Mahound’s Weblog

I’ve put up a code snippet that can be used as a shell script, in order to consult the DLPO (portuguese) dictionary. It’s a simple HTML scraping (html5lib + BeautifulSoup) example, but it’s really useful (at least for me).

Example:

Noah Slater called my attention to this:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney 

He’s doing something similar, using an IRC bot. At first, it fooled me… it looked like a quite literate human on drugs.  Then, I started noticing some patterns, and eventually found out. However, I’m still kind of embarrassed about this… my faith on the Turing test has decreased, not because machines are supposedly getting smarter, but rather because i start to believe that the conditions of a hypothetical “Turing test” should be more constrained than previously thought: i.e. the machine should convince the human that he’s talking with a sane and sober human being.

Just added OpenID support to the weblog. I’ve disabled registration, so that everybody that doesn’t still have an account has to go through OpenID in order to login. I’m sick of phony users and spam bots…

If you don’t have an OpenID, create one… it’s quick, and it works for lots of websites.

Falling asleep to Mike Oldfield’s rendition…

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008).

Yes, now this blog is part of the Linked Data community. Thanks to triplify, all the posts and comments contained in this blog can be exported as RDF (N3 or JSON-encoded). The source is http://weblog.zarquon.biz/triplify/ (default: N3, use http://weblog.zarquon.biz/triplify/?t-output=json for RDF/JSON).

The output is still a single graph (much like a dump), but I’m confident that the triplify guys will soon start using different contexts, and make the URIs browsable.  In any case, it’s already possible to link these data with, i.e. FOAF info, using  foaf:mbox_sha1sum.

A short example…

A very interesting concept… I’ve been playing a bit with it: http://groups.google.com/group/xoperator/browse_thread/thread/11397420fb298dea .

• Project page: http://aksw.org/Projects/xOperator

Do you remember that specific project that you started 7 or 8 years ago, and just didn’t have the will/time/manpower to maintain? Well, one of my early experiences happened when I was 16: ptCTF, a “Capture The Flag” extension for Half-Life, that I developed with some friends in high school. It seems, it was not totally forgotten…

• FRAGLíder :: Verificar tópico - Mod Tuga para HL2 - Gathering a Team] (portuguese)

At the time the objective was to create a portuguese-stereotype kind of game. Therefore, the scenario was a North vs. South war, one of the few (and, yet, artificial) ways in which we can split the portuguese culture. Some details were meant to be purely stereotypical, like the wine bottles that served as health packs, etc…
Well, it was essentially a failed project, as a whole (only the initial version was released, and no-one would want to play it, since there were far better alternatives), but i see that at least it hasn’t died, deep inside the mind of some (older) portuguese gamers.
Just as an aside, I believe that this project marked my first contact with the MingW32 gcc/glibc port, that eventually lead to my conversion to GNU/Linux.

Tags: ptctf, half-life, projects, past, nostalgy

Is twitter such a fundamental concept that we can use it as a basis for defining “IRC”?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a UNIX-based system of chat servers that was introduced in late 1988. A series of networks and thousands of channels allowed people to “tweet” about various topics, share cool links, and offer technical support. Twitter now offers a somewhat similar experience with a more user-friendly interface and mobile support.

(from http://www.copybrighter.com/blog/social-media-in-the-1990s)

Tags: irc, twitter, nonsense, inverse logic, egg, chicken

A Wiimote, an IR LED array, and some reflective tape. That’s all you need in order to create a device that tracks your fingers using the Wiimote infrared camera. Johnny Chung Lee develops some very interesting projects that explore the capabilities of the Wiimote. Here is one of them, but visit his project page for more:

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/