The windy shores of Galway - as seen through a Treo 600.

Merci Valentin for the screenshots.


Update: The official annoucnement is out. I quote:

«What Mosaic did for the web, we think Piggy-Bank will do for the
semantic web!»

Sounds like a bit too much, but hey, those guys have all reasons to be proud :)

I'll have a presentation about the free and open learning management system Moodle and its success story at LOTS.
There's more (german) information on the LOTS site.

See you there.

Dear reader,

My second week in Ireland is over without a single blog entry here. Sorry. Basically this was due to things going not as well as I would have liked. Main reason: It's hard being far from your love. Hell I miss her. But that doesn't belong here, I guess.
What else? The boys took me out for a match of the local rugby team, playing a welsh side (Connacht 8 , Cardiff 18, despite all COME ON CONNACHT shouting). Besides big boys clashing into each other until unconscious this was rather boring for me, I mean soccer offers much more action, is much more dynamic. Ok, but then I might not understand rugby, sure.

Then there's the '1^st Symposium on Interoperability Issues in Semantic Web Sites' at KMI on the agenda, which I'm going to attend with Stefan and Andreas(both being very kind to me, by the way). Please let me know if you have input, issues to be brought in at that occasion.

And then there's my regular work on that paper here, it will involve some PHP hacking, most probably interfacing with YARS, most probably dealing with beta.semanticweb.org and certainly involving Fresnel. Proposal will follow.

Oh, and I made Serendipity "podcast-enabled", which earned me the 38th mention on the Bitflux Blog. But alas, even hacking doesn't help against sadness and loneliness sometimes. I know it's my own fault, okok.

I won't mention the weather here, by the way.

Everything is going to be alright. Sure it will :)
You won't have to read further self-therapy postings, I promise. :)

The "the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment" is dying*. Slashdot has the story.

What a luck I went visiting MLE Dublin when it was still somewhat alive last fall.
Glad I preferred DERI at the end :-)

__
* with thirst of funding

URIQA, the Nokia URI Query Agent is a model for knowledge discovery, they call it a "Semantic Web Enabler". It is based on introducing a set of new HTTP methods (like MGET) for not accessing a resource, but a "Concise Bounded Resource Description" about that resource.
Looks like a reasonable (although disputable) solution to the problem, there are advantages over special HTTP headers, URI suffixes and other approaches which are explained on the URIQA website. Special headers could just be ignored by a server, and usually they are. But if you introduce new HTTP verbs, servers will not know them and should return an error. Apache does, so all seems ok.

Enters PHP. As people wanted to use PHP to, for example, implement WebDAV, they patched their SAPI and pass all HTTP methods to the script requested.
Means you don't have to apply funny workarounds any more, but also means that agents/clients can not rely on the result of queries with those new methods: PHP scripts will return their usual output, not caring about whether you GET, MGET or SHOWMETHATSHIT them:

hg@hg2:~$ telnet gassert.ch 80
Trying 213.3.6.224...
Connected to 224.6.3.213.fix.bluewin.ch.
Escape character is '^]'.
MGET /showmethod.php HTTP/1.1
Host: gassert.ch

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:05:44 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/5.0.3RC2-dev mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.3RC2-dev
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html


It's Wednesday 12th of January 2005 09:05:50 PM
Your request method was MGET

As you can't tell if your request is handled by a PHP script (mod_rewrite et cetera), this does look like a bit of a problem for URIQA, because PHP (+ Apache 1.3.x) is all over the place indeed. Doesn't it? Does PHP kill this nice idea of this Semantic Web Enabler?

It's just my second day here at the Semantic Web Cluster, so I might very well just misunderstand the concept and there's no problem at all for anybody?

A post in the category "Local". But local is somewhere else now.


I'm in Galway, Ireland right now. There's a lot to tell - but not as much as I would have liked. But let's start at the beginning.

As you might know, I'm here to write a Master Thesis at DERI, where quite a bunch of Semantic Web gurus do their research: You might remember my visit for FOAF-Galway.
It's rather warm (gulf stream!), rainy of course, but I did really underestimate the winds, I will have to buy a good windstopper :) I'm sleeping at Sleepzone, which is remarkable indeed: free and fast internet access via wlan, reasonable pricing, quality facilities, good electronic access control.

On the train from Dublin to Galway I met Andreas Harth (chat about SemWeb business opportunities et cetera), here at the hostel I ran into Jørgen W. Lang, O'Reilly's German translator of almost all their recent Perl books (chatted about writing books, tools and languages, et cetera).

Monday I'll start with the top priority item on my todo list: the definition of my thesis topic. It's somewhat clear, but still needs quite some refinement and writing out. Besides as much talking as possible with the relevant people at DERI the plan for the week also includes finding a suitable room and getting internet access at the university: Preparing, building up concentration, getting really ready to get things done.

More tales about the aspiring city of Galway soon, I hope to illustrate them with some photos, although it looks like I won't be able to 'moblog', haven't yet managed to get GPRS running.

If you want to you can skype me, my user name ist hannes.gassert, I'm always interested in stories from less peripheral parts of the world.

Oh, and before I forget: it's my first time at the Atlantic Ocean. I do like it a lot, the sea is wonderful indeed. It really looks like the above photo here.


Update: I'm at DERI now, I have a desk already, an IBM docking station + screen, I'm online and will have an email address in some minutes. Looks all like a perfect match. If only I was prepared a little better :)

Sounds scary, although rather unlikely indeed: Earthquake: Coincidence or a Corporate Oil Tragedy?