Where did all the creativity go?

I'm watching TV this evening and a commercial comes across the screen. A village is being invaded, a boy with an overly large sword, long hair, and no shirt. "Oh no" I exclaim. My wife doesn't know yet. More scenes, poor english, more shirtlessness, more massive sword, then the title. My wife now exclaims "What!". It's "Conan the Barbarian."

What happened to creativity? Have all the creative writers died and my generation is just too lazy to think up anything original? Are executives forcing cheap remakes to keep up the bottom line?

Part of me thinks I'm just being cantankerous before my time, especially when I go looking for information about this topic and I find a similar article in the Christian Science Monitor. All I have to do is think of Top Gun 2 and I realize I'm not being as irrational as I think I might be. Do we need a "Top Gun 2"? Couldn't you have made a fighter plane movie in this era without relating it to Maverick? Oh I forget, "Stealth" was such a epic failure that obviously it wasn't the poor plot idea or so-so acting, it was the fact Maverick wasn't in it.

T-minus 6.5 hours

48 hour film project starts in six and a half hours .....

University of Florida's VIVO running 1.2 SDB

We did it, after a couple of late nights and alot of planning, the University of Florida's VIVO is running 1.2 in SDB. SDB, or Sparql Database for JENA, has been best described to me as Jena's second iteration on semantic data stores. The first iteration, RDB, stored two tables for every model, one for general statements and one for reified statements. The SDB focuses on a single table for all triples. Main model triples are stored in "Triple" while named graph triples are stored in "Quad". We're very excited to see the new performance with VIVO 1.2. You can see the site here, vivo.ufl.edu.

Harvester Webinar: 1st Presentation

Today was the first day of the Harvester Webinar's. We've got about 34 people scheduled, and they evenly split between Tuesday 11am and Wednesday 1pm EST. The webinars are about 2 hours long, focusing on the basics of setting up the Harvester Library and using building a script for harvesting people and publications into VIVO.

Tuesday's webinar was well attended, 7 non-harvester team connections were watching the webinar with several of the connections have 2+ people. Alot of great questions and good feedback. Primary concerns seem to be performance and perhaps usability/accessibility. We'll be addressing these over the next 3 iterations as we begin to integrate with the VIVO code base for User Interfaces. We'll be posting everyone's questions and posting a copy of the webinar on vivo.sf.net very soon.

Fitness like a geek

I've read all kinds of storied about geeks finding new ways to fitness. My favorites are the stories about people building fitness devices that power their game playing. Treadmills that move WoW characters, bikes that power game systems. Its all about being healthier while staying true to your self.

Tonight I embark on exercising with my Xbox using "My Shape, fitness evolved". I loved the Wii fit, but pulling that balance pad out all of the time has gotten to be annoying. Now that I own a Kinect, its time to try out the camera for fitness. Desiree has already used it and its supposedly a very good workout. Here goes nothing.

VIVO in the Open

The VIVO project has always been "open source". However, as the project progresses we are moving from just "open source" to "open source open development". This is not a simple tasks, with openness brings concerns of accessibility. Many projects are open source and open development, but some lack the tools to enable passerby's to become engaged in their project.

What do we need to do to be open and accessible? Open information? A team at the UF Libraries is migrating data from Cornell's confluence and UF's redmine to the sourceforge wiki. The JIRA ticketing system used by the VIVO teams has been opened for anonymous viewing. Open Communication? VIVO has its an IRC channel on freendode, #VIVO. We also have open listsservs on sourceforge that are archived so anyone can read and search.

All of these open avenues help us as a project be more accessible, but that doesn't mean the information is easily accessible. It will be interesting in the next few weeks, months, even years as the project grows. What is required to make our project more accessible? Is it better organization, better tools? Only time will tell.

VIVO Harvester 1.0

The VIVO Harvester went live as 1.0 yesterday! Its been a long process going from a simple concept of ETL into a library of tools for moving data from various formats into a RDF data store. We still have a long way to go and many tasks on the table: integration into the VIVO GUI, inclusion of more National data sources, better disambiguation algorithms. Check out the release announcement.

The VIVO Harvester team is pleased to announce the availability of release 1.0 of the VIVO Harvester. The release is the result of alot of hard work on the behalf of our wonderful testers and contributors. Many thanks is given to all of your for help. This release brings a major rework and upgrade from the 0.7 series of the harvester. See the included changelog inside the package for full details. There is a growing set of documentation to be found on the sourceforge wiki. A great place to start learning more about the harvester can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/vivo/index.php?title=VIVO_Harvester
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/vivo/index.php?title=Harvester_User_Guide

You can find the tarball and debian package on sourceforge here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Harvester/harvester-1.0.deb/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Harvester/harvester-1.0.tar.gz/download

As always, the team is available for questions and feedback via this list or IRC -- http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=VIVO&uio=Mj10cnVlJjQ9dHJ1ZSY5PXRydWUmMTE9MjM2JjEyPXRydWUe5y

Finally, if your curious about testing VIVO or the harvester without the hassle of setting up a new server, the updated version of the Virtual Appliance is now available. It contains both VIVO 1.2 and the VIVO Harvester 1.0.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Virtual%20Appliances/VIVO-v1.2-VirtualBox-Standard.tar.gz/download