. "Generated by Triplify V0.3 (http://Triplify.org)" . . . "2008-01-17T03:21:45"^^ . "The start of something beautiful. Maybe." . "Welcome to RAM and Whiskey! After weeks of abuse from colleagues that I didn't have a technology blog, I caved and decided to create one.\r\n\r\nMy IT street-cred was at stake...and I couldn't idly sit by and watch it wither away.\r\n\r\nI have loads of neat stuff going on in my life, that I'm anxious to post here. Please bear with me as I finalize the page design. Thanks!" . "2008-01-18T08:59:03"^^ . . . "2008-01-17T03:21:45"^^ . "About" . "Welcome to RAM and Whiskey, where the joys and pangs of technology coalesce into one man's rant!\r\n\r\nQ: What does whiskey have to do with Information Technology? \r\nAbsolutely nothing. Actually, I'd advise against ever mixing the two. The whole \"whiskey\" thing started as a joke amongst friends in the IT field, where \"taking a swig of whiskey\" seemed like the only solution in making a horribly implemented information system usable. RAM and Whiskey aims at taking a critical, yet light-hearted approach of analysing emerging technologies, applications, and frameworks and how they can be applied to various situations.\r\n\r\nQ: Who are you?\r\nMy name is Tim Schultz, and I am currently employed by a large pharmaceutical organization working in what's known as the \"Technology Office\". The role of this group is to address problems experienced in the drug development process and solve them through the use of appropriately innovative technologies. Currently, I am responsible for developing solutions for our global High Performance Computing (HPC) grid - a large mix of Linux and Windows servers, workstations, and desktops. This initiative has received a large amount of press in the past few years, including CIO Magazine. I am also a part time graduate student at Drexel University, studying Information Systems - specifically in the areas of Information Architecture and Web Services.\r\nFor my undergrad, I majored in Information Science and Technology at Penn State University (Main campus), with an emphasis in application development. Undoubtably, the four years spent there at Penn State was the greatest time of my life. If someone tries to convince you that Happy Valley isn't the happiest place on earth, inform them that they need to stop talking immediately.\r\n\r\nQ: What are your interests outside work and academia?\r\nRugby is by far my favorite sport. Over the source of 8 years, I've played on two amazing nationally ranked teams: the Doylestown Dragons and Penn State. If you've never seen a rugby match in your life, I suggest you turn on Fox Sports World and check it out!\r\n\r\nIn my free time, I enjoy developing open source tools and solutions to various problems - specifically in the areas of semantic web, open web standards, and other emerging web technologies. You can read the \"Projects\" page for more information about some of the fascinating projects I'm currently working on!" . "2008-01-21T06:13:09"^^ . . . "2008-01-20T21:41:42"^^ . "APMLStream 0.1 Released!" . "APMLStream is a Java library that allows developers to easily serialize and deserialize Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) data within full compliance of the APML specification (currently 0.6). This makes editing, merging, and querying APML files in an object-oriented environment extremely easy.\r\n\r\nAPMLStream uses the XStream and XML Push Pull Parser libraries, and is currently released under the Apache License 2.0.\r\n\r\nYou can browse the source here at Google Code, or checkout and build the source from SVN: svn checkout http://apml-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Java/APMLStream/APMLStream-0.1/ apmlstream-src\r\n\r\nTo build the source, you'll need the Java 6 SDK and Apache Ant. I'm using the most recent Java SDK (1.6.0_04) and Apache Ant (1.7.0). Building is as simple as issuing the following commands in your terminal: ant, ant jar, ant javadocs. Then, include the apmlstream-0.1.jar into your project, and you're done! I've also provided the binary distribution with this post.\r\n\r\nAlthough I still have a laundry list of to-do's for this library, v0.1 contains the basic functionality for APML data manipulation. Expect an APMLStream tutorial within the next day or so! Comments and suggestions are also welcome.\r\n\r\nDownloads:apmlstream-0.1.jar apmlstream0.1-javadocs.zip" . "2008-01-20T21:54:24"^^ . . . "2008-01-22T22:42:33"^^ . "Projects" . "TODO" . "2008-01-22T22:42:33"^^ . . . "2008-06-21T22:47:51"^^ . "Does IORG have the cure for information overload?" . "Email, instant message, RSS, blogs, social networks, streaming media, user-generated content......the list goes on and on. It's no secret that the ability to create, publish, and share information over the Internet is easier than ever. However, we're reaching a point where this inundation of content is causing information overload - so much content that we can't possibly keep up with it in 24 hours time.\r\n\r\nThe areas of technology that interest me, as you could probably tell, are within the areas of portable data (DataPortability) and semantic web (Linking Open Data). I see these as two complimentary ways of diminishing the effects of \"information overload\" (and there's certainly some overlap here):\r\n\r\n1. DataPortability aims to reduce the instances where data is redundantly generated (such as social network contacts between MySpace and Facebook) by promoting the implementation of open data format exchanges between heterogeneous web services.\r\n\r\n2. Semantic web technologies aim at redefining how information is located and retrieved. To be able to quickly and precisely acquire information means not having to deal with as much \"noise\" surrounding search results, and hence, information overload is abstracted away from the user. (Next post is around some insight around this where Sherman Monroe at Linked Data Planet likened conventional Internet search to finding detailed photographs on a low resolution monitor.)\r\n\r\nI think these two related initiatives aim to cure information overload from a technical standpoint. But what are some other initiatives that aim to bring some sanity to the deluge of information that bombards our screens every day?\r\n\r\nHere's an interesting organization that I was just informed of from a work colleague called the Information Overload Research Organization (IORG). According to their site, their mission is to:\r\n

\"...work together to build awareness of the world's greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.\"

\r\nThe organization is planning a day-long \"inaugural\" event filled with breakout sessions to discuss topics surrounding information overload. Although I'm not entirely certain the exact nature of what will be covered, I was interested to see some of the IORG members on the list - including Microsoft and Google. I noticed a few members who work in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which got me thinking a bit. We're tackling information overload from a data perspective, but will this ultimately solve all of our problems? How would I render and display a complex query again semantic metadata that returns back thousands of triples? This is where I see portable/linked data spanning into other disciplines such as HCI. Can conventional web interfaces handle all of this robust data so that it's intuitive to the user? There's certainly a lot more room for different concentrations to attack these issues.\r\n\r\nI threw up the IORG Inaugural Event in Yahoo! Upcoming here, as I certainly plan on attending with my schedule permitting. I think a lot of the things discussed there will in fact complement the more technical focus around portable/linked data. What do you thing?\r\n\r\nIs anyone more familiar with IORG and would like to comment? I'm certainly interested in hearing more about the organization and the event!" . "2008-06-21T22:47:51"^^ . . . "2008-06-18T22:23:51"^^ . "OpenCalais at Linked Data Planet - NYC" . "OpenCalais has made a strong showing here at Linked Data Planet - New York City. I'm currently sitting in their lunch presentation demonstrating the various tools they provide, and they're quite impressive. Essentially, OpenCalais is a suite of various tools that will take plain-text and automatically embed metadata (such as Microformats) into it.\r\n\r\nThis blog is now \"OpenCalais-enabled\". They have a Wordpress plugin called Tagaroo which reads your Wordpress blog entry as you type it, and automatically suggests tags for it. It also pulls down Flickr images based on these tags so they can be included with the entry. More in-depth review of these tools after the presentation!\r\n\r\n

" . "2008-06-18T22:29:13"^^ . . . "2008-01-24T02:19:38"^^ . "Academia" . "Penn State University (2002 - 2006)\r\n

Information Science and Technology - IT Development (undergrad)

\r\nDrexel University (2008 - Current)\r\n

Masters of Information Systems - Information Architecture

" . "2008-04-11T05:35:43"^^ . . . "2008-04-11T05:29:53"^^ . "Geospatially Visualizing Users Preferences from APML Profiles" . "So, I'm getting some abuse from friends and colleagues for not updating my blog. Between grad school and work, I've found there's little time to write entries! I'm sitting here in a hotel room in New Brunswick, NJ waiting for the new Office to come on, so I have some free time for the moment...\r\n\r\nBut here's something that people may find interesting. For my INFO633 (Information Visualization) class at Drexel, I developed a framework for tracking trends and patterns in Google Earth based on concepts captured from APML profiles. This is my initial research in the feasibility of the idea, spanning about four weeks of work. I submitted it to the IEEE Information Visualization 2008 conference for review out of interest for understanding the call for papers process.\r\n\r\nI'm a huge fan of DataPortability and am actively seeking areas where regular (non-technical) users will find value in the concepts and principles outlined by the initiative. Possibly a project for the DataPortability Labs?\r\n\r\nDownload the file here (11.3MB PDF warning).\r\n\r\nDevelopment is on-going. Comments welcome!" . "2008-04-11T05:29:53"^^ . . . "2008-07-26T02:23:45"^^ . "Laconica, PHP5, and GD Woes - and a quick patch!" . "So, I've been playing around a bit with Laconica, an open source micro-blogging engine used to power Identi.ca. I finally have it up and running smoothly, however, I've found that the \"official\" installation documentation is a bit sparse and missing a few steps and dependencies. Because of this, a few snags in the setup process had me scratching my head. What did help me immensely in the process is the following blog entry on 0xDECAFBA - Getting Laconica up and running.\r\n\r\nThe problem I ran into was with the avatar upload. When I tried to upload my avatar, I would be greeted with a blank page (the \"oh-crap-internal-server-error-where's-my-whiskey\" kind of blank page). I opened up my /var/log/httpd/error_log to seek out what exactly occurred. Here's what I found:\r\n

[Wed Jul 23 13:01:55 2008] [error] [client 10.6.132.139] PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function image_type_to_extension() in /var/www/html/laconica/classes/Profile.php on line 85, ...

\r\n\r\nInteresting. My brand new fancy avatar is now reduced to a broken image in Laconica. To revert back to the default gray and apathetic face avatar, simply remove all entries in the avatar table of your Laconica DB instance.\r\n\r\nSome quick background about the configuration:\r\n\r\n$ uname -srvpio\r\nLinux 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5PAE #1 SMP Fri Jun 20 02:51:01 EDT 2008 i686 i386 GNU/Linux\r\n\r\n

$ php -version\r\nPHP 5.1.6 (cli) (built: Jun 12 2008 05:02:35)\r\nCopyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group\r\nZend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

\r\n\r\nA fairly recent setup. Since this was a fresh install, I figured something had to be wrong with the installation of the PHP GD libraries. Naturally the next step would be to do a var_dump(gd_info()); to confirm any issues:\r\n

array(12) {\r\n[\"GD Version\"]=>string(27) \"bundled (2.0.28 compatible)\"\r\n[\"FreeType Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"FreeType Linkage\"]=>string(13) \"with freetype\"\r\n[\"T1Lib Support\"]=>bool(false)\r\n[\"GIF Read Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"GIF Create Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"JPG Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"PNG Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"WBMP Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"XPM Support\"]=>bool(false)\r\n[\"XBM Support\"]=>bool(true)\r\n[\"JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support\"]=>bool(false)\r\n}

\r\nNope. Everything looks fine with the setup. And according to PHP.net, image_type_to_extension() should be available for >=PHP5.0. This, however, doesn't appear to be the case. As Chris notes:\r\n

Function was added in PHP 5.2, not PHP 5 (you would assume this means 5.0)

\r\nSo, evidently, my current version of PHP (and the most recent in the RHEL5 repos) does in fact not support the image_type_to_extension() function. If you have the most recent version of PHP, you should be fine. If not, here's the fix: To work around this issue, I devised a simple modification that would overwrite the image_type_to_extension() functionality if you're experiencing the same issues. Head to $LACONICA_HOME/classes/, back up Profile.php, and then open it up in your favorite editor. Head to Lines #84 and #85 $filename = common_avatar_filename($this->id, image_type_to_extension($info[2]), NULL, common_timestamp()); and replace it with the following code snippet below:\r\n\r\n

# Start - More RAM.\r\nif(function_exists(image_type_to_extension))\r\n{\r\n$extension = strtolower(substr(image_type_to_extension($info[2]),1));\r\n}\r\nelse\r\n{\r\nlist(,,$imageType) = getimagesize($image);\r\nswitch($imageType)\r\n{\r\ncase IMG_GIF:\r\n$extension = \".gif\";\r\nbreak;\r\ncase IMG_JPG:\r\n$extension = \".jpg\";\r\nbreak;\r\ncase IMG_PNG:\r\n$extension = \".png\";\r\nbreak;\r\n}\r\n}\r\n$filename = common_avatar_filename($this->id,$extension,NULL, common_timestamp());\r\n#END - More whiskey.

\r\n\r\nSave Profile.php, and now try to upload a new avatar. Problem fixed!" . "2008-07-26T02:23:45"^^ . . . "2008-08-11T00:23:57"^^ . "Semantic FAIL!" . "Consider the following image I came across on Digg:\r\n\r\n $\"Semantic$ \r\n\r\nCold War all over again? Not really - it's obvious what happened here. But I think this is a great example of how the semantic web will wrap people, places, and things with context, and these types of issues will become a thing of the past!\r\n\r\nInstead of \"Georgia\", a semantic agent will see something like http://dbpedia.org/page/Georgia_(country) or http://dbpedia.org/page/Georgia_(U.S._state) and thus have an understanding of how to differentiate the two." . "2008-08-11T00:34:55"^^ . . "plutarch" . "e6d3567d0ffada91616db800317854b3669da21d" . "http://www.ramandwhiskey.com" . "Tim" . . "joergkurtwegner" . "24b30ec9eea4a5ec1dcea4e22012251a00c35626" . "http://miningdrugs.blogspot.com/" . "joergkurtwegner" . . "Andrianq" . "dabefad719a2c252d09ee81dbc399d42d524f231" . "Andrianq" . . "MikeWink" . "9724a59d8ad37b704941aedd4ed47242eee7a4de" . "MikeWink" . . "UlricheDmond" . "f024ccd99862111f023d45aa21b399de8ccc0776" . "UlricheDmond" . "Tim" . "Joerg Kurt" . "Schultz" . "Wegner" . . . "Beren Erchmaion" . "50cadd7e0bbb3a07d97b9c11084ada4113942a15" . "http://tarnaeluin.wordpress.com/" . "2008-01-19T22:55:48"^^ . "Excellent - liking the RAM chip in the whiskey...hopefully its the bourbon :-)\r\n\r\nberen" . . . "Beren Erchamion" . "50cadd7e0bbb3a07d97b9c11084ada4113942a15" . "http://tarnaeluin.wordpress.com/" . "2008-01-22T05:40:40"^^ . "You really should clean yourself up - all real IT hackers drink bourbon...whiskey is for amateurs! \r\n\r\nberen :-)" . . . "The Old Man" . "a83eca62102fe28d4ae407f4776f5b81b767abf6" . "http://ramandwhiskey.com/2008/01/17/hello-world/" . "2008-01-23T03:25:43"^^ . "RRRRRRRRRRRRR\r\nUUUUUUUUUUUU" . . . "Tim" . "e6d3567d0ffada91616db800317854b3669da21d" . "http://" . "2008-01-24T00:24:58"^^ . "PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP\r\n\r\nSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS\r\n\r\nUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU" . . . "Susan Gasson" . "5f4d0c3402eeec0a66caefbe09554344556196e2" . "http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/gasson/" . "2008-02-29T01:44:12"^^ . "Nice site. Actually, the real drink of choice for geeks is high-end vodka -- gives you much less of a hangover ...\r\nSusan" . . . "Susan Gasson" . "5f4d0c3402eeec0a66caefbe09554344556196e2" . "http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/gasson/" . "2008-02-29T01:46:14"^^ . "You realize that you have probably cleaned off the layer of gunk that was keeping the solder connections working, on that RAM board?" . . . "Google Earth » Geospatially Visualizing Users Preferences from APML Profiles" . "08445a31a78661b5c746feff39a9db6e4e2cc5cf" . "http://google-earth.crazyblogz.info/?p=4047" . "2008-04-11T07:34:40"^^ . "[...] Tim wrote an interesting post today on Geospatially Visualizing Usersâ?? Preferences from APML ProfilesHere’s a quick excerptFor my INFO633 (Information Visualization) class at Drexel, I developed a framework for tracking trends and patterns in Google Earth based on concepts captured from APML profiles. This is my initial research in the feasibility of the … [...]" . "pingback" . . . "daniela barbosa" . "b35a19097fd7f151ab3e450b689cd061214caa4e" . "http://www.danielabarbosa.blogspot.com" . "2008-04-11T10:41:14"^^ . "whiskey,wine and APML - can't get better then that. \r\nGood stuff- you have to get Garvy V on this!" . . . "Juan F. Codagnone" . "76d39bdebea2320ba2bb2abfa61914ba26c4d5c1" . "http://juan.zauber.com.ar/" . "2008-04-13T02:40:10"^^ . "I made a maven's POM for this project. The patch is at\r\nhttp://code.google.com/p/apml-library/issues/detail?id=1" . . . "Tim" . "e6d3567d0ffada91616db800317854b3669da21d" . "http://" . "2008-04-13T06:37:43"^^ . "Juan,\r\n\r\nGreat idea! Many thanks!\r\n\r\nCheers.\r\n\r\n- Tim" . . .