This time a special edition following the Australian press reports about Austria.

Category Austria

Last year I extended my Topic Maps implementation into several directions. One was to host also documents as part of a topic map. With such a construct you can do a number of things: Have a fulltext search over the map, have text-to-map transformations, or build graphical map representations.

Now this is all good and well when working with an API and having all local on a box.

I still have my eyeballs fixated on the AllegroGraph server. Since v3.2 it has a new HTTP server exposing a pretty RESTful interface (not perfect, but close) derived from Sesame.

The Python client shipped with the distribution is using it, so I wondered how this would pan out in Perl. Pan out on CPAN, so to say. Last weekend I did some tinkering and concocted a first, naive Perl client.

One other thing to get rid of is my ISO involvement.

When I got interested in Topic Maps in 2000/2001 I was quickly sucked into this circle of standardization. First only by providing intense feedback as developer on the SC34/WG3 mailing list, then also by participating in meetings all over the world.

Against popular belief these meetings were neither boring nor brutally controversial. Except maybe 2003 when the Ontopian and the Newcombian church were arguing about the virginity of Mary, i.e.

The man took the shotgun out of the trunk. As he walked around the car, the radio was still playing christmas songs. It was short after sunset and the air was warm and moist, quite usual at this time of year.

With the headlights on, he leaned on the hood. The engine was hot from the long drive up north. He started to feel hungry.

Getting the gun in the big city had been more difficult than anticipated. At the end he had to kill the dealer and ditch him somewhere in the outskirts. Better not to leave any traces.

He knew his target would arrive soon.

Ever since my blog picked up traffic, I found an increasing number of spammers on it. In mostly manual labor they post comments to existing entries, either just to vandalize or to promote external websites.

Some try to be clevery cloaked, mostly with phrases like this:

Very good blog entry! Thx!

and then having the promoted link under the signature. Difficult to spot. Really.

But for me it means that I have to scan my blog on a regular basis.

This time something less subtle to appeal to my Chinese spammer audience.

Category Politics

As my interests shift I will have to jettison a few things.

My first (innocent) victim is the Semantic Web course I gave the last years at the local Technical University.

The last iteration was definitely smoother than the one before, both in terms of content and organisation. And dealing with students was quite fun.

I am still trying to find a decent VPN client for my MacBook. One which actually works. And one which is not messing up your whole machine.

Today I tried the SecureClient from CheckPoint only to find out how retarded that piece of shit is. Although probably my real point is

Intentionally retarded.

As if it was ported from Windows.

CatBert was sitting in front of his CatBook. He again made this hissing sound letting me know that he is onto something.

"Ok, what is it today?"

• "You've seen the Semantic Web Snake Oil blog entry?"

"Uhm, no. What about it?"

• "Well, this guy is observing that many Semantic Web organisations, conferences, companies, etc. have not put their own content into RDF form.