Wow, over a month since I wrote anything here. I suppose it's because I've not had time for small useless hacks that fit into my idea of what goes on "nothing clever". Instead of hacking I've spent my time playing with my new camera and doing fun things to pictures in gimp. I'm still undecided on how much post-processing of photos is "OK" (to who? the thought police?) I used to regard what came off the memory card as sacred… but shooting in RAW means you can get so many different outcomes for a single shot all of which are tecnically "correct". So I keep coming up with arbitrary rules, like: "adjusting the contrast of the whole image is ok, but selecting only the clouds and doing the same is not". All ridicolous of course. At the end of the day I should gimp I much as I like, it's all about having fun anyway. Still I can't help feeling that gimp'ing is like writing a program to find all primes by doing
sys.stdout.write("1\n")
sys.stdout.write("2\n")
sys.stdout.write("5\n")
sys.stdout.write("7\n")
…
Vice versa I suppose you can argue that pursuing the perfect contrast straight off the camera is like coding in brainfuck, it could be seen as a noble task, but it is completely stupid.
I just realised what I did hack, that I could have posted here:
A Pimo-Overview widget (essentially a tree-view on an ontology with instances and relations) for the Nepomuk/IBM Lotussphere demo. It's not rocket science, but I coded it using Eclipse RCP/SWT/JFace stuff, and it was really quick and easy to get going. In the end I dont think it made it into the demo, but it was a learning experience, and I found that SWT/JFace+Eclipse Visual editor is almost as quick as Delphi for developing GUIs.
I've also worked hard on finalising the clustering experiments for my thesis, and again I find that my previous work was kinda sloppy and has big holes in it. Oh well – I'll post meaningless graphs on here again as soon as I'm done.
Finally, here is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson on the internet to his friend (and illustrator) Ralph Steadman:
"We're fucked up, Ralph. They invented the perfect tool for the New Dumb. They can now flourish in the land of serious stupidity and greed. They can infest the planet with every sick asshole you can dream of and make him sound sane. Now, nay cheap, lying fuck can become President of the United States and sound good. Every mindless little screwhead can pour his sickest thoughts into this new machinery, twist it a degree out of normal and send it back as wisdom. You think we have arrived in the Land of the Living Dead. No, Ralph! We have only just begun!"
(Quoted from The Joke's Over – an overall enjoyable read!)
I'm going write an intelligent and witty comment on this quote, just let me refresh digg… and slashdot … and fark… and check if anyone replied to my comments on flickr…