Daniel’s Blog

I have news, yeah I know I’ve not posted in a while, but I’ve been hard at work… and hard at work at home.

I have my own little Project. I’m going to be transforming my own website! This blog and the rest of the site will be placed upon a Drupal 6 platform, and will be restructured into a 4 section blog (each with individual RSS feeds) - the four sections will be:

• Technology and Computer Science:- Which will include code snippets, software/hardware/gadget reviews, as well as tech videos and random thoughts about computer science news.
• Religion and Spirituality:- Which will provide my thoughts as a Liberal Mystic Christian, as well as information about Religion/Spirituality in general.
• Masonry, Mysticism and Esotericism:- Which will bring you information about the world of Freemasonry and the mystic/esoteric studies that I and many others pursue.
• Miscellanea:- Which will bring you my random other thoughts such as personal things, poetry, politics and psychology.

I’ve got the platform all setup and ready to go. At home I’m in the process of modifying the page structures and the theme.

I hope to release my new website in the not too distant future… but for now, I bring you an interesting video which has stumbled into my radar. It’s a video from Intel and is about their “Project Orick”, which seems to be some kind of glove. At the moment we can’t work out whether its an actual device or some kind of nifty advertisement for another Intel system… have a look here:

The only information on the Intel website that I could find out about is here “Project Orick“.

Any thoughts?

ok, so the next book by Dan Brown is titled “The Lost Symbol” (even though it had the code-name through writing of “The Solomon Key”), and will be released in September 2009.

All of the Dan Brown fans seem to be excited to get their hands on it. But many Freemasons are worried…. the reason… because The Lost Symbol is rumoured to be about Freemasonry (but as of yet we don’t have full evidence of this). Dan Brown is very well known to make very tenuous links between things, and merge fiction with non-fiction… so as a warning, please don’t believe everything that he says, and remember that he is a fiction writer.

However, there is some clever marketing going on at the Random House which involves the new “The Lost Symbol Website“, as well as a @lostsymbolbook twitter feed.

The twitter feed of which has the first post of:

Codes of ethics? T 10 C; 6 P O T SOD; 12 S O T Z

Which I know what it means

As more and more time goes by,
I'm realising that my life is constantly changing,
constantly evolving, like the wind or the rain;
speed, direction, pressure and temperature.
Life does continually change,
Sometimes better,
Sometimes we see it as worse,
but we must ride on wind.
Three years before writing this,
I wasn't in a good situation,
I was trapped, but somehow,
Maybe that developed me.
Strength from turbulence.
Now, I am happy,
Consistently learning and evolving spiritually,
Constantly in love,
Always trying my best for society.

This is me. A poem called “Evolution of Myself” written by Daniel Lewis on the 2nd March 2009 at about 6:30pm.

I’m now, officially, half way through (ish) my Masters in Machine Learning and Data Mining at the University of Bristol… and I’ve got a decision to make very soon.

When I started my MSc I thought “yeah, I’ll do the MSc and then go straight onto a PhD“. It has now come to the time when I need to decide if I do want to go straight onto a PhD, and if so in which area. I’ve already seen one of my Professors about it, who would be happy to supervise me as long as I have an interesting idea to research and I get a reasonable grade for my MSc…. so that’s not an issue.

The problem that I am having is that, although I really really would love to do a PhD, I do really really want to have a normal and stable lifestyle… which is very hard to have while doing a PhD in addition to only getting the very minimalistic funding that a studentship provides. Which means that there is the proper full-time working again.

There are lots of options, and at the moment the more favourable one is working for one or two years (at least) after the MSc and then doing a PhD later on in life (for instance, if I start it in two years time I’ll be 26 and should still have finished it before I’m 30).

If I did start the PhD from next year, which isn’t necessarily favourable at this precise moment, I would be in one (or a couple) of the following fields:

• Logic Programming (particularly ILP).
• Semantics (Description Logic and/or the Semantic Web) and/or Pragmatics (potentially the Pragmatic Web).
• Natural Language Processing.
• Artificial Intelligence applied to the Study of the Humanities/Society and Liberal Arts.
• Computational Imagination.
• Can computers attain wisdom? Or tap into Sophia? (Artificial Wisdom / Artificial Spiritual Wisdom).

So much to think about. If you’d like to contact me about anything I’ve written in this blog post (or elsewhere), then please do get in touch. I’m always happy to hear from people, and discuss things in detail.

Many many thanks for reading, and so many thanks for those who have and will be supporting me through my decisions.

Daniel

Good News!

My second article through IBM developerWorks has been published! (there are one or two things wrong with this article, I won’t say anything about it for now and will try to rectify it asap!)

It’s titled “Building Semantic Web CRUD operations using PHP” (<- click the title to go read it). It’s essentially about showing:

• The similarities and differences between the Relational Database Model and the Resource Description Framework model.
• The similarities and differences between SQL and SPARQL.
• How to implement SPARQL calls for Creation, Reading, Updation and Deletion (CRUD) operations using PHP.

After a bit of toying with it (keep at it, because it will be challenging but worth it!), you should be able to build your Web Application with RDF and SPARQL manipualtion.

If anyone has any questions about it (or about my previous developerWorks article which was titled “Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web“) then please do let me know.

Oh yeah, by the way… both of my articles so far have been “featured” articles on the IBM developerWorks front page

Daniel

OK, so I’ve just got my login details for the “MyBristol” system, which is the University of Bristol’s portal for Staff and Students. I have to say, I am incredibly impressed by the whole system.

It’s got:

• A personalised home page (looking a bit like iGoogle), including tabs and widget-style subwindows
• Integration with the Bristol WebMail (based on SquirrelMail)
• Course detail integration. INCLUDING integration with Blackboard
• A simple bookmarking system (looking like a simplified version of del.icio.us), preloaded with useful related bookmarks
• An RSS feed reader, preloaded with useful related feeds
• A “Contacts”/Address Book system
• A PDF Converter
• Print Credit integration
• Personal Information viewing/editing
• Library integration
• Student Union integration (probably reusing the RSS Feed Reader)
• Themes!

This looks trillions times nicer to use than the old “PIP” system that I had to use back when I was at Oxford Brookes University. I mean, themes! It’s also has a lot more functionality.

One thing that I am quite surprised that MyBristol doesn’t have, is a Calendar. It would be useful to have a Calendar.

Interestingly, the MyBristol system is actually quite similar to the OpenLink Data Spaces system. Except ODS is a lot more general, and provides even more functionality. Plus ODS is available to everyone, whereas MyBristol is just for University of Bristol staff and students.

It’d also be nice to see a SPARQL endpoint on MyBristol, which is something that ODS does provide.

Still, I’m very impressed by MyBristol. Well done to the Information Services and ILRT departments at Bristol.

I had evolution setup for a week now, and on Friday I decided to install the evolution-rss plugin which is an RSS and ATOM newsreader built into evolution. The plugin (without me being aware of it until today) stopped me from receiving emails (so I apologies if anyone has sent me an email to my work email address ( dlewis at openlinksw dot com) over the weekend and I haven’t received/responded). I’ve now uninstalled the evolution-rss plugin and I seem to be receiving email fine now, including those during the weekend.

Setup:

• 64 bit processor
• Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
• Evolution 2.22.3.1
• evolution-rss 0.0.8

I mentioned a few days ago that I would be setting up a “Bristol Knowledge Unconference“.

I’ve had a few emails about it, and a few blog comments… and I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised about the broad range of people interested in the event. I am still interested in hearing from others!

So heres the plan:

I’ll be visiting various people and organisations this week and next week, to find out what they want from the event and for me to get to know them and them to get to know me (as I am quite new to Bristol), and what we work on. The first of which is tomorrow afternoon. (If you’d like me to come visit you in Bristol then do send me an email, I’ll be happy to do so)

I hope to have set a date by Monday 21st July 2008. My feeling so far is that the event will be at some point in the next couple of months (i.e. before the end of September 2008). I will obviously let you know about this as soon as I have set it!

Today has been one of those days where you just want to get things done. Particularly this afternoon when I’ve felt like a hermit trying to make the esoteric become exoteric and I’ve just needed to focus without any distractions in order to get the right formula to turn base metals into gold.

Like Alchemy… the Semantic Web / Linked Data can be a bit esoteric at times, but really it is more arcane than esoteric and so therefore my work is more about turning the arcane/esoteric into the exoteric. The “right formula” I mention above is the words I use to describe things, and it is really important to get those right words. Unlike turning base-metals into gold, it is possible to get the right formula for turning the Esoteric Semantic Web into the Exoteric Linked Data.

This is in relation to a document which I am currently writing, and I am really wanting to get this exactly right in order to make it the most understandable that it can be, but still express everything that I (and others) want it to express. With a little Wisdom, Strength and Beauty this document and my future documents will shine.

The strange thing is, is that Linked Data actually gives a huge helping hand when it comes to documentation and tutorial writing as it allows you to express exactly what you mean and clears up any misunderstandings before they are created.

(I apologise for the rather arcane blog post… it has been an incredibly bizarre day!)

I’ve been nominated for the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 2008 in the Programming and Development category.

Each candidate gets a nomination point for each person that nominates his/her blog. So add your nomination by sending an email with, the subject “development-blog” and my blogs address as the content. Like so:

To: [email protected]

Subject: development-blog

Content: https://www.vanirsystems.com/danielsblog
The nomination points system closes on the 31st May 2008, and then it’s up to the judges to work out whether my blog is worthy enough for the award. I certainly hope it is, theres lots of good content in this blog :p