Back on Martinique

We were on a sailtrip for the last two weeks, offline from the … how do you call it… web?

Two weeks of looking at palm islands in the carribean, it was truly nice. Sunday evening I will be home again and show pictures, the Mangobay bar here has creepy slow internet.

See you in two weeks, I am on the beach

Announcement: I will be on holiday, sailing in the Carribean, for the next two weeks. I will be back at around 13th February. Leo Sauermann will not answer your e-mails, phone calls or anything else, I will be offline.

We are sailing on a big catamaran, starting in Martinique and then, who knows where the wind brings us. Its ten people on a boat, and I think we will have a lot of things to do, like drinking beer and getting a sun tan.

Continue reading “See you in two weeks, I am on the beach”

Semantic Desktop Article in “Technology Review”

The word is out there – the german “Technology Review” magazine, a partner of MIT’s technology review, has published an article about the semantic desktop and myself in its februar issue.

logo of technology review

If you happen to be in a german-speaking country like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, go to a good bookstore and buy the february 2007 issue. The article sums up my idea of a Semantic Desktop very good, and they also have nice articles on the future of food. The keypoint is, that Semantic Web is a good idea, and Semantic Desktop can help start it.

Gordon Bolduan interviewed me, and I will publish a photo of him interviewing me (which I made) later in February – because I am going on holiday now! see the next post for more…

Making desktop search worth it: connecting strigi, beagle++, aperture

Did you ever ask yourself why you can’t find anything on your own computer, but can find stuff in the internet? Its the great search engines.

On the desktop, the Nepomuk project is aiming to enhance desktop search with semantic features. So additional to asking “where are these files with ‘money'” you can ask for things related to job offers within the last month.

Sebastian Trüg (whom you may know because you have been using K3B to burn CDs, watch the “about” window of this KDE app) is leading the Semantic Desktop integration for KDE, and he connected us with many other people, for example Jos van den Oever from the Strigi project.

We have set up a wiki page with plans for the future, and will try to integrate RDF search with fulltext search. This would allow a very generic, “technically beautiful” solution to data indexing, RDF is very generic and reusable and fulltext-indexing is quite handy already.

Pray for us, hold your thumbs, if all goes well, we will agree on one standard and desktop search will rock and roll.

Powerpoint Karaoke im Kliklokal am 20.1.2007 – und Donnerstag TGE!

Diesen Samstag hatten wir eine Powerpoint Karaoke im Kliklokal in Kaiserslautern, Schillerplatz 4. Ein schöner Event, vielleicht kommentiert ihr einfach unter den Bildern oder hier eure Eindrücke.

Insgesamt waren wir etwa 40 Leute, viele Folien, super Stimmung. Die Hütte war voll.

Hier die Pics:
Powerpoint Karaoke, Julian

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/sets/72157594496501173/

Achtung! Am Donnerstag, 25.Januar 2007 abends um 20:00 ist “The Great Escape Deluxe” im Kliklokal, und am Samstag ist große Abschlussparty. Haltet es nicht geheim!

Endless Bar in Kaiserslautern

You think you are at the end of the world? You’ve not been to Kaiserslautern yet 🙂

I, urban, want to connect to people in big cities – to do this we have projects like “silver fire” or “endless bar”. We connect to people all over the world using Video-Conferencing software.

Last Friday we connected Kliklokal in Kaiserslautern with St Oberholz in Berlin. On the Kaiserslautern side were Martin, Katrin, Antoni, Jochen, etc etc on the Berlin side Richard and Arne.

Here are Arne’s Pics:




Endles Bar Set by Blogwerk/Arne


Originally uploaded by Blogwerk.

Here are my Pics:

Verlängerte Theke

Notes on Connecting First and Second Life

Matt Biddulph has published notes on how he connected a hardware knob with a second life parameter. Second Life is a computer world where you can create objects, manipulate them, sell them, within a three-dimensional world. Matt used an arduino board, a kind of electrical device you can plug into a computer and play around with electronics.

Watch the video demo on his weblog.

The direction this is going is exactly what I love: connecting the world of information (secondlife, the web) with the physical world.

Now what I would love to see is to use the Nintendo WII hacked, so that I can use the WII wireless controller to get the Secondlife stuff moving.

It seems this hack is still to be done, but this video gives a light impression of what I mean:
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The guys from zedomax.com have used a CUBLOC controller to create a Joystick USB device for a PC. But not a joystick, a six-axis-of-freedom-controller. The glue is some basic code on a basic controller.

Semantic Web at XTech 2007

People from the W3C SWEO group are wondering if anybody from the Semantic Web is giving a demo or talk at the XTech 2007 conference in France.

Are you on the XTech, presenting Semantic Web? If yes, please contact me (leo.sauermann@dfki.de) or Susie Stephens (susie.stephens@oracle.com), we want to help people find tutorial material and collect useful presentations on the Semantic Web.

Btw, The goal of the SWEO is to develop strategies and materials to increase awareness among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web, and educate the Web community regarding related solutions and technologies.