Astrosmurf

Prime Minister of Sweden Played With Hendrix

marma — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:17:06 +0000

According to sources, Fredrik Reinfeldt (Prime Minister of Sweden) used to be a part of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The cover of the album “BBC Sessions” clearly shows a younger Reinfeldt raising an eyebrow in what can only be described as his signature move.

When asked to comment the office of the prime minister declined and the Hendrix family were too busy making money.

Dramatic New Year

marma — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:49:06 +0000

Disaster struck one of our neighbours on new years eve. Their (a grandmother + kid) christmas tree caught on fire and their whole flat was basically destroyed, either by fire and smoke, or by water. Our living room was turned into a crisis control center for an hour while the firemen and ambulance people did their job. No one was seriously hurt, and the grandmother got the kid out of harms way within minutes. Bravo!

Made me think a lot about safety though. I’m buying a fire extinguisher tomorrow. And I need a better off-site backup routine. Maybe rsync with a large hardrive at work.

Anyway, here’s a picture from later on. Happy New Year!

Classic comment

marma — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:03:57 +0000

I refound this classic comment on Slashdot.

[...]
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device …

There is Apple’s market. Pretty slim, eh? I don’t see many sales in the future of iPod.

“I don’t see many sales in the future of iPod” – that’s funny. The comment is up there with “640kb should be enough for anyone”.

LCSH.info too good to be true, at least for now

marma — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:04:11 +0000

When Ed Summers launched LCSH.info earlier this year I was thrilled. It was the first complete dataset from the library community to have an actual impact on the rest of the semantic web. It was elegant, had a SPARQL endpoint and a squiggly animation. Ed was asked to shut it down on December 18th by LC. Apparently because of “confusion”. Which is ironic since LCSH.info was a wonder of simplicity and usefulness compared to other sites displaying authority information.

At work I used the SPARQL service to map the Swedish Subject Headings to LCSH. It only took a small number of lines of Python so, to me, it was instantaneously useful.

I’m going to give LC the benefit of a doubt and assume that this is just a “branding”-related mistake. Hopefully an avalanche of mail and blog entries will set them straight. Or work faster at the getting the “non-confusing” version out the door.

Space invaded

marma — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:58:27 +0000

I need to work on my masking technique, but I think it turned out pretty good. It’ll be fun to add smaller ones closer to the floor for the, well, small one.

/martin

A girl with an infinite name

marma — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:07:42 +0000

It’s a girl! And a big one, 55cm/4255g (1.8ft/9.38 lbs.). I’m a bit wary about posting pictures, I’m predicting that today’s toddlers will end up as information hermits since their life will be documented digitally from day zero. Also I feel that internet exposure, like religion, should be opt-in. But I’ll do it just this once.

One of her names is Pi (or π, or 3.14159…). Stating that it was an irrational choice did not go down well with my more mathematically inclined friends. Although π is infinite the jury is out on whether it’s normal or not. So, her name might be a superset of every finite sequence (e.g every name, place, …), but we’re not sure yet.

Retrospective blogging: DC 2008

marma — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:20:02 +0000

I went to the DC 2008 this year to present my project report “Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web“. It was a lot of fun although I was exhausted by the last couple of months work. I wish I could have stayed longer, but with an eight month pregnant girlfriend even stying one day felt like pushing it. Still, met some people, ate some food, drank some beer.

I only had time to see Ed Summers‘ great presentation. Got to love the huge swedish flag in the middle.

Retrospective blogging: New apartment

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:36:38 +0000

So, we finally found a new apartment. Two weeks before the baby was born we got the keys and “we” started frantically to move our two apartments into the new bigger one. We have ~1800 books (1426 + ~400). Go backpain!

There is a deck (available to residents) adjacent to our own mini deck-on-the-roof where the view is truly awesome. We are happy.

If you pay millions, apparently you still get monkeys

marma — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:37:10 +0000

What, no one figured out that giving loans to people that cannot pay back was bad idea? Or that speculating in other people’s speculation could cause instability? Come on!

There’s some great mathematics in economics, I’m sure. But once you act on it, the conditions change. Certainly interesting, but please do not try to make it sound like it’s comparable to physics or engineering. I used to compare economics to predicting the weather, but clouds do not watch the weather channel, freak out and start raining.

But ok, the real problem is not the theories, although a lot of them do seem to start with “given that …” and then some conditions that do not exist. The problem seems to be that Beavis and Butthead are doing the trading. Homo Economicus … yeah right.