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The day sets off with a panel discussion headlined “Standardization: Positive impetus or market restraint?” The panelists are: Norman Heydenreich, a director of Microsoft Germany Hans Kauper, PSI and BITKOM Wolf-Dieter Lukas, Ministry of Education and Research Andreas Luxa, Siemens and IEEE Ingo Wende, German Institute for Standardization Moderator: Rainer Thiem, e.V. Microsoft is the main sponsor of the conference Thiem: Standardization […]

I’m at Berliner XML Tage 2005, an annual XML and Semantic Web conference in Berlin. It has a local focus, most of the attendees and many of the talks are in German. Usually there has been a fair share of industry presence. I blogged the conference last year (in German). The number of talks is […]

The only thing you have to do to get whatever you want, is to be willing to do whatever it takes! Both a truism and a profound wisdom. Paraphrased from here, and the one-sentence summary of this book.

Understand the downsides, and then do it anyway

An absolutely amazing movie. (Via Martin Pittenauer)

The Pragmatic Programmers famously recommended to learn one new programming language every year. Last year I learned AppleScript (page in German). My plan to learn Objectice C this spring didn’t work out for lack of time, but now I got closer to fulfilling my 2005 obligation: I wrote my first useful Ruby program. Email archival woes: […]

If you work with pie-in-the-sky technologies like this semantic web stuff you might have read about on this blog, then you need some kind of grounding to keep you connected to reality. You need some kind of compass that points you back to real-world problems. Is this technology useful? What’s missing to make it useful? […]

Scoble interviews Bill Gates (WMV, biiig file) This is good stuff. He doesn’t actually say anything surprising, but watching this is fun. Bill is a nerd. Interesting body language. Too expensive clothes. You don’t get to see stuff like this on TV. This is also evidence of the strange transformation that has been taking place at Microsoft for […]

It’s 2:32 in the morning. I just spent two rather unpleasant hours cleaning up after I noticed that my webspace got broken into. So what happened? Apparently, about two days ago, the attackers exploitet a vulnerability in PHP’s XML-RPC support to gain access. The culprit that left the door wide open was the Wordpress installation of […]

Dave Beckett is going to work for Yahoo. This opportunity will allow me to apply my skills, experience and knowledge of RDF, semantic web and software development into Yahoo!’s systems and rich content. The media group covers Yahoo! News, Sports, Finance, Movies and Music but there are of course other Yahoo! groups with semi/structured […]

From an excellent piece in the Sunday Times bashing the Bush administration for their incompetent handling of the New Orleans crisis: Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different? That is a really, really good question.