Note to myself: My professor mentioned PLS (partial least squares) as a method to consider for our analysis. I know nothing about it (yet). First link I found about it, is here.

My girlfriend Almut und I used to joke about couples who complain if they can’t meet every weekend (we used to live quite distant for some time in the beginning and saw rarely). Now she left me to be away for 5 days and I already feel lonely on the first day. *Sigh*
On the other hand I ‘ve already prepared a stock of beer, cigars, garlic buttered bread, and snus next to my desk, all the smelly stuff I usually avoid…
So expect some more active chatting (and coding?) from me during the couple of next days.

I just updated the wordpress version of our Institute blog, which I maintain. So far everything looks good. Now let’s see whether even trackback is working…

Update: Thanks to Almut for notifying me of this!
The newsletter of the Victoria Institute mentions the workshop on OS. It even features a picture of us discussing there…
cool man

Stefan Haefliger writes:

writing my perliminary thesis on open office (needless to say) i�m sending freezes to my office in .doc format. today i opened one of these freezes to check the formulas, and as somewhat expected, word could not display the open office math stuff. but worse than that, word displayed the following warning!”

It translates approximately to
“Word could not [process|handle|modify] Microsoft”.
P.S. I saw the dialog box as well. This is no mock up!

The sunshine project reports that an US ARMY researcher has recreated the “Spanish Flu” virus which killed 20-40 mio people in 1918. Apparently they reconstructed the virus by mixing gene strains from exhumed victims of the flu (at least that’s how I understood it). Great for the big country that hates WMD so much.

Let me just quote one sentence from an (admittedly biased) sunshine biologist : “If Jeffery Taubenberger worked in a Chinese, Russian or Iranian laboratory, his work might well be seen as the ‘smoking gun’ of an offensive biowarfare program,” says van Aken.

Mmmh, when I got interested in Freenet back in 2000, this was about the only project for anonymous and decentralized publishing and retrieving of data. I have taken part, contributed a bit and followed the project in general. However, despite having a paid fulltime developer for more than a year now, I am a bit disappointed with the state in which freenet is today. Looking around for alternatives today, it seems that I missed a whole bunch of parallel projects started to achieve the same. Some have been inspired by Freenet, but some we “conceived around the same time” (mnet).

So, there are: grapevine, entropy, mnet, gnunet,… and of course similar networks like invisible IRC at various stages of development. What a pity to see so much brain power working on redundant projects. But then, hey, choice is good 🙂

Stefan and I take part in the conference on communities and technologies in amsterdam, september 19-21. the day before the main conference, the organizers are holding a series of workshops, each with a different focus. we will be joining the one on open source software movements and communities with our research project on knowledge reuse in open source projects. i do hope, the high conference fees will be offset by a few opportunities to see the city of amsterdam! (credits to stefan for the text which is shamelessly ripped from his blog entry :-))
I am going to present a draft of our next project. Let’s see what feedback we get…