Lost BoyA journal of no fixed aims or direction, by Leigh Dodds

A view of my del.icio.us bookmarks:
extisp.icio.us – ldodds
Pretty accurate with respect to my interests these days. The Java/Speech tag is overblown though just because I’ve not marked other Java related pages.
It’s just a damn shame I can’t make it to FOAFCamp or the FOAF Workshop. Family holidays and work deadlines have crowded out my schedule.
Link courtesy of Many-to-Many.

Comments are now disabled on this blog (by the brute force method of moving the CGI script) until I decide on a better way to handle comment spam. It’s getting to be a real pain in the arse.

I was taken to task by my mother over Xmas. She’d been browsing my website during her lunch hour and had neglected to find any new photos, and precious few of her latest grandchild.
After setting aside thoughts that I’d slipped into an issue of The Onion I realised she was right, and that those dozens and dozens of images I’ve taken with my spangly new digital camera really ought to be published somewhere.
But I don’t want to do it half-heartedly, I want to publish as much metadata as possible along with the images themselves. There’s lots of fun to be had with co-depiction and rdf annotation.
But I’m essentially a lazy person so want a really, really simple way to publish and annotate the photos. So far I’ve been able to think of two, each with it’s own merits.

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Every year come October I get this overwhelming urge to go back into education again. I loved being at university as both an undergraduate studying Biology and as a postgraduate studying Computing, and freely admit to pining for the mental stimulation that full-time education brings. And yes, the lazy mornings and impromptu mid-week drinking sessions, but that’s another story…
So, come October I always wonder what I might have done if I’d continued on with my education. I’m still adamant that one day I’ll take a crack at a Ph.D; perhaps when the kids are older and I can get them cleaning chimneys to bring in a few more shiny pennies.

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Mark Baker has posted the first draft of RDF Forms:

“The Semantic Web is currently missing two key features of the hypermedia application model which are prevalent on the browser based Web; the ability to declare the intent to receive data for processing, and the ability to use data as arguments in the client-side construction of a URI. RDF Forms addresses these two needs in a manner similar to how HTML forms addresses them for the current Web.”

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Just noticed that the papers from the Hypertext ‘03 conference are online. Some interesting stuff to dig into there.
Hypertext’03 Conference: Complete List of Papers
You can also download PDFs of the poster presentations and demos.

Been rather busy over the past few weeks one way or another. I took some holiday after the Big Chill (which was excellent, btw — The Cinematic Orchestra were my muscial highlight of the weekend, other other was bumping into a friend I’ve not seen for about 9 years) but came back to all sorts of deadlines. Mostly day job stuff, but I’ve just finished another developerWorks tutorial this time on XML Catalogs. Expect a few ruminations from me on that score as there’s a number of items that didn’t make it into the tutorial that I want to write up. And here seems as good a place as any.
Got some time now to sit back, relax and catch up on my reading. Practical RDF dropped through my door this week so I’ll be taking a look at that over the weekend. I’ve also got some time to play with my new camera which’ll be fun.

In Goodness gracious, great circles, Edd writes up the results of more cool Dashboard related hacking. So now you have another good reason for adding GeoURL tags to your ‘blog. Edd is also looking for more geographic related services and data sets.
I came across one a while back whilst doing some related research (enriching search results by identifying place-names and adding links to more information).

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Apologies to anyone who has mailed me over the last week or so and is still waiting for a response. We’ve just gone through an application release here at work and so things have been extremely busy. Not had time to think about anything other than bug fixing. In case you’re interested we’ve just moved our production server over to JBoss.
I’ve got lots of things to write-up, and will be catching up with this and email over the next few days. So if you’re still waiting on a response, please bear with me!

I took some time last night to start refactoring the FOAF Wiki. This was something we needed to do, but comments on rdfweb-dev from Marc Canter, suggesting that folk are struggling without decent FOAF documentation, prompted me to devote a bit more time to it this week.
I’m pretty happy with the result as I’ve ended up with main entry points (FAQ, Tools, Developers, and DataSources) under which everything else can probably be arranged. Barring a Syntax page which ought to tie together the various vocab and extension discussions.
The FAQ should hopefully answer the majority of queries that Marc raised, including oft overlooked details such as “how do I link to my FOAF?, what icon(s) can I use?”, etc.
This all got me to thinking about Wiki Refactoring in general. Is Wiki Refactoring really Refactoring?
Martin Fowler recently aired a pet peeve about the abuse of the term: people talk about “refactoring” when they really mean “rewriting”. I’m pretty sure I’ve done this on more than one occasion.
Re-organising a Wiki — breaking down pages into inter-linked related pages; combining related information — seems like refactoring on the surface. But is it? The re-organisation seem to add (implicit) information, if only in the links between topics.
Not surprisingly there are pages about Wiki Refactoring on the C2 Wiki, which I’ll be exploring when I get a few free minutes.
Bill de h