Larsblog

Three Kingdoms is a Chinese "novel" written in the 12th century based on the events of the so-called "Warring States" period of Chinese history (that is, the 3rd century). It is extremely famous in China, in fact, the Rough Guide to China claims pretty much every Chinese knows the story. Personally, I'd never heard of it before I started preparing for a holiday there in 2004. (Yes, this is also a posting that's been sitting around and suddenly got posted now.) ...

As I wrote in an earlier posting I was in Beijing to teach Topic Maps to the developers of a Chinese start-up. The details of their product are secret right now, but the experience of teaching Topic Maps in this environment is quite unique. This posting has been sitting around unpublished for a long time, and I just stumbled over it now, but decided to publish it. ...

The title of this posting probably sounds like a silly joke, but Moss is famous in Norway for "Mosselukta" (the Moss smell). As soon as I stepped off the train I could not only smell it, but also see the factory chimney from which it issued. The cellulose factory of Borregaard is located in the centre of Moss, and spews out sulphurous fumes that smell faintly like rotten eggs. It used to really stink up the whole town, but in the last decade or so it has gotten better. Still, not the best conditions for trying a microbrewery with outdoor serving, but having spent 40 minutes (and 200 kroner) on the train, I gave it a try anyway. ...

I've been doing some thinking about identity lately, but to explain myself I need to first get across the concept of an equivalence class. Equivalence classes for me are one of the wonders of modern mathemathics, in the sense that it's a concept that's brilliantly simple, obvious, and elegant, and at the same time incredibly useful. ...

My friend and Ontopian colleague Geir Ove Grønmo (yes, he of the fridge and the typed data) has started his very own beer blog. He's a dedicated home brewer who has been brewing for at least three years already, and even won a first prize in the Norwegian home brewing championship before he started brewing stuff that was too hard-core to appeal to the judges. ...

Most people who are not into beer tend to divide beer into two types: normal and dark, and they'll tell you things like "I don't like dark beer," which makes no sense. It's like saying "I don't like red-coloured drinks". There are lots and lots of different kinds of dark beers, and they all taste different. So you may find that you like many of them, or some of them, or, theoretically, none of them, but as long as you think that "dark beers" share more than just the colour, you are clearly not in a position to judge. ...

The Norwegian Topic Maps Users' Group had one of its irregular meetings tonight, with talks on various subjects, plus updates on the administrivia of the users' group itself. It was of course followed by beer and socializing at a local bar. ...

I got some questions about how CXTM actually works, so I thought I'd put together a little introduction to it. If you want to create a CXTM file for one of your own topic maps you can actually do this in Omnigator with the export plug-in. ...

One thing that's really needed is a conformance test suite for XTM 2.0, which can be used by implementors to verify that they've actually gotten their implementations right. Of course, it could also be used by customers to verify that the implementation they are thinking of buying actually conforms to the standard. This is becoming more important as the hype around Topic Maps grows, and vendors start claiming they support Topic Maps without even knowing what it is. ...

The TM/XML syntax is easy to understand for humans, and easy to process with XSLT, but seeing how to write a TM/XML deserializer is not trivial from the spec. However, once you know how to do it it's actually quite straightforward, so I thought I'd document the approach that I took here in case anyone else wants to have a go at this. ...