from some projects creating video footage who might be interested in creating LOM records for learning video resources they have created and uploaded to utube. Cool :) So there will be some content in the FE portal at least.

* Object storage.. maybe in for the release, ability to upload resources, docs, video, sound recordings, etc as well as metadata.

Well.. just a taster for whats to come over the next 6 months of learning portal redevelopment. Hopefully iteration 0 will kick off around the 18th of june with iterations following evey three weeks.

An OAI-PMH Profile/Ontology for RDF objects in Jena

2007-05-03T09:49:00.000Z

Jena is an open source RDF repository with pluggable back end storage modules and a modular front end RDF Query interface. Although the semantic web community has long advocated the use of RDF as both storage and exchange format for next generation of web applications, there are issues to be resolved before RDF could be used for projects such as the peoples network or curriculum online LOM repository. Specifically, there are two issues which I believe to be generic, but which jena helps us see in concrete terms. Firstly, to actually search the underlying structure there is a need to propagate both full text and spatial queries down to the statement store (Before any inferincing takes place, to select candidate statements) and there is a need to be able to access the contents of an RDF repository in a structured way (OAI-PMH). Both these issues don't need to be solved at the same time, if we can get a functional jena based metadata repository for cultural heritage, or learning objects started with a working OAI interface, then we can simply inject those records into a relational database for retrieval, using the base URL as a "Document Key" and retrieving the appropriate documents from the jena repository. There is also research work underway at the OS into accessing spatial indexes via the jena query interface. To my mind, extending jena with lucene indexes, and sidestepping the built in full text capabilities (Now present in all serious relational database systems) is an error beyond what knuth was talking about when he said "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

So, all that said, OAI and RDF repositories.. seems like a worthwhile thing to get working, and not too much trouble. Since an object in an RDF graph can be a member of an arbitrary number of classes, it seems to me that we should define a namespace and an ontology for objects to be shared through OAI-PMH that can be used for all RDF repositories. Any repository implementing the RDF QL and supporting the OAI-PMH ontology should be capable of acting as an OAI-PMH data provider. The properties of this class will need to contain (Or allow derivation of), the properties of the OAI Header record.

In theory, the OAI-PMH engine for RDF repositories should work over any RDF repository supporting the standard query mechanisms. It might be that this approach can extend beyond OAI-PMH and into the realms of OAI-ORE.

OAI-PMH Class for RDF should be incredibly simple, and therefore, it's benefit is in getting it defined at a high enough level to promote reuse. First impressions are that it should contain the following properties

Date Added
Date Last Modified
Date Deleted (Some flags to control deletion tracking needed)
OAI-Sets

The record identifier will be the URI of the base object. Format is determined by the classes of the object itself.

Next step would be to get this class formalised in some kind of Ontology Markup Language then try and build the repo under jena.... more to follow.

RDF and ePortfolios

2007-04-17T08:40:00.000Z

Just needed to get this down before I forget... RDF & semantic web technologies generally have been nipping at the heels of several information retrieval projects for a while now. Every six months or so I check out and build the latest jena to see if we could actually build some of our IR systems using it, and it's always the same story: I start off really enthusiastically, but slowly start hitting walls that mean it's just not possible. This time around it was accessing native text and spatial indexes in my jena database backend. But.... We've been struggling for a long time now with OSPI and the SAKAI ePortfolio module and suddenly I can see an application for RDF and defined ontologies, and users being able to extend the data model in ways they want. It seems to me that jena-db could be exactly the right backend for a real usable ePortfolio system... Not sure where we'd get started building a beast like that tho.

LOTRO

2007-04-16T08:57:00.000Z

A note for all mmorpg friends....

Currently playing on Laurelin (UK RP Server) with the following :

Whilat (There at the launch of three mmorpg's now... cool or what) elf loremaster
Draff - Human Hunter
Suwen - Elf Champion
Mirathanor - Elf Bard

And wondering if I dare upload screenies of me at the foot of wethertop to flickr ;) Guild name is "Núror Muinaréva" (Without the accents... I guess the text must all be US7ASCII) msg me ingame for invites :)

Random thoughts - JZKit3

2007-04-02T09:17:00.000Z

After a morning trying to fit the SQI square peg into the SRW round hole, I'm having some thoughts about re-organising the search plugins and the aggregator service in JZKit3. It seems with the way the world is today, with alerters and users creating their own data feeds (The horrible, if cool pipes demo, which could be so much more, if only it worked). The problem we have with JZKit right now is that some of the plugins require oodles of configuration (JDBC/Relational Database Plugin) wheras others require nothing more than a url (Z3950 URL, SRW/SRU, etc). To create a simple search portal app thats easily installed, users don't want to have the grief of learning about relational database plugin config. We thought we cracked that nut in jzkit2 by having the plugins register their own config mechanisms, but the config woes persist. So, how about, after thinking harder about how we can work with SQI, we split the plugins into two classes, those that are URL configurable and those that aren't. The ones that arent need to be exposed as an SRW/SRU/Z3950 service in their own right, and are then aggregated by the simpler plugins. This *vastly* simplifies the config (Still have all the query rewrite stuff to deal with, but at least it cuts out the big problem, which is database config). This also fits with rewriting the jdbc plugin to use hibernate map based objects instead of our home-grown persistence layer. Sounds like a good direction for jzkit3.

oai-ore and open knowledge and other thoughts

2007-03-22T10:37:00.000Z

OK, I've been reviewing the oai-ore work, mostly with one eye on whats going on in OKF, but also relating to other work k-intis involved in (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/). Bloody hell people.. if there isn't an opportunity for some "Disruptive" technology here I don't know where there is.... Storing and replicating actual digitial objects as well as their metadata seems like an ideal... the trouble is, many of todays "Digital Objects" are not discrete. They are composed of evolving streams of data such as map data, scientific data, or in the case of PN/IT For Me just a stream of records such as local council alerts. It's almost like we need a recusrsive oai structure where the metadata record sits atop each recursive entry, with the ability to freshen the objects below it....

Repository Use Cases, first thoughts

2007-03-18T07:13:00.000Z

I seem to be suffering a case of bloggorhia...

Here are my initial thoughts about a set of use cases for an Open Source Repository that might suit the needs of a subsequent version of It For Me, Peoples Network, Seamless, or any of the Open Knowledge Foundation projects. It's just one of a thousand flowers that might blossom in the OKF community, and I've got specific questions of my own to answer outside the domain of OKF, but if there's the potential for reuse, why not exploit it.

These initial use cases are going to be used to focus attention for Spike 1 - In which I'm going to try and figure out if JENA is capable of performing as a back end for a several million item database. For the spike we'll use jena and the MySQL database. I've got a straight 8 million item database for MySQL, so can do some meaningful comparisons. The use cases should stand as useful outside the spike, but here's what they are for:

Terms:
PDWDA - Public Domain Work Detection Agent - A software module that uses a number of rules to identify public domain works and notify the repository of that data.

UC#1 - New Known Schema Resource (Sound Recording), with New Related Data (New Composer/Artist), via internal API (No web services)
In this UC A "PD Works Detection Agent" Submits a New Work by a previously unidentified artist/composer. We will be using a SoundRecording DTO object and the interface will need to call SoundRecordingDTO -> RDF, then insert the RDF, creating new SoundRecording and Composer/Artist data.

UC#2 - New Known Schema Resource (Sound Recording), with Known Related Data (Existing Composer/Artist)
As UC#1 but with reference to an existing Artist/Composer. We will deal with deduplication of errant composer/artist data in a later version. For now, identify via composer->person->normalised name,dob,dod.

UC#3 - Arbitrary XML Schema Submission
We'd like to be able to ingest arbitary XML without the need for code. This is going to require some kind of codified "Profile"... more to be filled out. Ideally, the system would hold the input document in a queue if the schema was unidentified until the administrator could create the profile. A central repository of profiles would be cool, so people could reference or download storage, indexing and dissemination rules. -I think we want more than just lucene style indexing tho... more structure is needed. Some jena/lucene crossover might be very interesting, and of broader scope than any of these projects individually-

UC#4 - Arbitary RDF Submission
Like 3 but for RDF.. Easy for the RDF engine, hard for the database engine (But retrieval performance goes the other way.. thats what the spike is for).

Public Domain Works Database - Thoughts

2007-03-18T06:30:00.000Z

Just blogging this for info really. Apparently there are issues with access to the BL's music database, for checking works copyright status. I don't know if we can legitimately use the Library Of Congress instead, but I believe their public SRU/W server includes their music collections. Hence this query can be used to identify works of Bob Dylan. Interestingly the AAAF (The LC Name Authority File) Seems to contain much richer alias and pseudonym data for artists than the composer list, and my sample matched 100% for the data we were trying to find. it may be that the LC server is a good additional resource for checking resource status. Of course having identified the works getting hold of them could be a different problem.

OKF - Open Knowledge 1.0 First Musings

2007-03-18T05:58:00.000Z

So, yesterday was the first OKF meeting at limehouse town hall in East London. I'm not going to try and report back each presentation blow by blow, others will do that far more accurately than I ever could. I did make notes about my "general feel" for the day, and I've got some specific thoughts on the level of cohesion between the diversity of all the projects presented. I guess my biggest concern is that there's lots of good intention, and lots of willingness to put effort in, but from what I could tell, nobody had really really started to grasp the nettles of interoperability amongst hugely heterogenous datasets. There's lots lots lots more to OKF than that, but because it's what I've spent most of my working life trying to deal with, it's inevitable that I see that problem everywhere I look, and that thats the problem area I'm most likely to be able to have a positive impact on. But.. my thoughts on the general feel will have to wait until I can decode my chicken scratch handwriting.....

What I wanted to get down, rather than going over the conf again, was how yesterday has changed my thinking.... My interest in OKF started because of huge links with work in projects such as seamless UK (Community Information for the People of Essex), The Peoples Network Discovery Service (A clearinghouse for cultural heritage resources funded under various digitisation programs), IT For Me (Public/Local information in south yorkshire), and a load more. These projects are all basically aggregators taking diverse sets of data from providers who don't always have a public interface, munging the data into a cannonical format, and then pushing it out again both via OAI, SRW/SRU and a web interface. Along the way, full text and spatial indexes are added to make the works searchable in lots of interesting ways. There are many similarities or links with almost all the projects of OKF. Where there's not a similarity in terms of sharing collections, theres a potential data provider link.. for example.. the planning alerts service would make a great feed for IT For Me and Seamless.

So.. how did yesterday affect my thinking.... Well, For Peoples Network we've been working on a new repository format. The current PN and IT For Me systems use a relational database as the repository. We have several "Filters" on the front end of the system that allows it to ingest many many different metadata schemas. We then cram this onto a single relational structure, doing a mapping job as we go. This kills two(Maybe even three) birds with one stone: The storgae and access is dealt with in one blow, once in the repository, we are set to search. once in the repository the records can be output in any form we can transform the canonical schema into.

I've been working on some filters to get the public domain works database into mysql so we can include the content in peoples network perhaps. But I'm worried about the diversity of data the OKF might generate and how much semantic density we might looks by cramming everything into one DC-like Schema.

What about RDF? This question has plagued me for a long time. Judging by some of the comments at the govt information presentation, it worries some of the conf attendees too ;). I've been a long time tinkerer with jena, since it's *very* early days. I never felt, however, that it was ready to have seven million objects poured into it and be able to perform at anything like the level our database could. it also lacks the full text and spatial operators we get for free in mysql. What it does have on it's side is a hugely expressive power.

So, after OKF 1.0 whats changed? I think maybe it's really time to seperate the repository and aggregation functions from the searchable index ones. It might be that we can make jena perform by adding full text and spatial indexing capabilities to the database backen. However, I don't think this can be a major goal. If whatever is (I) produce for the next peoples network data model or similar project is to be useful to the OKF community, it needs to separate out the concerns of storage and use. To do this, some architecture is needed. We need to start being able to store and distribute the "Knowledge" richness without loss of semantics. Selecting resources for inclusion in other indexing services is something else. I'm going to refactor some of the composer import code I wrote to create a RepositorySubmission interface, this thing needs to be able to let me make some choices later on about the MySQL / Jena backends, and we need to do a spike with several million records to see if we need to trade off semantic density for performance (And if we do, we need to split the repository into two seperate functions so this ceases to be an issue). For now, my interest is in generating a jena backend to the repository submission interface.

2007-03-05T13:32:00.000Z

Exposing UK Cultural Heritage Digital Resources in Second Life

The Peoples Network Discover Service is an MLA funded service that aggregates content sources that deal with cultural heritage and other MLA funded activities, and provides a digital preservation service for the metatdata generated by such services.

This blog category gathers together my link research into how it might be possible to create an empty shell bulding in second life. The building would essentially be an empty museum-type structure with a console in the lobby. The idea would be to have a SL user enter an “Instance” (Given that I don’t even know if second-life could support such “Instances”, we are at first base here, although it might be an interesting topic for the SL open source program) and use the console to provide topics (Well, search terms really, but it would be nice to do something more advanced). Once happy with the kinds of results the user would select a go control and fill the museum with digital artifacts which they could then explore, and interact with.

Later stages…. there’s lots of work to even arrive at a proof of concept for this, but once sorted, here are other ideas I want to explore

Abstract out the features and create a generic JZKit -> SecondLife bridge so that anyone using JZKit to expose their repository can expose that data in SL. Ideally, I’d like to be able to create vanilla search-houses and search-walls and search-pictures (you get the idea) that users can use in their own structures or place on their own land.

Provide possible integration with e-commerce (Dependent upon license data in metadata). This would allow two distinct options -> Allow users to request prints of digital artifacts etc in the real world, and possiby more interesting to SL, allow users to download inages for use as textures and other SL resources.

Organisation of the “virtual museum” could be interesting, how we categorise and structure the exhibit so it’s not just a “Relevance Ranked” list of stuff arranged throughout the shell of a building is going to be challenging.

Providing some way for people to “Store” or “Share” pre-populated museum collections, and link them into their own structures. Perhaps this could be a bit like a saved search or and RSS feed for exhibits people can use in their own structures. In fact, a possible idea for SL commerce might be to provide a “Changable Picture” that users can buy to hang on the walls of their SL buildings. These pictures would be backed by a search of the MLA discover service and the content would change at a user specified interval, for example “Nottingham Lace Market” every 5 mins, could be hung in the lobby of a person or organisation connected to that area.

This also provides a new opportunity to MLA.. the inclusion of interactive SL resources in the discover application.

A Bit About Me

2007-03-05T12:28:00.000Z

Ok, here's the obligatory "About Me" post so that people who follow a link here from somewhere I've Registered can actually discover something: I'm an open source software developer (Actually, I part own a software company and officially my job title is director, but I still call myself a developer, and I'll be cold in the ground long before I ever introduce myself as MD).

My work interests center around information retrieval, information repositories, semantic and systems interoperability, systems integation and semantic web / text processing. I develop and maintain an open source toolkit JZkit for developers looking to access or expose information repositories using z3950, SRW/SRU or OpenSearch (Amongst others). On top of that there's a portal application called iNode, but I'll put up a projects category and make some entries for the individual things I'm involved with. I also maintain a really low level asn.1 to java precompiler and ber runtime called a2j which is used allover the place, apparently even in some voip software on mobile phones... Makes me wonder what I was doing when I lgpl'd that one ;). Sector wise, I work mostly in libraries, learning and public information, and recently I'm doing an alarming amount with vocabulary management, which seems to excite some people quite wildly, but not me.

"Academically" (Most people I know would never use that term around me I guess) my interests are mostly aligned with work, IR algorithms and text mining. I've always loved organisational cybernetics tho (Especially the work of Stafford Beer), and have a healthy (Semi-active) interest in general systems theory. I secretly hold a bit of an ambition to go back to research at least in some small way before I'm done, probably just part time. Work takes up most of my time at the moment tho, although I'm currently trying to get to grips with some bioinformatics and I'm reading genetics for dummies.

What little free time I have is split between My wonderful wife, who doesn't get nearly enough attention, my kids (2 boys aged 7 and 9), fun coding, and martial arts (I've sorta seriously practised HapKiDo and TaeKwonDo in the past, along with a superficial smattering of Aikido, Taijutsu and Iado, and I'm currently full on having fun with Sensei Chris Robins at Norton Dojo Traditional Goju Ryu Karate School, I'm trying to keep a dojo blog up to date.

Sometimes I read (Fiction: mostly sci-fi and fantasy, *very* rarely horror, last fiction I read was Excession by ian m banks, and before that The Algebraist. Non-Fiction just about anything. Currently I'm having a go at re-reading Sartre's classic existentalist text being and nothingness, my teeny IQ struggles a bit to keep all the words in my head, but it's quite rewarding on the hole (See what I did there, eh?). The last fun non-fiction I read was The Progressive Patriot Billy Bragg, and before that I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which whilst I mostly "Get" I can't say I enjoyed, mostly because whilst the man is clearly bright and passionate, he has the charm and grace of a pubic louse. A friend also gave me a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll which I sometimes take to the winter garden at lunch time in an attempt to look intellectual. I think the furrowed brow always gives it away.. or maybe it adds to the illusion. Next up I'm hoping to read On Formally Undecidable Propositions of "Principia Mathematica" and Related Systems Since it sorta ties together some of my interests in cybernetics (And metasystems as a means to resolve undecidable propositions) and the maths of GEB.

Sometimes I listen to music and I get lots of stick in the office about my marillion t-shirts and 47 minute guitar solos. Generally speaking, I'm shy rather than antisocial, so it's OK to speak to me if you see me out and about. I'm a Crab, but don't believe in any of that crap beyond the ability of believers to use it as a prompt for introspection (How I feel about most systems of belief really). Although I really like the The Desiderata of Hope by Max Ehrmann quote below, I did recently see a friends religions status listed as "I believe in people, not fairy tales", which I also like, although it's a bit strong for me personally, it does kinda sum up how I feel about certain things :)

Well, if you want to know any more you best talk to me :)

Peace,
e.

eRiders home page

2007-02-18T12:54:00.000Z

Just blogging this for myself, as I keep loosing the url
http://www.eriders.net/index.php?module=articles

Tracking Fretties Blog

2007-02-13T10:55:00.000Z

Started my tracking fretties blog..Here