Blog
Books
Talks
Follow
Me
Search

Larsblog

Cantina

"Cantina," the sign said, next to a staircase leading up to the first floor. We looked at each other, wondering what sort of place this might be. Not knowing what to make of a place from the facade had been a constantly recurring problem for us in Japan. In other parts of the world this was not an issue, but Japan is different. Eventually, we shrugged, and decided to give it a try. ...

Read | 2008-04-01 12:58 | 1 comment(s)

Some thoughts on OOXML

I joined ISO's subcommittee 34 (JTC1/SC34) in 2001 to work on Topic Maps, and was somewhat bemused when OOXML burst upon the committee in 2007. I had more than enough to work on with Topic Maps, and so tried to stay as far away from OOXML as possible, since I sensed that it would be easy to pulled into spending lots of effort on this without really achieving anything. Now the story of OOXML in SC34 is approaching the moment of truth, however, and so I've been forced to make up my mind. Having done that, I figured I would have my say on the subject once and for all. (And I'd like to point out that this is my personal opinion, and very much not that of my employer.) ...

Read | 2008-03-27 13:55 | 5 comment(s)

Nude beer

I'm still not quite done with the subject of Japanese beer experiences, and have a few postings left in that series. This will most likely be the shortest of them all. It was prompted by Stonch's recent posting on dodgy pump clips. This isn't a pump clip, but it's still dodgy enough to merit a mention. ...

Read | 2008-03-16 12:38 | 30 comment(s)

10 tips on presenting a case study

One night I couldn't sleep I wrote a whole blog entry in my mind on how to do a good case study presentation on paper. I quite liked it, and so wrote it down on paper, and that paper has been lying around for a year or two now. Since the Topic Maps 2008 conference is coming up I figured this was a good time to finally post it, as the speakers are likely to be struggling with such presentations just now over the Easter break. ...

Read | 2008-03-15 20:58 | 9 comment(s)

Ringnes taste indicators

The biggest Norwegian brewer, Ringnes, a while ago introduced taste indicators on their beers to help consumers judge the taste of a given beer before trying it. The indicator system describes the taste in terms of sweetness, fruitiness, and bitterness, using for each a circle divided into eight sectors to show how much there is of each of these. ...

Read | 2008-02-14 11:22 | 2 comment(s)

VDNKh

I've hinted a couple of times in previous blog entries about "surprises" in Moscow, and the biggest of these was without question VDNKh, which has to rank near the top of the list of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. Unfortunately, all of my photos of it were lost, and never recovered, so the photos on this page are shared photos from Flickr. ...

Read | 2008-02-03 13:42 | 1 comment(s)

New camera

On Tuesday I went to the local camera store and came out with a Canon EOS 400D, sold in the US under the idiotic name of Canon Digital Rebel XTi. I'd done quite a bit of reading at dpreview.com beforehand, focusing especially on the lowest-cost DSLR cameras from Canon (the one I bought), Nikon (the D40x), and Olympus (the E-410). From what I was able to gather, they produce images of much the same quality, although the Olympus was perhaps slightly behind and needed its settings tweaked a bit. The Canon came with a poor lens by default. Other than that, they seemed pretty much equal. ...

Read | 2008-01-25 20:36 | 4 comment(s)

To DSLR or not DSLR

I started my digital photograpy career with a crappy Olympus camera I got for Christmas from my father. The camera may have been crappy, but I took lots of photos with it, and hugely enjoyed it. The trouble was that a lot of the photos came out really poorly, there was no zoom, and so on. So eventually I bought myself a higher-level compact digital from Canon, which I was really happy with. ...

Read | 2008-01-20 00:31 | 7 comment(s)

Blog metadata in Topic Maps

I've been thinking for a while of representing metadata about the blog in Topic Maps, and Robert Cerny brought this up again with his request for a way to get metadata about the entries through a web service. This would of course be a very cool thing to play around with, and having someone actually use the result would be even more fun, so clearly this needs to be done. ...

Read | 2008-01-19 12:47 | 7 comment(s)

On topic types in Topic Maps

A discussion on Svein's blog regarding FreeBase and a comparison of its data model with that of Topic Maps brought up some interesting question regarding Topic Maps that I think are worth discussing. ...

Read | 2008-01-16 18:13 | 4 comment(s)

<< Previous Next >>