Ontospy: three releases in a day, after nearly four years of silence
Today I released three versions of Ontospy: 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.
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2026
Ontospy: three releases in a day, after nearly four years of silence
Today I released three versions of Ontospy: 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.
Ask your mom whether your business idea is any good and she'll say yes.
A Dream of Venice, with Claude as Editor
My children can read Italian. Most of their classmates can't.
Reading Naples '44 as a database
I recently read Norman Lewis's Naples '44, and it stayed with me more than most books do.
Five new ways to visualize Wittgenstein's Tractatus
I've spent a bit more time this year on Wittgensteiniana, my long-running side project that turns Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into a set of experimental visualizations.
AI Skills Are a Cottage Industry - And That Might Be Permanent
Everyone in my organisation is building their own AI skills.
What the data doesn't show: presenting at CLACSO's funding flows project
I was in Buenos Aires last week for the closing event of Tracking research funding flows in the Global South, a project run by CLACSO in partnership with CWTS/Leiden University and IDRC.
The Shifting Landscape of Research Analytics: From Data Access to Trustworthy Insights
I watched the "Vibe Coding with Open Alex" video recently, and it's been rattling around in my head since.
2025
Event: Hayden Thorpe live in Pordenone
I went to see Hayden Thorpe for the first time the other night at Pordenone's Ex-Convento Live venue (Italy).
Event: Installation at Sydney Data Arena
My piece, "Dreamy Pianos - Study No 1 in C Minor," is part of a new sonic installation by Simon Porter, currently showcased at the University of Technology Sydney.
2024
Unpacking OpenAlex topics classification
In this post I have taken a closer look at the classification of scientific disciplines in OpenAlex, a recently developed database of scientific works.
This piece plunges into a heavy, atmospheric soundscape driven by the collision of overlapping basslines and raw industrial noise.
This livecoding piece crafts a suspenseful and ambient sonic environment built entirely from mallet percussion.
Livecoding: Out of this world (2024-02)
This generative ambient piece is a direct sonic meditation on the philosophy of Alan Watts, specifically his idea that "you don't come into this world, but you come out of this world."
Livecoding: Dreamy pianos - Study No 2 in B Minor
Hypnotic piano chords and melodies are layered and phased using cosine oscillators, creating an immersive, wave-like sonic space of infinite, shifting sound.
2023
Livecoding: Dreamy pianos - Study No 1 in C Minor
An experiment using overlapping, cosine-driven piano lines in C minor to demonstrate how simple phasing techniques can produce surprisingly complex and immersive musical effects.
Designing great dashboards: a slidedeck
What makes a dashboard great? Here is a slide deck (gslides )that consolidates several useful ideas I've ran into in the past.
Book Summary: Deep Work (2016)
I finally got round to reading Deep Work by Cal Newport (2016).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Arthur C Clarke once commented that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Springer Nature retired SciGraph earlier this month.
Paperpile: a PDF manager with Google Drive backend
Paperpile is an online PDF manager that stores your personal data in your Google Drive folder.
2022
Version 2 of the library includes SHACL support as well as various internal refactoring.
Bringing quotations back to life
There's a new section on this site that allows to navigate quotations: quotes.michelepasin.org.
A semi-automated conference assistant
A couple of weeks ago I went to the excellent Move Or Perish—Scientific Trajectories, Inclusion, And Inequality, And Their Consequences For Transformative Science workshop in Vienna.
Livecoding: exploring Bento noise box
Improvised acid loops using Extempore + Bentō.
Three things I do *not* like about Looker
Following up on my previous 3 things I like about Looker , here are instead the top three things that I really wish were different about this piece of software.
Livecoding: Study for Cello and Double-bass
This piece draws inspiration from the epic, thematic drama of Game of Thrones, featuring a rich texture built from intertwining cello melodic lines.
Three things I like about Looker
Looker is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that was recently acquired by Google.
2021
A static site generator using Django, Wget and Github Pages
If you're a Django developer and want to publish a website without the hassle (and costs) of deploying a web app, then this post may give you some useful tips.
Terminal script: getting the time in different world time zones
A little Bash script to show information about world time zones.
Recipe: Making a livecoding screencast with QuickTime and RecordIt
This post shows how to make a livecoding screencast using free macOS technologies.
"Rhythmic Cycles" is a new livecoding composition created using Extempore and Ableton Live.
Livecoding visual patterns with Hydra
I had quite a lot of fun live coding visual patterns with Hydra.
Extempore functions explorer updated to latest library release v0.8.9
The Extempore functions explorer has been updated with the latest version of the Extempore programming language: v0.8.9.
'The Kryos Noise' is available on Spotify
The prog rock album I worked on years ago with the band Kryos Project is now available on Spotify (and Amazon too).
2020
I've started a new livecoding project on GitHub called The Musical Code.
"Piano Scales" is a new experiment in algorithmic composition, demonstrating the captivating simplicity of piano-based systems.
More Jupyter notebooks: pyvis and networkx
Lately I've been spending more time creating Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how to use the Dimensions API for research analytics.
Getting to grips with Google Colab
I've been using Google Colab on a regular basis during the last few months, as I was curious to see whether I could make the switch to it from a more traditional Jupyter/JupyterLab environment.
Calculating Industry Collaborations via GRID
A new tutorial demonstrating how to extract and visualize data about industry collaborations by combining Dimensions data with GRID.
2019
Pypapers: a bare-bones, command-line PDF manager
Ever felt like software such as Mendeley or Papers are great, but somehow slow you down?
Introducing DimCli: a Python CLI for the Dimensions API
For the last couple of months I've been working on a new open source Python project called DimCli.
Running interactive Jupyter demos with mybinder.org
The online tool mybinder.org allows you to turn a Git repository into a collection of interactive notebooks with one click.
Overriding default VSCode snippets
Extempore's VSCode plugin is really useful, but sometimes you may not want to use all the snippets that come with it.
SN SciGraph Latest Release: Patents, Clinical Trials and many new features
We are pleased to announce the third release of Springer Nature SciGraph Linked Open Data.
Zero Hunger Hack Day: surfacing research about the Sustainable Development Goals program
This post is about a little dashboard idea that aims at helping policy makers discover research relevant to the 'zero hunger' topic, one of the themes of the Sustainable Development Goals program.
Ontospy version 1.9.8 has just been released and contains tons of improvements and new features.
2018
Exploring scholarly publications using DBPedia concepts: an experiment
This post is about a recent prototype I developed, which allows exploration of a sample collection of Springer Nature publications using subject tags automatically extracted from DBPedia.
SN SciGraph: more related objects links increase discoverability of content
The latest release of SN SciGraph Explorer includes a number of new features that make it easier to navigate the scholarly knowledge graph and discover items of interest.
PySciGraph: simple API for accessing SN SciGraph content
PySciGraph is a small open source Python library that makes it easier to access data from Springer Nature SciGraph.
SN SciGraph is part of the Linked Open Data Cloud 2018
The latest Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud has recently been made available by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics.
Interesting read: 'SciSci' i.e. the science of science
Albert-László Barabási is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, best known for his work in the research of network theory.
2017
SciGraph publishes 1 billion facts as Linked Open Data
Last Thursday, we reached a major milestone for the SciGraph project: nearly 1 billion facts (= RDF statements) have been released as Linked Open Data, most of it under a CC-BY license!
Exploring SciGraph data using JSON-LD, Elastic Search and Kibana
Hello there data lovers! In this post you can find some information on how to download and make some sense of the scholarly dataset recently made available by the Springer Nature SciGraph project, by using the freely available Elasticsearch suite of software.
A new version of OntoSpy (1.7.4) is available online.
2016
How to copy snippets from Github Gists to Dash
If you’re a Dash for MacOS user, here’s a little script to copy existing code snippets saved as Github Gists into the Dash snippets database.
Apple Keynote: extracting presenter notes to Markdown
Here's a simple AppleScript that makes it easier to extract presenter notes from a Keynote presentation and save them to a nicely formatted Markdown document.
Leipzig Semantics 2016 conference
A few weeks ago, I attended the SEMANTiCS conference in Leipzig, so here's a short report about the event.
On November 1st, we were invited to present the SciGraph project at the London ODI Summit, the annual event organized by the Open Data Institute to review and discuss the social and economic impact of open data in both the public and commercial sectors.
A new and improved version of OntoSpy (1.6.7) is available online.
SpotiSci: finding science concepts on Spotify
Ever wondered how many musical albums focus on topics like the moon landing, artificial intelligence, or DNA replication?
Nature.com Subjects Stream Graph
The nature.com subjects stream graph displays the distribution of content across the subject areas covered by the nature.com portal.
2015
Accessing OS X dictionary with Python
Here's a little script that allows you to access the OS X Dictionary app using Python.
Another experiment with Wittgenstein's Tractatus
I spent some time hacking over the weekend, and here's the result: a minimalist interactive version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Is wikipedia a valid source of scientific knowledge?
Is Wikipedia a valid source of scientific knowledge?
Towards an ontology for philosophy
I enjoyed watching a recent presentation by Barry Smith about ontology engineering and in particular its application in the field of philosophy itself.
Recent projects from CrossRef.org
We spent the day with the CrossRef team in Oxford last week, talking about our recent work in the linked data space (see the nature ontologies portal) and their recent initiatives in the scholarly publishing area.
A sneak peek at Nature.com articles' archive
We're getting closer to releasing the full set of metadata covering over one million articles published by Nature Publishing Group since 1845.
Impromptu language documentation back online!
For all Impromptu aficionados: here's a little online application that can be used to search and browse the language documentation: http://hacks.michelepasin.org/impromptu/
Nature.com ontologies portal available online
The Nature ontologies portal is a new section of the nature.com site that describes our involvement with semantic technologies and makes available to the wider public several models and datasets as RDF linked data.
Tribute to Alice in Chains (sort of)
I'm not sure how much this qualifies as a tribute video to Alice in Chains, but hey - who's to judge anyway?
Notes from the Force11 annual conference
I attended the Force11 conference in Oxford over the last couple of days (the conference was previously called 'Beyond the PDF').
Take control of your digital annotations with ResQuotes.com
Over the last few weeks, I had a chance to complete a personal project I've been working on for a while: www.resquotes.com.
2014
Italian public spending data: a review
The Italian government recently announced a new portal containing data on public spending: http://soldipubblici.gov.it.
Dereference a DOI using python
A little Python script that allows you to pass an article DOI in order to obtain all the metadata related to that article.
ISWC14 paper: a hybrid semantic publishing architecture combining XML and RDF
I'm posting here a short summary of the paper I presented at the last International Semantic Web conference in Riva del Garda (ISWC14) together with my colleague Tony Hammond.
Installing Stardog triplestore on mac os
Stardog is an enterprise-level triplestore developed by clarkparsia.com.
Installing ClioPatria triplestore on mac os
ClioPatria is a "SWI-Prolog application that integrates SWI-Prolog's libraries for RDF and HTTP services into a ready-to-use (semantic) web server".
Installing GraphDB (aka OWLIM) triplestore on mac os
GraphDB (formerly called OWLIM) is an RDF triplestore which is used - among others - by large organizations like the BBC and the British Museum.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an interactive environment where you could quickly hack together an RDF model and then show it to your clients or colleagues in a more accessible format - such as a diagram?
How to visualize a big taxonomy within a single webpage?
Here are a couple more experiments aimed at visually representing a large taxonomy.
Nature.com subject pages available online!
Subject pages are pages that aggregate content from across nature.com based on the tagging of that content by NPG subject ontology terms.
2013
Annotating the web with Scrible
Scrible is an online tool that allows one to add layers of annotations to webpages, save them in the cloud and share them with others.
New livecoding screencast: Ziggurat 51
So hard to find time to do something creative these days.
Building a master volumes UI with impromptu
Based on one of the examples packaged with Impromptu, I wrote a simple function that uses the objc bridge to create a bare-bones user interface for adjusting your audio instruments master volumes.
Textmate bundle for Turtle and Sparql
I recently ran into the Textmate bundle for Turtle, an extension for the Textmate osx editor aimed at facilitating working with RDF and SPARQL.
Creating useful classifications with taxonomies (part 1)
Taxonomies and other classification schemes are omnipresent in Information Architecture.
Messing around wih D3.js and hierarchical data
These days there are a lot of browser-oriented visualization toolkits, such d3.js or jit.js.
ESWC 2013 - report from the conference
Last week I attended the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC'13) in Montpellier and had a really good time meeting old friends and catching up with the latest research in this area.
Annual Bliss Classification Association Lecture: using faceted browsers in the DH
The Bliss Bibliographic Classification is a fully faceted classification scheme that provides detailed classification for use in libraries and information services of all kinds, with a broad and detailed structure and order.
Neo4j is a graph database that has been rapidly accumulating success stories, especially in areas such as social applications, recommendation engines, fraud detection, resource authorization, network and data center management, and much more.
Agile vs Waterfall… a few misconceptions revealed
Here's a list of interesting concepts in software development.
A metronome object for Impromptu
Metronome: a device used by musicians that marks time at a selected rate by giving a regular tick.
2012: a look back (for this blog)
With the end of the year comes the time for reviewing the progress made, and with this blog, I can't really complain!
2012
Here are a couple of reference sheets that can become handy if you're doing any semantic web-related work.
Here are the materials related to the second week of the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization online course.
This is a short summary of the activities in week 1 of the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization massive online course offered by the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas.
Teaching programming concepts visually with the Online Python Tutor
The Online Python Tutor is a web-based program visualization tool for CS education, developed in collaboration with Google.
Open Knowledge Festival – Helsinki, 18-22 September 2012
I'm at the OKFestival this week. Tons of inspiring talks.
Navigating through the people of medieval Scotland... one step at a time
Navigating through the people of medieval Scotland...
Using Mendeley and Dropbox to sync your pdf library across computers
Mendeley is a PDF and reference manager software that has a number of cool features: online/offline support, tools for creating public groups (collections of references), and last but not least, it's fast and easy to use.
Wittgenstein Tractatus and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
What do the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have in common?
Crowdsourcing interpretation with Prism, a new software from the Scholar's Lab
Prism is a new online tool by the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia.
The role of Digital Humanities in a natural disaster
As part of the New Directions in the Digital Humanities series this week, we had a very inspiring presentation from Dr.
DJFacet 0.9.7: MPTT hierarchical facets now supported!
DJFacet is a pluggable module for the Django web application framework that allows you to navigate the data in your web app using an approach based on 'facets'.
Getting hold of your Flickr collections with Python
Recently I've been a little disappointed with Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing service.
Conference: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology
Yesterday I went to the CAA 2012 conference in Southampton, one of the top conferences in the world in the field of computational archaeology.
Book Summary: Notes from the Metalevel
I've started reading "Notes from the Metalevel: An Introduction to Computer Composition" by Heinrich Taube, and realized I should have done that a long time ago!
The Future of the Book: reading and annotating online
In the last few weeks, I happened to run into a few online products that look at the future of the book—that is, at how reading (and the things we normally do when we read) will change now that the digital world is so pervasive and accessible.
Book Summary: HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
HTML5 Canvas Cookbook is a new publication from Packt Publishing that discusses in detail the new drawing functionalities the HTML5 canvas element makes available.
Setting up the new 'staticfiles' app on Django 1.3
Even though I've been using Django 1.3 for a while now, I've been holding off on some of its new features, such as the new way to handle static files via a new app called (guess what) staticfiles.
Special issue of CMJ DVD on livecoding
The latest issue of the Computer Music Journal is now available, and it includes a DVD full of livecoding performances and demonstrations.
2011
Article: Thought and Performance, Live Coding Music, Explained to Anyone
I bookmarked this article on createdigitalmusic.com a while ago (it's from July 2010) and ran into it again today.
Using Impromptu to visualize RSS feeds
Some time ago, I was experimenting with the processing and display of RSS feeds within Impromptu, and as a result, I built a small app that retrieves the news feed from The Guardian online and displays it on a canvas.
Towards a conceptual model for the domain of sculpture
For the next two years, I'll be collaborating with the Art of Making project.
Upgrading to Lion: tips and tricks
I've finally decided to upgrade my Mac operating system from Snow Leopard (10.6.8) to Lion (10.7.2).
Seminar: Tagore digital editions and Bengali textual computing
Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri gave a very interesting talk yesterday on the scope, methods, and aims of 'Bichitra' (literally, 'the various'), the ongoing project for an online variorum edition of the complete works of Rabindranath Tagore in English and Bengali.
Django B_project available on gitHub
UPDATE 2021-10-21: the code and project resources mentioned in this post have been archived
Article: Algorithmic Composition: Computational Thinking in Music
An article by Michael Edwards on algorithmic composition was published last month in the Communications of the ACM journal.
Luc Steels on creating artificial semiotic systems
In this post, I'm presenting an organized version of the notes I've taken after reading a beautiful paper by Luc Steels titled "The Symbol Grounding Problem has been solved.
Event: THATcamp Kansas and Digital Humanities Forum
THATcamp Kansas and the Digital Humanities Forum took place last week at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, which is part of the University of Kansas in beautiful Lawrence.
Getting lost in the world of Laputa
I'm certainly not an anime expert, but after spending a couple of months in Japan last year, I started developing an appreciation for this form of art.
First steps with Canvas and HTML5
I've been postponing experimenting with HTML5 for quite a while, so today I finally set aside a few hours to play with it.
Inspecting an ontology with RDFLib
RDFLib (homepage) is a solid and comprehensive RDF programming kit for Python.
Workshop on Live Coding @ RMLL-11
I just got back from Strasbourg, France, where I gave a talk about my experience with live coding and Impromptu at the Cultures et Arts Libres Workshop, part of the 2011 Libre Software Meeting.
Event: Livecoding 'Fjords' in Paris & Strasbourg
New song called 'Fjords': ambient electronica scales on a rollercoaster.
Event: Digital Humanities conference 2011
Last week I attended the Digital Humanities 2011 international conference at Stanford.
I just came across this interesting article by Brian Eno.
Bjork redefines the musician's product with 'Biophilia' album/app
I've been reading online that Icelandic artist Björk is once again pushing the boundaries of experimental music by releasing a new album, Biophilia, which will be composed of both music and interactive media in the form of an iPad app:
I hadn't realized that Chrome has a whole bunch of invisible experimental settings that you can turn on just by going to "about:flags".
DJFacet: a faceted browser for Django
DJFacet is a pluggable module for the Django web application framework that allows you to navigate the data in your web app using an approach based on 'facets'.
Hack4Europe! - Europeana hackathon roadshow, June 2011
Europeana is a multilingual digital collection containing more than 15 million resources that lets you explore Europe's history from ancient times to the modern day.
The new Livecoding Error Hook in Impromptu
Impromptu 2.5 has been out for a while now, but I never realized it contained this handy new feature: an 'error hook'.
I went to SouthBank for the Ether festival the other night and caught two very inspiring performances by Anna Meredith and James Blake (among others).
RDF programming with AllegroCL and AllegroGraph
Allegro Common Lisp (Wikipedia) is a commercial implementation of the Common Lisp programming language developed by Franz Inc.
A Space Odyssey Live with Philharmonia Orchestra
I went to the SouthBank Centre the other night to see Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey performed live with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Sound Reasoning: an open educational resource
I came across this resource by chance—it's a complete tutorial on musical analysis by Anthony Brandt and Robert McClure.
An alternative to the 'play' macro: 'iplay' and 'with-instrument'
The other day I was thinking: when I use the play macro in Impromptu (video tutorial), in my head it's already obvious which virtual instrument I want to play.
A few useful Linked Data resources
I've done a bit of semantic web work in the last couple of weeks, which gave me a chance to better explore the current landscape around this topic.
'Show us your screens': new Live Coding documentary
A nice documentary about live coding practice by Louis McCallum and Davy Smith.
Survey of Pythonic tools for RDF and Linked Data programming
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a data model and language that is quickly gaining momentum in the open-data and data-integration worlds.
Installing PIL on Djangostack 1.1.1/1.2/1.3
The popular Python Imaging Library (PIL) adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter.
What is the reaper time in Impromptu?
I came across this information while reading the Kontakt 4 documentation, and I thought it was useful to pass along.
Python links (and more) 7/2/11
This post contains a collection of various interesting things I've encountered over the last couple of weeks.
Opening a Finder window from Impromptu (or how to use the AppleScript bridge)
Imagine you have a bunch of audio samples you want to load up while live coding with Impromptu, but you can't remember exactly their names.
Live-processing is a Processing clone with live coding capabilities.
Setting up Django Registration
Django's admin framework includes the basic functionalities for logging in and out of the admin site, but if you're building a so-called 'social' application and want people to be able to sign-up, log in and thus benefit from additional site functionalities then you need to use a more generic 'registration' application.
The Digital Story of Nativity and other inspiring stuff
Here are a few inspiring things I came across recently.
Working toward meritocracy in Italy
It's no news that thousands of Italian researchers have left their home country in order to pursue their careers; what is news, however, is that we now have a scientific study shedding light on this phenomenon.
2010
"Turborobot" is a happy, high-energy electronica piece with a distinct electro-disco vibe that throws back to the 80s.
Event: Livecoding Xmas event @ Goldsmith College, London
Recording from Thursday Club Xmas party at Goldsmiths college, London.
JMusic: music composition in Java
jMusic is a project designed to provide composers and software developers with a library of compositional and audio processing tools.
Installing Mercurial on OSx 10.6.5
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool.
Clojure is a quite recent programming language that's becoming popular among developers; the big selling point is that it's functional and dynamically typed (such as Lisp or Python), but since it uses Java's Virtual Runtime as its platform it also accommodates the needs of the many developers have been growing up in the Java world.
Preloading stuff in django's interactive shell
Django's shell is a fantastic way to interact with all the components of your django application, eg when testing new functionalities or debugging a nasty error.
Last week I discovered the work of Ryoji Ikeda [official site] and soon got hooked up by it.
If you're coming from Lisp, and then start using Scheme (or the other way around) there are a few small differences between the two languages that it's useful to always keep in mind.
A video that may convince you that LISPers are a bit crazy
LISPers are a definitely a rather eccentric developers' community.
Ozric Tentacles live @ Islington Academy, London
The lineup featured Ed Wynne (guitar, synths), Ed's wife Brandi Wynne (bass, keyboards), Silas Wynne (synths, keyboards - Ed's son) and Oliver Seagle (drums, percussion).
Jeff Beck live at the Royal Albert Hall
Quite an amazing evening with Beck rocking the RAH out the other night; the man is well over 60 (born 24 June 1944) but still performs with great confidence and inventiveness.
Editing PDF metadata on OSx (ie: having the Kindle display the right title/author with pdfs)
One of the cool things you get to do with a Kindle is being able to access your pdf library on the go; however soon enough I ran into the problem of getting all the pdf files to show up with the right metadata, e.g.
This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers
"This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world....." I've never watched this 1976 classic - The Network - but after listening to the short clip below it's now high on my priority list.
Gmail's labels are great for they let you organize your constantly growing mailbox in a non-final way.
Amazon's Kindle is slowly changing my life
I've been very reluctant to buy the Amazon Kindle at first, but since I got it I've realized more and more that that was the right decision, and I'll tell you why.
Good news for livecoders: a new version of Impromptu is available (direct link to the 2.5 dmg package).
Book Summary: Where Mathematics Come From
"Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being" [amazon link] is a recent book by cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez, in which they argue that the origin of our mathematical ideas (even the most abstract and immaterial) is to be found in the materiality of our everyday experience.
Sometimes a picture is more eloquent than a thousand words.
NoDictionaries.com :: innovative way to read latin classics
NoDictionaries is a web app that makes it very easy to look up the meaning of words while reading a latin text.
Raphael: js library for Scalar Vector Graphics
I don't do much (web) front-end design usually, although often I find it vital to visualize my ideas using some sort of basic but functional UI-kit.
Musorg : tons of classical music for free
I found out about this via o'reilly radar's blog..
The Bad Plus - each time I listen to them I can't avoid thinking they're geniuses!
I spent a couple of days in Linz, Austria, visiting for the first time the Ars Electronica centre and the related festival which is happening these days.
Little brilliant music player: Pico Play
The purpose of Pico Play is very simple: don't get in the way.
KR workshop #2: introducing CIDOC-CRM and FRBR-OO
This is the second appointment with the knowledge representation seminar we're having at CCH (Kings College, London).
I tried installing django-cms, an open-source project from Switzerland's company Divio.
Knowledge Representation workshop @ CCH
Last month or so I started a Knowledge Representation workshop with my colleagues at CCH.
The power of django's Q objects
I've been spending some time today doing research on how to best use django's Q objects.
A spiced up version of the original space invaders from Taito.
Bernstein's Mass at Royal Festival Hall
The other day I went to a concert at the Southbank Centre in London, as part of the Leonard Bernstein season.
DjangoCon returned for its second year in Europe; the first as a wholly community-supported conference.
Good news, mythical Ozric Tentacles [official website] are going to have a number of gigs in the UK in the coming fall.
I just watched online a number of very inspiring performances from the the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), as part of the their recent Spring Concert.
ReBirth faithfully emulates dance music's three backbone devices: The Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 and 909 drum machines.
Have you ever edited a movie using the new iMovie 7 or 8?
Django Debug Toolbar 0.8 from Idan Gazit on Vimeo.
Creativity and personal mastery
By Srikumar S. Rao, who can be found also on TED talks.
Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools
A short movie about livecoding, Andrew Sorensen (creator of Impromptu), TOPLAP and other related stuff.
Links to CS 193P iPhone dev lectures
For some reasons the excellent slides and other course materials that used to be available on the CS 193P iPhone Application Development website have been removed..
If you've heard about the 'brain in a vat' thought experiment but never had the time to read more about it, this movie is a quite pleasant dramatisation of the argument!
Tale of tales: artistic interactive games from Belgium
Tale of Tales is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn in Belgium in 2002 (*).
I went to the National Museum of art in Osaka the other day, and saw a lot of inspiring stuff.
BBC article on interactive art at Goldsmith University (London)
An interesting BBC article about the interactive art being produced by Goldsmiths students.
Nanoloop is a mobile music software that provides all functionality you need to create nice electronic music.
Processing.js, iProcessing: javascript does everything for you!
First off - check out how cool is the little game below.
Impromptu: access the Wiki docs from the editor
When you're Impromptu-ing but don't know the meaning or syntax of a function, the usual thing to do is calling (help function-name) to get some help about that function, or (help function-name #t) if you want to see also the examples associated with it.
Some songs, I'll never forget. They are still giving me the shivers as they did when I was a kid.
I've never realized that among the many things Textmate does well there's also python debugging.
Event: livecoding session @ Anatomy Theatre, King's College, London
"Untitled 12" is an electronic music experiment performed via livecoding at the Anatomy Theatre, King's College, London.
Getting back to the ontological work..
I'll be working in Osaka for three months on ontologizing a couple of datasets with the help of Riichiro Mizoguchi.
The anti-internet saga continues
Now Italy's government is trying to bog down internet providers by making them responsible for the (supposedly) illicit contents published on the web.
MacBook: getting the backlight to behave the way you want
Ever wanted to switch the keyboard's backlight on even if there's daylight?
Livecoding night @ King's College coming up
If you happen to be around London next Thursday (14th) you might be interested in joining us for an evening of livecoding!
A bookmarklet for searching delicious
This has been long overdue for me. A way to quickly search delicious.com without relying on third-party apps (which often you have to pay for).
Yesterday I finalized a song from last year..
Links on miscellaneous topics from the last week or so:
A new experiment, "Xanadu". Requires patience as the complex song base builds before revealing its most interesting and evolving sonic layers.
2009
Lots of patches available for Zebra you won't risk getting bored during these holidays!
Pyglet: multimedia library for python
UPDATE 30/03/1: Just realized that unfortunately pyglet doesn't play well with the latest 64bit architecture of oSX.
Creating Questionnaires with Django
Simple and useful application from Aperte: Django Questionnaire.
Livecoding: Kali (an experiment with Impromptu)
An ambient musical experiment created with Impromptu, designed to transport the listener to Kali, a serene Japanese musical garden.
The Four Pillars of the Ethical Company
Some deeply inspiring and wise words I found in the mystical Guitar Craft's website, which is not a religious sect but one of the creations of unconventional 60's guitar hero Robert Fripp (best know for his work with King Crimson).
This is a really cool feature of django that I've never explored, so I though I'd made a post about it so to remind myself of using it more often!
Graphics over code in Impromptu
Andrew Sorensen posted some code in the Impromptu mailing list showing how to add graphics (and various other things) on top of a code 'image'.
Django 1.1: LogOut links apparently broken
I lost quite a few hours on this, but the solution was simple.
Visualizing Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Shameless self-plug: some time ago I made an alternative visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Hey there - this morning I checked out a nice screencast by Ben Swift and was struck by the if-mod construct he's using.
Yolk is a Python tool for obtaining information about packages installed by distutils, setuptools and easy_install and querying packages on PyPI (Python Package Index a.k.a.
LilyPond: music notation for everyone
LilyPond is a free piece of software for generating nice musical sheets from specifications written on a text file.
Neat little project that will speed up your data modeling using django: think up an application model, formalize it by drawing a UML diagram using the freely available ArgoUML, and have it translated into django models automatically.
Impromptu & Zebra: a perfect match!
I've been having so much fun using Impromptu with the Zebra audiounit lately (I just got the demo version for now).
Installing PyGraphviz [tested on OSx Leopard]
PyGraphviz is a Python interface to the Graphviz graph layout and visualization package.
Among various other useful freebies, Rogue Amoeba software is giving away for free Pong Saver, a nice little screensaver that emulates this classic arcade game...
[Update 14/09/11 : If you're using Django 1.3 you can also skip point -4- below, as the 'cut' filter is included in Django by default now!] [Update 15/2/10 : I added a small example that shows how to make this work with Inlines too, see point 6 below...] [Update 18/10/09 : please note that the code has been tested on django1.1!
Event: Livecoding at the Shunt, London & a few lessons learned
Initially conceived as 'Voices Slowly Talk To Me,' this piece quickly took on a life of its own, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of livecoding.
Using jquery's autocomplete in Django's admin: what about 'inlines'?
I still haven't solved this problem entirely, and I'll tell you why.
Just wanted to flag up SO-Clone, an interesting project on googleCode that wants to replicate the fundamental functionalities of Stack Overflow.
Using Django-MPTT: lessons learned...
Here we are again with Django and MPTT 0.3 (I already have other posts about it).
Learning iPhone development while sitting on your couch
I guess this is just part of the huge e-learning revolution happening in our century..
Weird 'example.com' urls appearing on my django site...
It all started when I added the get_absolute_url method on my model objects:
MySQL-Python and Apple OSX 10.5 (Leopard)
UPDATE 30/12/09 : Snow Leopard and most recent versions of MySQL-python have broken the recipe below: you'd better check this blog post for an updated version (it worked for me).
Satire you won't be able to listen to in Italy
I couldn't help passing this on (from BBC's Mock of the Week):
Social Reference Manager: Mendeley
A colleague mentioned the existence of Mendeley to me - a new and free reference manager.
This is a follow up to the previous post on managing and visualizing trees using django.
Just found out about FLuid through the THisWeekInDjango podcast.
Representing hierarchical data with Django and MPTT
Apparently, you've got two options for managing hierarchical data in django - django-mptt and django-treebeard.
Here's a neat trick I got from my friend Geoffroy: open up your preferred Javascript console and type in this command:
If you're into humanities computing and NLP, you might want to check out the eAqua project.
While continuing the interminable search for the ideal python editor, I run into three really useful libraries for scraping information off webpages:
The Roman Port Networks Project is a collaboration between 30 European partners, examining the connections between Roman ports across the Mediterranean.
Algorithmic music: first steps
I finally managed to find time to play more seriously with the fantastic impromptu - here's a first screencast, it doesn't sound that good but it made my day!
I found an interesting article on the SEP this morning, it seemed to me well written and clearly argumented.
Understanding Google's BigTable
BigTable is google's proprietary data storage system - and that's what you've got to learn if you want to work with the Google Application Engine (a web application environment by which you can make use of Google's powerful IT infrastructure free of charge).
Share and browse links with MultiUrl
MultiURL allows you to combine multiple links into one short link that you can quickly and easily share with your friends, colleagues, on your blog or any other website.
Visualizing Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ
A classical piece from Bach, delivered in a rather unusual way.
WordSift [http://www.wordsift.com/] is a tool that was created primarily for teachers.
Snippet to load stuff quickly in the Django shell
Sometimes you end up testing out things a lot using the handy django shell, but every time you've got to repeat the same commands to load all the necessary models, utils etc.
How to get the iPhone to stop automatic back ups
This is a problem that irritated me so many times - I'm so glad I found a solution now, thanks to this blog post.
Python pitfall: Passing Mutable Objects as Default Args
I have a long and nested lists of parameters to throw out with a django template, but the visualization routine in the template processes them better if the parameters are ordered two by two.
I really dig the concept - but after playing with it for a little I think that the whole thing is still too convoluted (lots of forms to fill in, popups etc.).
The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass.
RDFlib is a Python library for working with RDF, a simple yet powerful language for representing information.
SoundManager 2 makes it easier to play sounds using Javascript
By wrapping and extending Flash 8's sound API, SoundManager 2 brings solid audio functionality to Javascript.
A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha
It's the new brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, author of Mathematica.
An offline copy of the django docs can be quite helpful if you find yourself doing development work without an internet connection.
Spread the word: the Italian circus goes to the EU
I think I'll start using this mostly technical blog to help in spreading the word about the incredible political situation in Italy.
The UIF file extension stands for Universal Image Format.
Augmented reality with MIT's \"Sixth Sense\" game-changing wearable tech
link to the full video here
Academic Earth - hours of free lectures online
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.
NetNewsWire - Great RSS reader for mac/iphone!
For my online and offline RSS needs I've been using Shrook for a while - but since recently I got an iPhone the issue of syncing it with my mac gracefully has become quite important.
DB visualize : The Universal Database Tool
I've been searching for something similar for a long time.
Faceted Browsing: a conceptual map
UPDATE 8/6/11: I uploaded an improved version of the map Faceted search (navigation, or browsing) is a technique for accessing a collection of information represented using a faceted classification, allowing users to explore by filtering available information.
GAE SQL designer is a simple app that allows you to Draw E-R designs, Edit tables and rows, Manage keys, Create relations (FK constraints), Save & Load designs and Import DB schemas.
TextMate software "brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors.
MacPython/Leopard - PythonInfo Wiki
Some people have legitimate reasons for wanting to install IDLE on Leopard.
Using the OS X Terminal Application
This tips page provides a detailed introduction to using the unix command line that the Terminal application provides.
Pysmell - Python auto-complete - works with TextMate too!
One of the reasons that kept me away (sigh) from TextMate is the lack of autocompletion support..
Komodo-Edit :: a nice free python editor!
Finding the perfect IDE for a programming language is always an ongoing process - even more if your language is python - I've been happily using eclipse/pydev for a while now, but recently I ran into KomodoEdit and I liked it.
Google Flags Whole Internet As Malware
Google mysteriously breaks and you can't surf the web anymore; seems like a remote scenario that you'd never take that seriously.
Guitar Rig 3 Demo - Audio Line-In glitch fixed!!
The other day I decided to have a go with the already-famous Guitar Rig 3 (a music production software for guitarists, including amplifiers, effects etc etc).
Python easy_install - The PEAK Developers' Center
Easy Install is a python module bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages.
How to make a (Mac) screen saver that shows your uptime
Found an interesting blog post that shows how to use QuartzComposer and a few patches to create a screensaver for your mac...
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Are we gonna say goodbye to the keyboard too?
MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections
MIT student Anita Lillies shows off her project Music Box:
Phenotype: any observable characteristic or trait of an organism: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior.
2008
Quotation from Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields.
Comparing programming languages
Imagine you've got to set to lowercase a string...is it shorter to write it in php or in perl?
The British Wittgenstein Society gets started
The British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) is opening its doors (well online at least): it'll add up to the already existing Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society (ALWS), International German Ludwig Wittgenstein Society (ILWG) and North American Wittgenstein Society (NAWS).
Social Innovation Camp in London
The Social Innovation Camp aims at bringing together some of the best of the UK and Europe's web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.
Book Summary: Knowledge Technologies
A new interesting book on Knowledge Technologies from Nick Milton is available online.
I was asked to give an example of lisp+ajax, so once I prepared it I thought it could be of help to other people too :-)
A new version is now online - I reckon it will be one of the latest ones!
It's nice when a few people's interests happen to converge.
Got a headache by trying to use the flash version of Prefuse, which is called Flare, in the Flex2 builder environment (which I found out, you can get for free if you're a student).
Humanities Computing and web2.0
Last week I spent two interesting days in London, at the Epistemic Networks and GRID Web 2.0 for Arts and Humanities workshop.
How semantic is the semantic web?
Just read this article thanks to a colleague: I share pretty much everything it says about the SW, so I though it wouldn't be too bad to pass it on to the next reader.
2007
No double meaning here - Ijust love getting on a train and finding myself in new places and situations all of a sudden.
I haven't written much in the last days - been busy writing a new browser for kmi's semantic web services team, and moving on my phd thesis during the rest of the time.
Day one - part time job - semantic web services.
Jamendo: free and quality music online
Jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music.
Zotero - is the browser enough to do research?
Zotero, a personal research assistant, directly into your browser.
I've been very happy to help out Cyrus Harmon debugging his Nuclblog package to make it work with lispworks too (he developed it using sbcl)...
It's not the only semweb repository out there, but for sure it's the more interesting.
I have no time to write anymore! The phd is sucking me down..
MAMP - php development made REALLY easy
Basically, you go to the site, download 100megs of stuff, move it to your applications folder (of course, I'm talking about a mac) and run it.
30th International Wittgenstein Symposium
I am going to talk at the 30th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 5-11 August 2007, Kirchberg, Austria.
Article Summmary: Sketch of The Analytical Engine.
I recently read the original article of Charles Babbage - which deals with the work he and Lady Ada Augusta Countess of Lovelace did on the Analytical Engine, one of the (mechanical) predecessors of the modern computer - thanks to a blog post from David Dodds.
Conference: SASO 2007 on Self-Organizing systems
Reminds me of Maturana's ideas.... It's the First IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Boston, Mass., USA, July 9-11, 2007.
Discovery: philosophy in the digital Era
It looks like the semantic web rumor is spreading out fast, also in the philosophy circles:
I read from Bill Clementson's blog that AquaMacs Emacs 1.0 (is an Aqua-native build of the powerful Emacs text editor) has made its appearance during the last days - let's see how many new users it will conquer!!!
Article: 'The Semantic Web: The Origins of Artificial Intelligence Redux'
A very interesting article from Harry Halpin, whose work lies at the borderline between history of science (of computer science especially, I gather) and (Semantic) Web.
It's nice to see the ancient philosophy keeping up with the new technologies - shows how the soul of philosophy is immortal, and linked to men instead of publication mechanisms.
It's the best-looking online game I've ever seen - stunning graphics that resemble a "normal" game: it's GET THE GLASS!
Lispdoc - Online Lisp Documentation Search
I read this on Planet Lisp:
During the last days, I almost switched from Lispworks (too many tabs, too many things in general) back to MCL (essential, fast, with a powerful meta-dot command).
I'm afraid this is just in italian, for now.
Modeling Representations (take 2)
I wrote something in the last weeks about the difficulties related to the modeling of representations and their contents.
It's an interesting web-journal written by Henry Gladney, which deals with various subjects from document digitalization, encoding, semantics and in general the revolution linked to the digital world.
I'm probably one of the last ones getting there, but I decided to do my best not to use Microsoft Word for editing my phd thesis.
A really nice application to browse conceptually related egyptian artifacts, with many features: visual navigation, possibility of creating personal "libraries" of artifacts, typed entities.
Ecto : multiple blog manager and WYSIWYG editor
Read an article about the "must-have" applications for the mac on slashdot - incredible how they haven't inserted QUICKSILVER, which is a revolutionary launchbar program in my opinion..
Internet research ethics: a first journal
I'm busy writing an article these days, which sort of feels like being in a long and tiring trip to the underworld..
It's been three days that I'm struggling with concepts of content, form, representation and so on..
NINES : SW faceted browser - by SpecLab
I tried it out last night, and the interface seems really rich and powerful.
Following suggestions which turned out to be really good, I've found myself having a lot of fun with the JQuery library.
Only £120 for students!!! It's the International Lisp conference 2007
Hi guys! A new philosophical search engine is available out there.
Turning the pages of literature
It's a new service offered by the British Library, consisting on a Shockwave app that lets you flick through the scanned pages of various authors' works.
News for all the guitarists and music technology lovers: the Source Audio Hot Hand motion control for guitar effects.
The works in the Internet Classics Archive come from two major sources, an archive of unformatted electronic texts from the Eris Project at Virginia Tech and the Perseus Project from Tufts University.
MacFUse - Gmail-gigs on the desktop
Got this news from here :
2006
There's a class of applications that conquered a big slice of new mac users, after the appearance of OSX: the applications coming from UNIX.
Quite an intense experience getting everything to work properly with lisp and Hunchentoot (a CM web-server), but I succeeded eventually yahoooo ....
I'll be posting more about this - it's a very lisp-ed period of life.
A nice alternative to BBedit (which beyond being not free, takes a long time to load on my machine - too many plugins installed maybe) is Smultron.
Wow half past ten Friday night, I had a paper to finish and now I feel like my eyes are getting lost into the screen...
Knowledge Elicitation: playing with cards
If you want to work with knowledge, you need firstly to 'extract' it.
Pathway: Wiki Semantic Navigator
Just found a very cool app that lets you organize and store the navigation on any mediawiki site, Pathway.
The Nora Project aims at putting together a big pool of digital texts in the humanities in order to develop and test data mining techniques specific to this domain.
MultimediaN semantic navigator
Winner of the Semantic Web challenge 2006, the MultimediaN e-Culture demonstrator looks at
Just read an article by John Markoff, in the New York Times.
Free learning resources from the OU
The Open Learn project has been launched not many weeks ago:
PhD life.. it's easy to lose track of what you're looking for, and even more, of where you're coming from.
Since I've got to annotate and reorganize a large set of text data, I guess I will have to visualize them too at some point.
Semantic Wikipedia: some issues
Just went to a talk by Denny Vrandecic, one of the people who developed the Semantic MediaWiki.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is a very nice venue, and its paintings even better.
A Random Walk through the 20th Century
I wanted to post something about this for a long time, but never got down to it.
Compendium vs Nestor - knowledge organization tools
Spent some time trying to figure out the key features of two knowledge-organization tools, Compendium and Nestor.
Article Summary: Automatist storyteller systems and the shifting sands of story
A few notes after reading a seminal paper (1997) by MIT researcher Glorianna Davenport on 'storyteller systems'.
I went to an interesting talk today about the future of library e-services, especially in the light of Web 2.0 technologies.
What a treat to find a hidden AI gem in your computer.
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