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  1. 28 Jul 2010

    Master Degree

    written by Sergio Fernández at 15h01

    Finally, after too long (remember that I got my Bachelor Degree on 2006), early this morning I presented my Master Degree thesis about trioo. If you are interested, you can checkout the dissertation and the slides (sorry, both in Spanish). With this milestone I close a quite hard stage of my life reconciling work and studies, but at the same time it opens the question about the Doctoral Thesis. But now it’s time to enjoy the summer.

    Related on this, last week I was in Athens presenting a paper about my Master Degree at the 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2010). I can’t attend the full conference, but it was quite interesting to see what the people is researching on software engineering, and how we can bring the advances on Semantic Web there.

  2. 25 Jun 2010

    SDoW2010

    written by Sergio Fernández at 10h42

    Following the success of SDoW2008 and SDoW2009, this year we (Alex, John, Uldis and me) repeat with SDoW2010:

    SDoW2010

    The 3rd international workshop on Social Data on the Web (SDoW2010), co-located with the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2010) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Web.

    Submissions are welcomed till August 27th. See you in Shanghai!

  3. 17 Apr 2010

    djubby

    written by Sergio Fernández at 13h18

    In order to simplify the deployment architecture of STEAMY (hope Nacho can publish something more soon, because it’s a quite interesting FLOSS Linked Data project), I started the development of djubby in some spare moments of this week. Djubby is nothing more than a Python implementation of Pubby, i.e. a Linked Data frontend for SPARQL endpoints for the Django Web framework.

    djubby's architecture

    For further information, you can read the getting started guide to learn how to use it, or try the demo application with DBpedia. Although release 0.1.4 is quite nice, I know that there is still a long way for djubby to become a stable software artifact, so all feedback is welcome!

  4. 20 Mar 2010

    Spanish Manifesto in Defense of Fundamental Rights on the Internet, back again

    written by Sergio Fernández at 12h36

    I already wrote a post about this last year, but now it’s time to push again to defense our fundamental rights on the (Spanish) Internet.

    A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

    1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
    2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
    3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
    4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
    5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
    6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
    7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
    8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
    9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
    10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

    (This text originally comes from this manifesto. Please, distribute it. For further information, visit its official webpage)

  5. 15 Dec 2009

    Key insensitive dictionary in Python

    written by Sergio Fernández at 19h34

    How nice looks a key case-insensitive dictionary written in Python:

    class KeyInsensitiveDict:
    

    def init(self, d={}):
        self.dict[“d”] = {}
        for k, v in d.items(): self[k] = v

    def getattr(self, attr):
        return getattr(self.dict[“d”], attr)

    def setattr(self, attr, value):
        setattr(self.dict[“d”], attr, value)

    def setitem(self, key, value):
        if (hasattr(key, “lower”)):
            key = key.lower()
        self.dict[“d”][key] = value

    def getitem(self, key):
        if (hasattr(key, “lower”)):
            key = key.lower()
        return self.dict[“d”][key]

    Actually it’s just a simple usage of the decorator pattern. And I wrote this code because we need it for the Python SPARQL Wrapper.

  6. 2 Dec 2009

    Manifesto on the rights of Internet users

    written by Sergio Fernández at 12h50

    Via Barrapunto (the spanish version of slashdot) I’ve discovered this manifesto on the rights of Internet users by my friend Javier Candeira (aka Candyman):

    A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

    1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
    2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
    3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
    4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
    5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
    6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
    7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
    8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
    9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
    10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

    Note: This manifesto is the work of several authors, and the property of everyone. Copy it, publish it, pass it on as you will.

  7. 17 Sep 2009

    HTC Magic and Android, my review

    written by Sergio Fernández at 08h33

    android
    Some weeks ago my old k800i died. The best choice could be the new N900 with Maemo5. But time and prize restrictions make difficult this option, so I decided to try other options.

    Last week I finally got the portability of my number to Vodafone, and with that also my new mobile phone, a HTC Magic with Android. So after a week I think I’m in the right position to express my opinion about this device.

    HTC Magic black

    Although it sounds weird, I’d like to start enumerating its bad points:

    • The battery is really bullshit, less than one day. If you take care of shutdown some things (3G and WiFi mainly), I got two days. II’ve read that with other unofficial ROMs this time can be enlarged, but no time yet to check it.
    • I don’t really like the idea to lose the physical keyboard in a mobile phone. Although I’m starting to write faster with the on-screen keyboard, I’m quite faster writing on my N810.
    • Very few free software on the official Market. I still prefer the repository approach than a central market.
    • Although it’s a linux-based operative system, actually you don’t have a Linux device (as Maemo is). Therefore you can not access to the huge catalog of software that currently works on GNU/Linux.
    • And the camera is really bad :-/

    A now the things that I like:

    • HTC is making a good work, the device moves well, it’s light and quite nice.
    • It’s an open source platform, at least mostly.
    • I’ve software for a big part of my needs. And I can developer whatever I want, not like in other platforms.
    • Integration with Google services is superb. It’s a pity not to have support for voice/video in GTalk (as we have in Maemo two years ago), but that looks more a commercial problem (phone operators won’t allow it) than technical.
    • 24/7 connectivity is amazing. For the first time I can enjoy my own connection since I moved to my new flat.

    I’ve to say that the platform is still in a very early stage of development. Without going further, this week Android 1.6 SDK was released. Let’s see how far it goes…

  8. 15 Jun 2009

    SDoW2009

    written by Sergio Fernández at 10h41

    After a shot holidays in Sardinia, I’m back to announce the 2nd International Workshop on Social Data on the Web (SDoW2009), that will be held at Washington in October, co-located with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2009). We’ve just send out the CfP, contributions are welcomed until July 24th August 10th.

    SDoW2009

    I’m very proud to co-chair for the second consecutive year this workshop with John, Uldis and Alex. Last year in Karlsruhe we enjoyed an amazing day, let see what we can get this year.

  9. 12 May 2009

    Migrating to libre.fm

    written by Sergio Fernández at 18h31

    Some weeks ago I decided not to use more last.fm. Thanks to a set of python scripts, today I completed the migration of my tracklist to libre.fm. It’s nice to know that I’m the owner of my own data :-)

  10. 7 May 2009

    Bocanegra revives

    written by Sergio Fernández at 23h21

    Today SEAT presented in the Barcelona Motor Show the new Ibiza Bocanegra:

    Ibiza Bocanegra

    Too nice to be real…