Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Registration for the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference is now open. This is a pretty cool conference. At least last year it was. The line up this year looks just as good. This year I’ll be giving a talk on how we are using Semantic MediaWiki at Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. I’m pretty excited about this. This will be my first time presenting on this topic and there is a lot to talk about.

But it’s not all about me, I didn’t know this unitl today but it looks like Steven Forth and Nell Davie will also be talking about SMW. I’ll be sure to catch their talk on this topic as well as many others I hope to see there. And of course a must see talk will be Kent Bimson’s update on Year 3 of his project down at Cape Canaveral. Kent’s the one that got me hooked on all this semantic stuff. His project is pretty interesting and it’s a working solution not just a demo.

Continuing to learn Flex 3… What to code?, oh, what to code? Why turtles of course! So here is yet another demonstration of simple images rendered with Turtle graphics. Still an inspiration after all these years, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve ported turtle code over to a new environment just to have a little fun. Oh yes you can have the source too!

Of course I have additional motivation. This is also a demo I have put together for a the class I’m teaching. “Building tools for creative practice” although the course is not primarily about Flex or Turtle graphics I’m hoping this might be a nice little diversion we might take tomorrow night.

What are turtles you ask? Well you might check out the original book or go see Steve Kurtz, who first exposed me to the inner workings funny critters.

I am writng this entry using a desktop blog editor called “Bee”.  Bee is a sample AIR application from Adobe labs. So far I really like what I see in the “about to be released” Flex 3.  The big news I assume is the introuction of AIR  (Check out the cool video).  So the same application development  environment you use to build flash apps fo rthe web can be used to build desktop apps outside the borwser. Nice.   I’m not sure if Flex (mxml and actionsscript 3) counts as a “4gl” or even “5gl” lanuage environment (so who’s counting anyway?) but it feels very state of the art to me. I like it.  By the way the way there is a reasoable FAQ for AIR here.   (Alas, I fear there is no spell checker is the Bee thing…) Ok here we go posting…

Attempting to integrate my wp blog with gallery (photo gallery)

testing 1 2 3… this post is from my pocket pc over wifi via mobiblogr

- Posted by MobiBlogr from mobile phone.

Well it’s only been about two years of blogger dormancy… Don’t know why, can’t explain it. Wont. But here you go. Odds an ends I find on the internet. Things I create and share and the occasional rant. Got to have those.

And now I fiddle with Wordpress and I’m hosted. No more Linux box in the basement. I’ve got scads of bandwidth and tons of storage. Seems tooo good to be true. I’ll let those nice people at Dreamhost manage my box. The novelty of hacking my own Linux server has worn off and I’m happy, no ecstatic to let someone else worry about back up, power, connectivity, etc. blah blah blah woo hoo!