• I am yellow

    I went through a psychometrics evaluation recently as part of a group activity in Microsoft. It was extremely interesting to find out about the characteristics of different personalities. Of course, we should always treat such tests with a grain of…

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  • Concert updates

    I recently went to see Sigur Ros with friend who had an extra ticket. I really enjoyed it. Good energy and great show. Photos below. Tonight I am seeing Death Cub for Cutie again (loved them at Sasquatch) supporting Neil…

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  • Podcast about Famulus and supporting the Scholarly Communications lifecycle

    Paul Miller from Talis interviewed Alex and me the other day. You can listen all about our Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) and the rest of our tooling in the podcast.

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  • SWORD plugin binary release

    We got requests for a binary release. So I tried creating an installer (checked in) and uploaded the first build. If you encounter problems, let me know. Feel free to go and change the code if you want 🙂 OfficeSWORD…

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  • Research-Output Repository Platform (codename Famulus) Beta 1 is Live!

    I am soooo excited to announce the first public beta release of the Research-Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”)*. It’s been a lot of fun working on Famulus for the last few months and the entire team is extremely excited to…

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  • SWORD plugin for Word 2007

    When we started thinking about what we could do to support researchers with tools and services, interoperability with existing formats, protocols, and services was amongst our primary goals. The Conference Management Tool (CMT), eJournal, Chem4Word, Creative Commons plugin for Office…

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  • Oh dear…

    I am seriously embarrassed that Microsoft produced this video 🙁 And I am scheduled to attend PDC08 🙁

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  • What happened to MEST? Why are we talking about the Web?

    Bill de h ra made a comment on Stefan Tilkov‘s post about our “How to GET a Cup of Coffee” article… Q205: “I feel that I have learned a lot from the discussions with the REST folks and together with Jim…

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  • “How to GET a Cup of Coffee”

    My “web book” co-authors (Jim and Ian) and I worked on a fun article for InfoQ about how Web technologies could be used to support a “cup of coffee ordering” scenario. It was really fun working on the article and…

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  • “Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Services”

    Our own Dan Fay (eScience blog) has a great post about data mining services in the cloud. “So for fun – I downloaded a csv file of a stream gauge near Redmond into Excel and ran the “Highlight Exceptions” tool…

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  • “I’m a PC” ad campaign

    After all the buzz about the Seinfeld ads, Microsoft announced the “I’m a PC” campaign. Clever me finds. Finally, something creative from Microsoft. I’ve said in the past how much I love the Apple ads (not just the “I’m a…

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  • On advertising (that new Microsoft ad everyone is talking about)

    I must admit, I do love the “I am a Mac, I am PC”, as I’ve said a number of times on this blog. When Microsoft announced that they were investing $300M on a campaign, I hoped that something good…

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  • Travel blog: A week in Greece

    And what a week has been! Lots of food, meeting friends, traveling around, and even been productive with work (i.e. no meetings!!! 🙂 I am now back in Xanthi and at my family’s home in Petinos (3.5km outside of Xanthi).…

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  • My online identity… change it or keep the current one?

    When the .name top-level domain name became available, I thought that I would make use of it for all my online identity needs for the rest of my life, so I purchased the savas.parastatidis.name domain. My personal email has been…

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  • Freebase Parallax

    This is a break from my “travel blogging” 🙂 I just watched the video of the “Freebase Parallax” browsing interface demo. Really really cool. It’s the power of semantics!!! Freebase Parallax.

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