captsolo weblog

Good news everyone! After a five year vanishing act the sci-fi spoof Futurama returned this week with a direct-to-DVD feature. Wired has an article about its return, including the story of the show’s origins, a behind the scenes gallery, interviews with creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and some interesting trivia.

- via Slashdot: Futurama Returns!

Futurama title image courtesy of The Infosphere: A Futurama Wiki

Futurama is one of those great sci-fi shows which probably got canceled because they were too good to be on TV. Another of those is the “Dark Angel”.

Piektdien, 16.novembrī, notiks lekcijas “Praktiskais semantiskais tīmeklis” otrā daļa. Plašāka informācija par lekcijas saturu un iepriekšējās lekcijas slaidi ir atrodami šīs lekcijas lapā SemWeb.LV wiki.

Atrašanās vieta: LU Matemātikas un Informātikas institūts, Raiņa bulv. 29, Rīga - 413.auditorija.
Laiks: 10:00

Īsa atskaite par iepriekšējo lekciju ir atrodama ieraksta ‘Rīt - Lekcija “Praktiskais semantiskais tīmeklis"‘ komentāros.

P.S. Kā jums patīk jaunais semantiskā tīmekļa logo?

Eng: announcement of a lecture on practical semantic web at the University of Latvia

Š.g. 9. un 16.novembrī es uzstāšos ar lekciju kursu “Praktiskais semantiskais tīmeklis” Latvijas Universitātes datorikas maģistratūras telpās.

9. novembrī - 1. daļa [ Ievads (RDF, ..). Ontoloģijas (FOAF, SIOC, …), RDF rīki ]

Visi laipni aicināti.

Atrašanās vieta: LU Matemātikas un Informātikas institūts, Raiņa bulv. 29, Rīga - 413.auditorija.
Laiks: 10:00

While searching for some blog articles, written long time ago, you can stumble upon “hidden treasures” that you were not even looking for. Here are some fun or interesting finds:

Wired 12.10: Point Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye [2004-10-19]

Links on photo annotation. Points to a Wired article about photo annotation and how we shoot large quantities of photos to never find them again. Is it better now, 3 years later?

Wikis => Comparing Wiki Features

Posted when looking for a wiki engine to use. Can be interesting to see what wikis were cool than and what now. It does not even mention MediaWiki and it is very popular now. - What wiki engine would you use?

The articles that I was looking for is a selection of Semantic Web related links used as a reference material for a couple of lectures I was giving at the University of Latvia. Here they are:

• Useful [Semantic Web] Links - 1 [2004-05-26]
• Useful [Semantic Web] Links - 2 [2004-11-11]
• Useful [Semantic Web] Links - 3 [2004-11-26]

Episode “Down the Rabbit Hole” - a woman’s murder sends Mac into Second Life, the internet-based virtual world to track down the killer in both the real and cyber world.

Update: see how this Second Life episode changed popularity of CSI:NY on the Web [tvbythenumbers.com].

CSI:NY Comes To Second Life Wednesday [TechCrunch]

Second Life is bracing itself for an influx of new members this coming week with the long awaited episode of CSI:NY does Second Life to be shown in the United States on Wednesday. The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far.

CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website. CSI:NY will have three options for CSI-related inworld activities. The first option will allow viewers to walk around virtual New York buildings and visit a CSI lab and play forensic games.

…

ESC (Electric Sheep Company) is launching a special version of their new second life client OnRez tailored for exploring CSI:NY and this virtual murder. More details on OnRez Blog.

Coincidentally I am in Boston and could watch this episode right away as opposed to waiting for it to appear in Europe. Was good.

Trešdien, 24.oktobrī no 8.00 līdz 17.00:

Pie Saeimas nama visiem Latvijas balsstiesīgajiem iedzīvotājiem būs iespēja parakstīties par grozījumiem Satversmē, lai dotu tautai tiesības ierosināt Saeimas atlaišanu. Vienlaicīgi norisināsies Latvijas Brīvo arodbiedrību savienības organizētais pikets pret valdības un Saeimas vēlmi pieņemt budžetu, kurš taupa naudu uz Latvijas tautas maznodrošināto rēķina.

šāda ziņa klejo caur draugiem un citiem elektroniskās saziņas līdzekļiem.

vienlaikus es nevarēju tai atrast nekādu apstiprinājumu interneta portālos un citos masu saziņas līdzekļos. vai kāds var komentēt vai šada akcija vispār notiek vai nē?

Papildināts: šeit ir vairāk informācijas - PIKETĀ PIE SAEIMAS PARAKSTĪSIMIES PAR GROZĪJUMIEM SATVERSMĒ! (LBAS mājas lapa)

When Dopplr announced importing your social network from other sites the single most requested feature in comments was FOAF import (with CSV import being second).

Note: Please add your feedback. Comments are working, but may be held for moderation and will appear after being approved.

So - what’s the use of FOAF for Social Network Portability?

1. Existing FOAF data

LiveJournal is one of the largest sources of FOAF data and every user automatically gets a FOAF profile (http://username.livejournal.com/data/foaf/, same works for communities). It creates a large amount of data which other application can make a use of. Exporting FOAF is a simple task and other community sites may start exporting it should they see a good reason to do so (which is what this article aims to address).

You don’t have to look at “raw” data, though. Let a computer do the job and take a look at a more human-friendly rendering of FOAF (and navigate the data by following links indicated with arrows) using one of the many RDF browsers. This will show you what data are in there, but can still be quite nerdy.

In the end it will be other applications and sites like Dopplr that can use FOAF and other structured data to provide better services to its users. E.g., Apple Safari RSS reader uses FOAF to display a list of person’s friends when browsing her LiveJournal feed (a screenshot here).

P.S. If you want to be aware of web pages containing FOAF, SIOC and DOAP machine-readable information while browsing the web, the Semantic Radar extension for Firefox may be for you.

2. What about hCard + XFN ?

Many may think that vCard or hCard + XFN is the only / best choice for this. As a format for representing structured data they are a good thing, but at the same time are only and not always the best solution.

Most of the entries in a list of Services with hCard+XFN supporting friends lists start with “login and …".

A public hCard+XFN usually will not contain enough data to identify your friends. It would need to provide information for linking their identities across sites, such as an email address. hCard expresses it in clear text and this is something that spammers will like but your friends may not.

You could require a user to enter a login name and a password to access a private profile with all the required details. (An alternative is to only use public information, but this is mainly limited to exact nickname matches.) Will you always trust a site enough to give it passwords for all other sites you want to port your data from? Really?

Also, once the sites are talking directly, they don’t necessarily need an HTML-based data format and can as well use the APIs provided by these sites.

3. Useful properties of FOAF

FOAF has some useful properties that make it particularly interesting for social network portability.

FOAF was created with identification of objects in mind. It is built on RDF, which is a generic format for linked data on the web. As such, it gives us some flexibility on how pieces of data can be distributed across the web. We’ll use that later. (But enough about RDF)

Take a look at any LiveJournal FOAF profile (or a human-readable rendering of it). You will notice there some basic information about the page (title, feed, …) and quite a lot of information about its author. This includes core FOAF properties (name, homepage, birth date, image, interest(s), …) and LiveJournal extensions to it (city, country, school, bio, …). foaf:knows allows to link together people and their friends.

There vocabularies may use different namespaces, but FOAF + RDF allows to freely use them together and make sense of this data. What matters it that this is some rich data applications can work with.

4. Identifying objects in FOAF

We need a way to identify people (your friends) based on the public FOAF profile. While you can express an email address in FOAF we don’t want to do that on a public web page. Take a look at foaf:mbox_sha1sum instead.

It is a unique hash generated from person’s email address (using SHA1 algorithm). There is a one-way correspondence between an email address and its SHA1 hash, but no way to recreate an email address using a hash.

This makes foaf:mbox_sha1sum very useful when you need to identify a person by her email address, but do not want to put this email on the web in clear text. Many LiveJournal profiles (but not all) contain a foaf:mbox_sha1sum. This information can be used by other sites to show you if your friends are already registered there. All they have to do is compare email SHA1 hashes of registered users (which can be easily calculated) with those of your friends.

P.S. There are other ways to identify a person (e.g., via a homepage URL), but let’s concentrate on email and its hash now.

5. What’s stopping Dopplr ?

If people are asking for FOAF import and if this format is worth considering, what is stopping Dopplr and other social media / network sites?

Best if they can share insights into what the real problems are. While waiting for comments, here’s what I think: it’s practical data access issues. It makes sense to start with large sources of FOAF data and look how they are structured.

LiveJournal is probably the largest of them. Notice that a LJ FOAF profile contains a lot of information about a person itself, but not that much info about friends. Fear not - reference to every friend contains a link (rdfs:seeAlso) to the full FOAF profile and you can follow it to retrieve all the details required.

And that is a problem. To check for all your friends a site will need to make (n+1) HTTP requests where n = a number of your friends. LiveJournal policy for bots requires not to make more than 5 requests per second. Doing those many requests takes time and bandwidth and may be something that the sites you are migrating want to avoid.

6. Solution

How to make LiveJournal FOAF data more useful?

Let’s just take all the properties needed (foaf:mbox_sha1sum in this case) from friends’ FOAF profiles and copy them to where they are referenced to in your FOAF profile. Remember the flexibility of FOAF and RDF? That makes it perfectly valid - just copy’n'paste.

This would require a simple change at LiveJournal’s side, but would make using this data much more efficient - now just 1 HTTP request is needed to move a network of all your friends to a new site.

What about other FOAF data sources? Many already contain information needed to identify their contants. For example, every person in FOAF profile of Tim Berners-Lee has an email address, its SHA1 hash or a unique identifier (URI which is another option how to identify objects) assigned. These sources are rich enough for our needs, but may not provide the critical mass needed to get the ball rolling.

That’s why we need to get better FOAF data from large social media sites. And to get a clear understanding of how FOAF can be best used for social network portability.

Related links

“Thoughts on the Social Graph” by Brad Fitzpatrick

… will add suggested links here …

Comments

I would love to hear from you - is this information interesting or useful? Is it all wrong, perhaps? Do you want to add something or ask a question? Go ahead!

P.S. This is not an attack on microformats. Some of the things described (e.g., a hash of the email address) can be easily added to them, if needed. Data can also be converted from one data format to another. The goal of this article is to provide some information about using FOAF for social network portability. I hope you will find that it has some power we can use.

More than 50% of “Second Life” inhabitants are from Europe

From a report by comScore, dated 4 May 2007, titled “comScore Finds that ‘Second Life’ Has a Rapidly Growing and Global Base of Active Residents". Also by them: “Social Networking Goes Global” - shows growth dynamics of a number of most popular social networking sites.

Linden Labs to Eurpoean Union Residents: It’s a Tax Time

“Second Life” EU residents now have to pay VAT (~20%). That’s what many learned from direct emails sent to premium subscribers.

Gallery of Adobe remedies

eBooks are often distributed as PDFs with a bitter taste of DRM added. This means that an ebook you’ve bought may be locked to a particular device and most probably you won’t be able to use it with Linux. Don’t we have a right to use the eBooks purchased on any device we own? This gallery lists some remedies to Adobe PDF encryption and DRM.

If you can print PDF to a PostScript file then these links can also be useful for converting it back to a DRM-free PDF (did not succeed applying these suggestions in my case though, let me know if they work for you):
Anon: Adobe eBooks to PDF (anon-ebook-to-pdf.txt)
Making protected PS files distillable (convertable back to PDF) (200610_pdf_ps_hacking.html)

Programming Digital Media - Making and modifying digital media by writing custom software for Mac OS X

Education materials. Found via stumbling upon An Introduction to PostScript, a part of this course.

Scripting Tools for Scientific Computing

Course materials from Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo - Simula Research Laboratory - April 2003

Python module that parses palm files

Date: 04/08/2004 - Version: 0.5.It has been a while since I last used a Palm PDA. But those 10k+ applications built for PalmOS, mostly free- and share-ware, were something many other platforms could wish for. One of my favourites is DateBk4 (and follow-up versions).

Liga used to write here on mazais weblogs - a part of this [multi-blog] site, with her posts covering a number of interesting topics, written in both English and Latvian.

Now she’s the author of Marketing Garden - a blog about Marketing, Advertising, PR, Design, and Social Media. In the last couple of days it also got a new domain name [ marketing-garden.com ].

Congratulations!

Her most popular blog post: making logos

The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. Read how the OpenCoffee initiative started.

Galway OpenCoffee Club #3 will take place this Friday (07-Sep-2007), organised by Ina O’Murchu.
Location: Foster Court Hotel (google map), in the cafe/bar.
Time: 11:00
Event details: see upcoming.org

Review of Galway OpenCoffee Clubs #1 and #2 - a great review of the previous events by John Breslin.
I went to the GOC #2 and enjoyed it a lot.

Tags: opencoffee | galway

“Semantic Web: How Can We Make Semantic Web Usable?” is the title of today’s SDForum Semantic Web SIG event taking place in Palo Alto, CA.

That’s an interesting topic and it gets even more intriguing if you look at the list of speakers and moderators of the event:

• Nova Spivack - CEO of Radar Networks
• Holger Knublauch - VP of Product Development in TopQuadrant
• AJ Chen (moderator) - Senior Search Engineer, Healthline.com
• Jeffrey Pollock (moderator) - Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

It would be interesting to find out more about what happened at the event. If you participated or just know more about it please add some comments.

Apple’s special event - new iPod Touch, iPhone price drop, …

Today (September 5, 2007) Steve Jobs announced many news in the iPhone and iPod range of products [engadget.com].

The most exciting product of these is probably iPod Touch which has most of the features of the iPhone apart from the mobile phone functionality. A full size screen, Multi-Touch interface, WiFi, Safari and it’s 8mm thin. Pricing - $299 for 8Gb, $399 for 16 Gb.

Other things announced:

• iPhone 8Gb price cut - down to $399 !
• refreshed iPod classic line - 80 Gb and … “a slightly thicker one as well… and it’s going to have 160GB.”
• new, smaller iPod nano
• partnership b/w iTunes WiFi music store and Starbucks hotspots (now that both iPod touch and iPhone have WiFi)
• … (perhaps more) …

Looking forward to find a video of this event online. These events (eg, iPhone launch) are always a good show. For now take a look at the

Personal view:

Multi-touch interface is sexy and I’d like to get one of these devices to listen to music and enjoy their style. But regardless of Apple’s announcements I would not call it a device for normal web browsing. Their screen resolution is just too small.

Unless even old 800x600 px desktop displays have too high resolution for your browsing and video watching needs.

This video - “Klystron Tube” - is a first of two videos in Stanford’s video campaign called “Hail, Stanford, Hail!". Let’s see how this attempt at viral marketing goes.

While the video holds a very scientific title it is about an object that you can probably find in every home now - a microwave.

Update: second video “FM Synthesizer” is now online.

” The klystron tube and the FM synthesizer are among Stanford’s most notable inventions. … Dailey & Associates, a West Hollywood advertising agency headed by Stanford alum Bruce Miller, collaborated with Stanford to create these commercials reflecting both the university’s capacity for innovation and its spirited irreverence. “

Also of interest - Stanford team puts campus on map; wins Google Earth 3-D modeling contest. Stanford’s campus is very nice and this may be a good opportunity to take a look at it, at least virtually.

Upgraded version of the blog engine used to B2evolution 1.10.2.

Please let me know if you notice anything weird. It’s a major version upgrade and therefore things can go wrong.

One thing I know about (and wonder where it came from and how to fix it) is that the encoding of international characters in non-English posts and comments is broken.

Luckily I do not have that many non-English posts.

Need to fix it anyway. First attempts did not fix the problem, but will keep on trying.

SSSW 2007 is at its start and there is hardly a better way to describe it than the title of the blog post by Stephan Baumann who presented the first invited talk at the school: SSSW2007: Work Hard, Play Hard

More information about the event: SSSW'07 Home Page.
It takes place on July 8-14, 2007 in Cercedilla (Spain).

Later in the day we had an introduction to OWL by Sean Bechhofer and a presentation about ontology design patterns by Aldo Gangemi.

An interesting update: on Wednesday there will be an invited talk by Peter Mika on Web 2.0 [and everything ].

There is now a SSSW 2007 group on FaceBook - come and join it, and use it to keep in touch after the summer school has finished.

P.S. We need some way to aggregate all the information about the event so let's choose a tag "sssw2007" and hope there's no name clash or anything. For those who are here - it's been great to meet you all, this certainly is an interesting event we are in.

Tags: semantic web | sssw2007

Komentāros rakstam "EuroPython 2007 - Vilnius, Lithuania - July 9-11" radix vaicā:

- Labprāt apmeklētu - meklēju kompāniju.

Ja gribat sastādīt kompāniju un piedalīties šai pasākumā, lūdzu atsaucaties komentāros šim vai sākotnējam rakstam par EuroPython 2007.

Pasākums notiek tepat blakus (Lietuvā) un varētu būt tīri interesants. Tādēļ ir jēga mobilizēties un doties turp. No Latvijas varētu būt vismaz 2 braucēji un, kā saka, barā jautrāk.

It's my name day today and time for some celebration.
Best wishes to all who celebrate something today, including all with names = [ Uldis, Ulriks, Ulvis, Sandis ] !!!

To keep it short:

• Name_day -> Latvia [en.wikipedia.org]
• My Namesday !!! [04-Jul-2005]

Actually, rather too busy to celebrate but will figure something. The US will have some fireworks tonight for sure, and we have some champagne ready.

ArsTechnica: "Report: FireWire doomed to niche interface status"

...

Part of USB 2.0's success in supplanting FireWire as the high-speed connectivity interface of choice has to do with cost.

Initially, FireWire's IP owners demanded royalties of $1.00 per port (later dropped to 25¢ per system) from manufacturers, which turned some OEMs off. In contrast, Intel strongly backed USB 2.0 and quickly integrated support into its chipsets, where FireWire was usually available in PC systems only in the form of a PCI card add-on. As a result, FireWire's advantages over USB 2.0—like being able to support multiple hosts per bus and peer-to-peer device communication—were rendered irrelevant, and the interface is being relegated to niche status in the PC and peripheral market.

Seems like demanding (relatively) large royalties does not help to get a large market share and sustain it. On a slightly different topic, same can be said about adding DRM to one's products and preventing users from using what they have legally bought.

EuroPython 2007, the annual volunteer-run conference for the Python and Zope communities, will start in less than 2 weeks in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is on July 9-11, 2007.

See "EuroPython 2007 - Conference Timetable"

Wish I could be there. Via Simon Willison, met during HackDay London, who was looking for (and had found) an environment-friendly way to travel to the conference.

P.S. Talk abstracts are linked from the timetable. Will there be some more detailed information online at this site later on, e.g., papers/publications, transcripts, videos?

About Python 2.5 has a nice and easy-to-read overview of the new features in Python 2.5.

For a more formal, detailed description of all the things new please see "What's New in Python 2.5".

Added information about Python 2.5 which may be something useful in this post for those who are not going to the conference itself.

Tags: europython | hackday | python | vilnius

Need to blog more. HackDay London was great! This would probably fit within 1 Twitter message.

Word of the day: "Negative Triples"

From: XUL Planet | Querying RDF Datasources

var target = datasource.GetTarget(karen, name, true);

You might have noticed that the GetTarget method has a third argument which is set to true above. This is used to indicate whether you want to retrieve a negative triple instead of a normal one. This is a special Mozilla-specific feature that allows an RDF statement to be false instead of true. Remember that when a piece of information is not supplied in the datasource, it means that the datasource does not know that information, not that the information is blank. For instance, if we hadn't specified Karen's name in the RDF/XML, it means that Karen's name is not known to the datasource. She may still have a name however.

A negative triple indicates that a particular statement is not true. For instance, we could add a statement that Karen's name is not 'Tracy'. Note that there is no way to actually specify this in the RDF/XML, only by directly manipulating the datasource. However, negative triples should generally be avoided. They don't really offer a lot of value and usually this kind of information is better specified in other ways.

It would be interesting to know how much these negative triples are/were actually used in Mozilla/Firefox and what for. Once there is a way to take triples away you could do incremental updates of RDF datasources if needed.

A related conversion, from #swig logs (2007-06-28 @ 14:32:36):

< TipTop> how to say that a statement is invalid, for example, without reification?

< timbl> have to either do reification properly, or you use N3 formulas.
< timbl> { Sky clor blue } a log:Falsehood.
< timbl> is the latter.

Tags: mozilla | n3 | rdf | xul

Semantic Web developers already know how to use RDF data (e.g., create timeline of the whole weblog¹) exported by SIOC RDF export tools. WordPress SIOC Import plugin demonstrates how SIOC data may be used by regular blog users (e.g., via admin user interface).

Read more and download the plugin at: WordPress SIOC Import Plugin [wiki]

The way it works is very simple: go to blog admin's interface, enter a URL of SIOC data, press "Process URL". A blog post or multiple posts are created based on this information and published on the blog.

See a screenshot below of a blog post recreated this way using SIOC data from the latest status report by John Breslin: State of the SIOC-o-sphere (#4)

Some things to keep in mind:

• There may be multiple sioc:Post objects in the source data stream. Look for "edit link" in the status reported by the plugin and find objects which were imported. If a post has comments you will probably also see some "Empty post data." messages at the bottom.
• Imported blog posts are published instantly, without using a draft. Will change this at a later stage.

"uldis, this is massively huge and massively cool. I agree, this just opens a door as big as the sky" - thanks to Mike Bergman for great feedback and testing the plugin with WordPress 2.0!

See the result of his experiment: Massively Cool (aka) T-SIOC, Object-centered Sociality (based on a post by John Breslin)

About opening the sky - this experiment acts as a demonstration² that you can use SIOC data in regular web applications and I hope it gives web developers a hint of what cool opportunities appear once you do that and start connecting different systems. And you don't need to know much RDF to do that.

For some ideas see SIOC Import Plugin - Advanced Applications [wiki].

Source SIOC RDF data do not necessarily need to come from the WordPress SIOC plugin. Any SIOC data source (SIOC Exporters contains a list of SIOC tools) which contains sioc:Post(s) is OK. A useful property of SIOC data exporters is that every page on a SIOC-enabled site (forum, bulletin board, ...) has a machine-readable representation in RDF which offers interesting possibilities compared with regular web feeds.

Note that this is an experimental, development version. Play at your own risk. Please report if you notice any bugs³.

This application uses Bengee's ARC RDF framework for PHP for parsing RDF/XML and the SIOC PHP API.

¹ Blogs in RDF: SIOC timeline
² It is a demonstration. Copying may not be so exciting by itself, and it just an example. The possiblities that open up by learning to re-use rich semantic data from social media sites are.
³ Developed on WordPress 1.5. Should work with 2.0+, let me know how it goes.

Tags: sioc | rdf | wordpress | import

The FAQ is now on the front page of Digg.com (a screenshot).
Thanks to all who participated in making it popular!

Higher visibility has also attracted some comments (11 26 at this point) which may be interesting to read and respond to.

Technorati Tags: faq | rdf | semantic web | w3c

W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions

A collection of answers to questions that you may have about the Semantic Web. Written for a general web public, with some answers going into more detail. By W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO IG).

You can digg it: http://digg.com/software/Semantic_Web_FAQ_by_W3C

Technorati Tags: faq | rdf | semantic web | w3c

I presented this talk at BarCamp Ireland 3 on April 21, 2007.

There was a lot of interest and we had to move to a bigger room to accomodate all the audience (thanks to Ryan Alexander for arranging the bigger room).

PowerPoint file: "SIOC - Semantic Web for Social Media Sites" (6 Mb, PPT)
If you watch the presentation on SlideShare the hyperlinks should work as well.

Olivier Ansaldi (in comments to an earlier post):

"I really enjoyed your talk (just in case you remember, I asked you a question about microformats), it helped me get a better understanding of the semantic web. I feel more inclined to start digging in the literature that I felt before!"

If you were at the presentation and have some questions about it, please ask. Literature is one place to start, but at the same time you can try to work with the Semantic Web and RDF, and judge for yourself when and where to apply it.

Technorati Tags: barcamp | ireland | semantic web | sioc

Semantic Web and DERI Galway appear on Slashdot:

"Super-Fast RDF Search Engine Developed"

TheRegister is reporting that Irish researchers have developed a new high-speed RDF search engine capable of answering search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second.

'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. 'These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.'

From DERI press release [ "Semantic World Record at DERI Galway!" ]:

Andreas Harth and Aidan Hogan, key researchers on the Semantic Web Search Engine project, have been working on the project for about three years are excited about the prospects: "These were the fruits of hard labor" says Andreas Harth, "I am excited about the prospects ahead. We are currently working on realizing inferencing - making the web truly intelligent - and we have results already."

Eng: These are in Russian, not subject to translation. If you know cool jokes in English, welcome to add those in comments.

#1:

???? ??????? ?? ??????????. ?????????:
- ?????????? ??? ? ????.
???????:
- ????????? ? ????, ?????????, ??? ????????.
?????????:
- ??? ???! ??? ???????? ???????? ?????!
???????:
- ????????, ?????????. ? ? ??????? ?????????.

#2:

??? ????? ???????? ???????? ??????.

GRINDCORE ??????? ???????, ?????? ??? ??????????? ?????? ? ???? ???-?? ?????????????????, ? ????? ??????.

NU METAL ??????? ????????? ?? ????? ??????? ? ?? ????? ????? ? ?????????.

RAP ??????? ???????, ???? ? ????? ??????? ? ????? ? ???????, ????????? ????? ? ??????? ?????. ????? ????? ? ???????? ???????? ??????????.

GOTHIC METAL ??????? ????????? ? ?????? ??????, ??????? ? ?????????, ????????? ?????? ? ???????????? ?????, ??????? ? ????????? ? ???????? ???????. ????? ?????????? ? ?????? ? ??????? ? ????????? ??? ???. ????? ?????, ?????, ??? ?? ?? ???, ??????? ? ???????? ?????????. ??????, ??????? ??? ????, ????? ??????? ? ?????????. ??? ??????? ??????? ? ????????? ? ??????. ??????? ?? ??????, ???? ??? ????????????.

Update - April 25, 2007 - IPRED2 Slips Through, Fight to Continue [eff.org]

The European Parliament has just voted to pass the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) without substantive amendment, despite growing public opposition from across the European Union. The final vote of 374 to 278 with 17 abstentions points to a margin of Parliamentary support that has been narrowing ever since the Directive left subcommittee.

Take Action Now: Tell Your MEP to Amend IPRED2

A coalition of groups representing librarians, consumers' and innovators have come together to support of a series of amendments that would fix the worst parts of the proposed Directive on Criminal Measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRED2).

If you live in the EU, contact your MEPs and ask them to support these amendments at the plenary vote in European Parliament on April 25, 2007.

http://www.copycrime.eu/action - go there to sign a petition and see what else you can do. Contact your MEP (Members of European Parliament) before April 25, 2007 and tell to support the series of amendments by the Librarians', Consumers' and Innovators' Coalition, or reject IPRED2 entirely if its flaws are not fixed!

Lat: Spriežot pēc tā, ka starp visiem šo petīciju parakstījušajiem ir tikai 3 cilvēki no Latvijas, nevienu šeit tas īpaši neuztrauc. Ja tas tā nav, tad ir laiks kautko darīt. Tiesa, ar petīciju vien nekas nebūs panākts. Rakstiet vai zvaniet un izsakiet savu nostāju Latvijas pārstāvjiem EP.

Context: Situation with a tap water in Galway is a mess - there is some bug (Cryptosporidium) in the water that makes people sick. Only solution the authorities offer is - "boil the water" - and it's unclear how long it will last. People in Ennis have had a similar problem for a while and "water boiling notice" is in effect there since 2004.

Not everyone is happy with this situation and there's a protest organised at 6pm today:

There will be a protest outside City Hall (College Road) at 6pm about the water crisis in Galway. If you are affected by the water contamination in Galway I would urge you to go. The Irish government and the Galway people have been very complacent about the water problem, but if you are annoyed at the reaction (or lack thereof) of the Irish government then please come along to the protest today. (If you can bring empty water bottles!!) The protest is organized by the ordinary citizens of Galway.

Just a quick list of things the government hasnt done:
- No information leaflets given out to the people of Galway telling them that the water is contaminated and how to get rid of the parasite (apparently you are meant to boil your water for a full minute)
- No VAT free water (we really shouldn't be paying VAT on water)
- No tankers of free water into the city

This is a human health hazard which should be taken very seriously

For more information see Galway Water Crisis website [at myspace.com]. Apologies for a short notice, found this information just now (also note that TZ of this blog is 2 hours ahead of Irish time, so there's still almost 3 hours until the event). Thanks to Cathal for sending information about the event.

Also related: Galway Wants Water.
[ John, thanks for the info. ]

We are going up to BarCamp Ireland 3 in Dublin tomorrow. Looking forward to see interesting presentations and meet people active in startups, technology and social media.

But that brings up a question - where to stay? If traveling from Galway to Dublin for an event like this it makes sense to stay overnight in Dublin. But all the places are either booked out or insanely priced (for student budget at least).

This reminds me about a very cool project - "Can I Crash?".

Quote: ... is a project of toothless tiger initiated by Henriette Weber Andersen - who basically is a young female who is tired of busting her entrepreneurial budget when there is things ( dinners, conferences, vacations) in other countries ( or cities) she wants to attend.

So this young female is thinking that if she opens her house to fellow bloggers ( after following the guidelines) when they are looking for a place to stay in Copenhagen or Denmark - maybe some other bloggers will open their house to her ( or other bloggers again) in other countries - that's the idea. This is how we are going to try out if it works in practice.

A quick look of the site shows that fellow bloggers may help you out if you are going to San Francisco and other places in the US. Europe is much less represented, e.g., in France it's only Lyon and in Ireland - in Limerick and Wicklow. Dublin's not on the list, though.

Can someone in Dublin offer a place to stay overnight this Saturday night? Actually, this post probably came to be too late to help us but this initiative is good to spread a word about anyway. We should put Galway on its list, too. What do you think?

Update: Now Joost invitations are widely available and you should not have a problem to get one. Requests in comments are growing too fast and I can't keep up w. them, therefore commenting is disabled now.

I'll try to send invitations to those who asked. Visit the front page (or follow the RSS feed) for more hot and interesting stuff.

Joost - TV, the way you want it

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

Thanks to Libby Miller for sending the invitation in the first place.

Keep in mind that this is a part of beta-testing - please report any suggestions and bugs found. And while there are quite a few TV channels available now this list will probably get larger when Joost is out of beta and becomes available for everyone.

Update: Me and Liga (Marketing Garden) sent all the invites we had, so we are out of them now.

Update2: If you have Joost invitations to spare - there are more people in the comments to this post who would be happy to get an invitation.

Twitter Toolbox is a new Firefox and Flock browser extension I just wrote that "lives" in browser's sidebar and will show you:

• Fr[iends] - Vi[ewers] = you are following them, but they don't see you;
• Fr[iends] & Vi[ewers] = you both follow each other and can talk via Twitter @replies
• Vi[ewers] - Fr[iends] = they've added you as a friends, you have not [yet].

Download / Install Twitter Toolbox

"Viewers" is another name for Followers and allows to abbreviate these terms. "Fr - Fo" or "F - F" looks more confusing to me.

Important: this tool does not duplicate a simple friends or followers list. Many tools already do that, as does Twitter's home page.

Instead - Twitter Toolbox shows what's different and what's common to these two lists. See a quote below for a use case. If you know how to explain this in 140 chars or less, please tell me.

Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways.

I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).

-- Stephanie Booth in "Geeky Frustrations"

Instructions:

Activate it via a menu "View -> Sidebar -> Twitter Toolbox" or via a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-T (Cmd-Shift-T). Once you see the list, click any of the names to display their Twitter page in a new tab.

First time the sidebar panel is opened Firefox may ask for your Twitter username and password. This information is managed by Firefox.

There's one thing that would be nice if Twitter added - a way to tell who in the list of last updates on your Twitter homepage is following you and who is not. Sure, you can use Twitter Toolbox to look it up, but I'd like to see it instantly if it makes sense to @reply to a person or not.

P.S. This is an early development, it does the job and that's it. Plus I tried to make user lists look good.

Please leave suggestions and bug reports in comments to this post.

Technorati Tags: firefox | flock | twitter | xul

Have you also noticed "cyclic" referers in the stats of your blog? When the current page URL is also the referer? In other words: someone is visiting a blog page and then follows a link leading to the same page.

That is what I notice in referer logs, and there's quite many of them. You may not always notice this even if this takes place - a blog engine may hide referers coming from the same site.

Why would someone do that? What does she want to see by following the same link? If you happen to follow a link from a blog page to the same page again, please leave a comment and tell how to improve the user experience.

P.S. Another possibility - this happens when someone comments on a blog post. No reason why it should be so, but still there's a slim possibility.

Best Easter wishes to everyone!

on deviantArt: larger photo + more notes

This is a nice example of how nature + some work can yield beautiful Easter eggs and nice photos.

No paints or brushes are used in this traditional process of egg "painting". It's all down to wrapping an egg in natural things - leaves, flowers, onion peels - and then boiling them in water with more onion peels. Even the bright orange color was achieved this way. And you never fully know what you're gonna get - every egg is unique.

This is a crop of a larger photo. I saw a Flickr group once where you can post a photo and people try different ways to crop it. Can't find it any more - there're too many groups. Can anyone remind what is this group called?

Like the eyes in this shot. Maybe crop more and leave just the eyes?

Recently I did some changes to improve your experience when visiting this site.

First of them was getting rid of comment spam. Now the site is reasonably spam-free and it is safe to subscribe to comments feeds and have a more dynamic way to follow conversations:

- comments in RSS - comments in Atom

You may have been wondering why the number of post comments in a recent posts list was often much higher than the number of comments a post has. No, I was not inflating it to make those posts more interesting. That number also included a number of comments rejected by the spam filter. Fixed - now shows only a number of published comments.

That's all for the comments.

Power-user's tip: subscribe to a category-specific posts feed.

First you need to find out the category id (see below). Go to any invidual post page on the blog and find a list of categories in the right-hand sidebar (it's hidden on the front page, for simplicity). Look at the category link URL and find the category number at the end of it: "?cat=number".

Once found, add it to the URL of the main posts feed. E.g. Semantic Web is category #3 and its feed URL is: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3

There are some more interesting things you can do with per-category feeds:

- Combine multiple categories together = "Social Software" + "Semantic Web" would be: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3,82

- Aggregate sub-categories (automatically done by b2evolution). A category feed will contain posts that appear in the main category or in any of its sub-categories. E.g., a feed for "My Folder" also contains "Art", "Presentations", ...: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=41

This is quite powerful (and been in b2evolution for years). Main downside is that you can't easily guess that these feeds are available or find out what category identifiers to use. That's where we would benefit from a structured category hierarchy made available in RDF using SKOS (and integrated into the SIOC profile of the blog).

Can anyone tell what has happened to this book? Information about it was widely available, it was supposed to be published this year, yet its page has simply disappeared from Amazon.com.

Pro Firefox Extension and Application Development, by Kurt Cagle and Mark David Peterson, "is the first book to show how to extend Firefox's capabilities using JavaScript, the eXtensible User-Interface Language, XForms, CSS, XUL, and XBL.", according to amazon's Editorial Review. Kurt Cagle, "is an author and developer specializing in XML-based technologies". The 600-page book will be available on February 26, 2007.

via: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2006/09/upcoming-mozilla-books/

Does anyone know what's the fate of this book and if it is published? It sounds like an interesting book and it'd make me sad if it has just vanished in plain sight.

This is just one of fun search terms via which people got to this website recently:

• "names of all the houston rocket players on a sheet of paper from bst to worst with their ages on"

P.S. You know you are in the U.S. when a pilot of the plane announces progress and results of a sports game together with all the essential flight information.

Twitter is addictive as you can see.

Earlier: "Twitter - let's try it!" [March 14, 2007]

Lat: laiks dzimšanas dienas svinībām

It is my birthday today.
And this is a traditional blog post on March 19th complete with a picture of a hot anime girl.

Celebration began early this year with St.Patrick's Day Parade on March 17th. Today is a bit quieter, we'll have some cake and champagne. It's gonna be fun!

Happy Birthday to all who are celebrating it today!

Previous years:
- March 19, 2006
- March 19, 2005
- March 19, 2004

Was surprised to see that there already is a history of birthday posts on this blog. One thing to notice is that the 2004 post talks more about wishes and things to do. Does that mean that events fly by too fast now to think and write about what I want?

Things that happened recently:
- discovered Twitter
- enjoyed WebCamp: Social Networks workshop

Near future plans:
- go to ICWSM'2007 - International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Picture of the anime girl from "Anime Desho Desho Rwar! (August)"

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes.

I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

... writes Marc Hedlund in "'sfearthquakes' on Twitter" on O'Reilly Radar. I like his approach.

What UNIX commands are role-models for Semantic Web applications?

Conway's Game of Life in SVG - an implementation by Kevin Lindsey. It's fun to see dynamic things like this implemented in SVG. Follow the link to see it in action.

Update: "Faster SVG Game of Life"

A local copy of one of examples: life_2_0_bw.svg

We went to the parade, it was rainy but fun. Enjoyed it. Poor souls who were walking in the parade though.

Enjoy St. Patrick's day!

Twitter is the latest thing in social networks and attention economy.

You can publish your status (what are you doing), share that with the world and follow "twitters" from you friends. Add to this "soup" RSS feeds and support for IM and mobile phone texts, and you get a pretty addictive thing. "Twitters" soon start to form conversation threads turning into a way of communication.

One more thing: you are limited to 140 chars. Having to keep within this limit adds a different feel to it. Probably that's your text messages for the web, for those who do not spend all of their time sending mobile phone texts.

Here's my Twitter: CaptSolo.

Trying it out now. First read about it at "How can we capitalise on Twitter’s addictiveness?" by Tom Raftery. Will write more when I get a feel of it.

Update 1: "All of a Twitter" - an interesting article by Ian Delaney.

Update 2: Twitter channel, which I added to blog's sidebar, shows up empty for me. The other Twitter badge/widget which is a part of this blog post shows up ok. Do you also experience the same problem?

"Links from my Twitter Followers" by Chris Pirillo - use your Twitter network to collect cool links and interesting information from your fans.

WebCamp: Social Networks, an open day-long event on social networking took place in Galway last week and was a success.

There were 6 talks on a wide range of topics and 50-60 people attending the event. Any more and the largest meeting room in DERI would have been too small.

The two presentations I will look at in particular are "Social Network Analysis 1987-2007" by Valdis Krebs and "Topics, Tags and Trends in the Blogosphere" by Conor Hayes.

Keynote talk by a social and organisational network analysis expert Valdis Krebs about various projects he has worked on in this arena during last 20 years covering experience in almost 500 SNA/ONA projects. This talk is for anyone interested in social networks and social network analysis. See also his blog post "Can it really be 20 years?".

A talk by Conor Hayes about topic clustering in blog networks. It would be interesting to combine a rich data model of SIOC-enabled sites with a topic clustering analysis Conor is working on.

All the presentations were good and you can see them at Slideshows tagged: WebCamp. Or see a blog entry "After the WebCamp workshop on social networks" by John Breslin who organised this WebCamp.

???????????? ??????????:
- ??? ??? ??????? ??? ?????? ??????? ?????????? ?????
- ??, ?????? ?????. ??? ??? ????? ??? ????? ?? C++ ?????.

Translation to English:

A programmer was asked:
- How did you manage to learn English so quickly?
- Oh, that's very simple. They've taken almost all their words from C++.

"Lunar eclipse wows sky watchers" [BBC News]

About this shot:

Taken with a Canon SLR and a zoom lens at 300mm, then cropped to show a close-up view.

Hope you like it. This is the moon during a total eclipse.

A short line in the center of the photo is a star - you can see how far it has moved through the sky during an 8 sec exposure. Would have been happy to get a sharper picture, but this was the best I could. The moon also moves through the sky and one would need a shorter exposure and maybe a better lens to get a sharper photo.

"Lunar Eclipse" - the same photo on Flickr.

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles.

Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

[ a quote from the starting titles of film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (link to the screenplay) ]

This is a presentation about XUL and Mozilla Application Framework.

Presented it at DERI Reading group some time ago. Now putting some slides online and this is the first of them.

[ XUL + RDF + JavaScript + CSS ] forms a framework used to build all Mozilla applications and Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, ... extensions. There is also XBL and XPCOM for more demanding applications. It is interesting that this framework is one of first widespread uses of RDF (even though you might not be aware that it has RDF under the hood).

Read more! »

Former Sun CEO says nonprofit Curriki Web site encourages learning (San Francisco Chronicle)

Sun Chairman Scott McNealy has spent most of the past year as the leading pitchman for Curriki, a nonprofit group that's trying to build a mega-Web site of educational materials that teachers, students and parents anywhere in the world can use, modify, critique and expand on. And they can do all that for free.

"There is no reason why in California (we) need to spend $400 million a year on textbooks when we can open-source. ... If we had half of the annual California textbook budget -- and we just need it one time -- we think we can become self-funding." -- he says.

Some trivia (new for me):

As the chief executive officer of Sun, McNealy often pointed to education as an arena where network computing can make a major difference. He routinely cites the tech giant's origins as a startup formed by a group of Stanford and UC Berkeley students who early on had to decide what to call their company.

"The big decision was to call it Stanford University Network or Berkeley University Network, and 'Sun' won over 'Bun,' " he quipped. "We've always been looking to pay back, share back, if you will."

Currently I did not find too much material in there, but it is a good idea to follow. I believe that we can only benefit from freely available education materials. (Still some prefer to lock them down).

This reminds what a colleague from E-Learning cluster said yesterday that in the future people will acquire most of their knowledge via informal learning. Or are we already doing that?

This is a followup to "Yahoo! opens [a Web of] Pipes".

From a comment to the Yahoo! Pipes article by Tim O'Reilly:

" It finally seems, Yahoo! secretly started building a Semantic Web powerhouse, by making clunky RDF chunks (re-)deployable for the average web developer without having to care about the groundwork… ;-) "

Yahoo! Pipes is a wonderful service which makes creating new mashups very easy, but its dependence on RSS, while part of its success, could also be limiting its potential. Please correct me if I am wrong, but the structure of data that flows through these pipes is RSS or something very similar.

This may create problem if you want to use data that are not RSS and are not easily representable in RSS. E.g., how would you describe in RSS who are your friends?

Pipeline architecture itself is not unique to Pipes. Applying it to the Semantic Web (or to RSS) is not unique either - many have been collecting / integrating information from a number of sources and asking questions like "show me the publications by people who know [user input here, e.g. "Stefan Decker"] and filter the answers according to some criteria" and passing the results to other applications in JSON or RDF/XML. That makes a simple pipeline, even if it is built manually and without a nice UI.

What is unique, though, is how easy it is to create new mashups with Yahoo! Pipes and the potential they provide to make Semantic Web used by a large group of people.

All that needs to be done is to allow Pipes to feed on arbitrary RDF data sources. RDF can represent any information, including RSS, Atom, friends lists, publications and more, therefore no information will be lost.

Information can then be processed using generic, user-built queries, e.g., "For each item that is in a foaf:knows relation to me". All existing Pipes operators should work with some minor modifications and having a flexible content model will open new possibilities. SPARQL would then be a natural choice for representing queries (actual choice is up to developers / architects).

At the end of a pipeline will be output format generators capable of generating RSS (possibly loosing some data), JSON and RDF (preserving all the information). Using RDF does not mean inventing something new either - just use RSS 1.0 (which is also RDF) or SIOC to represent information about portions of content (posts).

Summary - take Yahoo! Pipes, let RDF flow into them and through its pipelines and you will create Semantic Pipes! They should be even more flexible and present interesting possiblities for reuse of information. Remember: data out there are not limited to just RSS or what can be represented in RSS.

There will be some technical questions to be solved, but that should be well worth it.

Related:

• See "[RT] Rethinking the need for inferencing" where Steffano Mazzocchi discusses applying pipeline architecture to RDF. I wonder how far has this effort progressed since then.
• Danny Ayers goes into a detailed discussion re. Semantic Pipes in "The pipes are calling". He also suggests that RSS can be limiting if used as an internal data format and asks the question: "What's the data model?". I hope someone out there can provide an answer to this.

Technorati Tags: pipes | semantic web | sioc | yahoo

Yahoo! has just opened a new services - Pipes.

It allows everyone to process, remix and publish RSS content and implements a number of paradigms and design patterns:

• mashups
• pipelines a.k.a. pipes and filters design pattern
• a simple drag & drop GUI for building pipelines

This service allows people to combine a number of data sources (e.g., from existing RSS feeds) customised by user input and process them through a number of operators or filters. Resulting data are published as RSS feeds called Pipes. Users can share pipes, browse other's pipes and clone them into new pipes thus providing a nice introduction into "playing" with a web of RSS data.

Read more:
- Introduction to Pipes by Tim O'Reilly
- "Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes" by Brady Forrest for more technical information

Followup:
- "Semantic Pipes and RSS" (coming soon)

If you want to try Yahoo! Pipes yourself you may have to wait a day or two though:
It is online now

" ???? ?? ????????? ??? ???????? ????????. ??? ???????, ??? ??? ???????, ??? ? ?????.
???????????? ???? ??????? ? ???? ??????? ??? about:blank. ??????? ???? ??????, ?? ????? ? ????????.

?????? ? ???? ??? ????? ??? ???????????? ????? ? ? ????? ?????? ?? ???????! "

LG and Prada have officially announced the LG KE-850 (Chocolate) Prada Phone which some are calling an iPhone killer. It features a full touchscreen and a stylish design by Prada, and has already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007. It will hit the stores in 5 European countries at the end of February and in some parts of Asia before the end of March.

Its design and touchscreen interface may challenge iPhone, but there are some things that I will be missing - it may have a smaller screen resolution (not clear yet) and it does not have WiFi (that's a no-go). Still a very nice phone.

via Engadget.

In "How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote" Mike Elgan claims that announcing iPhone in so many details 6 months before it gets to customers was a big mistake and lists 6 reasons for that.

1. Apple set expectations too high.

While the keynote and its echo throughout the media idealises the iPhone as doing every thing imaginable, actually the opposite is true:

« The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones. The problem Apple now faces because of Jobs' premature detail-oriented announcement is that of dashed expectations. When customers expect more and don't get it, they become dissatisfied.

What doesn't iPhone do? Unlike most smart phones, the iPhone doesn't have voice dialing, voice memos, 3G Internet access, Word or Excel support, one-handed operation or video recording. It can't be used as a laptop modem. The battery can't be replaced. It doesn't support removable storage. The calendar, task list and e-mail won't sync with Microsoft Outlook. ... »

Read more about this and other reasons in the article.

This confirms that Apple still has a fight to win and we can't yet tell how will it end. Whatever the result we as customers will win. And answers to questions (see "Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2007") about impact of the iPhone announcement on the mobile device market are even more interesting than the device itself.

I hope to see more [low-cost ] devices with WiFi, high resolution touch-screens and an open platform with many useful application. Something Palm or Linux based will do. Plus it needs to run Skype (which may rule out PalmOS) or another widely used VoIP service.

« The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".

Our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" — and have it stable enough for corporate use. »

Mozilla Suite, which continues its life as SeaMonkey, is a browser I really liked. Combined with an excellent Multizilla tabbed browsing extension it was a pleasure to use (and had a better tabbed browsing support than early Firefox versions).

Switched to Firefox because the development of Mozilla Suite was kinda stalled and all the recent extensions were coming out only for Firefox. But still there were some things that were easier or more friendly Mozilla Suite: type-ahead search (was broken in Firefox, you have to press Ctrl-F before searching, in SeaMonkey you just type), a Composer (HTML editor, just say "Edit this page" and see it in edit mode), ability to just type a word in the URL bar and search for it (hate to have to switch to a separate Search input field), etc.

Good to know it is back on track and after SeaMonkey 1.0 there comes SeaMonkey 1.1.

Read What's new in SeaMonkey 1.1.

Sure, there are many good things in Firefox too. It is very strong on marketing (and creating evangelists) and liked by people. And its extension system is much better, making the development of XUL extensions easier producing a large number of Firefox extensions. I hope that soon one will be able to easily develop extensions for both of these browsers with minimum browser-specific code. For now it looks like Firefox wins in this field and you need to spend some additional effort in order to get your Firefox extensions work with SeaMonkey.

Future of RDF in Mozilla projects?

As DanBri said during the ExpertFinder 2007 workshop presentation Mozilla were the first to make real production use of RDF. This might have had an impact on Mozilla application architecture (in terms of information integration, etc.) but it also means that they started to use RDF when it was very raw and lacked the clarity and tool support that it has now. This may be a reason why there are talks about Firefox developers considering replacing RDF with something else.

Therefore the question - what is the future of RDF in Mozilla, will they continue using it and what interesting things may grow out of it? DanBri also mentioned adding SPARQL to Mozilla as an interesting possibility. Hope he will elaborate on that.

See "How to replace microdrive with compactflash in LifeDrive" at wikia.com.

Via TamsPalm

What I like in LifeDrive is that finally Palm have a device that is not seriously limited in any regard - it has a decent screen resolution, a 4Gb hard drive, WiFi and a mike (which Palm T|X lacks).

It is nice to explore hardware hacking pages. But I need to get some new gadgets first (and find some time to play with them). What are the recent cool gadgets out there?

???? - ??? ????? ????????? ??????????????? ???????. ????? ??????????? ?????????????? ??????? ?? ?????? ??????, ????????? ???????? ????, ? ???????? ??????? ??????, ? ???? ??????????? ??????????-????? ??????. ??? ?????? ????? ??????????? ? ????????. ?????? ??? ??? ???????? ??????????-????? ??????, ?? ? ?????????? ????? ?????? ???????? ??? ??? ?? ???????????. ????? ?????????? ????????, ???????, ?????? ?? ????? ????? ?????????? ?????????? ????.

Eng: We can see the climate change with our own eyes these days.

While many places in Europe would normally get snow during winter and would have a white Christmas and New Year's Eve this year most of the Europe lacked any snow at all. Probably the same is true for other parts of the world.

Look below for a rough translation of the Russian text that this post begins with. It's funny, but very sad as well.

Winter is the time for a routine maintenance of the Matrix. In order to free up computing resources necessary for garbage collection they decrease the duration of daytime, strip trees of foliage and paint the sky in a unform gray color. All this helps to decrease the amount of computation required to render [the Matrix].

They used to cover everything with a layer of uniform white snow but with the recent increase in computing power that is no longer necessary. The rumor has it that after the next upgrade cycle there will not be any need for a dedicated winter at all.

... is taking place now. Follow a live coverage (transcript, photos) at MacRumors Live.

Update: Watch the video of Steve Jobs Macworld 2007 Keynote (QuickTime).

iPhone is here!

From the keynote speech:
9:42 am: 1984 - first mac; 2001 first ipod;

Today - introducing 3 revolutionary products:
9:42 am: 1st - widescreen ipod
9:42 am: 2nd - revolutionary mobile phone
9:42 am: 3rd - internet communicator
9:43 am: one device, not 3 separate

iPhone features Mac OS X, WiFi and GSM, a full web browser (Safari), a wide screen with MultiTouch interface (that's cool!) and 3 modes of work - an iPod, a phone, a communicator. Full sensor screen, use the best pointing device you have (your fingers), MultiTouch gestures, can "touch" your music.

Priced at $499 for a 4GB model, with 2 year service plan.

There is no question that this product will change the landscape of phones and mobile devices as we know it. The question is - how? What will happen to such products as Palm Treo or Nokia 770 Internet Tablet?

How will competition respond? One thing characteristic to Apple is that users will be tied into iTunes and its DRM therefore an interesting field to watch will be more open devices or development platforms that will inevitably turn up.

By the way - its not all cool and amazing. Many of things are already out there, in other devices. The really cool part is the "touch" interface, full screen size and the web browser / communicator part of it. But even then "nobody needs a stylus" part raises questions - entering text by tapping fingers on a virtual keyboard is slow and messy, using a stylus and Graffiti handwriting recognition is much faster.

Let's see what will happen. I want one of those anyway!

Apple Keynotes - Behind the Scenes

It is amazing to see Steve Jobs and Apple marketing and PR machine at work. Such a show does not happen in one day and there is an incredible amount work put into creating such a presentation (not to speak about the amount of work that goes into products themselves).

Read a first-person account of this process: The Guardian article "Behind the magic curtain"

Macworld Conference & Expo 2007 starts today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and will run until January 12.

What new things will be presented there this year? Looking forward to find out more on the MacNN (Mac News Network) and elsewhere.

To make this event more fun participate in the "Steve Jobs Keynote Bingo": "Bingo templates are randomized out of a pool of 50 possible keynote events. When one event happens, press a button. If you get five buttons in a row, column or diagonally you scream: bIngqo!! (Because only a Klingon is prepared for what Steve has in store this year.)"

Check out our photos from Macworld 2006:

See also some photos from the MAKE and #joiito MacWorld 2006 Meetup.

P.S. Between the time I started to write this blog post and the time it was finished the current date in Latvia switched from January 8 to 9. Therefore, let's clarify - the conference starts on January 8, and the expo starts on January 9.

David Bowie celebrates his 60th birthday today. Congratulations!!!

He is one of the most dynamic musicians of the last (and this) century. I've always been amazed by his ability to change, adapt to new times and come up with new ideas. While he has made many appearances (e.g., playing the king of goblins in a cult movie "Labyrinth") one of my favorites parts is the action/quest game "Omikron: The Nomad Soul" which he composed a whole album for:

1999's "Hours" featured "What's Really Happening", the lyrics for which were written by Alex Grant, the winner of Bowie's "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition.

That same year also found Bowie composing the soundtrack for a computer game called "Omikron: The Nomad Soul". David Bowie and his wife, Iman, made appearances as characters in the game.

Omikron remains one of the best computer games I've ever played.

You can find many more interesting facts about David Bowie on Wikipedia.

Some of my favorite songs by David Bowie:

• "Space Oddity" (1969)
• "Absolute Beginners" (1986)
• Album "Hours" (1999) a.k.a. the soundtrack for "Omikron: The Nomad Soul"

If you like Bowie's music, what are your favorites?