Porcupine Tree - Porto, 8th Oct 2008
June 30th, 2008
Poetry (1)
June 28th, 2008It’s probably nothing new for our British folks, but “Eloisa to Abelard” is one of the most amazing poems I’ve ever read. Divine, erotic and tragic: a perfect trinity that is fulfilled by this wonderful work by Alexander Pope.
I come, I come! prepare your roseate bow’rs,
Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow’rs.
Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,
Where flames refin’d in breasts seraphic glow:
Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,
And smooth my passage to the realms of day;
See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!
DLPO scraping
May 1st, 2008I’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:
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mahound@magrathea ~ $ dlpo português
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* adj.,
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- relativo a Portugal;
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- diz-se de uma variedade de trigo-mole;
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* do Lat. portucalense
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* s. m.,
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- indivíduo natural de Portugal;
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- indivíduo que tem nacionalidade portuguesa;
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- língua falada pelos Portugueses, Brasileiros e todos os povos africanos de língua oficial portuguesa;
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- antiga moeda de ouro.
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* fig.,
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- franco, leal, apesar de rude;
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mahound@magrathea ~ $
Mark V. Shaney
March 31st, 2008Noah Slater called my attention to this:
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.
Go, Yasi, go!
March 22nd, 200815 year-old prodigy… no need to say more…
Oh, and she’s been playing for 3 years…
I guess I won’t touch a guitar again…
OpenID
March 22nd, 2008Just 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.
This morning…
March 21st, 2008The landscape in St. Genis-Pouilly(GEO: 46.245616, 6.028238) was like this:
The Songs of Distant Earth
March 18th, 2008Falling asleep to Mike Oldfield’s rendition…
R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008).
We’re linked!
March 17th, 2008Yes, 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.
