Arne Handt comments on a John Gruber piece about software that tries to be too smart and thereby becomes unpredictable and annoying. My favourite example of this is Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrection feature. It often changes my double quotes into some completely unappropriate quote style, and insists on “fixing†my “errors†by randomly jumbling letters around or [...]
Cool, that was about time: maps.google.de, and a bunch of other European countries got street data too. This is where I live. Weird: The new data doesn’t show up in applications using the Google Maps API. In my FOAF geolocation thingy, most of Europe is still a big blank territory. (Update, it works now, thanks to Alex [...]
Via Guy Kawasaki, whose headline I also stole for this entry, comes this poem: There Is No Indispensable Man by Saxon N. White Kessinger, Copyright 1959 Sometime when you’re feeling important; Sometime when your ego’s in bloom Sometime when you take it for granted You’re the best qualified in the room, Sometime when you feel that your going Would leave an unfillable hole, Just [...]
Yesterday I returned from the Semantic Desktop Workshop. My intention was to live blog. I didn’t find the time. Days started early and ended late. In between was way too much high-information goodness to let any of it pass. The two previous workshops were centered around Leo Sauermann’s gnowsis. This time we had a wider focus, with [...]
The first talk is by Leo Sauermann. He gives an update on the state of the semantic desktop engine gnowsis. “Personal information management is the main use of a PC, why is it not in the operating system?†Gnowsis is a desktop operating system enhancement. It’s an RDF layer on top of the existing structures and resources [...]
Anja, Arne and me are at the Semantic Desktop Hands-on Workshop in Kaiserslautern. Things are starting out well – we have coffee and wireless. That’s going to be a fun weekend.
Jena team meeting notes: Target date for release 2.4 completion: April 30th. Very timely, with the Jena User Conference in May. The main new feature seems to be support for assembler specifications, which are “RDF descriptions of how to construct a model and its associated resources, such as reasoners, prefix mappings, and initial content.†This means applications [...]
Silly Firefox ad. (via fscklog) Update: Link broke, here’s a working one.
Scott Adams on respecting the beliefs of others: I fantasize about becoming President one day and insisting on settling the question of which religion is “right.†I’d assemble all the experts on history and religious and science, and televise them arguing the merits and evidence of their sides, with cross-examination and – most important [...]
The Semantic MediaWiki folks are evaluating RDF triple stores for use in their system. Currently, the PHP-based stores of RAP and ARC are on their shortlist, as well as the C-based Redland store. This is interesting because MediaWiki powers Wikipedia, and if the Semantic MediaWiki folks do a good job, then maybe, just maybe, Wikipedia will [...]
A new micro-movement in the software development community attempts to reframe test-driven development as behaviour-driven development. This is an attempt to overcome the backwardness of test-first development. If I want to test something, I need to have that something first, right? So writing tests for something that doesn’t even exist is a pretty weird concept. Call [...]
I guess I should pay a bit more attention to the Microsoft side of the world. It took me three weeks to notice that Internet Explorer 7 is available as a beta download. Anybody used it yet? Is it better than Firefox?
The schedule for JUC2006, the Jena User Conference in Bristol (May 10th and 11th) has been finalized and is online. Looks like quite an interesting mix, there’s applications and there’s infrastructure work and there are tutorials and there’s die-hard research. (I’ll be there. I still have to make up my mind about attending myself. I’d have [...]
SPARQL JavaScript library This looks very cool. I imagine it takes most of the pain out of doing AJAX over SPARQL.
Wikocracy is a wiki where users can edit the text of US laws – the Constitution, the Patriot Act, the DMCA and many others. It’s a fascinating idea. Wikipedia has demonstrated that wikis can be a great way to hammer out consensus, even over hotly contested topics. Could the same consensus-building process be applied to lawmaking, [...]
This one sounds like another late april fool’s joke, but it’s real: Boot Camp is a piece of software from Apple that lets their new Intel-based machines boot into Windows. You have to bring your own Windows CD. Boot Camp is a free download and will also be shipped with the next version of Mac OS [...]
I somehow managed to miss this one on April 1st … Google Romance — because, “when you think about it, love is just another search problem.†Brilliant. (via AG NBI)
Oh, I didn’t know that W3C has a Web API Working Group, and that they are standardizing the XMLHttpRequest object, the base technology of AJAX. XMLHttpRequest already works pretty much the same across browsers. Nevertheless, an official W3C stamp of approval will be a good thing.
Sometimes there are lucky coincidences. I tried to find time for writing a review of this extremely fascinating book, which I finished reading a couple of days ago. But today Guy Kawasaki has an interview with the author: There are some books that are “must reads†for entrepreneurs; some for marketers; some for salespeople; [...]
On the semantic-web@w3.org list, Harry Halpin makes a good case for why attempts to standardize on a Unified Formal Ontology (UFO), such as Cyc and DOLCE are ill-considered. Harry provides lots of literature. Hard to argue with that. I just don’t want people to think UFOs are a good idea without knowing there is [...]