Categories
Weblogging

Look who came in from the cold

Tim Bishop at Geodog spotted the new post at Mark Pilgrim’s weblog. It’s all about bathin’ the baby. I personally liked the Beta patch in the corner–very 2.0.

Whether Mark is continuing the weblog is hard to say. According to Mark in discussion at Sam Ruby’s weblog:

Funny story, vaguely related: I was at FOO Camp last fall, and struck up a conversation with someone who (1) was familiar with the Syndication Wars, and (2) had been a regular reader of my blog in its day. He asked if there were any circumstances under which I would resume blogging. I replied — I am not making this up — “when hell freezes over, or Cadenhead switches to Atom.”

Well, Rogers Cadenhead did switch to Atom.

There are a few people who have gone quiet or closed down their weblogs I would like to see weblog again. Mark was one, Jonathan Delacour another, and wouldn’t mind seeing Alan Moult weblog again (Leatherwood Online is a lovely site–but I miss the personal stories). I’m also not sure what happened to Yule Heibel–her weblog seems to have disappeared.

There are others who are gone I miss: Baker’s Dozin, Farrago among them. But hey! Look at that! A picture of Mike Golby. And Frank Paynter isn’t missing, he’s just moved to a site called Listics.

Anyway, good to see Mark Pilgrim fill in this particular textarea.

Categories
JavaScript RDF

Asking permission first

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Tim Bray has an interesting take on the use of AJAX: rather than have your server do the data processing, use AJAX to grab the data and then have the clients do the work:

A server’s compute resources are usually at a premium, because it’s, you know, serving lots of different client computers out there. Lots of different computers, you say; and how busy are they? Not very; your average Personal Computer usually enjoys over 90% idle time. So you’ve got a network with a small number of heavily-loaded servers and a huge number of lightly-loaded clients. Where do you think it makes sense to send the computation?

The thing is, you know what’s happening on your server, but you don’t know what’s happening on each individual client machine. In addition, you don’t know what each client can and cannot support. You don’t even know if your client has JavaScript turned on to be able to allow you do to the processing.

I agree that we can do some interesting work with Ajax and grabbing data from the server and processing it on the clients. Perhaps we need to explore some newer uses of JavaScript and RDF in light of the new server-client interoperability.

However, a developers first priority is to do no harm to those using their application. Their second priority is to ensure their pages are accessible by their target audience. If we start making assumptions that the client’s machine is ours to do with what we will, we won’t need hackers to inject harm into our scripts–we’ll do a fine job of it, ourselves.

Categories
RDF Semantics

Acorns

From Jamie Pitts an article in the Guardian Spread the Word, and Join Up. In it, Tim Berners-Lee is quoted from a recent talk about new directions in RDF and the Semantic Web. I can agree with him when he says, The nice thing about RDF data is you can merge it.

More than a ‘nice’ thing–to me, it’s the key to the concept, and what sets it apart from any other data model.

Tim B-L goes on to talk about new directions in semantic web effort, including getting data out on the web:

Berners-Lee did concede that as with the world wide web, the semantic web should “serve useful stuff”. “One of the problems we’ve actually had with the semantic web, I only recently realised, is we haven’t been doing that.”

Not enough useful RDF data has been left online, he explained: “The whole value-add of the web is serendipitous re-use: when you put it out there for one person, and it gets used by who-knows-who. We want to put data out there for one purpose, then find it gets linked into all kinds of data. And that’s been not happening, because we forgot ’serve useful stuff’, not to mention ‘make useful links’.”

It’s a direction many of us have followed, without necessarily any positive acknowledgement from the greater Semantic Web community. I can read with relief the new directions Tim B-L perceives, but then I’m puzzled when he continues with:

Berners-Lee told his audience in Oxford that the semantic web has already been adopted in drug discovery in life sciences, where solutions represent cures for diseases. “People in these fields are bright and intelligent, they are early adopters, they have quite a lot of money to throw at a problem,” he said. “We have an incubator community there.”

Genome data could be extremely helpful for the medical community, but I wouldn’t necessarily see this as a way to make RDF ubiquitous. I would wish that the W3C would stop focusing on Grand and Glorious data uses. We all can’t be research scientists.

Categories
Media

Dirty margarita

I’m sitting here with what I call a ‘dirty margarita’. I learned this one from a restaurant a while back. Instead of salt around the rim, which the bartender considered equivalent to drinking Boones Farm apple wine–with a straw– you get that necessary salty tasty by pouring the margarita straight up with green olives–just like a martini.

Well, I don’t have a martini glass, but I can make a mean 30 or so proof margarita, and I throw several green olives at the bottom. It’s so much of a better drink, and it’s a giggle playing with the olives. When you’re drinking margaritas that can melt plastic, it’s necessary to have something to do with one’s tongue.

I watched two charming movies this week. The first was Monster-in-Law with Jane Fonda as the mother-in-law to be with Jennifer Lopez as the bride. I guess the snooty types would call it ‘predictable’ but I don’t care. I hereby forgive Fonda for selling out the cause of women while she was married to that macho prick (who was a good environmentalist) for so many years. She has finally become a good actor.

The second movie was The Wedding Date with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney. A spurned woman hires a male prostitute to be her date at her sister’s wedding in England, where her ex-fiance is the best man. Of sure, it’s a rip on Pretty Woman, and there’s even a couple of scenes that seem to realize this in a tongue-in-cheek manner. ButDermot Mulroney. He would be worth it, even at 3000.00 pounds.

Actually, it was three charming movies this week. A few days ago, I watched a third lovely little movie, this one from Australia: Danny Deckchair. What I liked about it was that it wasn’t an Australian movie geared toward the US market. They didn’t exaggerate the accent or have all the characters wear hats with the sides pinned up — not to mention knee socks with the khaki shorts. No, this is the story of a man, a dreamer disappointed in life, who decides to attach several helium balloons to his lawn chair during a Bar-b-que. While watching a game on TV, his friends let him go and he flies away, away, until landing in the backyard of a women traffic cop in a place many miles away, where all the people are the type of people we’d like to live with. And then it goes from there.

The people at Rotten Tomatoes absolutely loathed all of them. However, If I only tell you about movies that would impress you, then I’d be marketing myself, rather than being myself, wouldn’t I? None of these movies are what you would call great cinema. But then, none of us are what you would call, great people. What’s wrong with simple people and simple charms and uncomplicated, gentle giggles–or a little romance?

Or a dirty margarita, and all of the above.

Okay, I’ve had my break. I’ve had my brakes, too. (Damn, but I’m a clever chicky.)

Back to explaining regular expressions in the book. I’m in the right state for it now.

Categories
Stuff

Less than Agile

I’ve been pretty tired the last few days, and I have a lot of work to do–on both the project and book. As such, I won’t be writing as much for the next couple of weeks. I do have the post on agile programming I promised to Stavros the frugal chicken, and maybe a few other odds and ends. Something fun maybe.

I did want to thank those who commented and are still commenting on the last post. Everyone has been cordial, even in disagreement, and there’s been a great deal of thoughtful discussion. If I’m not joining in as much, it’s because sometimes I just want to read and enjoy the comments.

Well, I also have to admit that I’ve given into the dark side of the force. I so want to buy a SUV. And did you hear? WindowsXP boots on a Macbook Pro!

Another thunderstorm rolling in. And to think we’re still a month away from our peak season. I was reading that the same conditions that make for an active storm season in the midwest in the spring, could also be responsible for floods in the north, the drought in the south, in addition to being the same conditions that make for an active hurricane season in the Atlantic in the summer: warm Gulf and Atlantic waters, and a La Nina effect in the Pacific.

HaHaHaHa! Those underground Tahoe commercials. They crack me up. Can hardly hear the thunder, I’m laughing so hard. My Daddy didn’t love me. This is how I compensate.