Libraries do of course like to group things together into collections and make sure that like is with like. So it comes as no surprise to see that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council Libraries have been doing just that…
Processing is a Open Source data visualization programming language. I first played around with it about a year ago. I was recently reminded of it by Rob, and have started playing with it again. However, I just discovered that earlier in the week John Resig released his JavaScript Port, Processing.js. So far it looks amazing, virtually all the demo/example applications that are shipped with Processing are running using the CanvasElement in JavaScript. I’m going to have a lot of fun with this.
John deserves a huge amount of credit for this contribution.
Development, javascriptLiqueur Felix posted a photo:
The sim designed with a Venetian essence.
Posted by Second Life Resident Liqueur Felix. Visit Talis Cybrary Island.
1913 A Boy's Will
Revelation
WE make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
-- by Robert Frost
Personal, Poetry
Toon 0 Chelsea 2
I’ve had enough. I’ve reached that point when I just wish things would be better for a while. To wake up in the morning, feel refreshed and actually look forward to the day ahead. To not be constantly wondering what the next thing to give me a stress overload is, whilst dealing with the current ones.
The latest bundle of joy is having the side of my brand new car wiped out by ‘White Van Man’ on the way home from work. I guess at least I can be thankful that I walked out of it unscathed.
I’m not a religious person in any way but, if there is anything out there, can I please have some nice things happen for a while please, or at least no more bad things for a while?
Busy. Colourful. Bright. Neon. Starbucks. KFC. McDonalds.
This wasn't what I expected of the vast sprawling city of Beijing. I don't know what I did expect. The grey stone and imposing buildings of Tiananmen Square, Mao's Tomb and the Great Hall of the People perhaps. Or maybe the flocks of bicycles. A view built mostly on UK coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising of nearly twenty years ago.
We see these short tableaux of places in times of crisis and they sit, static, in our minds while the place itself moves. Always having been so much more than what we saw anyway. The Beijing we met was busy all the time, streets full of people into the early hours. Not revelers and police, though there is some of that, but lots of men and women just going about their business.
Driving in Beijing appears to be a more or less constant game of lane-change chicken. Everything is done in close proximity, with cars maneuvering on the three-lane ring roads (of which there are seven or eight) within inches of each other. Horns beep constantly, but not in the aggressive way they are used in the UK, but as a constant "I'm here", "That's my space" kind of way that no-one seems to take offence to.
The city is, of course, rushing headlong towards the August deadline of the 2008 Summer Olympics. We saw nowhere that wasn't undergoing some work. New paving here, a new road there, replacing the tiles on hotel frontages. There was also much more substantial construction work happening with new tower block going up in many places around the center. The center, that's an interesting aside - Beijing doesn't really seem to have a center. Sure there are ring roads that go around an area, but the city is so large, so spread out that it really has no distinct point - apart from Tiananmen Square, of course.
Tiananmen forms a nice point from which to discuss the some of tourist sights, with the Forbidden City adjoining it to the North (?) and the Temple of Heaven just a short taxi ride (costs about 180RMB) to the south. We were also driven out to the Great Wall at Badaling by a friend of a friend and spent a couple of hours walking a short section there, Badaling is about an hour's drive from Beijing in a car (or two on a tour bus). And of course, also a little way out of the city is the Summer Palace.
Our time in Beijing was short, seven days in Beijing, five days were taken up with the WWW2008 conference (and a bit of hotel shuffling). A further day on each end of the trip to travel. So with restaurants to try every evening and just two days to see things we had to make our time count.
Food was important, with a fantastic Chinese community here in Birmingham providing amazing food it seemed like a good idea to try equivalents in Beijing as well as looking for things we can't get at home. Something we had not seen at home is the Hot pot, or Chinese Fondue, which involves a central pot with stock or oil, heated from below, in which you cook your own meat, fish and veggies. Really great food.
Beijing, formerly known as Peking, is famous for its Duck restaurants, so no trip would be complete without a visit. The duck was great, about a dozen of devoured wood-burning oven-roast ducks with pancakes, hoisin sauce and shredded spring onions and cucumber. What impressed me was not so much the quality of the duck here in Beijing, but bizarrely the quality of the duck we get back here in the UK which comes very close to what we we were served. The most notable difference is that here in the UK I've never seen the head served with the rest of the meat.
Saturday morning we got up early and hit the subway to make our way to Beijing Zoo, we already had the trip to Badaling lined up for the afternoon, so needed something easy to do in the time and we all decided we wanted to see pandas. We got to see the pandas, sleeping in the heat, trying to ignore the crowds with cameras. Beijing zoo's enclosures look small, they're definitely zoo and not safari park. We rushed round a few of the main large animal enclosures and headed back to the hotel.
We weren't at the hotel for long when our host for the weekend, a friend of a friend, arrived to pick us up. He'd very kindly agreed to show us around and our first target was the Great Wall.
Pictures of the wall give you a pretty good idea of the size of it, the wall alone is intimidating. What you don't get a sense of is the geography in which it's built. The wall rides the tops of steep sided ridges, sharp edges with steep slopes either side, a formidable obstacle in their own right.
The most disappointing aspect of the wall was the number of little stalls and wall-walkers attempting to sell you utter tat.
After a couple of hours walking on the wall (following a busy week conferencing as well) we were all more than ready for food. Our kind host had spent a few years here in Birmingham, so was well aware of how good the Chinese food available here is. With this knowledge he wanted to ensure we got food in Beijing that we can't get in Birmingham. We'd already had hot pot and none of us really fancied the frogs on offer so we ended up in a restaurant famous for its crab.
The crabs arrived raw, so we could decide how many we wanted between us, then came back around ten minutes later, cooked and cracked in a spicy paste. Chris and I are not great fans of crab here in the UK, they seem to taste like seaweed to me, but these are fresh water crabs and they taste completely different. The crabs were meaty and very tasty indeed.
Next day we managed to get up early, check out and dump our bags with the concierge ahead of a day exploring then the flight home. We got ourselves over to the Temple of Heaven first. Set in beautiful grounds, surrounded by lawns and paths shaded by cherry blossom trees the temple is visible from some distance. Beautifully tranquil, despite the number of people. The temple is very well maintained, a little too well maintained in some respects, you could almost believe it was new.
From there we cut across through Tiananmen Square passed Mao's Mausoleum and into the park around the forbidden city. It was getting hot by now, the sun very bright, so the shade of the woods was very welcome. The sun, and the impending need for some lunch, made u decide not to spend the apparent two hours queuing to get into the Forbidden City. Instead we met up again with our kind host and he took us to a great barbeque place where we had lamb, beef, big green chilies, chicken wings and squid. All served on kebab sticks. Very spicy, very good.
From there we wanted somewhere to unwind a bit, so a trip to the lake at the Summer Palace was perfect. We wandered around for a while (trying to find a loo and cussing the unhelpful signs) and then hired a boat for a trip out on the lake.
Being out on the water was cool and relaxing, Chris' advanced driving skills came in handy controlling the high-powered vessel we had, blasting across the water at just under strolling speed.
The lake (Kunming Lake) is huge and beautiful, so huge that you would never guess that it was man-made. The Emperor had it dug out, combining two previous ponds, to make the current lake.
A short shopping trip later and we were back at the hotel to pick up our bags and off to the airport.
One of the great things about working for Talis is that we take conferences seriously. Having sent five of us half-way around the globe staying an extra couple of days, eating well and being expected by those back at the office to make the most of it is part of having a great work/life balance.
I don't know how many other companies have quite such an enlightened outlook - I guess it's because we're employee owned, so Talis is us.
In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to Superstring Theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. This is a wonderfully visual and accessible Ted Talk.
superstring-theory, ted-talkAfter the WWW2008 conference ended me and guys stayed on in Beijing for a couple of days in order to take in some of the local sites. Armed with our camera’s and a subway map, Rob, Paul and Myself managed to find our way to Beijing Zoo and saw an assortment of wonderful animals - but for me it was the Pandas, that I had really wanted to see.
We also a section of The Great Wall in Ba Da Ling. The sheer immensity of this 6000 km structure is breathtaking. You can’t help but feel small and insignificant as you walk along the wall and and take in the view around you:
We also visited The Temple of Heaven, which is situated near the center of Beijing. There was something wonderfully serene about the temple, that made you feel as though you’d stepped from the hustle and bustle of one world into the magical calm of another. It’s a site rich with tradition and as a temple it is beautiful to behold.
We also walked through Tiananmen Square. In some ways it felt surreal, as we walked through it taking pictures, I couldn’t help but recall as a teenager seeing images on television of students demonstrating and vividly remember seeing images of tanks bearing down on demonstrators. Yet as I looked around there were thousands of people, mostly chinese, milling around the square, there were also many tourists everyone seemed cheerful, it was a far cry from those images on TV:
We tried to visit The forbidden city, but unfortunately by the time we arrived there were hundreds of people queuing to buy tickets to get in and because it would have taken at least an hour to queue there we opted not to given we only had a few hours left. So we decided to walk around the grounds outside The Forbidden city and take some pictures:
Following that we finally visited The Summer Palace, which for me was the highlight of the trip. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We took a boat out on the lake and took some pictures of the palace:
I loved the visit to China. I wish I could think of a bad thing to say but I really can’t - everyone we met was polite, approachable and kind; the sites we saw were amazing; the food was great!. I must confess there was a huge difference between the China I experienced and the China that is reported in the media here in the UK - which is the real China? I honestly can’t say, but I will cherish my memories of the place. As usual all my photo’s are on flickr, but I should warn you that I have uploaded roughly six hundred of them (out of the 1500 I took!). To make things easier if you click on any of the photos above they’ll show you pictures tagged with that specific location. Or if your prefer you can view the whole lot here.
You can also see Rob’s pictures here and you can see Chris’ pictures here.
beijing, Talis, www2008The day got off to a very slow start I wasn’t feeling very well so I missed the keynote. I made my way to the Dev Track and got there in time for the first session. The opening talk was by Giovanni Tummarello on Semantic Web Pipes which seemed like a great idea. Semantic Web Pipes are analagous to the Yahoo! Pipes framework but differ in that the Yahoo framework uses RSS and the item lists in RSS do not lend themselves to the graph based modeling that RDF has. Giovanni explained that with Semantic Web Pipes you can fetch, mix and process RDF files published on the Web because the output of a Pipe is an HTTP retrievable RDF model, simple pipes can also work as inputs to more complex Pipes.
There were a couple of other memorable talks one by Rajat Agarwalla on Scrabulous, in which he explained how and why they developed the game., and what they experienced having to scale up very rapidly to satisfy the phenomenal demand they had. The one thing Rajat said that resonated deeply with me was (im paraphrasing here because I can’t fully remember it) “if you build something you love you’ll make money eventually, but if you build something just for money then you won’t“. This sentiment echoes what Confucius once said:
"Choose a job that you love and you will never
have to work a day in your life"
- Confucious
The other talk that both Rob and I wanted to listen to was by the Sebastian Kruk on MarcOnt Mediation Services. He told us that they had completely rewritten the MarcOnt portal and it should now be available, but it wasn’t clear to me that they were planning to do anything with Marc21 or that they had engaged with any of the other people working in this area, which was disappointing.
There were other talks during the day, after which we all got carted off to the evening Banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. Our colleague Jingye had told us how rare it was for anyone to be invited to dine there and that it was a very special venue - and he was right! My only regret was that I didn’t take my camera or phone with me. We had been told earlier in the day that camera’s weren’t allowed and that phones with camera’s might not be allowed either, so we decided to leave them in our hotel rooms. When we got there it was apparent many others had brought theirs with them and no-one was stopping them taking pictures - so I was kicking myself all evening.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave his keynote before the banquet and shared with us his hopes for the WWW, many of which seemed to be centered around the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement, both of which we at Talis are heavily involved in. Tim talked about the need to get better at communicating our ideas and to engage with each other more., about breaking down barriers and get better at communicating with each other across both the physical and social/political borders and barriers that exist. Paul has a done great writeup of the keynote over on ZDNet, so I won’t dwell on it too much - suffice to say that I thought it was great keynote, and quite inspirational in some ways.
After the keynote the banquet and the evenings entertainment got under way. The food was great as were the performances, particularly one by the Peking Opera. We all had a great time. It was a very memorable evening.
beijing, sir_tim_berners_lee, Talis, www2008I’ve been feeling quite fed up the last couple of months and looking through the Metro yesterday morning I discovered that Madam Butterfly was on at the Alexandra Theatre that very night. Great, something different from my usual routine, so on the spur of the moment I rang a friend who said she’d come with me, booked tickets for us and we were set for the evening.

It was the Ellen Kent production of Madam Butterfly with the Ukrainian National Opera that we went to see, and we got the £21 mid range tickets and were sat right up in the gods. But this was a good thing as it gave us a great overview of what was going on on stage as well as the fantastic scenery and settings. I’ve seen Madam Butterfly years ago with the opera sung in English, however, this was sung in the original Italian and I was surprised and pleased to see that it was subtitled. I know roughly the story, but it’s good to be able to understand the details of the plot and what the singers are actually on about. Subtitles were displayed right at the top of the stage on a board which looked like the sort of board you see at New St Station to give you the train times. I’ve only been twice to the opera (both times Madam Butterfly), and I don’t know if subtitling a performance like this is the done thing, but I think it’s a splendid idea which should encourage more people like me to come to the opera as they will understand what’s going on, though I can imagine some venues being too snotty to do it.
The previous version of Madam Butterfly that I’ve seen was an excellent production and sung in English (and a good translation as far as I could judge), however, the music and singing in last night’s performance moved me far more. My friend Maria thinks, and I tend to agree, that this is because the opera is meant to be sung in Italian, and when sung in English you’re hearing it in a language that it was not originally designed for, no matter how good the translation is. As the music and language are intertwined perhaps this is why I found the Italian version more engaging.
The role of Madam Butterfly was superbly performed by a young Korean soprano, Elena Dee, in her first professional role. I got the impression reading the review in the Metro that Ellen Kent, whose production it was, doesn’t like overweight opera singers and won’t employ them no matter how good their voices are. However, my friend Maria reckons that opera is one of the performing arts where looks, age and body shape don’t matter; only the voice matters. I tend to disagree when opera is a viewing spectacle and Elena Dee, being young and good looking, really looked the part of Madam Butterfly, played a wonderful tragic heroine and had the most gorgeous voice. The tenor, Andriy Perfilov, playing Lieutenant Pinkerton was excellent and being young, handsome and fit really suited for the role.
I’ve heard several versions of the famous aria at the beginning of the second act, and Elena Dee’s that we heard last night was absolutely gorgeous. However, I’m going to be really picky now and say that Maria and I agreed that her voice tended to lose its power in the lower registers - the best versions of Madam Butterfly that I’ve heard have a warmth and power and vibrancy in the lower notes which to me really packs an emotional punch, but she’s a young singer and certainly has a beautiful voice and I’m sure this will come in time.
There was tremendous applause for her at the end of the show and tremendous applause, as well as some boos and hisses, for Andriy Perfilov in his role as the cad Pinkerton.
The audience were the usual middle aged couples but also a surprising, to me, number of young people dressed up for the evening (well young women to be exact as I don’t think Madam Butterfly would normally attract groups of young men on a night out).
I’ve never been to the Alexandra Theatre before and the seats we were sat in were quite good as they were at the corner of the grand circle - not right at the top, but with a wall behind us so that we could lean forward without annoying anyone behind.
It was a wonderful evening and I’ll certainly go and see another Ellen Kent production if I get the chance.
