Daniel’s Blog

I’ve almost got a new phone.

From Wednesday (at about 3pm) I’ll be running on my new mobile (aka “cell”) phone. The wonderful Nokia N900, which runs on a variant of Linux called Maemo. The idea of a linux-based phone fills me with joy, as many of you know - I am a bit of a geek, and I use Linux at work and at home. I like the idea that if I can’t do a particular thing with my phone, then I can quickly code up something in Ruby/Python(/something else) or port something in order to do that thing!

The N900 has both a touch screen and a pull out qwerty keyboard, which is are both good features for me. This does mean that it’ll be reasonably chunky, but people managed to cope with massive mobile phones back in the 80s and early 90s (then we started to see shrinkage).

It’ll be the first time I move over to Vodafone UK (my mobile providers in the past have been largely O2 (my first phone was on One2One, and I’ve had another phone on Orange)). I’ve heard they are good, and to be providing the N900 they must be good!

At the start of the post I said “I’ve almost got a new phone”, thats because it was delivered to my parents house - and so I can’t get my hands on it until Wednesday. I’ve also had to get an O2 PAYG SIM Card as a temporary number until Wednesday, because my new phone has stolen my old number already. Oh well.

As many people know, I’m quite interested in the history of religion as well as experiencing spirituality itself. One of my recent interests has been within Hermeticism, which is said to have come from ancient Egypt. Hermeticism is also hypothesised to be the key to modern day science! So Egyptian stuff has been popping up on my radar, and the Open University are currently doing an interesting course which they’ve told me about recently, it is entitled “The Arts Past and Present” which includes a subject called “Cleopatra: Beauty or Brains”:

I’ve not checked out the video yet, and intend to do so when I get home this evening (I’m at work at the moment with no earphones). But they tell me its interesting

I’m quite tired as it’s quite late and I’ve been working on the new site all evening. But, I have just released it! It’s called lc8n.eu

The site is a web application which acts a bit like a URL Shortener, but for locations instead. It forwards you to a map of a particular location.

Heres an example of where I am:
* http://lc8n.eu/a

It’s at the very beginnings of it’s life, and I’m planning to do a lot with it. I hope you enjoy using it! You can use it like this (via twitter):
“Hi everyone. I’m currently located here: http://lc8n.eu/a , quite tired because I’ve been working on the new site all evening.” - http://twitter.com/danieljohnlewis/status/5993518753

As I say. It is quite early on in its life, so if you have any thoughts, comments or bugs that you’ve spotted then please do get in touch. I’ll be more than happy to answer.

Well I’ve released details of the Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009.

Our main website is: Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009 : http://www.craftivism.net/wiki/UnCraftivism/Bristol_Knowledge_Unconference_2009

It will take place in the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol on the 12th and 13th December 2009 as part of the “unCraftivism” satellite event which is part of the Craftivism exhibition. unCraftivism is about merging technology and art, and Bristol Knowledge Unconference will be one stream of working during that weekend, other events during the weekend will be done in collaboration with Dorkbot Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Lab.

The Knowledge Unconference will be similar to what it was last year, it’ll be all about Knowledge - although we’re slightly more focused this time and have a subtitle: “The Art of Knowledge”, and will experiment with the mixture of art and science that is knowledge. Last year we were lucky to have over 50 people turn up from diverse areas of expertise such as: Knowledge Management, New Media, Semantic Web, Business, Chemistry and Psychology… and we hope to continue to have a diverse mixture of people to take on the subject of knowledge, with a twist of art.

I hope that you will be able to join us, as this will be a really exciting event.

Feel free to get in touch any time if you have any queries:

Daniel Lewis
* UK Telephone: 07834355516
* International Telephone: +447834355516
* Email and Jabber: danieljohnlewis [at] gmail [dot] com
* Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009 website: http://www.craftivism.net/wiki/UnCraftivism/Bristol_Knowledge_Unconference_2009
* Twitter: @danieljohnlewis
* Skype: daniel.lewis

I have news, yeah I know I’ve not posted in a while, but I’ve been hard at work… and hard at work at home.

I have my own little Project. I’m going to be transforming my own website! This blog and the rest of the site will be placed upon a Drupal 6 platform, and will be restructured into a 4 section blog (each with individual RSS feeds) - the four sections will be:

• Technology and Computer Science:- Which will include code snippets, software/hardware/gadget reviews, as well as tech videos and random thoughts about computer science news.
• Religion and Spirituality:- Which will provide my thoughts as a Liberal Mystic Christian, as well as information about Religion/Spirituality in general.
• Masonry, Mysticism and Esotericism:- Which will bring you information about the world of Freemasonry and the mystic/esoteric studies that I and many others pursue.
• Miscellanea:- Which will bring you my random other thoughts such as personal things, poetry, politics and psychology.

I’ve got the platform all setup and ready to go. At home I’m in the process of modifying the page structures and the theme.

I hope to release my new website in the not too distant future… but for now, I bring you an interesting video which has stumbled into my radar. It’s a video from Intel and is about their “Project Orick”, which seems to be some kind of glove. At the moment we can’t work out whether its an actual device or some kind of nifty advertisement for another Intel system… have a look here:

The only information on the Intel website that I could find out about is here “Project Orick“.

Any thoughts?

Heres a quick SPARQL snippet to get a list of the worlds Newspapers along with their political stance. It is only a quick one, with a bit more work its possible to get the English titles of the Newspapers and the Political stances.

SELECT ?Newspaper ?Stance WHERE {
?Newspaper rdf:type dbpedia-owl:Newspaper;
<http://dbpedia.org/property/political> ?Stance}

Plug that into the DBPedia SPARQL interface: http://dbpedia.org/sparql

and get out the result for newspapers and their political perspective.

Tada! Quick bit of Semantic Web goodness!

Cheers,
Daniel

[update]fixed evil wordpress formatting on part of my sparql query[/update]

Hi all,

As many of you will know - I’ll be getting married next year. I’m actually in the process of considering my own “stag party”, but it’ll have to be very very me, which is a celebration of my non-married life, and a celebration of my forthcoming married life.

Therefore I am considering something spiritually uplifting. Something really special for me. Potentially a retreat of some kind, which may involve high elements of spiritual exploration. Both London and Glastonbury have come to mind, but it’s the finer details of what I’d like to do if I go there…. potentially: visit various religious services (Christian, Mystic and otherwise), visit masonic meetings (not just craft-masonry) and do some deep meditation.

Its really quite appealing to me, and what I’d do is probably detail what I’d be doing and when and where, so that anybody who is interested and wants to celebrate/explore with me can do so if they so wish.

Any thoughts/ideas about the specifics of what I could do would be appreciated.

Today, in the Christian calendar, it is John the Baptist day. Every Christian will known the story of John’s birth, John’s baptisms and John’s death as explained in the canonical bible. We celebrate this day as a remembrance of the wonderful life of John the Baptist.

However!!! Little does the average Christian know (and those of other spiritual paths) that John the Baptist is not just a Christian Character!

John the Baptist appears in Mandaeanism, Islam and Bahaism.

In Mandaeanism, John the Baptist is a key figure in scripture. His Mandaean name is Yahya/Yahia. Mandaeanism has quite different theology to Judeo-Christianity, but it does actually detail the baptism of Jesus. Here is one of the fantastic quotes from Mandaean Scripture:

“Bring fire and burn me; bring sword and hew me in pieces.” But the priests in Jerusalem answered to Yahy?: “Fire does not burn thee, O Yahy?, for Life’s Name has been uttered o’er thee. A sword does not hew thee in pieces, O Yahy?, for Life’s Son rests here upon thee.”  -

Mandaean John the Baptiser
John the Baptist can be found in Islam too. His Islamic name is also Yahya. Here is one quote from the Koran:

“O Yahya! take hold of the Book with strength, and We granted him wisdom while yet a child” -

The Koran
And also (but not finally) he is mentioned in the Baha’i faith. John is one of the prophets, and is mentioned here:

“As to the list of the prophets with whom Bahá’u'lláh identified Himself in the passage found on pages 26 and 27 of ‘The Dispensation of Bahá’u'lláh’, their names are as follows: Abraham, Moses, Joseph, John the Baptist, Jesus, Imam Husayn, on whom Bahá’u'lláh has conferred an exceptionally exalted station, (and) the Bab.” -

Lights of Guidance
There are also various other spiritual reference to John the Baptist in various Gnostic and Apocryphal-Christian writings.
But it doesn’t stop there… if you dig deep enough you’ll find references to John the Baptist in writings about Anthroposophy, Theosophy and even Freemasonry. But maybe that’s a topic for another time.

So I hope you all have a joyous John the Baptist Day! Christian, Mandaean, Muslim, Baha’i, Gnostic, Anthroposophic, Masonic and otherwise!

ok, so the next book by Dan Brown is titled “The Lost Symbol” (even though it had the code-name through writing of “The Solomon Key”), and will be released in September 2009.

All of the Dan Brown fans seem to be excited to get their hands on it. But many Freemasons are worried…. the reason… because The Lost Symbol is rumoured to be about Freemasonry (but as of yet we don’t have full evidence of this). Dan Brown is very well known to make very tenuous links between things, and merge fiction with non-fiction… so as a warning, please don’t believe everything that he says, and remember that he is a fiction writer.

However, there is some clever marketing going on at the Random House which involves the new “The Lost Symbol Website“, as well as a @lostsymbolbook twitter feed.

The twitter feed of which has the first post of:

Codes of ethics? T 10 C; 6 P O T SOD; 12 S O T Z

Which I know what it means

Yep, thats right… I’ve published my own poetry book.

It is a very high quality print which contains 25 of my poems spanning the years 2002 to 2009. My poetry, if you don’t already know, is very Spiritually, Philosophically and Society orientated.

You can buy it from lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/content/7291647 (See the Light and See the Dark by Daniel Lewis)

Here is the description: “A collection of poetry written by Daniel Lewis between 2002 and 2009. His poetry is inspired by life, and more specifically spirituality, philosophy and society. This very high quality book will compliment any household. It is a must have!”