My daughter made this for me today. Notice the invitation to user generated content…free-for-all flowers!
Øredev Kickoff
November 4th, 2009 § 0
Yesterday the speakers were invited to dinner at Malmo’s city hall. Ever since accepting the invitation Øredev has been a succession of surpased expectations. Underneath the reserved, dare I say standoff-ish Scandinavian persona is a deep and sincere hospitality. And perhaps the conference organizer’s plans are working, because I feel highly motivated to give the best talk I’ve ever given.
I had several happy conversations. Among them, a respected luminary shares my dislike of Grails and it’s over the top complexity. He will go unmentioned, but I’m not afraid to go on record…if you must learn of Hybernate, XML, Spring, and Java (as is the case in my experience) to create a grails app, something is wrong. I also had a good talk with Nitin Bharti of DZone, who will be conducting interviews with Oredev speakers.
looking back at the semantic technologies conference 2009
June 18th, 2009 Comments Off
I enjoyed this (my third) conference experience most of all. Over the course of three years I’ve come to know more folks in the community and that makes a big difference. Another big win this year was bringing alo ng a colleague to help deliver the talk. One small but significant treat is visiting a talk and getting more out of than you expected. Paul Gearon and James Leigh gave a talk called “merging RDF stores” which was really a summary of layout methodologies for triple stores. They covered the common techniques and pointed to the trade offs and advantages of each, depeding on the characteristics of your dataset. Paul gave me an interesting explanation of how he solves the minimum spanning tree problem, which is a very useful query to make which cannot be handled with basic SPARQL. » Read the rest of this entry «
The Dumbing Down of the Technologist
June 5th, 2009 § 0
I was having a conversation with a respected colleague yesterday and and we began discussing publications. His comment was that he stopped reading Dr. Dobb’s because it was full of complicated algorithms he’d never use. That struck a nerve within me. Although a side of me respects the drive towards simplicity, some things are necessarily complex. It seems that the computing field is becoming less tolerant of thinking hard about difficult problems. » Read the rest of this entry «
Regional Tech Conferences
June 1st, 2009 § 0
I attended The Big (D)esign Conference yesterday. I was impressed with how well it was organized and the implications for furture technology conferences. It was organized by a team of volunteers as a joint venture by the Dallas/Fort Worth Usability Professionals’ Association, Refresh Dallas, and the Dallas/Fort Worth Interaction Design Association. During the conference I was able to see some top notch speakers, and the venue was small enough to ensure you were able to get a chance to speak face to face with nearly any one of them. It cost $50 and a short trip to SMU. Constrast that to the 1,000+ and flight it normaly requires to get a line of similar caliber.
It was held at the student center at SMU. I liked the venue because it was small, and yet still had plenty of conference rooms to allow 4 simultaneous tracks. The sponsors setup booths at the center…so there was no partitioned off exhibit floor, they were front and center.
First semantic web meetup in Dallas
May 21st, 2009 § 1
The first semantic web meetup was held May 20th, at the co-working office of http://www.companydallas.com/. As I expected it was a motley crew. The “semantic web” space consists of RDF/OWL interests, natural language processing, and mathmatical techniques such as LSA (latent semantic analyses)…it’s really a diverse set of interests and I sometimes wonder what joins them all together. I gave a talk on geosparql, a tool build on google’s new app engine for java. My favorite talk was from 80legs.com. They have a new cloud compute model that targets when crawling. Somebody asked “what does that have to do with the semantic web?”. I was thinking to myself…everything! The semantic web requires that one be able to scrape here and there, or at least I see it that way. Swingly was also introduced, an index of questions and answers found on the internet…again, very interesting. PureDiscovery came out to set us straight and remind us that ontology creating will never work, why do we keep trying?
Easy LRU cache with Java
May 5th, 2009 § 4
The JDK is full of gems. My latest discovery began with a need for a simple in memory “least recently used” (LRU) cache. I wanted a hash map with limited size. When the cache is full, it should remove the least recently used item, keeping the more popular items in memory. I figured there was probably an existing implementation in java.util, but nothing fit, until I ran across some posts that mentioned “LinkedHashMap” as a possible solution…Bingo. The java doc even mentions this type of application and provides an abstraction ready for implementation when you extend LinkedHashMap,
removeEldestEntry()
Today I found a good example with documentation, for anyone who is curious, or would like an off the shelf ready to use example of LRU cache for java, see
Screentoaster demos on Google Code Wiki
April 21st, 2009 § 0
The googlecode wiki system allows you to insert google gadgets into your pages, as well as the front page of your open source project. Do this by using using the wiki:gadget tag:
<wiki:gadget width="450" height="365" border="0" url="http://link/to/mygadget.xml" title="title of your gadget" />
That’s the easy part…the xml file describes the content you’d like google to “iframe” into you wiki page.
<Module> <ModulePrefs title="Developer Forum" /> <Content type="html"> <![CDATA[ your stuff here ]]> </Content> </Module>
The simplest thing to do is host this file within your SVN repo. To see and example here’s my xml file that includes and embed for a related screen toaster demo. I merely took the HTML code suggested on screentoaster and placed it in the gadget module descriptor.
How to Truncate a Google Apps Datastore (Java)
April 16th, 2009 § 0
It’s not super simple but possible to truncate your google apps datastore. Please, don’t do as I did and attempt to use the web GUI to delete page after page of data for anything over a few hundred Entities. Instead, use this simple servlet example after changing “myKindOfData” to your own type. It’d even be better if you spend a few minutes and improve the servlet so that it takes a parameter to supply for the “kind” of entity.
public class TruncateServlet extends HttpServlet {
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp)
throws IOException {
DatastoreService datastore = DatastoreServiceFactory.getDatastoreService();
Query q = new Query("myKindOfData");
ArrayList keys = new ArrayList();
for (Entity taskEntity : datastore.prepare(q).asIterable())
keys.add(taskEntity.getKey());
datastore.delete(keys);
}
}
What I learned doing this activity is that when you’re deleting many rows, you’ll want to first collect the keys, then supply the collection to the delete() method, as opposed to deleting in the query loop, which will time out on you. (GAE is very picky about how long web requests take). I like how GAE applies all these restrictions on us…it forces you to economize and avoid long running servlet requests. Don’t leave this servlet on an open URL for too long, anybody can come along and delete your data.
Your Very Own Google Code Maven Repo
April 11th, 2009 § 7
This post describes how to make a maven repo for your google code project. I’m a big fan of google code. It’s a tremendous service for those looking for a place to host their open source code. The only thing I lacked was a maven repo. I have to be honest here, while I use maven, it’s still a big mystery to me how things end up in the main maven repo. If Google were to add one new feature, I’d prefer it be a maven repo and hudson build that autodiscovers maven projects and builds them…but we’re not there yet, so the question I’m going to answer is how you can provide a maven repo for your open source customers hosted on google code. » Read the rest of this entry «
Downloads for project jenabean on Google Code- Semantic Web Resources
- Semantic Web Activity (w3c)Main entry point for semantic web resources at the w3c. […]
- Planet RDFRecent news and opinions on all things RDF. […]
- Semantic Web Activity (w3c)