Categories
Burningbird Technology

Semantic web, live and in color

I’m taking advantage of this server move to make some pretty drastic changes in my own sites. For instance, I’m not going to try maintaining the old numbered system for my Movable Type page names because, to be blunt, it’s a mess.

What with my recent tax evasion weeding out, and my habit of splitting weblog entries across different sites, the numbering is completely out of whack. Enough to bother even me, virtual slob that I am; for the anal among you, it would be enough to send you into a coma.

I contemplated a weblog redesign — something all new. My first thought was to put a big graphic at the top of a half naked man, but then I thought, what does this tell people about my weblog? So I discarded that idea. The For Poets sites has a look I like and I considered using it with this weblog, but displaying different photos every time you access the page. However, this idea is too much like Jonathon Delacour’s and I don’t want to steal his mojo.

Besides, I like my weblog look. I’m used to it. It suits me and what I write about. I may, however, change the look of the photo blogs, and I’m definitely changing the rest of the sites, such as burningbird.net.

The photo blogs are going to their own domain, mirrorself.com. All my photographs are going to this domain, and you can imagine how interesting this is going to be with all the embedded photos I have in my pages, and the number of photo blogs I have (each with hardcoded absolute URLSs). The For Poets weblogs are also going to their own Movable Type installation, and will be using the new page naming system. There aren’t that many For Poets weblog entries so doing redirects could be handled manually. However, with Burningbird and the rest of my stuff, we’re talking a significant impact. I have an application that’s currently tracking requests for missing resources and all I can say is, you sure can tell I’ve been online a long, long time, and that I move things around a lot.

One challenge with splitting my weblogs into completely different MT installations is my current comment/trackback facility. Normally this goes across all the weblogs; through this approach, to be blunt, I own Blogdex, as a comment for one post is repeated across all weblogs and robots see this as a fresh link to the post. I’ve been in the top Blogdex ranks every weekend for two months (weekends are slower linking times.) I’m trying to decide if I’ll find a way to work across databases, or to be kind to Blogdex.

To handle the Burningbird weblog reorganization, I’m putting my little PostCon application into full gear. The only part missing on the application is the forms-based front end that allows you to create a PostCon RDF file from scratch. I really don’t like doing forms-based development — I like working backend stuff. However, I don’t need to have the forms-based component right now. It would be handy, but I don’t need it.

(What would be nice is a generic forms application that can be used to define a data model, automatically create the forms, and then record data to create the serialized RDF/XML files. Wait a sec, I do! It’s called Protege. I’m using Protege for my PostCon pages that aren’t being generated through Movable Type.)

I integrated PostCon into Movable Type some time ago, but now I’m increasing the integration and am using pieces of PostCon, as well as Movable Type to handle the redirects — from old numbered pages to the new page system. More than that, though, is that each page now has its own particular history — what did the resource used to be named, what is it now, who wrote it, what’s it about, and linkage info. All in a machine readable format, that can also be viewed by people pushing a button on each individual page and seeing the ‘hidden’ page self-description. There’s a little FOAF in this, as well as a few other odds and ends RDF vocabularies that I’m absorbing.

I’ll be writing all this up in my Semantic Web for Poets site. I hope to show that the semantic web starts small, and starts when each of us takes a little bit of extra time to record just a little bit of extra information that could be helpful down the road. Yes, PostCon uses RDF. But it also uses plain old, Perl, too, and is served through Apache, and run on Linux. The entire Internet did not have to be rewired in order to use it.

For those who like moving parts, yes, there’s even some moving parts, though my weblog still doesn’t talk to my toaster.

Caveat on all of this, though: There is going to be some major changes and expect a rough week for my sites. Not for anyone else — the other weblogs should move with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Categories
Technology

State of Greek: Interchangeable Parts

I had promised to return and finish the State of Geek series, but I haven’t been in much of a mood for it. I have such mixed feelings about ‘geek’ lately. I am once a geek, but I am also not a geek — one foot in, one foot out.

The good news about the job market would seem to preclude these writings because, as it seems, the problems are all gone — hail, hail, the jobs all here. But you know, and I know, these jobs are not geek jobs. No, the hot degree now is in Business — the degree we laughed at when we trotted out into the work force with our hot and heavy tech credentials.

(Where were the laurel leaves and the whispered, “Thou art mortal. Thou art mortal.” in those days?)

America has become a service economy, which means we export raw material and import finished product and most people are employed facilitating this whole process. But among the moving parts, don’t count on tech or manufacturing. And the smug bunch holding up their biotech degrees? Remember those laurel leaves — you’re next.

All in all, this is not a healthy situation for a country to be in, but it is a short-term cost effective solution for corporations barely able to keep up with their bonus payments and still show inflated profits each quarter.

Still, I am less a geek now than I am a writer or photographer. Why should I care that the geek jobs go overseas? You might say my geek job caught that ship two years ago, and two years is a long time to stand on the pier, waving Bye bye. Bye bye.

Then I read stories such as a recent one in the Mercury News (thanks to Head Lemur and Ralph Poole):

Avinash Vashistha, managing director at San Ramon-based offshore consulting firm NeoIT, loves telling the story of asking a Silicon Valley executive this year which jobs he could offshore.

“Could you move this person’s job?’’ asked Vashistha.

“Oh, no,’’ the executive said. “I couldn’t move her job. She’s been here for 25 years. It would take eight people to do her job.’’

“Very well, we’ll hire eight people to replace her,’’ Vashistha said.

NeoIT calculated that the company could hire eight people to replace that one longtime employee and still save 20 percent by moving the entire division overseas, Vashistha said.

There is become two types of people in the world — those who control and those who work. When we, who work, become nothing more than cheap, non-differentiated interchangeable parts to those who control, then there’s a lot more at stake than some geek jobs in the States.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Comment spam? Or DoS?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The topic about comment spam still rages, with people following the spammer’s tracks to shut them down or at a minimum harass them with bills and whatnot. The spammers then come back with, “It’s all legal, your comment forms are open.”

Well, yes and no. Try thinking of comment spam as a Denial of Service (DoS) and the legality changes, real quick. All it takes is using Movable Type with comment emailing turned on and then getting hit with close to 150 comment spams at once, as happened to me this morning before I shut the web server down to stop it.

When you have this many comment spams at once on Movable Type, with the associated activities such as database lookup, update, and email, then any and all other activity basically slows down to a crawl, or stops completely. Since the person deliberately triggers this many updates at once, it is a deliberate denial of service, and hence a DoS, and against the law.

This is the approach I’m taking to fighting back at comment spam of this nature.
If the spammer just did a few comments and I had better comment control, this wouldn’t bother me. But the recent multi-post blitzes, well they take down the system and I’m getting right tired of this.

I’ve already warned the company hosting the dial-up, and the company providing the nameservers – one more DoS and I’m filing a criminal complaint.

Mt-blacklist would have stopped the multi-post blitz, but I don’t have mt-blacklist installed – it stopped working for me with version 1.5, and still doesn’t work with version 1.6. Since I’m trying to move several webloggers to a new server, I don’t have time to work through what’s out of synch.

However, I do want to take this time to refresh my Movable Type wish list (and yes, Six Apart, you can put this into a commercial variety of the beast – just don’t go crazy on the fees, okay? )

Movable Type Comment and Trackback Wish List

Pretty please, sirs and lovely lady. May I have some more…

– Comment control: pull up and review comments by email, url, and IP address. Allow deletion based on all entries pulled up, or based on checks next to each item. Allow this at the installation level, not the weblog level – and also provide rebuild based on deleted entries

– Trackback control: ditto

– Blitz Prevention: Test to make sure the blitz doesn’t happen, this is really killing my system each time it happens. Restrict based on number of comments posted within an inhuman length of time for the same IP, or something of that nature.

(This is a real killer for me and I may hack the code myself to stop these blitzes, because I have a feeling I’m going to be getting these more frequently.)

I’d rather have these then blacklisting. We in the Wayward Weblogger co-op are already suffering because of uncontrolled blacklisting from SPEWS and I’m not sympathetic to banning in any form, though I can understand why people like this preventative measure.

(Not that I don’t appreciate Jay Allen and his mt-blacklist (which I wish I could get working again) – right now it’s the only thing standing between us the howling comment spammers at the door.)

As for the new wars: I think i’ts good we’re all fighting back, as long as we all remember something: anyone who we push can push back, and most of us share servers with others. When you say you’re going to put yourself on the line – you might want to spare a moment or two to the others you’re dragging along with you in your crusade. Be deliberate if you’re going to pick a fight, knowing all the consequences.

Categories
Technology

The State of Geek: Part 1 — Temp Job, No Health

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This week a rising tide of optimism is beginning to fuel hopes that that the the United States is finally on the rebound economically. The GDP was at a staggering 7.2% and for the first time in 18 months, jobs were added in September rather than lost.

Yet the only people popping champagne corks were among the senior White House staff, declaring a victory for President Bush’s policy of tax cuts. The rest of us see these statistics and we think, and hope, that times are better; but then the majority of us know at least one person who is unemployed and we ask ourselves, “How can bad times be over when (Sally|Mark|Joanne|Tom) is still unemployed?”

Jobs are returning, as the figures show in September; but they’re not the jobs we used to have. If you’ve lost your job because your plant was closed, you’re a technology worker and your company has downsized, or you were part of a call center that’s no longer in operation, chances are you can kiss that job good-bye permanently. According to the folks who know these things, the number of jobs in these industries in this country will never recover to pre-recession levels. As reported in the Daily Gazette in Massachusetts, a state that’s a major center for both tech and manufacturing jobs:

The state’s job market has just started to stabilize and should begin some job growth by the end of this year, said Michael Goodman, director of economic and public policy research at the University of Massachusetts.

Still, even by the end of 2005, the state is likely to recover less than two-thirds of the 150,000 jobs lost during the recession, he said. Many of those new jobs will be in sectors other than high-tech and manufacturing, those hardest hit during the recession.

But this doom and gloom doesn’t take into account how inflated the economy was before the recession; how tough it was to find workers to fill jobs created by bloated expectations –particularly in the high-tech fields, when companies used to give BWM cars to tech workers signing on. In addition, states like Massachusetts and California and Oregon that had a higher than average percentage of high-tech jobs are going to feel the tech downturn more acutely than other states with a more balanced job market. Based on this, adding up all the factors, if the job market for high-tech recovers to even 90% of its pre-recession boom-time across the country, then we should still be looking at a relatively stable employment situation. Shouldn’t we?

We should. But the dot-com explosion fueled a lot of changes that are going to continue to negatively impact on technology jobs in this country, and the rest of the world, for years to come. This impact is going to be significant enough that if people were to ask geeks like me whether we would recommend that their little Bobby or Susan study computer science in college, we would have to honestly say, “No”; an answer that has serious consequences to the state of geek.*

Temp Job, no Health

Recently the grocery workers at the one of the three major chains went on strike, and workers for the other two were locked out because the same union covered the employees of all three stores. There were over 10,000 workers out of the job and on the picket lines, a scenario repeated in other parts of the country including California, Utah, and on the East Coast.

I expected the stores to severely limit their hours and services, and was consequently amazed at how quickly the stores returned to something approximating their state before the strike occurred. In less than a week, nine thousand workers had been hired, trained, and put into service at the stores in St. Louis alone. This may not seem like much in a city of 370,000 people — nine thousand is barely 3 percent of the populace — but that’s nine thousand people willing and able to cross picket lines, to be labeled scab labor, an epitaph abhorred in this country even with the loss of union power over the years.

I have no doubt that if the companies continued hiring after the first week or two, the number of applications for the jobs would have doubled. Perhaps even tripled.

A vote ending the strike was taken yesterday and the workers will be returning to their jobs — an awkward time as the regular employees come on and the ’scab’ labor gets pushed out the door. The irony of the situation is that the contract the workers voted on yesterday is virtually no different than the one they rejected four weeks ago. According to the St. Louis Today:

In the end, union workers voted on two contracts that were identical in cost, supermarket executives said.

But several workers said they wanted to strike to make a point with their employers.

Shenika Bishop, a bagger at Schnucks in Cool Valley, said the strike taught her that workers should “stand up for what they need and deserve.”

Yes, but they didn’t.

Union officials say this strike, as with so many others among the grocery workers in the rest of the country, was about one thing — the lack of a National Health Care system. According to weblogger Joe Kenehan:

A semi-national strike by grocery store workers in California, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in defense of health benefits is pushing a broader American anxiety over the cost and accessibility of health care for regular people into the open.

It would seem that restaurant workers in New York may strike for the same reasons — just in time for the holidays. However, as with the grocery workers, I don’t think there will be much delay in bringing in ’scab’ labor.

What does this have to do with the state of geek, you ask? Because these strikes are a sign of the times: two few jobs, too many workers willing to work temp jobs with no security, and a growing national obsession with health insurance.

If there’s one label I could attach to the jobs I’m seeing out on the market for tech workers now, it would be “Temp Job, no Health”: temporary or contract job, no health insurance or other benefits provided. I’m not sure the state of the rest of the country but the job market in St. Louis consists primarily of contracting jobs; many of them for far less money then the good old days, and none of them with health insurance. Where before we could hope for a car, now we hope for a temp job that will last at least a couple of months and give us enough money so we can buy our own health insurance and still pay rent.

Economists say …

(Wait a sec. Who are these ‘economists’? Have you ever met an economist? Do economists really exist, or are they figures that publications invent so that they can provide their own predictions without having to back up their statements? “The economy is improving by a 15%”, the report says. We look around and don’t see an improvement and ask, who says the economy is improving by 15% and the report answes back, “The economists say so”, and well go, oh, well, if the economists say so. But I digress…)

Economists say that contract work is the harbinger of an upswing in permanent jobs as companies expand their labor pool cautiously in advance of better times. Where contracts go, permanent jobs are soon to follow. According to an WebTalkGuys Radio Show interview with techies.com president, Paul Cronin, increased numbers of contract jobs are a Good Thing:

The tech worker should see this as a great opportunity. One of the best ways of finding permanent work is through networking. When you’re out there talking to people and building relationships, it just seems to me that if someone offers you a project that is going to last 30-60-90 days and it’s a project that you’re qualified for and may even challenge you, it would make a lot of sense to take that project. The opportunity of staying with that company is increased by the fact that you worked with them already.

A few years back I wouldn’t have contemplated a permanent job, preferring the adventure and change that contract jobs provided. In most cases, my gigs would start out at the traditional 3 months, but in actuality they were usually extended indefinitely. I never worried about finding work because I received calls constantly from headhunters, always on the look out for new talent. I have to admit, I wasn’t always good about calling them back.

However, people who used to like contracting in good times are now looking for permanent work because the freedom of contracting is countered by the increased level of anxiety in jumping from short-term gig to short-term gig in an economy where reports are regularly published about the number of jobs permanently lost in high-tech. Today’s contract market is tighter, with more competition for jobs; today’s buyer, the employer, can offer less money and still get the same level of talent.

If you’re not a tech worker, you’re probably going, so what? The tech workers are a small job market compared to other jobs. We’re hit, but the rest of the country is doing okay. Right?

Wrong. If tech workers had money, we also spent money, especially on high ticket items that eventually ended up fueling entire industries. Once the first domino fell — the death of the dot-coms — other dominos fell in a display of cause and effect to bring down the house. This isn’t guesswork, you can see the impact in the record record number of bankruptcies filed this year. According to the Contra Costa Times:

Many Americans are struggling to pay their bills, and those out of work find job opportunities bleak. Research by the Federal Reserve indicates that household debt has risen to a record 14 percent of disposable income. Personal bankruptcies are on track this year to surpass last year’s all-time high of 1.5 million, says the American Bankruptcy Institute.

This country has pushed people to buy, buy, buy, and they bought, bought, bought. Now that times are tough, they’re no longer buying, which is impacting on both service and manufacturing communities and leading to yet more loss of jobs. Pity the poor American geek who can no longer shop at Disney and Warner Brothers, you think. But you don’t pity us because, as you see it, our own greed has caught up with us.

So the mighty have fallen and we log on to monster.com and hotjobs.com and we send resumes out and network, and we network; hungry flocks of birds all looking for the last worm. We’ll be thankful for what we get.

In the Sacramento Bee an article (featuring among others, weblogger Ross Mayfield) talks about the downturn in the Silicon Valley, and people being happy to get work:

At the Calvary Church in Los Gatos the other night, the weekly Need a Job Support Group drew its regular crowd of more than 60 unemployed tech workers.

They mingled over cookies and coffee, many wearing name tags spelling out their technical field: Hardware. Software. Marketing. It was mostly a male crowd, middle aged, casually dressed, folks like Kent Conrad.

A 41-year-old engineer from San Jose, he has started a handyman business after six months of unemployment.

“There’s more than one way to pay the rent,” Conrad said. “That whole dot-com bust, boom and bust, has damaged the whole industry. Companies are real cautious about hiring people.”

On this night, technical writer Milt Brewster was a star of sorts: He just got a job after 32 months of unemployment.

The job will last only six months and represents a 30 percent pay cut, but he wasn’t griping: “I consider that a stroke of luck — it’s only 30 percent.”

Times are getting better, we tell ourselves. And when the headhunters call us, we pretend we don’t hear the satisfaction in their voices when they tell us thanks for the resume, they’ll add it to the pile.

Perhaps we need a Union.

*And as I was writing this part of the essay, Meg wrote a comment to my previous post:

Globalization is here and I change my mind a few times a day about what we should be doing about it, especially in the IT industry. For the most part I think it is not wise to enter the IT field in the US right now, while others think that women should be encouraged more to enter into this ever-changing industry.

“Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be IT workers..”

Categories
Technology

Now that’s Semantic Web(?)

Danny pointed out SemaView’s new calendar based product, Sherba, congratulating them on a …winning application of SemWeb technologies.

The company is using the iCal RDF Schema to create a windows-based application to manage and share event information through an interconnected calendaring system. My first reaction when I saw “window-based application” is to wince at the use of semantic web to what sounded like another Groove-like product that just happens to use RDF/XML for the data. Or does it?

According to the developer documentation, though the company’s application generates the RDF/XML data, it’s not hidden into the bowels of an application only accessible through archane, proprietary rituals or other perversions of openness. (And yes I’m including web services in this because to me, open means open — wide out there baby, just like this web page is. )

There are web services available, but more importantly to me, me being a person who believes that the semantic web is about data rather than applications, the product produces lovely RDF/XML files. Crawlable, open, plain view, accessible RDF/XML files.

Better, it gets better. Not only does the company produce the RDF/XML, it allows organizations that use the product to register their calendars in a global search directory called SherpaFind. Now you can search for events based on a set of parameters, view the calendar, download it, or best of all, directly access the RDF/XML for the calendar.

This is open. This is data within context, though Tim Berners-Lee hates that word . This is data that’s saying: excuse me little bots, sirs, kind sirs, but this data you’re slurping up isn’t just a mess of words waiting to be globally gulped and spit out in a bizarre search based on weights and links; it’s data that has some meaning to it. This data is calendaring data, and once you know that, you know that a lot.

Having said this, though, some of what I read leads me to think this isn’t as open as I thought at first glance. First, if I read this correctly, the Sherpa calendar information is centralized on the Sherpa servers. I’m assuming by this, again with just a first glance, that Semaview is providing the P2P cloud through which all of the clients interact in a manner extremely similiar to how Groove works. If this is true, I’ve said it before and will again — any hint of centralization within a distributed application is a point of weakness and vulnerability, the iron mountain hidden within the cloud.

Second, I can’t find the calendar RDF/XML out at the sites that use the product. There are no buttons at these sites that give me the RDF/XML directly. Additionally, trying variations of calendar.rdf isn’t returning anything either. Again, this is a fast preliminary read and I’ll correct my assumptions if I’m wrong — but is the only way to access the RDF/XML calendar information through SherpaFind? How do bots find this data?

Let’s compare Sherpa with that other popular use of RDF/XML: RSS. I generate an RSS 1.0 file that’s updated any time my weblog pages are updated. You can find it using multiple techniques, including searching for index.rdf files, following a link on my page or using RSS autodiscovery. You can find my site originally by me pinging a central server such as blo.gs. However, most of us find each other because we follow a link from another weblog. If we like what we read, we then subscribe to each other and use aggregators to keep up with updates. The golden gateway in this distributed application is through the links, rather than through an organization’s P2P cloud.

This is almost a pure P2P distributed application, enabled bya common vocabulary (RSS 1.0), serialized using a common syntax (RDF/XML), defined using a common data model, (RDF). Since it is dependent on the Internet and DNS, there’s an atom of iron in this cloud, but we can’t all be perfect. The only way to break this connection between the points is to take my site down (micro break), in which case there is no data anyway; or if we take the Internet down (macro break).

When you have a centralized cloud, like Groove’s, then you’re dependent on an organization to always and consistently provide this service. For Groove the product to work, Groove the company must continue to exist. If Groove no longer exists and the Groove cloud is no longer being maintained, hundreds, thousands, of connections to each other are lost.

The SemaView site mentions Sherpa Calendar in the context of Napster, as regards its functionality, except that calendaring information is shared rather than music. (We also have to assume the RIAA isn’t out to sue your butt if you use the application.) But Napster is based on the data being stored on the nodes — the end computers, not on the web. (Well, not directly on the wide open Web.) Is it, then, that the calendar data is stored on the individual PCs, only accessible through the Sherpa cloud? If this is so, then ingenous use of RDF/XML or not — this isn’t an application of the Sematic Web. This is just another application of web services.

(Though Tim B-L believes that the Semantic Web is based on functionality such as web services rather than data in context, I don’t agree. And many in the semantic web community wouldn’t, either. )

Without a closer look at how the product works, the documentation only tells me so much so my estimations of how this product functions overall is somewhat guesswork at this moment. When I have access to the product, I’ll do an update.

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