Tript to Boston MA

Lately I returned Boston MA where I attended HP Tech Con 08. As usually even to get there was an adventure - no seat from Prague to London (but booked seat from London to Boston), delayed flight and missing stand in London and less then 2 hours to connect the flight at ESB powered Heathrow Terminal 5. Roman scared me enough, but finally everything went OK and I safely arrived to Boston on time.


HP Tech Con is prestigious HP technology conference. You have to earn your way there by writing a paper that is judged against more than 1200 of other papers written by the best technologists in the company - like the one on memristor. There are only about 120 papers accepted and therefore I was very honored to get an invitation.

Presentations were excellent, I met a lot of interesting people and definitely I will strive to attend the next year again.


It was my 3rd time in Boston, I visited Harward and MIT Museum. After the conference ended I also did 10 mile workout from the hotel to Charles River. And also I met my ex-Systinet colleague.

Nice trip ;-)

Yahoo! Started The Semantic Web Era

For several years I'm annotating my web pages with various microformats in order to make them comprehensible both for humans and machines. This is what the Semantic Web is about. Until the day before yesterday it was just funny academic exercise - my FOAF profile, DC annotation of HTML pages, DOAP for MR, ...

Yahoo! finally gave to everybody purposeful reason why to annotate their pages. Thus started the era of the real semantic web. And others will follow for sure as it is not just about SEO.

Yahoo! guys proved that they are real innovators. Looking forward to new adventure - it's time to improve our webs ;-)

My Weekend Runs

Weekend run is my bonus for week hours spent on treadmill. Recently I discovered very nice Google Maps based mashup application where I can map my runs. Especially I like to search for other people who run the same trails as I do...

Mikuláš

There are no words to express how happy I am!

TC + MC Jakes @ Pete Tong's Essential Mix

Yet another excellent mix by TC. I still cannot forget the live act he did for Fab in December 07. TC and his Bristol squad (Hanna and MC Jakes) impressed me both with their live presentation of dnb and as personalities, very strong.

Enjoy!

MR7

Busy, sleepy and tired gathering minutes and hours while slowly summoning MR 7...



Tag navigation and clouds, labels, sketches, incremental FTS indices, sub-pixel antialiasing, cross notebook concept linking and more...

Check it!

Finishing Baby Training

I want to share with you extremely enlightening training materials I came across while I'm getting ready for the baby ;-)

Enjoy!

[HowTo] Google Docs Backup

I like Google Docs service very much. At the same time I don't trust anyone... here come two unofficial ways how to backup Google Docs documents:

• http://1st-soft.net/gdd/
  
  and:


• http://code.google.com/p/gdatacopier/

Enjoy!

drum 'n' sub-base

As Fab described in one of his shows '07 was heavy year with high number of extremely good tunes. Release by release we were supplied with extraordinary things. Personally I see the main reason in the spin of the dubstep and its influence to dnb. Dubstep added a new axis to the dnb tunes - the sub-base - and thus a brand new vibe.

Last year I heard an interview with Goldie, he was talking about Commix as his favorite Metalheadz crew. This year I got it - Call to Mind is the album of the year for me. Commix became member of my very special selection of dnb warriors. Tunes like Belleview or Be True clearly confirm the trend I have described above.

No retreat, no surrender by my big dogs! High Contrast dropped definite tune of the year If we ever (Tough Guys Don't Dance @ Hospital). There is everything - check old school jungle drums, beautiful vocal by Diane Charlemagne and sub-base vibe. Lomax attacked with Brain Freeze (Brain Freeze @ Spearhead). Klute got me again with with his standardly outstanding release and 174 BPM (The Emperor's New Clothes @ Commercial Suicide) - is it liquid funk, dubstep or what? ;-)

Looking forward to '08!

RESTafarian's Weapons

FF

• Poster
• Live HTTP Headers

IE

• Web Dev toolkit

Mozilla

• HTTP Debugging

Proxy

• Fiddler

CmdLine

• cURL
• wGET (windows)

Validator

• ASF/RSS/KML
• JSon
• URL
• XSD
  

Rearmed!

... & ready for two babies.

My SaaS Microcosmos

I actively use several computers - laptops (3) and workstation. In the past I have been fighting hardware failures, replication inconsistencies and was unable to do anything when on business trip/holidays. As former internet bubble promises are becoming reality, I'm striving to have as much as possible of my data in the internet. Here comes my selection...

• emails
  
• GMail
• video
  
• YouTube
• photo
• JAlbum + web hosting
  
• blog
  
• Blogger
  
• feeds
  
• GReader
  
• bookmarks
• del.icio.us
  
• friends
  
• Facebook
• office
  
• GDocs
• presentations
  
• SlideShare
• calendar & address book
  
• Plaxo (<- Exchange -> mobile)
  
• open source
  
• SourceForge
• money
• eBanka
• backup
• (IDrive)
  
• password
• (PassPack)
  
• mind map
• ;-)

Mind mapping is one of the gaps I have to close... and it is really difficult. Although I like it, I do not want to use a traditional mind mapping service (fancy spiders that do not scale) like Mindomo - I prefer productivity, quick navigation and powerful search. Still did not found what I'm looking for.

Computers Need To Forget

A Harvard professor argues that too much information is being retained by computers, and the machines need to learn how to forget things as humans always have. "If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper.

This is exactly the idea I have in my mind for some time. Having installed the same system for three years and looking to my desktop, downloaded documents, mailbox and mind maps I can see how it is spoiled and contaminated by zombie items.

The purpose of computers is to remember everything. Actually I think that human brain remembers every single piece of information as well (cognition, experience, perception). Human beings just differ in ability to look up the particular "thing" - it's there, but an appropriate stimulus that triggers the association queue is needed (scent, sensual perception, event).


The right question to ask is "What does it mean to forget?"

In my opinion it is a function of the mind that protects it from madness. Presume that your memory is a graph - "things" are nodes and associations are edges (pretty common model). There is an entry node. A new stimulus is put right behind the entry node. As the stimulus get older and older it dives deeper and deeper. If there are no fresh associations which would keep it near enough to the entry node, it is forgot. Say that the distance is defined as number of hops from entry node to the stimulus node and there is some threshold (let me call it Rubicon). The piece of information is forgot once the distance from the entry is is bigger then Rubicon.

The same approach could be applied to computers...

• Imagine that there is hades - an underground where old bookmarks, applications, emails and mind maps stay.
• Once the application is not used for some time, it gets across Rubicon and ends in hades, the same applies to emails and comments which are not read, etc.
• The important thing is that e.g. icons @ desktop are not deleted (like windows icon sweep offers), but just moved to hades, and might be rescued later.
  
• If you search "live" part of the system, hades is searched as well. You might ask system to union live and hades icons on your desktop, etc.
  
• If you use GMail, you know I mean ;-)
  

In other words I just wanted to say: "to forget doesn't mean to delete". Does it make sense?