A slideshow made for the conference HyperUrbain.2 hold in Paris, on the 3rd and 4th June 2009.

More info: http://www.citymurmur.org

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road – despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

A Webmachine application is a set of resources, each of which is a set of functions over the state of the resource. We really mean functions here, not object-methods, infinite-server-loops, or any other such construction. This aspect of Webmachine is one of the reasons why Webmachine applications are relatively easy to understand and extend.

nl is a python library, that exposes a declarative API that allows us to build sentences and rules. These are used as input for a knowledge base built on the CLIPS production system. CLIPS builds a Rete network with the rules and sentences, which can then be queried for the consecuences of those in a most efficient way.

The main claim of nl is to offer a syntax that can accommodate any coherent theory that we may build with the natural language (in the same sense as something like the semantic web's OWL-Full would), while at the same time being based on a simple finite domain first order theory. This theory is NL, a discussion of which can be found here. This discussion is probably required reading to understand the breadth and the limits of nl, but not to start using it.

Pushing METAR data on Twitter

I'm planning to donate $100 to archive.org as I have a whole new appreciation for how rare an internet-wide full archive service -- one that includes images -- really is.

Cherry Blossom is a blogging system written in Python. It was written specifically because I had a lot of pyblosxom blog entries on my previous blog, but I wanted to use cherrypy instead of plain-ol cgi. It adds features like object publishing, session support, access to lots of cherrypy plugins, access to GET and POST vars as method parameters, and others. This software's been running my blog (http://billmill.org) for over two years now, and has survived a couple redditings and a flood from stumbleupon, all without a hiccup.

analyzes Python source code looking for bugs and signs of poor quality.

The United Kingdom's Met Office recently released temperature data for about 1700 weather stations across the globe from 1701 to 2009.