Category: Technology

Categories
RDF Specs Technology

RSS: The neverending story

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Hi, Evil Twin here!

I’m not sure why, but the very mention of RSS tends to bring me out of my quiet corner, where I sit filing my nails while Burningbird does her thing. So, while she’s off cleaning house and trying to get the next episode of that RDF Poetry Finder finished, I thought I would just sneak in here, and add a new post. Just for fun.

There’s been considerable discussion about RSS for Weblogs, and RSS profiles, and XHTML in RSS and RSS and FOAF, and so on lately. In fact, if RSS were chum, you could walk on water, there are so many sharks circling about. Sam’s is a good place to track most of the discussion, so start here, then here and here.

Much good input, lots of great ideas from smart people. However, it struck me as I leisurely meandered through all of the juicier bon mots, that what the discussion needed was a little perspective.

I got to thinking about the possible impacts that could occur if the same level of energy applied to the discussions of RSS were applied to other areas of human interest such as science and the humanities. Based on this, I came up with the following, my list of things we’d be doing now, if only RSS energy was universal.

 

1. Next vacation I’d just hang about in the next neighborhood. Andromeda.

2. We would have a cure for the common cold. Unfortunately, 1 out of 20 people who take the cure die.

3. Men will finally understand why they’re from Mars and women are from Venus.

4. We’ll be using cold fusion devices to chill our cans of beer.

5. We find Schrödinger’s Cat. His name is Bob.

6. The next blogging get together will have 200,000 people attending, all teleporting in. The remaining 300,000 will just pick up the details from their minds.

7. Virtual sex would no longer be so virtual. No, I’m not giving details.

8. Our SUVs get 1000 miles to a gallon of gas.

9. New techniques can compress 1000 gallons of gas into one, which will cost about $2,345.56 at the station.

10. Lie-detecting glasses will enable voters to see when politicians are lying.

11. New political laws will be created to allow governments to exist without politicians.

12. Computers will be smaller than a speck of dust, and hard wired directly into our brains. We think, we blog.

13. Weblogging tools will incorporate a new feature called the “Oh Shit! I didn’t want to print that” quick erase.

14. Someone invents a penis stretcher that really works, and a pill that melts fat. Not long after, Vogue begins to feature plump, voluptuous women as the new sex symbol, and men start wearing dresses. Loose dresses.

-and finally-

15. Time travel exists. I have seen the future. I know how RSS ends. I’m not telling.

Categories
Semantics Web

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A discussion about the Semantic Web is taking place at Bloggers Unlimited. My hope is that this conversation brings together the techies and the non-techies, and it seems like it is. At least a little bit.

More voices would be welcome — all views are welcome. This is a friendly thread. Honest.

As for my part, I’m talking at the discussion thread, and I’m continuing the RDF Poetry Finder essays. We’ll see how it goes.

Categories
Web

RSS: The Sledge-o-matic of markup

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Long time no talk about RSS. I’m overdue.

Thanks to a pointer from Sam, I read The article Why Blogs haven’t stormed the business world. According to it, the reason why more weblogs aren’t in use today is because it’s too difficult to move content from one tool to another:

The greatest problem, however, is not the limitations of the front end of this software, but rather what goes on behind the curtain, so to speak. As bloggers add content to their sites, the programs update and store HTML pages in a collection of directories spread throughout a Web site. Each tool has its own directory structure, its own names for the archives it compiles of past postings, its own method of updating each page.

That way lies trouble. While the actual pages in a blog may be simple HTML, the sum total of elements in a blog is a giant heap of files and folders understood only by the tool a blogger is using at present. What would happen if you were to switch tools tomorrow? With even the simplest blogs, many users would be daunted by the need to move files, change directories, get the new tools to hook up with the old. In short, each new tool would break your current blog. There simply is no portability under the current structure.

What an idiot.

I’ve spent the last few years helping organizations integrate from products as diverse as Peoplesoft, Oracle Financials, Blue Martini, and Vignette. Compared to this, transforming the content from something such as Radio or Blogger to Moveable Type is a piece of cake. What’s difficult for the individual who has no programming expertise is nothing to a junior programming with a little time, and a good, not great, knowledge of Perl or Python or Java or half a dozen other languages. Not only that, but any weblogging tool worth anything has developed export and import procedures between their products and others.

How many people have ported their pages from one weblogging tool to another? The key is an import mechanism, not a format.

According to the author, if all the tools would just agree to use RSS as the import/export mechanism, all of our problems would be solved:

 

In fact, the answer may be at hand. The RSS protocol, mentioned above, is used to tell reader programs where to find a blog. Why not use the same technology to tell blog software how to pick up the entire contents of a blog and integrate or repurpose those contents? In effect, the XML standard for structured Web data could be used as a uniform way to transform each tool’s blog into another’s, in order to hand off control. Not only would this avoid a knowledge disaster in the long term, but it would encourage blog sharing and collaboration in the near term.

 

What XML standard? XML itself isn’t a standard, but at least there is only one consistent implementation of it. RSS consists of multiple specifications, some of which are controlled by one company, and another of which is controlled by a bunch of people through a Yahoo news group. And, as we saw recently, what should be a simple, hierarchical syndication/aggregation format is the focus of numerous techno wars, which doesn’t make sense because it’s nothing more than a simple, brain dead data model.

Well, it is until we start mucking around with it. Trying to use it for everything and anything, as if we have to justify the time we’ve spent talking about it, working with it, tweaking it.

Hello RSS people! When will you be done?

I think what annoyed me the most about the article, not just the fact that now we’re going to have yet again another round of tweaks and talks and nasty asides on “RSS as intra-blog transformation meta-language”, is the author’s statement:

 

I’ll leave it to the experts to iron-out the specifics. At some point, the community of coders will have to realize that adding more and more features to blogs won’t fix the problem of organizing and disseminating all the content piling up in the unfinished basement below. This problem should be addressed before the blog becomes the blob.

 

Clueless. Absolutely and completely clueless.

There! That satisfied my RSS weblogging need for at least another few months.

 

Categories
Technology

The problems with virtual

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The problems with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is that it isn’t Unix as you know Unix. I had this with my last virtual server that was FreeBSD based, but it wasn’t too bad. All of this is different with Ensigm and VPS on Linux. And none of this was helped by lack of documentation.

Bad boy, bad boy. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do… when your customers come for you because the documentation that comes with your fully released commercial application has “To be done” for most of it. They shoot people in Texas for this, you know.

documentation.jpg

However, after a chat with a supervisor to find out I have to specifically ask for certain things to be installed, such as Tomcat, they’re now installed. And I now have root access, and a pretty good idea of what I can, and cannot touch. But since I don’t normally customize the kernel for kicks, we should be okay.

Let’s say that the customer service experience today was a mixed bag, but alls well that ends well. I am what is known as a tough customer. Just call me Burning Bitch.

I can do so much damage on this new system! Expect frequent crashes and mayhem as I experiment and play around. I love the smell of fresh burning wire insulation in the morning.

It’s fun even going through this type of activity, rather than a count down of the hours until the site goes out for the count. And it’s fun playing with the technology again. So thank you all for this delightful headache. It’s good to be back in the mess again.

And see, I’m back into the threadneedle, ThreadsML stuff over here, too. Busting balloons, being a pain in the butt. You know, the usual.

Bad boys. Bad boys. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when I come for you. Bad boys. Bad boys…

Categories
Technology

I’m going shopping!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This weekend I have the very real pleasure of shopping around for a new host, thanks to the generosity of friends. I am blown away by the support I’ve received, and hope you all won’t regret it because the fire’s back and I’m feeling hotter than ever.

I won’t be staying with my current host for a couple of reasons: space and technology support. There has been some performance problems with Hosting Matters in the past, but these seem to have originated primarily from the NOC (Network Operations Center) that HM was using. The company has since started the process of switching to a new NOC, and since I was moved to a new server at the new NOC, I’ve not had performance or downtime problems, and the support has been good. If it weren’t for space and issues of technical experimentation, I wouldn’t move.

All those photos I upload eat up disk space as well as bandwidth at a fairly quick pace, and I do so love taking photos and sharing them. In addition, I want to start experimenting around with technology again, including running Java applications through a Tomcat server and my current host doesn’t support this. Dorothea knows me so well when she wrote:

 

On the up side, an email from Jonathon indicated that the Burningbird campaign is going well. Could always be improved upon—especially given Bb’s tastes in server hardware—so ante up, folks.

 

Well, you did. Beyond wildest expectations. I am all agog with the dama…urh, new things I can do now in this year you’ve given me. And I solemnly promise to share whatever I come up with, including finishing my online C# book and the RDF Semantic Web Poetry Finder, and PostCon (yeah!) and a blackbox experimentation my evil twin is tentatively calling RSS Buster. Hee.

Ahem, back to technology requirements. Few plans offer Java support because of the potential for problems as well as the resource burden. No shared hosts allow for root access to allow new software installation. Based on these two requirements, I’m currently looking at several Virtual Private(Dedicated) Servers (VPS) at several companies.

A VPS is having root access to a server as well as dedicated CPU, bandwidth, and space, but without higher costs of a completely dedicated server. Software such as that built into some FreeBSD installations, and provided by Ensim literally partitions a machine’s resources among the VPS installed, preventing one from taking resources, or causing problems, for the others. By the use of this technology, I can do something such as run a BrownSauce RDF Browser for my experimentation and it won’t impact on resource use of other clients on the machine. Or I can create a Perl CGI script that goes insane and only worry about taking my own system down. Same with the other clients — they can’t touch me, my CPU, bandwidth, or space slice. Best of all, I can customize the software install without having to ask the host — something that pretty much eliminates software experimentation. One might say that shared web hosts really would prefer that their clients not experiment.

Among the VPS hosts, I have to find ones that provide high bandwidth and disk space, but also provide DNS (Domain Name server) support for multiple domains and sub-domains, with little or no additional costs. I still have multiple domains such as yasd.com and dynamicearth.com, and I want to park them pointing to burningbird.net without having to pay a DNS setup fee. The odd thing is that shared hosting plans such as Hosting Matters provide this service for free and make DNS management a snap; while companies that support VPS, such as Interland and possibly Web Intellects, and which one would assume would have more need of this type of service, tend not to provide this type of support, or only with a fee. Go figure.

I can use free DNS servers, but DNS management is a bear, to be honest. I’d much rather have a quick and dirty form that has me type in the domain and a process automatically adds the proper DNS records. I like to experiment, but not with DNS.

Anyway, I’m looking at several companies that provide VPS (suggestions welcome!). There might be a day or two overlap when the site ends at Hosting Matters but I’m not finished at my new host. If you can’t see this site May 1, be patient, it will be back.

I am having so much fun looking for a server, getting my current sites backed up for moving, figuring out what software to install, what new project to try first, and getting applications I have on my personal machines ready for re-load to a server; and all of this fun activity is thanks to your generosity. You are all steely eyed missile men, and very good people.