Snapshot #2

On my birthday last year I wrote up a snapshot of what was happening in my life. A year has flown by and so here's this years snapshot. Warning navel gazing commences... Home Our second child, Martha was born last October and has brought as much joy to our lives as Ethan has. Being a … Continue reading Snapshot #2 →

Using RDF

Nice article from Bill de h

Programmers Are Interesting

Another great article from Sean McGrath: The mysteries of flexible software. Bang on the money. I don't know how many times I've encounted software (and yes, some of my own devising) that has all sorts of wonderful flexibility but in all the wrong places. Time spent factoring applications into layer cakes, introducing endless layers of … Continue reading Programmers Are Interesting →

The Info URI Scheme, Why?

I've been skimming through the info URI scheme RFC. From the Cover Pages we learn that the scheme "was developed within the library and publishing communities to expedite the referencing by URIs of information assets that have identifiers in public namespaces but have no representation within the URI allocation.". We also learn that "The motivation … Continue reading The Info URI Scheme, Why? →

The Fifth Sentence

Passing on a meme I caught from Norman Walsh. The fifth sentence on page 23 of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is: But while Lord Finkle-McGraw was not the sort to express feelings promiscuously, he gave the impression of being nearly satisfied with the way the conversation was going. This isn't the book I'm … Continue reading The Fifth Sentence →

XML Processing Model

The W3C have posted a Note discussing requirements for an XML Processing Model. This is good news, there's been a lot of desire to see this work progressing for some time now. Wonder whether XML Pipeline will serve as a possible basis for a specification? It seems to be a good match to the requirements. … Continue reading XML Processing Model →

Dashboard and Jabber

I've been thinking about writing some Jabber services or bots recently as we've been trialling a Jabber server at work as a replacement for the myriad different messaging services folk are now using. I've been hunting round, unsuccessfully I might add, for something as easy to work with as PircBot a Java IRC Bot framework. … Continue reading Dashboard and Jabber →

Music Metadata Summit

There's a Music Metadata Summit today at Stanford Law School. There's a conference "back channel" via #musicmetadata on freenode if, like me, you are geographically challenged. Some interesting topics in there and a lot of overlap with FOAF (tipjars, playlists, recommendations, etc). I'll probably be dropping in on the IRC channel later this evening.

AudioScrobbler Scalability

The AudioScrobbler folk are thinking very hard about scalability. Having recently switched to a new database server they're now pondering what other changes they may need to make to ensure that the service scales as smoothly as possible. In this posting to the audioscrobbler-development list Richard Jones outlines some proposed options. It seems that they've … Continue reading AudioScrobbler Scalability →

RDF Adventure Game

Liam Quinn wrote an adventure game using RDF (data). Found via the SWIG chump, and noted here so I can find it again in the future. I was reminded of it after stumbling across Inform a design system for interactive fiction that's been around since 1993. Since its invention...Inform has been used to design some … Continue reading RDF Adventure Game →