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Permalinks and trackback are the key to the semantic web

Posted by | rss | No Comments

The commonplace use of permalinks in weblogs has profound implications. At a recent tech discussion Mark Nottingham pointed out that the real difference between RSS and RDF (the cornerstone of the semantic web initiative) was that RSS was about lists. On the one hand this is true, however, the term list understates a crucial point about weblogging. Weblogging is designed to deal with nuggets of information that an author creates instead of a page that a publisher publishes. A permalink refers to a unique item, and in terms of the semantic web, indicates a component from which meaning can be extracted. more…

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What the Butler Saw

Posted by | uk | No Comments

The press are having a field day in the UK over the latest royals scandal and conspiracy theorists will have a lot to chew on – Diana ready to convert to Islam – the Queen warning Diana’s butler of mysterious powers at work. Every time the UK royal family picks itself up from humiliation, they are beaten down again by the press. I can’t help thinking that this is an inevitable feature of an anachronistic institution, that was artificially bolstered by Victorian politicians from terminal decline. Lest anyone forget, the royals are no strangers to PR, the very name Windsor was invented to divert attention from the rather German sounding Saksen-Coburg. Google Search: cluster:Diana

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Why is almost all software and hardware badly designed?

Posted by | design | No Comments

Lets face it – most software and computer hardware is crap. In most tech. organizations, design doesn’t exist or is part of marketing or engineering, something that would have managers from other product-based industries slapping their thighs and crying with laughter. In “the ten reasons ease of use doesn’t happen on engineering projects”, Scott Berkun outlines some reasons why the most basic of design requirements, ‘ease of use’, is willfully ignored in software development. Over the next month or so, in an attempt to justify my ranting, I’ll elaborate on the future of design in the Computer Industry. via Tomalak The ten reasons why ease of use doesn’t happen on engineering projects – UIWEB.COM

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A Nuclear Yugoslavia

Posted by | politics | No Comments

As the Economist points out, the time to act against a potential aggressor is before they acquire nuclear weapons, in the this respect the Economist votes in favor of war with Iraq. In terms of the implications of a war with Iraq, the two most important countries that the US must focus on today, for very different reasons, are Israel to the east and Pakistan to the west. Both have nuclear weapons and both are looking politically fragile. Israel…. In Israel, a coalition government has collapsed, and Sharon has endured three no confidence votes, continuing Israeli/Palestinian violence is playing to the right. The CIA cautions against involvement against Iraq while there is violence in Israel. Remember the Patriot missile system in the gulf war – well they actually brought down none of the Iraqi Scuds – their success was propaganda. A cornered Saddam could launch a bio or chemical warhead…

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Friday afternoon trivia

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. “Go.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day. It’s possible to lead a cow upstairs, but not downstairs.

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Michael Moore is rarely panned in Canada

Posted by | politics | No Comments

Glenn Reynolds posts that Michael Moore is Panned in Canada: “His journalism, in short, on the subject of Canada and Canadians, is nothing short of shoddy, manipulative and untrue. The same can be said for his journalism on his own country, and indeed on the terrible and complicated issue he purports to adjudicate.” More accurately this should read Michael Moore gets panned by one newspaper in Canada, the National Post. – big deal. Reading other Canadian newspapers the story is somewhat different: Toronto Star “A great documentary challenges social norms and demands reaction, and on that score Moore hits us right between the eyes.” Edmonton Journal “Michael Moore remains a welcome voice in the North American conversation, especially considering how stacked the deck has become. Even when he stumbles, he’s worth watching — and he’s standing pretty tall here.” The Globe and Mail “Moore’s documentary about gun control in the…

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The No War Blog

Posted by | politics | No Comments

A new blog that should provide balance to War Blogging at first glance – seems to have a slight Libertarian bias. – However, seems that the most excellent Max Sawicky is involved, so it must be OK! No War Blog

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FAIR causes New York Times to change its story

Posted by | politics | No Comments

After concerns raised by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), the New York Times changes its tune: NYT October 30: “drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers’, forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers.” NYT October 27: the “thousands” of demonstrators were “fewer people… than organizers had said they hoped for.”

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Seamless city

Posted by | design | No Comments

Armed with a digital camera and inkjet printer, San Francisco artist Michael Koller is in the process of producing a unique photographic study. He has taken thousands of sequential photographs of building elevantions along a 30 mile continuous route through San Francisco. By editing these images to join up seamlessly he is producing one single continuous image. Like many innovative art projects, this takes advantage of techniques that were previously unavailable. This is a project that would be almost impossible without digital cameras and imaging software. seamless city – San Francisco – m.koller

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Vignette acquires Epicentric for 32M

Posted by | technology | No Comments

The Epicentric/Vignette deal is interesting. Portals are about aggregation and CMS is about publishing. It links the portal and content management space and demonstrates that webservices will be a part of content management – no big surprise. More interesting, however, is that this is the model that was innovated on a grass-roots level with hybrid RSS news aggregation and weblog publishing systems like Dave Winer’s Radio Userland. Weblog publishing via standard XML based RPC API’s coupled with RSS aggregation are perhaps the template for all future enterprise content management systems. On a secondary note, it is bad news for Plumtree, with Epicentric, their nearest rival, selling for $32M it proves that they will have to go way beyond the current portal space into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) to validate their $70M market cap (already way below their peak of nearly $300M). To do this quickly will involve developing adapters into…

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America’s secular newspaper

Posted by | religion | No Comments

I am an atheist – not an agnostic but a rabid, dogmatic, anti-believer. It is for this very reason that one of the newspapers that I regularly read, online, is the Christian Science Monitor. In a country where money is tantamount to a religion, where corporations vote twice to fund both the GOP and the Democrats to ensure their interests are ‘marketed’ to the voters, the CSMonitor often provides a secular balance to the belief in free markets as the saviour of all. The CSMonitor was founded by a Mary Baker Eddy in 1908 – before women had the vote. After being hounded by Joseph Pulitzer’s (who later endowed the Pulitzer prize) New York World as being unfit to manage her own affairs at 86, she decided to form a newspaper that would injur no ‘man’ and be a truly independent voice not controlled by “commercial and political monopolists.” The…

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Charlton Heston’s fart

Posted by | diary | No Comments

A couple of years ago I found myself in a large room in the National Gallery in London. The room was unusually empty except for a tall middle-aged man who was standing next to me, looking at the same painting. I was suddenly overcome with the smell of putrefying flesh and Sulphur as he broke the golden rule of farting (don’t break wind when there are less than three people in the room). I glanced round and it was none other than Charlton Heston, the star of ‘A Touch of Evil’, he blushed and promptly made a swift exit. ‘From my warm moist…’ So I finally went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine this weekend, and sure enough Heston himself appeared on the silver screen holding a rifle and bellowing ‘from my cold dead hands…’ – and a curious thing happened, I could have sworn I smelled putrefying flesh and Sulphur….

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