Categories
RDF

Semanticweb meet Slashdot

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Interesting Slashdot thread about how Lehigh University is going to build the Semantic Web all by itself.

Computer scientist Jeff Heflin and others are building the Semantic Web, which they hope will handle more data, resolve contradictions and draw inferences from users’ queries. The new improved Web will also combine pieces of information from multiple sites in order to find answers to questions.

My reaction on reading this? Anyone that writes something like …are building _the_ Semantic Web, like it’s an object you can buy from Amazon, with easy to follow instructions doesn’t know beans about the ’small s, small w’ semantic web. It’s more than just the ontologies and the syntax, and more than technology. It’s about how to get people to buy into all of this. It’s about taking that same low cost to entry that allowed web pages to explode, and applying it to meaning as well as content. It’s about getting just plain Joe and Jane to go ‘cool’ and want to be a part of it–not just the geeks and science studs.

I do agree with the good doctor that we need to find a way to resolve contradictory ontologies, though I think we have the method for merging ontologies (i.e. RDF and OWL). But none of this matters if we can’t get buy-in to annotate data with meaning. So far, we’re not reaching beyond the science of the tech, to the people. And it’s more than the fact that all of this effort is young – it’s as if we see the non-tech as passive users of the semantic web, rather than active participants.

Sometimes I think that most people who work on the Semantic Web (the big letter fellow), don’t have a clue what it’s all about. It leads to wonder how much respect these folks have for those outside of their circles.

(This attitude, of course, being why I’m not on anyone’s Christmas Card list.)

The slashdotters get it:

The whole reason the web is popular is because it’s trivially simple to create content for it. Maybe the web would be more useful if it was like a giant encyclopedia but it’s just an exercise in futility unless everyone gets on board.

Categories
Political

Debate Winner

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

From the hits I’m getting, I just found out that I own the Google phrase winner of the debate.

By the way, I lied and did watch the debate tonight. Well, the domestic part towards the end. I’m not going to address each issue because I don’t get paid to do this, and spent too much time jumping up and down going, “He’s an idiot! He’s an idiot”. Hard to effectively report in these circumstances.

(My roommate has sworn never to watch another debate with me. Ever. Again.)

My respect for John Kerry has increased with this debate, considerably; that for Bush lowered even further when the only mistake he would admit to is who he has appointed, but he can’t divulge the names, so as to not hurt feelings. And I’m sorry, but tort reform will not magically create health care insurance for 45+ million people currently without any coverage; nor will it significantly lower the cost of drugs. And Bush, your forest initiatives are going to kill the last virgin forests left in this country.

For those who see no difference between the two candidates, you’re not looking hard enough. George Bush sees the world in black and white, right or wrong, with us or against us. He appeals to people who want the world to live in black and white, right or wrong, or to be with us or against us. Kerry, on the other hand, can see the gray, and this isn’t necessarily reassuring to some folk.

But I want my President to see the gray, as well as the black and white. And I want a president who is willing to admit when he’s made a mistake, and learn from it. Bush never will.

Categories
Photography

Did I happen to mention

how much I like my new camera?

I was reading Randal Schwartz’s review of the Canon 20D DSLR, especially his exhultation about the effects one can manage with the 1/8000 shutter speed in combination with the high ISO (1600). I was tempted to go get my turkey baster and have my roommate squirt streams of water into the air so I could attempt his stop-water action shots; instead, I thought I would find a really bad light shot and just see how the ISO 1600 photos look.

The ISO 1600 on my 995 is quite similar to 1600 film in that it was grainy. Very grainy. And the color would usually be a bit off – having an orange cast that couldn’t be corrected. But there many conditions when you need this speed, and it would be nice to have relatively decent photos.

As luck would have it, today was cloudy and dark, and I just happened to find a magazine laying on my desk – the magazine containing my recent photo essay, as a matter of fact. Fancy that. I decided that a great test of the higher ISO would be to take photos of the essay pages without using any other light than ambient room light.

I plopped the magazine on my bed, opened the page, focused, and snapped pictures of all the pages. I used NEF (RAW) mode, and adjusted the exposure up slightly and sharpened slightly, but other than that – no changes. As you can see from the photos below, the ISO 1600 with the D70 provides beautiful pictures, with nary a grainy or color cast look in the bunch.

Even a larger photo 800 pixels wide doesn’t show significant degradation of image quality, and this without much tweaking of the photo in Photoshop.

Did I happen to mention how much I like this camera?

Categories
Political

You might as well fire me

You might as well fire me, right now. Yup, just give me my marching orders and strip me of my feeds.

The candidates are in town tonight and I’m not going down to take pictures. Not only that, but I’m also not going to the DNC party, to see John Kerry make an appearance and take more pictures. I won’t be there to fact check that yes, Kerry is 6′ 4″, white, male, and speaks English.

In fact, I doubt I’ll even watch the debate tonight. I know, I know. There is no excuse. How can I provide my analysis, or point out any of the many gotchas that Bush, or Kerry, is sure to commit if I don’t watch?

I’m not sure what’s come over me. Flu? West Nile Virus? Too much interesting experimentation with drugs earlier in my life?

Personally, I think it was turning on the TV today to get a feel for the traffic problems and watching political ad after political ad, and not one was positive; every single one was a negative ad aimed at a candidate for one office or another, with largely unsubstantiated attacks that made each person seem like the Devil incarnate.

It was like watching snippets from political weblogs come alive on TV. I’m going to have nightmares for a week.

Categories
Weblogging

WordPress security fix and IT Kitchen languages

I gather that there was a security breach within the WordPress 1.2 installation. A fix has been provided but it, unfortunately, replaces all files in the WP installation, not just the files changed. I imagine the developers did this because whatever was changed in 1.2 for 1.2.1 could potentially conflict with whatever customizations a person has made, and providing all files is a way of saying, “Heads up – this works with the vanilla install, but may not work with your custom work”. Or maybe they did it because it was Monday when they released the code, and this is a Monday kind of thing to do.

I checked the files that are different and the impact to my custom installation isn’t much – a couple of files and having to move a couple of lines–but I am thinking that now might be a good time to just bite the bullet and start moving my sites over to 1.3. I’ll use the IT Kitchen weblog installation as a test of the stability of the code since I’m setting this up today and tomorrow, along with the site’s wiki.

Speaking of IT Kitchen, I’m rather hoping that my multilingual readers will volunteer to help translate the IT Kitchen weblog essays from the two week workshop into different languages, so that we can have a German IT Kitchen, a Japanese IT Kitchen, an Arabic one, a French one, and so on. If you can spare some time to do one or more essay translations, I’d be grateful.