Staticfree Blog

New photos in robots/:

Things you have to do with a battlebot for charity. Hole in power switch.

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I'm certainly not the first to come up with this idea, but I think it would be pretty swell to have a Lojban ↔ RDF converter. (For those playing along at home, unaware of what I'm babbling about, I'll try and make it understandable to as wide an audience as I can).

Lojban and RDF are more alike than you might imagine. One is a constructed spoken language intended to convey ideas clearly and unambiguously, while the other is a machine-readable language for describing things and ideas. Save the "spoken" bit, they're both of the same mindset: create a way to communicate (between people, machines, whatever) without all the crap that makes communication confusing.

There are a few levels to this. First off, to the skeptics: of course one cannot directly translate any arbitrary RDF to Lojban. Both Lojban and RDF provide languages for discussing objects and ideas. However, the meaning of those languages is up to the user to interpret (but is clearly defined in dictionaries and namespace declarations). So, besides the semantics of parsing the two languages, the real meat of a project working with the two is a mapping, a translation.

The best example of this that I can immediately think of is a Lojban mapping of the FOAF namespace. Consider, for example:

RDF

  <foaf:Person rdf:ID="steve">
    <foaf:name>Steve Pomeroy</foaf:name>
    <foaf:knows>
      <foaf:Person>
         <foaf:name>Carolyn</foaf:name>
      </foaf:Person>
    </foaf:knows>
  </foaf:Person>

The English equivalent would be something like, "I am describing a person (#steve). #steve's name is Steve Pomeroy. #steve knows a person named Carolyn.". The next step is to do a similar mapping into Lojban. For this, we will use the Lojban "se slabu" (which translates to "is old/familiar/well-known to", "prenu" which means "is a person" and "cmene" for name. For convenience, I'm translating the RDF identifier rdf:ID="steve" (which can be expressed as "#steve") to the Lojban "la stiv".

Lojban

la stiv. prenu .ije la stiv.se cmene zoi gy. Steve Pomeroy gy. .ije la stiv. se slabu da .ije da prenu .ije da se cmene zoi gy. Carolyn gy.

This parses, using the ever-handy jbofihe, to:

[₁(₂[prenu1 (person(s)) :] la stiv. [NAME])₂ [is, does] <<₃prenu being person(s)>>₃]₁ .i `.' je and [<sub>4</sub>(<sub>5</sub>[cmene2 (named thing(s)) :] la stiv. [NAME])<sub>5</sub> [is, does] <<<sub>6</sub>se cmene being named>><sub>6</sub> (<sub>7</sub>[cmene1 (name(s)) :] zoi gy Steve Pomeroy gy ?)<sub>7</sub>]<sub>4</sub> .i `.' je and [₈(₉[slabu2 (observer) :] la stiv. [NAME])₉ [is, does] <<₁₀se slabu being observer(s) of familiarity>>₁₀ (₁₁[slabu1 (familiar thing(s)) :] da X)₁₁]₈ .i `.' je and [<sub>12</sub>(<sub>13</sub>[prenu1 (person(s)) :] da X)<sub>13</sub> [is, does] <<<sub>14</sub>prenu being person(s)>><sub>14</sub>]<sub>12</sub> .i `.' je and [₁₅(₁₆[cmene2 (named thing(s)) :] da X)₁₆ [is, does] <<₁₇se cmene being named>>₁₇ (₁₈[cmene1 (name(s)) :] zoi gy Carolyn gy ?)₁₈]₁₅

You should be able to see that this isn't any where as optimized a way of saying it as possible (it doesn't make use of Lojban's subject context), but it conveys the exact same information as the RFD encoding (keeping things like "#steve" ≡ "la stiv." in mind).

The first step is to create a framework for creating direct translations between the two. Starting out with simple namespaces that can be directly mapped, as was shown above. Mappings should probably be encoded in RDF in order to please the sick and twisted. Eventually, features of Lojban and RDF will have to be taken into account and then translated/transformed. Logical constructors could be used for sequences, subjects can be omitted when redundant, etc.

Typing this at ~100KPH en-route to Rochester, NY. I'm traveling with Leighton and so I felt it was a fun chance to attempt to share my 'net connection with him. The easiest way to do such is to let him connect to my laptop via WiFi while my computer is connected via my cell phone. It's a bit of voodoo magic to get it going, but once it's up - it's pretty keen.

'Net → cell provider → cell phone via. GPRS → my laptop via. Bluetooth → his laptop via. NAT and ad-hoc WiFi.

See the complete entry to get the technical details on how to set it up in Linux.

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New photos in Rochester/:

Large ice crystals formed on all the plants this morning, due to extremely high humidity (thick fog), no precipitation and sub-zero temperatures. Nature can be so beautiful.

I updated my Rawdog to OPML exporter (ver 1.4) to now support categories. You can add OPML categories to your Rawdog file by using the following syntax:

           ### kittens
           feed 60 http://purr.example.com/index.xml
           feed 45 http://kitten.example.com/feed.rdf

           ### news
           feed 60 http://news.example.com/feed
           feed 45 http://morenews.example.com/news.xml

Where the ### comment designates the words after it to be the heading. Not complicated, but quite functional. I also removed the dependency on XML::Simple, as I don't really like using that module for XML generation. It should now be able to run on any out-of-the-box Perl installation.

I've noticed a number of "beta" websites popping up recently. Friendster, Orkut, Flickr, Peopleaggregator, and Plink just to name a few.

Now, beta websites have been around for some time. Cute little animated construction equipment icons used to be all the rage. "this page under construction" (only about 5,250,000 hits for "under construction" on Google) generally accompanied the icons. But, this "beta" seems to be a bit different: all the sites are related to social networking and only are of much value if a critical mass of people can be reached.

Is "beta" used to entice people into thinking they can be amongst the specially-invited few who (like Orkut and Friendster) get to participate in the website? Or is it simply a disclaimer warning users of potential instability? I can only imagine a bit of both - especially with Orkut which used invitation-only exclusivity to lure users in. They remind me of the those, "you might have already won! [but in all probability you didn't]" snail-mail ads - it's the little phrase that gets your interest.

I hope this trend fades soon and these services come out of beta. Either that, or they accept the notion that the world is still in alpha and hasn't even gotten to beta yet.