Text here. Later.

Update: Text here. Now.

So, the thing is this: What you see above is my Bern office (map) - private office, company headquarters still remains in Fribourg. It's a joint office shared by a couple of architects (bricks and mortar, not software), among them yel and gim.

Will be interesting to see what I can learn from them (à la Alexander), but the actual reason I took lodgings with them is that I needed some quiet place without phones, coworkers, customers and all that in order to pursue all those non-commercial endeavour I'm involved in.

First and foremost, I'm here in order to finally getting done with those degrees, writing those last papers needed for leaving being done with university (for the moment). On one hand I'm following the road to Ontologizing Wikipedia, on the other there's a paper for Charles Martig wanting to be written on Metafictional Aspects in Lars von Trier's works .. And then of course there's ArtCast, which has to take up speed again too, and then there's those people who want me to give (not yet announceable) speeches here and there - lots of output to generate, and that's was this place is meant for.

Works out pretty nicely so far, the plan is to be done with the university stuff in about 3 months, should be doable. Wish me luck and discipline - and be invited to come visit me when you're in the area :)

Today I went to meet neuroscientist Martin Rumo at EPFL. He's working there at the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group and lives with his fiancée in the pretty town of Morges. I can't say much about his work, but he's going to run stuff on BlueGene/L, currently the most powerful computer in the world. Not bad.
Anyway, I'll quickly have to explain the pictures above:

1. Inner courtyard of one of the informatics buildings. Special feature: Outdoor whiteboards! Way cool.
2. Martin at the lab, compiling some movie visualizing some process.
3. Same lab: A snake bot. There's also a fish bot and some modular robots that dynamically reconfigure and gather as new bots.
4. The new computer science building. Pas mal.
5. Presentation of the legendary BioWall.
6. The beautiful landscape somewhere between Lausanne and Fribourg.

[ via Wilhelm Tux ]

As the ETH is celebrating its 150 years of existence, they are actively collecting visions -essays- for the next century.

One of the winners of their essay competition is Markus Dapp with his contribution "ETH Zurich -A Pioneer in Digital Sustainability!", a fictional keynote by the ETH president in the year 2030.

In its 5 pages the essay tells the future history of a successful Free Software Movement, of thriving Creative Commons and ETH's (fictional) active role in promoting and creating open knowledge accessible to all. Being rather short, the essay/speech doesn't go to the ground of all issues discussed, but it's a great political pamphlet in the cause of sustainability in a knowledge society. The closing remark about the UN as a globals government wouldn't have been necessary, though. :)

All winning essays will be published in a book and are available online - under a CreativeCommons "by sa" license.

Yesterday, after the presentation I gave here at DERI about my favourite semantic project, Fresnel ([fʁɛ nɛl], s'il vous plaît), I had chat on (unsuccessful) entrepreneurship, Google, Stanford and stuff with (the great) Dr. Stefan. All of a sudden, (the great) Prof. Dr. Chris walks by, dropping a remark to me, like:

«Schönes Schweizer-Englisch sprichst!»

And rushed away, smiling. Oh. So der berühmte Herr Professor either made a nice flattering compliment or just tried to provoke quite a bit. I really have to go ask him, it`s bothering me. Can my accent be THAT BAD? :(
(now that's fishing for compliments ;))

Congratulations to Matthias Stuermer (LOTS organizer / politician / entrepreneur) for having published his very carefully done master's thesis on "Open Source Community Building".

He tells us about the "optimal setup for a new open source project" and much more, and concludes with seven dos and don'ts for open source project leaders:

1. Do it for yourself.
2. Don't loose yourself in perfectionism.
3. Do accept others ideas and work, too.
4. Do communicate openly.
5. Don't speak of ideas but contribute solutions.
6. Do behave nicely.
7. Do serious marketing.

Number one seems questionable. (Why not do it for your users? For the greater good? :))
And all of these sound reasonable for any kind of project, don't they?

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.

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

Published again:

Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui, Hannes Gassert and Beat Hirsbrunner: Context Meets Web Services: Enhancing WSDL with Context-Aware Features. In the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Best Practices and Methodologies in Service-Oriented Architectures: Paving the Way to Web-services Success, held in conjunction with the 19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA'2004, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 24 - 28 October 2004. PP1-14.

Should be published as a chapter in a Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume, if I got that right. Beautiful books indeed, and at least a better publisher than last time, even if it's only a single little paper :-)

The local Centre Nouvelles Technologies et Enseignement started blogging, they even have an aggregator, all based on b2evolution.

Strange, their projects are pretty similar to some of our own, they use the same tools and they're located just 3 minutes from our office.. but still I don't know any of the folks over there. Alright, but then they're state-run 'rivals' :)
Well, at least we invented them to the open house event in order to change that :)

Rumor has it that after Harvard and Standford, EPFL and the 17500 blogs offered by the University of Vienna to all students and staff, a similar project is on the at the Université de Fribourg.

The only statement I could get so far is this:

...actuellement il n'y a rien d'officiel, mais micromus au niveau des étudiants va proposer un blog d'ici la rentrée.

The "rentrée" is soon, so let's wait and see.