Author: danny

[work-in-progress] Functional tuplespace? I know quite a few folks around here have the same problem as me when it comes to making something: getting sucked into making tools to make (tools to make…) that something. Same phenomenon whether it’s a coding project or a wooden spoon. But I might now be taking it up another level – making a methodology...

A bit of a brain dump. It might turn into a tutorial one day. For now, a ramble. The title of this post is a hat-tip to Peter Norvig, author of a significant essay, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. While I can’t disagree with many of his points there (most are spot on), I do reckon he makes the...

51, old fart 😉

The other week I bought an axe head (€9 from hardware shop in Castelnuovo). Good steel, hand-forged, and I thought it might work as a carving axe, something I’ve been wanting for a while. So today I made a handle for it. Like so: A while ago I cut and debarked a bit of fresh ash for the purpose, but...

PS. I’ve worked on the code a bit more and split it out into its own project at github, fuwiki. For a bit of xmas play I’ve put together a minimal wiki that only uses (jQuery-rich) web pages and a SPARQL server. It’s only at the rough proof-of-concept stage (I just this minute got it working, rather pleased so decided...

I’ve had my doubts about the significance of context from time to time, but certainly in certain, er, contexts, it is pretty much essential. Case in point, news, as Chris Saad talks about in Context is Everything. News Should Be A Collaborative Work. Chris argues that “News is broken.”, and I don’t disagree, but would add the argument that news...

tl;dr – Abstract nonsense Wikipedia says : Category theory is used to formalize mathematics and its concepts as a collection of objects and arrows (also called morphisms). Category theory can be used to formalize concepts of other high-level abstractions such as set theory, ring theory, and group theory. …an abstraction of mathematics itself that allows many intricate and subtle mathematical...

tldr; Android devices are cool, confusing and interesting. I’ll say I was late to the mobile device party, even though years back I did a bunch of coding for the Palm. How things have changed, yadda. But when everybody else at Talis was provided wih the latest iPhone, I slipped through the net. It was known that I’d probably leave...

I’ve spent a lot of time around SPARQL stores, a big proportion of it doing user interface bits. Usually this has involved a bunch of server-side code, templating, transformations or whatever, but recently I stumbled a way of avoiding this entirely, putting all the work client-side, in conventional browser Javascript. I doubt this is original (once you’ve seen it, it’s almost...

Can’t be bothered looking into it right now, but writing down for something to come back to. A hypothesis, that flocking behaviour is so ingrained that humans will express it in their writing. I did do a few Wikipedia pages when the thought crossed my mind, and apparently humans do flock like sheep/birds/wildebeasts – in a crowd, if 5% change...