Life on Mars

Can someone explain the Swedish Pirate Party to me? Today’s Marketplace piece about the party sounded utterly ridiculous to me. How is this not a case of a lot of people who love to pirate commercial material trying to ignore the fact that what they are doing is illegal?

The Pirate Party says music and movies should be freely shared on the Web. Copyright laws should be rewritten, and the current patent system scrapped.

I’m sympathetic to wanting to change copyright laws and the patent system, but the Marketplace piece ended up sounding like these were secondary issues to wanting to be able to download free media and continue to make use of The Pirate Bay. Is this just bad reporting? Is the Pirate Party actually a civil rights party (as claimed), with those interviewed just making it sound like a party devoted entirely to pirating legitimately copyrighted media?

Long time with no updates. Again. (Again.)

It’s been a busy semester, which is now thankfully over. Since classes ended a few weeks ago I’ve remained busy, not only with research but also some travel and personal stuff.

Across the Charles

I went down to MIT for a W3C SPARQL meeting, meeting a lot of SPARQL people in person for the first time, and trying to avoid being attacked by the numerous robots that were patrolling outside our conference room (it’s a wonder we got anything done with all the robots around the CSAIL lab). While in Cambridge, I stayed with Kabir for a couple nights, enjoying the awesome view of Boston and the Charles river from his apartment.

Red Tulips

After returning from Cambridge two weeks ago, Kat and I went to the Albany Tulip Festival and saw some nice tulips before it started pouring rain. It was nice, but the flowers seemed a bit past their prime by the festival (last year’s timing worked out much better).

Buffalo

This past weekend, we drove out to Buffalo to spend the weekend with Karie. We had an amazingly full weekend, getting some great food (vegan buffalo “wings”!), drinks, waded out into Lake Erie from a secluded beach in Canada, and went to Niagara Falls (where there were much nicer tulips than in Albany).

Niagara Falls

More photos on Flickr of Buffalo and the Tulip Festival.

Last week, I finally found some time to wrap up the state of RDF::Query, and get things ready for a release. It’s the first release in almost a year, and while the user facing API is mostly unchanged, lots of things have changed under the hood. There’s too much to detail here (just compiling the changelog took me a couple of days, and it was mostly a firehose approach without the effort of summarizing anything), but I’ll highlight a few things I’m excited about, (especially in the context of the current DAWG work to update SPARQL):

• SPARQL syntax extensions:
  • Support for UNSAID keyword, allowing much simpler syntax for queries with negation.
  • Support for FeDeRate BINDINGS syntax, generalizing the ability to pre-bind certain variables.
• The new (fairly rudimentary) cost model code will give significant speedup on some queries.
• The use of proper query plan objects allows queries to be built programmatically (a feature requested by KjetilK).

The new version, 2.100, is available from CPAN, and ongoing development is available from github.

My iTunes library is huge. And it’s a mess. Every time I outgrow a disk, or move content to one of my external drives, or onto the NAS, etc., tracks go missing, and the library gets out of sync. I end up usually having to remove and re-add albums on an ongoing basis as I want to listen to them.

But the other day, I noticed this:

Something has gone dreadfully wrong. How in the world did iTunes end up thinking this song (which I bought through the iTunes store!) is located in my Aperture library‽ What could have possibly caused this? Utterly baffling.

Dopplr recently generated 2008 personal annual travel reports for its users, and here’s mine:

Wonderfully sleek, it summarizes my travels from last year, pulling photos from Flickr for the highlighted cities. I just wish there was some detail for all the cities.

Dopplr says my travel was responsible for 7.23 tonnes of CO₂. Not as much as I would have guessed, but still an uncomfortably large number. Hopefully visualizing this data helps me to keep the carbon emissions in mind when considering future travel — something we should all try to reduce.

Muscle Shoals, Ventura County, California

Wishing everyone happy holidays and a great new year.

I haven’t written in a while, being busy with the end of the semester and what ended up being a monster ice storm. Last Thursday, after taking some pictures of our awesomely lighted Christmas tree in the front yard (which at this point had icicles on it), things started to get bad.

The first problem was a leak in the living room ceiling. It wasn’t tons of water, but it was enough to be really stressful as the first major problem to come up with the new house. It was too late to call anyone, so we went to bed intending to call a roofer first thing in the morning.

As we went to bed, the wind was getting strong, and the ice just kept accumulating. We saw what we thought might be lightning out the window, but it turned out to be all the transformers blowing on the electric lines behind the house. Then came the crashing. Trees were losing branches or simply falling down left and right. Looking around town the next morning, you’d think there had never been an ice storm here before. There are areas of town where half the trees fell over or were uprooted and had to be cut down.

And that’s what happened to our neighbors tree. About half the tree fell over, leaving the neighbors yard mostly untouched but destroying a section of our fence and taking electric, phone, and cable lines down with it.

I’m on my way out of town for the holidays, but as I write this, the house still doesn’t have heat or power, and there’s no real indication when they might return.

So Obama won. Quite an exciting thing, and something I’m exceptionally happy about. The whole election has been tainted somewhat, though, by California’s passing of Prop 8, banning gay marriage. I find myself at a loss for words. It’s just overwhelmingly upsetting. Has a constitution ever been amended to take away existing civil rights? It’s tragic.

On a happier note, Californians won huge points for passing Prop 1A, a bond measure to help pay for a high-speed train between San Diego and San Francisco; and Angelenos passed Measure R, a half-cent sales tax increase to fund public transportation, including a subway extension to the Westside (!). Both of these were huge wins, and I’m absolutely thrilled they passed.

In conclusion, California, congratulations, thank you, and seriously, WTF‽

I’m not sure how things will change after the end of the campaigns tomorrow (I suspect it will feel like a news vacuum without the daily circus this election season has become), but this has been my reading/watching list recently for all things relating to politics and the economy (all daily except The Economist):

• The Wall Street Journal (dead tree version; all front pages, and other stories that catch my eye)
• CNBC morning market coverage
• The Economist (dead tree version)
• FiveThirtyEight
• Electoral-Vote
• Intrade
• Countdown
• Rachel Maddow
• NPR’s Planet Money
• … and the 303 subscriptions in my newsreader

It’s a wonder I find time for anything else! (Actually, it works out well because Countdown, Rachel Maddow and Planet Money are all available as podcasts and watchable at the gym, and I can toss the dead-tree WSJ and Economist in my bag when I leave the house.)