Month: November 2004

Categories
Places

Disconnected a wee bit sooner

I guess I’m offline much sooner than expected, as my cable internet connection failed last night. Since I’m not ready yet for this, haven’t installed all I needed, and since I’m paid up until the 20th, a repairman is coming on Monday.

Now I’m at Panera, having a lovely Danish and latte, on a beautiful Saturday morning, using the free wireless.

I earned today’s Danish by walking around the zoo for over three hours yesterday. The place was surprisingly empty of folk, which is nice if you’re not necessarily comfortable with hordes of screaming kids, whining for their Moms and Dads to ‘carry me’ or ‘buy me something’ (from overheard conversations from the families that were there).

It was my first time seeing the new Penguin and Puffin exhibit and this alone makes the trip worthwhile. The zoo created an enclosed, ideal environment for the birds (cold), and then built the tanks so that you’re right next to them. In fact, it would seem that a favorite hobby of some of the birds is to splash the people. Flash photography is welcome and I tried to take some photos of one fine fellow, but every time I would move in close to the tank, he’d flip his wing and splash me. The attendant said he was playing with me, as I recoiled in horror, throwing my body between my new camera and the water.

At the cougar exhibit, a young girl, probably about 10 or 11 jumped up and down yelling at the cougar to, “Look at me! Look at me you stupid cat!”

My, but this Danish is good. So is the coffee. This disconnected thing could work out; after everything is installed, of course. But no worries, still plenty of posting. So don’t forget to look at me. Look at me.

Categories
Critters

Cat Friday blogging

It hit me yesterday about noon that what we all really needed was a dose of cat blogging. However, rather than disturb the little princess, otherwise known as Zoe, to take more photos of her, I thought I would go to the zoo and take photos of the big cats.

First up was the exhibit with this fine looking sun bear.

“Where are the cats”, I hollered.

I’m a cat.

“No, you’re a bear.”

I’m a cat. See? I have claws.

“Do you like catnip?”

No

“Do you like to play with mice before you kill and eat them?”

Eat a mouse? Ewwww! Gross! Okay I’m not a cat. But can I ask you something before you go?

“Sure.”

Does this fur make me look fat? Can you see the line of my bikini underwear?

A bit further on, I came across this fine fellow, waiting to have his nose scratched.

“What’s your name, cutie”, I asked, as I stretched out to pat his nose.

Elvis.

“Where are the cats, Elvis?

I’m a cat.

“No, you’re a camel.”

No, I’m a cat. I’m covered with fur, and I have an adorable face.

“But what are those two huge lumps on your back.”

Fur balls. I have lots and lots and lots of fur balls.

“Ewwww! You just grossed me out, Elvis.”

Hee hee hee. See, told you I’m a cat.

From Elvis, I went to the new Penguin and Puffin Exhibit. There I met up with this handsome fellow, diving in and out of the water.

“Hi, I don’t suppose you know where the cats are, do you?”

I’m a cat *splash*

“Wow man, you almost got my camera. And no, you’re not a cat. You’re a penguin.”

Am not. I’m a cat. *splash*

“Geez, you’re going to ruin my camera with your playing. And you’re not a cat.”

Tell me something. Don’t cats like to play?

“Well, yes.”

And don’t they like to destroy things.

“Yes, that’s true. Cats do tend to destroy things.

Isn’t that camera of yours a ‘thing’?

“You got me there. But you’re in water. Cats don’t usually like water.”

I’m special. *splash*

Walking further, I arrived at the Seal display, and spotted this lovely on the rocks.

“Hey, where’s the cats.”

Strike a pose.

“No, that’s not what I asked. I asked where are the cats.”

Strike a pose.

“Oh, never mind.”

Strike a pose.

Eventually, I found the cats, but by this time, most had crawled off to wherever they go for their afternoon naps. Except for the cougar, napping in the sun on a rock near the roof of it’s enclosure.

“Finally, a cat.”

Damn straight, I’m a cat. And I want you to….

Saaaaay. What’s that jumping up and down screeching out ‘Look at me’ next to you? It looks tasty. Like a young pig I had once.

“Well, urh, it’s a child my cougar friend.”

A child, eh? Well, why don’t you take it out of the packaging and slip it into my cage.

I looked at the child, screaming, jumping up and down and yelling out its demands. And for a brief moment…

“Sorry, no can do. I mean, someone somewhere loves this kid.”

Most things are loved by someone, somewhere, lady. But a guy still has to eat.

“That sounds very philosophical.”

Hey, I’m a cat.

And there you have it, my Friday cat blogging post; posted on Saturday, true, but which is about cats, but also somewhat about the world with a little Elvis thrown in.

Categories
Technology

Back to biz

My internet connection burst back into life after we replaced the cable wire, so I was able to return to work on getting my Mac ready for Open Source development.

Installing and configuring MySQL and WordPress was quite simple, and matched the instructions at MacZealots; except that I am using an older PHP/MySQL client, with it’s older password authentication, and got this error:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested
by server; consider upgrading MySQL client.

Instead of opting to update my PHP install at the moment, I just updated the passwords using the MySQL command line and SET PASSWORD:

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘username’@’localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(’password’);

Now I am working at installing OsCommerce and possibly Drupal, and all the software I need. This has been an amazingly uncomplicated process. Much simpler than setting up the same environment in Linux.

If you want to see the weblog, just access http://localhost/wordpress/.

(Hee hee hee. I am an evil woman.)

Categories
RDF Technology

Wiki and Weblogs

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Tim Bray wrote a short note on weblogs and wikis, basically saying that contrary to assertions at Sun and elsewhere that the two are convergent, they’re both very different:

A wiki is a collaborative construction engine, with refactoring and edit-in-place being the dominant forms of activity, and many equal voices singing in a chorus. A blog is more like a content faucet, a source with one voice, always growing at one end; while updates to existing content are OK, the dominant activity is pouring new text and pictures and whatever in.

I can agree that out of the box, the two are very different; not only in implementation, but also in purpose and audience. However, that’s out of the box. It doesn’t take much to morph the one into the other, which I assume is where some of the discussion of convergence enters. (Not to mention that both are considered forms of personal empowerment.)

For instance, a wiki can easily be setup to only allow one editor, and limit one’s work to adding material rather than editing. And as can seen in the Kitchen, it’s not difficult to open a weblog up to the world, and the only thing stopping people from editing their work is habit and etiquette.

This latter is where the difference arises: the technology isn’t limiting how each tool is used, as much as our assumptions on how each is supposed to be used. The most significant assumption is that each writing on a weblog is relatively static and usually is identified by the author. In a wiki, the writing is usually not static and identifying your writing with your name is discouraged to prevent ownership of the material.

Further on, when Tim says that weblogging isn’t anything new, it’s because personal webpages controlled by one individual have been around since the web’s been invented. However, a wiki, with it’s lack of voice other than the corporate whole, and based on an almost universal trust, is very new.

Think of the difference politically: weblogs are Libertarian, while wikis are Green.

(Via Danny)

Categories
RDF Technology Weblogging

Thinking out loud: Wordform and Dynamic RDF

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

An issue about attaching metadata recorded as RDF/XML to a web object, particularly a web page, is that there is no clean way to embed the XML into an (X)HTML document; at least, embed the data and still have the page validate.

Yet creating separate files just for the RDF/XML can get messy, as I found when I generated PostCon data for my weblog post entries a while back.

However, with a dynamic page application, such as WordPress, another approach is to have the application provide the appropriate data, based on passed parameters.

For instance, with WordPress, attaching “/trackback/” at the end of the post name doesn’t serve up the post page; instead it triggers the trackback web services. Doing the same with “/feed/”, returns the RSS syndication feed, and so on.

WordPress also has a way of attaching keyword-value pairs to a specific post. I’ve used this data to provide sidebar meta information about a post, here and at Burningbird, and I plan on using this to more depth within Wordform, my customized fork of WordPress.

I’ve been asked whether I would be using this capability to generate PostCon entries. I could, but a slight modification of an RSS syndication feed could do this just as easily. What interests me more is the ability to support RDF/XML generation for a variety of models (i.e. specific vocabularies), architected using built-in utility functions within the weblogging tool. These then would map the data to a structure that could be used to drive out RDF/XML when attaching the specific model name to the post, such as “/postcon/” for PostCon, and “/poetry/” for the Poetry Finder.

Yeah, easier said then done.

What would be nice would be to integrate existing RDF tools and applications to handle as much as this extended semantic modeling and metadata management as possible. A PHP-based API, such as RAP (RDF API for PHP) could be used to handle much of this, and should integrate nicely into the PHP-based weblogging functionality–but how to simplify modeling relationships when your user is barely conversant with HTML, much less something more complex?

The best approach would be to use a plug-in architecture to provide simplified, user-friendly front-ends to collect the metadata based on a specific model. Based on this there would be an RDF Poetry Finder plug-in to collect the poetry metadata, which would then incorporate this data into triples in the database. Associated with the plug-in would be a backend process that maps to a ‘data type’ passed to the tool (that previously mentioned ‘/poetry/’) and generates the RDF/XML for that model.

Wordform is based on a cut of the code of WordPress 1.3, which I believe will be incorporating the capability of adding plug-ins to the administration pages–another piece of the puzzle provided. If not, this is a functionality that should be added – extending the admin UI. Without using DHTML.

So the workflow for Poetry Finder would be:

Create the post using basic weblogging functionality.
Annotate the post with poetry metadata, using the Poetry Finder administrative plug-in.
Use RAP to add the data to the database.

When the Poetry metadata is accessed, by an application passing “/poetry/” as an extension to the post name, the poetry plug-in intercepts the request, via Wordform/Wordpress filter, and uses RAP to pull the data from the database, and generate valid RDF/XML to return.

The same workflow should work with category data, and even at the weblog level. For instance, this could be used to generate a FOAF file if one wished. The strength of this approach, though, is for individual and category archives.

To make the data useful, it would then need to be aggregated, but we have successful examples of how this can be done with RSS and FOAF. A centralized store would need to be created of collected data, and be searchable, but that’s for another late night brainstorming session.