captsolo weblog

Mac users have been blessed with SubEthaEdit - "Recieving high praise from all users of the program, this truly is the "Killer app" of Pair Programming or Extreme Programming over long geographic distances."

Quoting Chris Schmidt and his "An open letter to the CodingMonkeys" [Aug 8, 2004] that ends with:

"If you wish to add your voice into this debate, feel free. I would be interested in hearing thoughts on either side of this issue - for or against the public release of such a protocol. However, it should be made clear that such a tool will exist on other platforms eventually, with or without the help of the originators of SubEthaEdit."

This time has come - "Gobby" is what SubEthaEdit is for Macs, but open source and runs virtually everywhere (in early / beta stage of its life though):

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It uses GTK+ 2.6 as its windowing toolkit and thus integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment.

Check out the Gobby's list of features, take a look around in our screenshots section and download it right now.

There is more: this project also offers Obby - a framework used to synchronize document changes. There is work on integrating this framework into other editors and I can't wait to see it integrated into Eclipse (despite no news about integration with this particular tool).

An example: Ebby - an implementation of Obby protocol in Emacs Lisp.

And there is Sobby - a dedicated server for collaborative editing using Obby protocol.

Linux.com article "Collaborative text editing with Gobby" by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier should provide more information in case if you are interested. His summary:

Despite its immaturity, Gobby is a good choice when two or more users want to collaborate on a text document in real time. Want to browse through a log file with another admin to troubleshoot a problem, or work together to edit a configuration file? Need to write up release notes for a project, work on some documentation, or put together a requirements list? Gobby makes things much simpler than passing around a text document or OpenOffice.org file with changes. The Ubuntu folks are even using Gobby to allow remote developers to participate in the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Gobby's developers have done an excellent job so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what new and interesting features they will add in the future. With any luck, other developers will start integrating Obby into their editors, and we can all collaborate no matter which editor we prefer.

Good to know that someone finds your work useful. Even better to see that the Semantic Web and finding its data is important to people speaking many languages throughout the world as you can see in this selection of articles in many different languages (re. Semantic Radar and the Ping Service):

Semantic Radar for Firefox [FOAF] on "Searching the next generation web":

Recently I read about Semantic Radar over at Frédérick Giasson’s weblog. Semantic Radar is a plug-in for Firefox, notifying the user if it finds SIOC, FOAF or DOAP data referenced by the page he or she is currently viewing. When such data is detected a little icon will appear on the bottom right side of you browser, which lets you access the embedded data easily.

I really like this little helper!

Pot-au-feu sémantique [SIOC] - in this article (in French, naturellement) he wonders about the food qualities of the FOAF+SIOC+SKOS mix. I hope it tasted good.

Note: [FOAF] and [SIOC] indicate what metadata would a Semantic Radar tell you about if you visited that page.

" His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god. "

- " But what does it feel like? "
-- " To have one's will overridden by that of another? You should know. "

Yama's smile vanished, then returned. - "You would like me to strike you, wouldn't you, Buddha? It would make you feel superior. Unfortunately I am a sadist and will not do it."

Sam laughed.
-- "Touché, Death," he said.

They sat in silence for a time.

Roger Zelazny - "Lord of Light"

It has been a very long time since I've been reading Roger Zelazny. He is one of the best science fiction authors and reading The Chronicles of Amber (a long time ago) was a breath-taking experience. Now another book has fallen into my hands, one of the first novels written by him (in 1967).

Zelazny fascinates by the visions he builds in readers' minds.

New version of the WordPress SIOC plugin supports content negotiation:

Every blog post (and other blog pages) has a "mirror" representation in RDF. It can be accessed by following an auto-discovery link or directly via content negotiation - by tools like Tabulator which send "application/rdf+xml" in Accept: header.

You only need to enter a URL of a blog post (from a SIOC-enabled blog) into Tabulator and it will display its SIOC RDF information.

This also means that a URL is all that you need to know - all other information can be fetched from SIOC / RDF data. [ Think Semantic Clipboard! ]

This is interesting:

PUSSH is "Pythonic Ubiquitous SSH"

- a command line wrapper script for sending commands to multiple machines in parallel, i.e. in *real time*, with options for controlling the degree of parallelism, timeouts, and node selections.

PuSSH was designed for usage on networks / clusters / machine farms with lots, or multiple hosts (or indeed over the entire internet, for that matter), ideally wherein SSH is configured with Kerberos or RSA/DSA keys in such a way as to avoid any password authentication. Using PUSSH, you can send the same command via SSH to a range of machines of practically any size, and in parallel.

In case you are wondering - Semantic Radar is compatible with Firefox 2.0.

Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Firefox.

It is a browser extension which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and informs about presence of them by showing an icon in browser's status bar. Currently it detects SIOC, FOAF and DOAP metadata.

Semantic Radar can also ping the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata are detected.
This allows for a community based discovery of the Semantic Web data.

Technorati Tags: firefox | semantic web | web 2.0

With today's upcoming release of Firefox 2.0 you may want to run multiple versions of Firefox in parallel. Or just run multiple profiles of Firefox 2.0 at once.

Here's how: Running more than one profile in parallel

SeeAlso:

1. Running Multiple Versions of Firefox (side by side)
2. Running Multiple Versions of Firefox on Windows

Skype 2.0 for Mac has been released.

What's New: Video calls with any other Skype user. Finally!

What's not so cool - calls to Easter Europe from a cell phone are still cheaper than via SkypeOut.

In a follow-up to E-Book Restricted in US, Public Domain in Australia take a look at this serious question:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia:

Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

Original link, via Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.

A nice and very addictive movie - "Met me here on IRC, LOLOL".

As seen on IRC, in #joiito.

Exclusive interview with Richard Hammond - the star of TV shows "Top Gear" and "Brainiac" - published in today's Daily Mirror.

He survived a crash of a jet-powered car at the speed of 288 mph (463 km/h) during filming of the show 33 days ago.

He is a great presenter, I love both of his shows and am glad that he is OK. This also shows how important it is to have all the safety precautions in place as they literally saved his life.

Quotes from the interview:

"Yet here I am ready to go back home after five weeks. I'm so bloody lucky. I can't believe it."

"At the time of the crash I was doing 288 mph so it's incredible that every doctor I've spoken to tells me I'm on course for a 100 per cent recovery."

Richard describes the crash helmet he wore as the "most spectacular crash helmet you've ever seen". He revealed the manufacturer wants it back to test, saying with a smile: "They told me, that after all it's the fastest test we've ever put it through."

Before he headed off for a much-needed nap, he had one final thing on his mind. Richard said: "Do you realise how annoyed I am that I've got no marks on me? Absolutely nothing at all, nothing for the pub."

"??? ??? ??! ? ??????? ????? ?????? ?? ??? ??????? ???????? ??? ???? ???????? - ? ??????? ? ???? ???????? ????????, ? ??? ???????? ???????!"- ?????????? ???????, ??? ?? ??????????, ??? ??????? ???????."

via anekdotov.net

How a pretty and real person gets transformed into what we see in magazines, ads and so on - OR - are billboard models real?

This is a video called "Evolution" by the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It is a very short and effective film.

Via BoingBoing. While writing this article I noted that Stephanie Booth has also written about this video (in French).

Extreme digital makeover by Greg Apodaca

Another example of extreme Photoshop retouching.
I wrote about it about a year ago: Graphic Artist Wizardry (in Latvian)

Miss Celania blog post "Real Beauty" has an interesting commentary about the Real Beauty campaign.

And another demonstration of digital makeover can be found here: Media Photoshop Retouching

Via: Chez Luc - "Une beauté artificielle inaccessible"

Interesting article in LawMeme: Tenth Most Popular Borrowed E-Book Restricted in US, Public Domain in Australia

The funny part is that the 10th most popular book that people are "borrowing" in libraries ("1984" by George Orwell) is public domain in countries such as Australia, Canada or Russia. If you live in these countries you can just download it, print it out and keep forever. Without any charge and need to "borrow" it.

You see, you can download free copies from the internet (more here), because in Australia, unlike the US, 1984 has entered the public domain. US library e-book users can only "borrow" 1984 as an ebook. Aussies can download a copy and keep it forever.

As Teleread points out, however, Aussies are considering changing the law and undoubtedly, as in the US, free works will once again be locked up. It is called copyright "restoration", as if the public domain has damaged the work or something, a use of the term Orwell would probably have ironically appreciated.

These different copyright regulations makes one think about borders in the Internet. And also reminds of times when some code (e.g., PGP) was legal everywhere but the U.S.

Imagine that there is content on the Internet, legal to be published and shared in the country where it is hosted, yet it is illegal to read or print this content if you are in the E.U. or U.S.

As "Books Online" says at the top of the page: Do NOT download or read these books online if you or your system are in the United States, or in another country where copyrights for authors with the dates shown below have not expired.

Interesting that in the Russia authors of literary works cooperate with online libraries and you end up having a free online library with large amount of full book texts of works whose copyrights won't be expiring another 50 years or so. The public only gains from that and authors seem to agree to this (apart from cases when authors ask to pull some work from the library because they are preparing an english translation and their U.S. partners object to having source text freely available)

Xeno te linku atsūtīja. "? ??????!"

What offline blogging tools are you using?

It is good to have the ability to edit contents of your weblog while offline and even more important to be able to manage all your blogs when there's too many of them. Now I am looking around to see what offline blogging tools are out there and what are best to use.

Quick exploration reveals some candidates and leads to LifeHacker: "Reader Poll: Best desktop blog editor?"

• Performancing for Firefox (11.7%)
• w.bloggar (10.2%)
• Ecto (8.4%)
• Qumana (5.6%)
• ... 60.9% of are only using online post submission interfaces

WordPress Codex has a longer list: Weblog Clients

I have looked at Ecto and Qumana so far but each of them has some problems and the search continues.

Ecto looks ok for the most part but it messes up the special characters of my Latvian posts. Since those posts are in Unicode this should not be happening.

Qumana looked nice as well, but was hanging up during installation and usage (e.g. when trying to retrieve previous posts).

Š?.g. 9.oktobrī plkst. 16:00 LU MII (Raiņa bulv. 29, Rīga) 413. auditorijā prof. Guntis Bārzdiņš nolasīs referātu par tēmu "Ceļā uz semantisko Latviju".

Referāts balstīts uz konferencē Baltic DB&IS 2006 nolasīto referātu.
Aicināti visi interesenti. Ipa?ši aicināti maģistratūras studenti.

Vairāk informācijas: SemWeb.LV listē.

A seminar "Towards Semantic Latvia" is taking place today.
It is based on a paper presented at the international conference "Baltic DB&IS 2006":

- "Towards Semantic Latvia" [PDF] by J. Barzdins, G. Barzdins, R. Balodis, K. Cerans, A. Kalnins, M. Opmanis, K. Podnieks.

Good: finally found this paper on the web at Audris Kalnins's page.
Bad: the web page of the conference "Baltic DB&IS 2006" is offline.

Vēlēšanu gaisotnē: grupas "???" klips "???? ?? ?????".

Laacz ģimene nesen devās apceļot Īrijas rietumus un iegriezās pie mums ciemos Galvejā (Galway).
Protams, ka Guinness baudīšana neizpalika.

Nākamajās dienās (pēc Guinness baudīšanas) bija ļoti, ļoti smuks laiks. Tieši kā radīts Konemaras apceļošanai kur Laacz arī devās tālāk.

Labprāt būtu pievienojies šim ceļojumam, bet diemžēl nebija tik daudz laika, jo tūlīt bija jādodas prom uz konferenci "BlogTalk Reloaded" kas notika šīs nedēļas sākumā.

Via Kingsley Idehen's Data Space:

Blogosphere 2.0

Ha! It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0 :-) Ironically, this is far more a "2.0" (a 'la enhancement over base technology) than Web 2.0 (which is simply a usage pattern relative to Web 1.0).

John Breslin has collected a summary of recent events in the SIOC-o-sphere that Kingsley Idehen is referring to:

Latest developments in the SIOC-o-sphere

The latest bits and pieces people have been saying and doing related to SIOC:

• Enabling SIOC for AI3 - Adaptive Information - Mike Bergman installs the SIOC WordPress exporter and describes his experiences
• SIOC and AtomOWL: a new way to describe content… - [GNU] remarks on bblfish’s proposal to use AtomOWL’s content:encoded to describe enhanced sioc:Post content
• Using SKOS to describe communication structures - [GNU] shows us that we don’t need all these sub-types of sioc:Role, sioc:Post, sioc:Forum if we use SKOS…
• SIOC data I use to crawl - [GNU] creates a plan file for scuttering SIOC data
• seeAlso for SIOC hooked in page via RDFa - [GNU] shows how to help with SIOC autodiscovery using RDFa
• Semantic Radar for FireFox and the Semantic Web Services environment - fgiasson talks about CaptSolo’s Semantic Radar plugin for autodetecting SIOC data in Firefox (as well as FOAF and DOAP)
• Ping the Semantic Web.com: a pinging service for the Semantic Web - fgiasson’s excellent web service for notifying TalkDigger of new Semantic Web data, including SIOC instances
• ODS SIOC Reference - Overview of how OpenLink Data Spaces allows SPARQL queries to be performed on ODS data via SIOC ontology mappings

With 64 subscribers on the SIOC-Dev mailing list and live discussions in the #sioc IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) SIOC has become an active Semantic Web community.

It also has a new webpage: http://sioc-project.org

"Arsenāls 2006" filmu saraksts

Filmu seansu saraksts pa dienām

Vai Jūs iesiet uz "Arsenāla 2006" filmām? Esat jau bijuši?
Uzrakstiet kā patika, uz kurām filmām ir noteikti jāiet.

Google has just unveiled Google Apps for Your Domain.

It is an extension of the earlier service called "GMail for Your Domain" and is a free, ad-supported package that consists of GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Page Creator.

Via: And the Emmy goes to Google for its supporting role in "The Office"

Was trying to upgrade Fedora Core on one of the servers. It is a virtual machine running under VMWare and is currently running FC3.

I would not need to upgrade it if it did not have a problem known to Linux running under VMWare - it looses time. Every second lasts twice as long and the clock on the virtual machine lags behind. Not a good thing, even if it can be worked around by synchronising time.

Did try to install VMWare Tools but it says there are no kernel modules ready for my system and compiling from sources fails. Therefore one of the options is to upgrade to FC4 or FC5 and see if the problem disappears or if the VMWare Tools would install or compile better.

The result so far: failure.

I did not have a DVD-ROM drive readily available so tried 2 other ways to install it: (a) by donwloading a DVD image and mounting it locally as described in "Upgrading from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 -- quick upgrade using ISOs from HDD" which allowed me to boot into the installer but failed later on and (b) installing via HTTP which failed at the same place.

In both cases the installer would collect information about the system, start the installation and then fail with an error message "There was an error installing filesystem-2.3.4-1" suggesting there was a media error, not enough disk space or other failure. This is a critical failure and the installation stops.

Will try to upgrade to FC5 now. Maybe that will work better. I wanted to upgrade one version number up first but probably there is no reason to hesitate going to FC5 (unless it is not compatible with VMWare that we have).

There is also an option to upgrade using yum as described in YumUpgradeFaq and mentioned in "FC3 to FC4 Upgrade Process Question" but is it is less tested than using an installer.

Putting Blogs on TimeLine.

Following the release of excellent SIMILE TimeLine visualisation tool here is what can be done using some SIOC data that's out there:

Fig 1. Blog posts on a TimeLine

Different icons show what blog the post belongs to (Christoph Görn, Harry Chen, John Breslin from DERI, ...).
If your posts do not have an icon and use a instead please let me know what icon to use.

You can go back in history (see below). Notice posts from Danny Ayers (watch out for cats!) appearing - from the time when he was using WordPress + WP SIOC plugin.

Fig 2. December 2005 on the same TimeLine.

Taking it to extremes: SIOC TimeLine from year 1997 showing the origins of John Breslin's blog.

Technical Details:

1. Master list for the crawler taken from SIOC-enabled sites list, converted to RDF using Alex Passant's Wiki->RDF script.
2. Gathered RDF data (using my crawler.py). Added Danny's SIOC data from the archive.
3. Stored data in a Joseki 3.0 beta server (SPARQL endpoint is here).
4. Perform a SPARQL query (script), used XSLT (sparql-tline.xslt) to convert SPARQL XML result set to TimeLine XML format (converted XML file). Icons for blogs are also added via XSLT (adding statements to the RDF store is another option).
5. ... and here is the result - TimeLine doing its AJAX-y magic.

For more info read How to Create Timelines on SIMILE site.

See Also:
- Danny Ayers: SPARQL Timeline ps.
- Alex Passant: SPARQL/JSON into Timeline

Notes:

There are some things that need to be improved.

• Visual bugs - icons are getting cropped and text labels are wrapped to next line and cropped at the bottom. Making icons smaller makes then unrecognizeable, so that is not a solution (unless there's an icon graphics wizard who can teach me how to make good, small icons)
• Visual appearance - after bugs are fixed there are improvements that can be done - e.g. make the posts (small vertical lines) appear at the monthly band in one line creating a "feel" of density of posts in time; ...
• Performance / data volume - the amount of data including full text of blog posts can be quite large (it is amazing how much a small group of people can write in couple of months). Loading data on demand can be a solution - both for metadata of posts that are outside of viewable area and for post contents.
• Reliability - Joseki 3.0 is still in beta and crashes from time to time. It is not a problem now since data for TimeLine are queries for only once, in "attended" mode. But it will be a problem if doing data loading on demand. If you notice the store is down, please let me (captsolo @ gmail.com) know.
• Dynamic updates - currently data are crawled and stored in one batch. How to do incremental crawling of new SIOC data?
• Use SIOC - timeline as is now does not use much of relations available in SIOC. There is more information in the data store - posts linking to comments, site pointing to posts it contains, topics of posts, etc. It would be good to visualize this richer data, although I am not 100% sure timeline is best fit for that.

The launch of Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-121 (planned for July 1) has been moved to July 4. This will be the 115th shuttle flight.

Date: Saturday, July 4

• Launch time: 14:38 EDT
• - 19:38 - Ireland and the UK

• - 21:38 - Baltic states, Finland

There remains a probability that the launch may be rescheduled if weather conditions are not appropriate. If that is the case I will update the launch date/time shown here with the new information.

Update: Launch planned for July 1, 15:49 EDT was postponed for 24 hours due to bad weather.
Update 2: Launch was postponed for 48 hours again due to bad weather and is now planned for Tuesday, July 4.

You can view the flight preparations, launch and the shuttle mission online:

• NASA Online TV

NASA pays a lot of attention to the mission safety and this is the first time when shuttle is equipped with a remote control device which could be used to salvage the vehicle of it is considered unsafe for the return of the crew (in which case the crew will stay at the International Space Station).

STS-121 Shuttle Mission - Press Kit [PDF]

The press kit is a 100+ page document with detailed information about the mission, crew, planned space-walks and everything else imaginable.

More information:

• Space Shuttle mission page

Peter Thomas has made a graphical visualisation of Java web application call stack from HTTP all the way down to the database access. With about 100 call frames it looks very impressive.

• Java call stack - from HTTP upto JDBC as a picture

Via: Ned Batchelder: Web application framework stacks where he compares this with mod_python/Django/MySQL architecture where a similar call consists of only 19 frames.

Lack of simple interoperability between the mobile phones is bad.

All the phone numbers are in the mobile phone. But almost every time when asked to send (SMS) somebody's number I end up having to write the number down and then entering it again in the SMS text. The reason: when trying to "just send" the contact via SMS it is send as a business card and the receiving phone says "can not save the card" or something like that.

This is not nearly the first time it's happening, but frustrating nevertheless.

Note: I am using Nokia.

"Web 2.0" has been trademarked by CMP Media.

Joined with O'Reilly they have sent a cease-and-desist letter to an irish Web 2.0 Half-Day Conference hosted by IT@Cork and taking place just a few weeks from now.

Q: What can we learn from this?
A: If you say "Web 2.0" you risk being prohibited to do so.

Via: [Ars Technica] Please cease-and-desist from using "Web 2.0"

Update: the trademark is registered for organizing events, workshops and tutorials - if you do not do any of the above, you should be safe for now.

Update 2: BoingBoing also has a good article about this - Can anyone own "Web 2.0?"

SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) plugins express the structure and contents of weblogs in RDF. Such exporters are not at all limited to weblogs - SIOC ontology used here is meant for expressing information about online community sites (that includes bulletin boards, forums, weblogs, ...).

Yet, this post is about weblogs. Here are 2 SIOC export plugins that provide per-page RDF export and support RDF auto-discovery. As a result - install them and suddenly you have the whole weblog in RDF.

WordPress SIOC plugin - v1.15

A SIOC export plugin for the WordPress blog engine v1.5+ written by me. It exports information about every blog page and every author in RDF.

The SIOC profile on the main page of the blog contains information about the blog itself and points to more information (rdfs:seeAlso) about posts and users. The main profile has links to information about the first set of posts and also a link to the "next page" with more posts, and so on. Thus a crawler can use the main page as a starting point and collect the entire site in RDF.

DotClear SIOC plugin - v1.0

Alexandre Passant has made a SIOC export plugin for DotClear - a blogging platform popular in french blogosphere.

Recent updates: added RDF auto-discovery

Alexandre is now visiting DERI Galway and the things we plan to work on is writing a browser for SIOC data and creating a PHP API to facilitate development of SIOC export tools.

The next versions of SIOC export plugins will implement the recent ontology changes. One of the main changes is better integration with FOAF - information about users will be exported as a foaf:Person.

All are welcome to install the plugins and experiment with data. I hope that will lead to some cool and unexpected use cases. If you have ideas, suggestions or bug-reports - go to the SIOC/ToDoList wiki page.

Or the SIOC Development mailing list.

SIOC Detect Firefox extension - v0.5

When a website generates RDF data, it is good if you can have see some indication that the page you are looking at has some RDF (= richer data) available.

SIOC Detector is a simple Firefox extension that looks for SIOC RDF auto-discovery links and displays a status bar icon if data are found. Pressing the icon leads you to the RDF validator page. It provides "an instant gratification" to see that there are some "invisible data" and is great for development purposes.

Now that both WordPress and DotClear plugins have auto-discovery links this tool has become quite useful.

To see it in action, go to one of the SIOC/Enabled Sites.

[GNU] writes in "SIOC enabling a community site":

After installing the SIOC WordPress plugin this site is enabled to provide SIOC data for the site itself, users and all articles on B:\datenbrei.

Many site on the internet don’t provide SIOC data, this is mainly due to the fact that SIOC development is still at an early stage. But what about Planets? Do they provide SIOC data? So let’s have a look at Planet RDF and how it may be enabled to provide SIOC data.

... continue reading ...

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.

EricP has more nerdiness, but that is well understandable

From The Onion (via Publishing 2.0 blog) — this is priceless indeed:

While discussing with Simon the behaviour of his semantExplorer (PDF) when looking for links to RDF data, had to look up the HTTP 1.1 RFC myself and found this nice resource on Content-Type(s):

The Content-type Saga

It has been started in 1996 "to demistify the HTTP Content-type and its relationship to browser configuration" and is being kept up-to-date and useful until this day.

Also interesting:

- Managing XML data: Identify XML documents - File extensions and MIME types [IBM DeveloperWorks]

- Misconceive Early, Misconceive Often [XML.com, by Edd Dumbill] - mentions "IFPs Are the New URIs?" and links to Mark Pilgrim's article (see below)

- XML on the Web Has Failed [XML.com, by Mark Pilgrim] - "The Curse of Default Content-Types"

Note: you may find more papers and presentations like Simon's at the DERI 2005 Seminar page.

It's this time of the year when winter transitions into spring.
And it's time for my birthday again.

Following the tradition of previous years please welcome a nice anime picture, this time themed after a wonderful, yet strange anime "Serial Experiment Lain".

Happy Birthday to all of you who celebrate their birthday the same day!

Previous years:
- March 19, 2005
- March 19, 2004

After some illness in real life and downtime of the blog in the virtual world me and this blog are back online.

And I have also returned back from the visit to Stanford.
Back in Galway now.

Torino 2006 20th Olympic Winter Games:

Latvia and USA played 3:3 (tie) at the olympic ice hockey. While a win would have been nice both teams are strong and bravo to the Latvian team for a good game!!!

TURIN, Italy (AFP) - Artūrs Irbe stopped 39 shots and Atvars Tribuncovs and Herberts Vasiljevs scored two quick goals in the second period as Latvia held the mighty United States 3-3 in Olympic men's ice hockey.

Irbe made 18 saves in the final period as his team was outshot 42-25 overall but still managed one of their best Olympic performances in their history.

The 39-year-old Irbe is the most prominent player on the Latvian team which almost scored the first big upset of the tournament despite having very few NHL players in their lineup.

Tribuncovs and Vasiljevs scored 40 seconds apart in the middle frame to give Latvia a 3-2 lead which they took into the third.

American defenceman Jordan Leopold tied it with just over two minutes gone in the final period and it stayed that way.

Latvia give mighty USA a massive scare [Yahoo News]

* 2006 International Ice Hockey Championship will take place in Riga, Latvia.

Reading a book "Angel Eyes" by Eric Lustbader.

It is a suspense that grasps your attention and does not let it go until you've read it all. A story around women with spirits of warriors, with action taking place in a number of cool places - San Francisco, Buenos Aires and Moscow to name a few - and it is fascinating how he ties all these events together.

I will not be telling you too much now, but judging by other his works the ending must be interesting and unexpected.

The immersion into warrior spirit and Japanese culture is not surprising - that's what many of his books are about. What is surprising though is a part about events taking place in the USSR at the time of falling apart, even if a worldwide conspiracy plan is something I would rather expect to see in Tom Clancy's books. His portrait of the USSR and people, places and events is good.

All in all - it is a good book.

Yet there is one word in the book that the author uses far too much. Absolutely all references to women in Russian boil down to a single word - koshka (?????) - which means a kitten or a pussy. While it is fine to see it used in a sexual context (though it is boring if it is the only Russian word used) it probably is not the word you would use when talking with one's very ill daughter. This destroys the emotional "touch and feel" of some scenes in the book.

Also - in some places in the book people [in USSR] are speaking too openly about their beliefs to strangers. Something most would have been scared to do at that time. Of course there were those who did, but they must have been more careful than that.

P.S. It was a long time ago when I was last reading one of his books. Glad I found this one in a used books store somewhere in Palo Alto.

GMail Chat has finally arrived to my mailbox.

Nice to notice this and explore. These additions can be summarised by 3 changes:

1. Ability to text chat with other Google/GMail account holders;
2. Quick Contacts list has appeared in the left sidebar - showing your friends and their presence online;
3. Chats can be saved and searched - see the "Chats" menu item added to the sidebar - this is where your past chat sessions can be found should you choose to keep them.

At the same time I noticed that very few of my e-mail contacts are using GMail. That's why Skype will remain my primary chat platform for now. But in the long run this might attract more people to GMail same way as I was inviting friends to Skype. Read more about GMail Chat.

Another change - which many including me have asked for a number of times - the ability to delete messages has been finally added. There is inconsistency though - you can delete a message with a single click now, but you can't do that at all using keyboard shortcuts. That's probably be the single shortcut I really need.

It's funny how introduction of delete button spawned reaction that it is confusing and the readers now will delete instead of archiving. Or - as someone wrote - "I may delete when I did not want to". Answer to the first would be - let users choose (!). And Google has already built the UI the way that you'd be tempted to Archive, so there is not a problem here. To the second - it's not the only choice and not the most important choice in life where you have to decide (and think) before doing.

And please add that shortcut!

Overheard in San Francisco:

- Yahoo worker: I went down to Sunnyvale on the train.
- Man 1, in surprise: Yahoo workers have to take the train? Google's got a bus. Don't you?

It's funny. Read how it ends - ValleyWag: "We've got a bus too."

Too busy to blog now.
And North California is just fine.

WordPress developers are planning to drop RSS 0.92 and RDF / RSS 1.0 feeds from the blog engine.
Unless someone can provide a good reason not to - e.g., that there are people using it.

[wp-hackers] Ditch RDF and RSS 0.92

... We came to the conclusion that RDF and RSS 0.92 are basically way too old to still be in the WordPress core, so they should be removed. If they are sorely needed by someone a plugin can replace them.

I hope that RDF 1.0 will not be dropped - and there are many Semantic Web hackers who are using WordPress and the RDF feed that it produces.

These discussions are not without a bit of curiosity though - one of the commenters [to the related Trac issue #2277] suggested dropping Atom support as well - with a similar motivation: "+1 to ditch Atom too. Atom is a dead end technology. MS, AOL and Yahoo all chose RSS. Google is providing RSS and Atom. Plus, having several formats confuses users, and I cannot name a single feed reader who cannot understand both formats."

Welcome to California!

I am on an exchange visit to the Stanford University.
A side effect of that is enjoying this lovely location, learning about cool ideas and meeting people.

Had this been a news site, I'd have to say it's all old news by now. We have been here for almost a week and a lot has happened since then:

• learning how to get around Stanford (which is beautiful)
• meeting the Stanford Logic Group (hosts of our exchange)
• going to MacWorld Expo
• ... and a MAKE and #joiito Macworld meetup at the same location
• and learning about microformats (= the lower case semantic web) at the SDForum Emerging Tech SIG talk last Tuesday

Today was the first rainy day this week - which left me sitting at home and writing a blog. But if you do know about cool things to do in Palo Alto, places to go and so on - please share the knowledge.

I've created a LiveJournal blog - http://www.livejournal.com/users/captsolo/

Did I hear - finally?

Main purpose of that blog is to communicate with friends on LiveJournal, read their posts, comment, etc. So most of the interesting content will still be appearing over here. I also wonder (again) if I should have a Latvian blog - to keep in touch with friends in Latvia.

If someone wishes you can create a syndicated version of my blog on LiveJournal as well. And for Latvian users there is a syndicated account of this blog in Sviesta Ciba (KLAB.LV) at http://klab.lv/users/captsolo_rss/

Finally - you can find online the photos from Irish Geek Dinner with participation of Robert Scoble. My apologies it took so long.

See: Photo set "Irish Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble"

There you will find some charming photos of Maryamie and see some of Irish geek bloggers. Don't miss the cool T-shirt created by FrankP (see the photo above)!

These photos remind me now about the people we met at the dinner and the people we saw, but did not get a chance to chat with (for example, PR bloggers at the other end of the table). Oh, and the presentation of Robert's new book should be soon - hope there will be another geek blogger's event to honor it. This time in Palo Alto.