Just a quick roundup to keep you up-to-date with the latest (publishable) developments about me, myself, and I:

1. Without being aware of, I attended my very last computer science lecture as a student.
   I actually was terribly sick, a stomach upset and a splitting headache were not actually helpful in delivering my OWL presentation, which turned out to be of inferior quality and entertainment value. I guess I should rather not publish material produced and presented under such unfavourable circumstances online.. :)
   
2. As a byproduct of the presentation, I hacked up popoon_components_transformers_highlightcode, which uses PEAR::Text_Highlighter to produce those nice colorful syntax examples included in the slides.
   
3. The paper for ICNEE I co-authored with Andrea Helbach has been officially accepted. This means another opportunity to practice public speaking.. I guess it'll be the first appearance in front of a non-geek audience :)
4. Ars Electronica 2004 will be just during my planned trip to Ireland. Which is a pity. I wan't to go see both, but Fribourg→Dublin→Galway→Linz→Fribourg seem just a bit too much (both in terms of km and €). Nevertheless, (the beginning of) this year's Ars Electronica Statement still is great fun to read:
   
   

   “I’ll throw the damned rearview mirror out of the damned window because I don’t want to know where I’ve come from, but where I’m going,” Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, is reputed to have said once in the ‘30s, and indeed he did actually break off the car’s rearview mirror and throw it out of the window. A brilliant anecdote. But...(read on)

   
   
   
5. I'm finishing "Hackers and Painter" by P. Graham... I don't particularly like it, in fact I disagree with quite a number of statements.. will be a fun review to write for O'Reilly :)

Thanks for your attention, please come back to check out the more interesting contributions slowly growing on my harddisk :) Stupid cliffhanger, I know.

Wilhelm Tux, The Swiss Campaign For Free Software is in great danger: The president is not available for reelection and there are four more vacant positions in its committee. If no suitable candidates are found until the general assembly ( 2004-07-15, 18:30h, Restaurant Beaulieu, Berne), the association will automatically be suspended and dissolved! (Announement of the president)
If you're interested in both free/libre software and politics, please consider helping this deserving organisation and apply.
I'm pondering this, too.


Update: ln -s published the story, although I cancelled it after it came clear that the situation isn't as tragic as I feared. Nevertheless, the association is currently discussing radical organisational changes on their mailinglist. No idea how this ends. Probably they'll find some folks and everything will go on as before.

Before I'll finally get back on topic and write about software development for the web and stuff like that again, I quickly want to lay out my plans for the time after my exams next week: After having finished some projects (semantic Tinja validation, CWSDL and some business stuff), I'll spend to weeks of unplugged 'agriturismo' on a remote old farm on a hill in Sardinia, Barranconi. I hope I will manage not to touch anything resembling a computer during that period.
Afterwards there's again lots of projects and papers to be worked on before the trip to Ireland I'm planning for the first week of September, hopefully attending the 1st Workshop on FOAF, Social Networking and the Semantic Web in Galway and if possible visiting the MIT Media Lab Europe, too.
So if you have a kind advice what not to miss in summerly Sardegna or in autumnal Ireland, please let me know. And before I forget: In winter I'll have to start my Master of Science thesis.. about some Semantic Web topic and together with a cool company, I guess. We'll see.

Stills above are taken from our lil' trainee's Valentin Vago latest video clip he still found the time to shoot in our funky backyard: Today he released the clip for the hot breakbeat track "Jump!" by DJ Bengston (Ritmic Records) which is going to be released on vinyl tomorrow.
Ritmic claims to be the very first .ch label with an MP3 shop, btw, € 0.99 a track.
Watching the clip I just can't help but thinking of Monty Python's "Silly Walks" :)


PS: Apropos Monty Python ..

"Public Art Project" at ART Basel (http://www.art.ch/). The last two images show a public toilet in the middle of the square, with walls made of that semi-transparent mirrors you see in the police movies: you see inside-out, but not vice versa. You have full privacy as well as a 360 degree overview of the Messeplatz and its crowds. Unique public pissing experience.

[via Tobias Schlitt]

Skippy is an Exposé-like task-switcher for Linux/X11. It's pretty, but I'm not shure if it makes switching between tasks actually more efficient in the general case. I'll try a bit and tell you.
If you want to try: download, uncompress, compile, run, works :)

[via heise.de]

Herkko Hietanen of HIIT(amazing picture on site! ;)) yesterday at iCommons summit at the Wizards of OS 3 conferene: Nokia is working on integrating Creative Commons licenses into their cellphones in order to enable their customers to tag their recorded images/sounds/videos with such a license.
Please go on with integrating MPEG-7 after that ;)

In today's issue of the Berner Zeitung there's an article on weblogs (not shure how long it'll be online for free, here's a copy). Among other people I was interviewed for this article by Mathias Born, a fellow student of mine.
I didn't say anything intelligent (or he didn't quote it if I did ;)), but he quotes me several times, for example saying (about blogs) «Die Form bestimmt den Inhalt» (The form affects the content).
Other Kaywa bloggers appearing in the article: Journalist Nick Lüthi and Roger Fischer, the boss.

The letterbox is that of my company.. *sigh*

The canton Fribourg is on rank 21 of 26 in terms of economic attractivity.

I had to prepare a paper + presentation for the Fuzzy Logic Seminar of Prof. Dr. Meier, only to find out that the thing I had to look at (the Einstein operators for the union and intersection of fuzzy sets) seems to be something nobody wants to use: The theorists only list it briefly, and the experts on comp.ai.fuzzy have never heard of it and haven't missed it either.

Well, that's a finding, too: That stuff has not really much importance. I'm not shure if we really can't say anything specific about the right choice of operators and their parameters, I guess if we used the semantic interrelations between fuzzy sets we could find some better ways of chosing operators than trial + error. Unfortunately the seminar is already over again, the next presentation to prepare for next week is about something entirely unrelated: Strategic E-Procurement. :)