Not sure how useful this prototype virtual desktop (PDF, 2.7 MB) is, but it sure looks extremely fun: Video on YouTube, 6:49 min. (Thanks Paolo!) Update: Merlin Mann convincingly points out that BumpTop might be useful for many things, but not for file management. Bonus link: Real-life BumpTop.
This snippet calculates the SHA-1 digest of a string: set s to “mailto:richard@cyganiak.de” do shell script “echo -n ” & quoted form of s & “|openssl sha1″ set digest to result This is useful for calculating foaf:mbox_sha1sum values, for example.
Dan Connolly complained on rdfweb-dev about FOAF’s redundant inverse properties (depicts/depiction, page/topic), and pointed to this TimBL post, which mentions a nice pattern for designing RDF vocabularies that should be adopted more widely. Avoid inverse properties. There’s no need to clutter your namespace with redundant inverse properties. Have either ex:parent or ex:child in your vocabulary, but […]
Flickr User Model, v0.3 A diagram of what Flickr is about. Stunning! How I’d love to produce this style of diagram instead of those boring UML things to document my software … (Via information aesthetics)
Productivity blogger Merlin Mann of 43Folders tells the story (audio, 10:50 min) of how he ended up not writing the “Life Hacks” book for O’Reilly. A great warning to all fellow procrastinators, especially those who like to endlessly fiddle with their organization systems.
Paraphrased from this Cory Doctorow piece: New technologies succeed by being good at the stuff that the old technology sucked at, not good at the stuff that made the old technology great. This happens to be a one-sentence summary of The Innovator’s Dilemma, the best book ever for understanding how technology changes the business world.
On Bots: On 2005-06-30 Googlebot visited node 1, the leftmost node. It did not crawl the path from the root to this node, so how did it find the page? Did it guess the URL or did it follow some external link? A few hours later, Googlebot crawled node 2, which is linked as […]
Damian Steer of HP Labs has released the initial version of his SquirrelRDF. The project homepage is the cutest ever. I talked about SquirrelRDF previously. Like our D2RQ/D2R Server, SquirrelRDF enables SPARQL queries against relational database content. In addition, it also enables queries against LDAP data. I didn’t have a chance to play with it yet, but it […]
From Christoph Görn: A little query form for some SIOC. The cool thing is that results are displayed instantly while you type. (Try typing the names of some Planet RDF authors, e.g. “Tim” or “Dan”.) Who says that RDF stuff has to be slow? OK, it’s just a toy dataset, but I still like it. The […]
Chris has updated the Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different Programming Languages. A bunch of toolkit descriptions were updated to the latest version, and the recent flurry of Javascript SPARQL clients (here, here) were added.
Paul is a friend of mine from school. In 9th grade or so we collaborated on an encryption tool based on, umm, the XOR algorithm, implemented in, umm, PowerBASIC. Hadn’t heard from him for a while – he just said hi in my comments. He writes about Java and tech stuff, with the odd […]
Jorge Pérez, Marcelo Arenas, Claudio Gutierrez: Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL (preprint) SPARQL has a dirty little secret: The spec doesn’t define the formal semantics. There is a lot of language to explain how everything is supposed to work, and there are a lot of examples, but no rigorous mathematical definitions that allow one to settle […]
Harry Halpin: In its classic game-theoretic formulation by David Lewis, a language is defined formally but established and used according to convention. A convention is used by a community to solve some co-ordination problem, such as determining how to list dates so as to schedule meetings or record history, even if such a choice […]
How to connect to MySQL over JDBC: jdbc:mysql://localhost/mydb?paranoid=true &pedantic=true&ultraDevHack=true Surprisingly, neither pessimistic=true nor patronizing=true work. (MySQL JDBC documentation)
Back in January 2005, being annoyed with the verboseness of a certain RDF API for Java, I tried to come up with a friendlier way of manipulating generic RDF from Java. My experiments never went anywhere and I forgot about it after a few days. I just found the files on my hard disk and […]