Shlrm.org Blag

At work I’m dealing with this “Semantic Web” concept thingy. “Web 3.0″ it is called. Frankly I don’t see the point in it yet. The goal is to have the internet also contain data to ensure that computers can find relations in the data and such, not just pages with links that people can browse. One of our projects involves taking unstructured data and mining entities and relationships from it. I’ve picked up a book, the only book, on programming software to (ab)use the semantic web. So far, I am unimpressed. The source code in the book does not match the source code that you can download from the books website. And, the two different packages on the books website (one is just Chapter 2’s code, the other is all the code for the whole book) also had different code, and the “all encompassing” one was even missing the right files needed to run the code!

So yeah, unimpressed.

I must be doing something wrong regarding my groovy code. I was talking to a friend and fiddling with a tower of hanoi solver code. Just burns in CPU basically. Now I hacked it up in groovy, after he talked about it, just because. Well I came up with a groovy-ish solution that should do the same thing his java code did. However, the Java code actually ran like 8 threads, whereas my groovy code only ran about 3. Based entirely on CPU usage in linux. On the same box. I don’t understand… The code follows. (continue reading…)

I even did the special é character in the title. How about that. I wonder if I got it backwards? (continue reading…)

San Antonio absolutely sucks for technology.

It is just about impossible to find hard copies of references or tech books.  I know that the internet is a widely available source, but sometimes you just have to have the paper copies of things. Especially when it comes to older languages like C. ANSI C. Not C#. Not Visual C.net. Not C++. Searching the internet for ANSI C tutorials (or help or examples or whatever) doesn’t net very much. (OMG PUN)

So I looked up a couple books based on reccomendations. There’s an 840 page ‘For Dummies’ book that is supposed to be quite good regarding getting into ANSI C especially coming from other languages. And then a C Reference book that would be useful. Especially when getting into the more in-depth usage of C (since there’s no “javadoc” for the C libraries online, at least that I’ve been able to find.) Of course these are only available in one store up in Austin. Even the library doesn’t know anything about these books.

San Antonio only exists for the Spurs, the Alamo, and the Riverwalk. Oh and the Government/Military and the Medical Center. If you’re not employed in one of those things, you might be mowing the grass (and then blowing the trimmings out into the street for someone else to deal with!!! [but that's a rant for another time])

San Antonio Sucks.

I’m noticing that these problems aren’t as much about learning the language as I’d have thought. They’re fairly simple tasks.

Anyways, here’s the second problem’s solution:
(continue reading…)