My Raspberry Pi is Alive

That’s a (35$ a.k.a. €45) tiny full-fledged computer, which is hooked up to my home internet connection 24/7, running a webserver (at http://pi.graus.nu — if it’s down, grausPi is off or my internet is down) headless.

It also runs a revived @sem_web (remember him? My linked-data Twitterbot — now called @grausPi), so my Raspberry Pi introduces random-linked-data-fact-noise into the tweetosphere on an hourly basis. So if you too want to stay up to date with mind-boggilingly interesting facts as at the bottom of this post, check out @grausPi.

In the meantime, my Pi waits for a €5 WiFi USB dongle I ordered from DealExtreme, so it can free itself from half of its wires currently attached. Then I’ll think about some more projects to run on this Pi. I still have some servo-motors, LEDs and LDRs (Light Dependent Resistors — simple light meters) left from Arduino days long gone, and apparantly I can control these GPIO pins through Python, as opposed to Arduino’s proprietary language, which is cool. Now for the take-home message:

Did you know the EntrezGene of Biomolecule Chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor is 7026?
— David’s Raspberry Pi (@grausPi) December 12, 2012

ECIR 2014 in Amsterdam!

The Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA) at the University of Amsterdam has been awarded the hosting of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2014. The ‘local’ organization concerning such tasks as arranging a venue, keeping an eye on finances, arranging a social event, arranging accommodation for conference attendants, etc. of this big conference will be largely in hands of me and my fellow PhD candidate-colleagues. In my opinion quite an awesome way of getting some experience in all the aspects involving the organization of such an event.

Within this ECIR2014 ‘local team’, I am trusted with PR/Communication tasks. The first task I’ve done is getting a website up. It lives here: ecir2014.org. The site is designed by Rutger de Vries/Perongeluk and subsequently ever so subtly destroyed into usability by me and colleagues. Another PR task is Twitter, as we have full confidence of Twitter remaining the number one micro-blogging platform in 2014 ;-). So, you know what’s left to do: follow @ECIR2014, like ECIR 2014 & visit ECIR2014.org. And put down in your agenda: April 13th to 17th, 2014. See you there!