Making a Semantic Web by Joshua Allen:

If you've paid any attention to the web standards discussions, you may have heard the phrase "Semantic Web", or perhaps even been pressured to use standards with names like "Dublin Core Metadata" or "RDF". If you've attempted to read any of the available documentation on these topics, you were probably intimidated by terms such as "reify" and all sorts of artificial intelligence concepts. This document attempts to explain what all of this chatter really means, and help you decide which parts you should care about and why. I have tried to use common-sense, real-world examples and stay away from complicated terminology.

Talking of the Semantic Web:

Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are becoming a high priority for many communities. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.

The Semantic Web Activity is a successor to the W3C Metadata Activity.

Are Users Stupid? (Alertbox Feb. 2001)

Summary: Opponents of the usability movement claim that it focuses on stupid users and that most users can easily overcome complexity. In reality, even smart users prefer pursuing their own goals to navigating idiosyncratic designs. As Web use grows, the price of ignoring usability will only increase.

The Art Of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond:

This book will attempt to capture the engineering wisdom and philosophy of the Unix community as it's applied today -- not merely as it has been written down in the past, but as a living "special transmission, outside the scriptures" passed from guru to guru. Accordingly, the book doesn't focus so much on "what" as on "why", showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software.

...

My ambitions for this book are not small. With the assistance of the community, I hope to create a true classic here, a book that will speak with authority of and for for the Unix tradition -- and convey the essence of that tradition to the new generation of programmers who have grown up with Linux and the Web.

I thought this quote from Chapter 1: Philosophy Matters succinctly summarised my own philosophy to programming:

Rob Pike, one of the great early masters of C programming, offers a slightly different angle in [NoPiC]:

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. (See Brooks p. 102.)

Rule 6. There is no Rule 6.

I wasn't altogether surprised that I popped out as the first link from a Google Search: smeed but I didn't imagine I'd make it into the top 20 (currently 16th) links from a Google Search: duncan!

As a wee experiment I tried a few more firstnames of virtual and real friends and what d'ya know Andrea's Weblog gets second link in a Google Search: andrea. Fame at last Andrea!!

Finally a Google Search: jotter cites this site as the 2nd top hit. Curious as to what the top rated jotter.com was I followed the links and lo and behold JotterSaf Features: Create Your Own News Feeds. I've never seen this mentioned amongst the Radio Userland community but it seems to have some parallels with aspects of RU. It's a small world!

Well enough of this displacement activity - back to work ;-)

PS I really think I should only associate with friends in high places (in google searches) ;-) But where does that leave John?

The search stopped at #870. I'm still not there. I guess I'm not famous.

But he's

...second or third searching under Curmudgeon!

so we can still be friends then!

PPS But this is definitely not Al of ViewFromTheHeart. Mind you Al's weblog title for today was Taken In so you never know ;-)!! Update But Alwin is #1. Friends in high places indeed.

During some vanity google searching I came across this rebuttal Re: NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE (the "US Reply")

Al's Lost For Words:

It's All About You I was going to write about the empowering experience of writing your own weblog, but it turns out Miss Hayden has already done so on A List Apart:

DOING GOOD

You don't get paid to do it. No one is going to hand you a golden statuette. You won't make any money from it. There's no IPO for doing good in the world.

For that is what you will be doing if you accept the challenge: doing good in and for the world. I want you to empower and entertain people. I want you to teach and to guide and to learn. I want you to contribute. I want you to give back to the web, thereby giving back to the world.

A superb article by Glenn Fleishman [Wait, I Didna Shoot the Editor!] prompted Dave to reiterate:

Hey we still make Mac software (I'm stubborn, I know), so if you cover the Mac, please consider evaluating Manila and Frontier. Did you think the Mac isn't on the SOAP network and can't interop with Microsoft .NET? Think again. All the stuff we're doing runs on the Mac as well as Windows. Perhaps one of the best ways to undo the bad vibes of the early 90s in the Mac biz is to take another look. Manila is unique, and it does run on the Mac.

I've thanked Dave before and now seems to be a good time to thank him again. So, sincere thanks Dave for making great Mac software!

Here are some highlights from a Search for Pentium 4:

• The CPU Scorecard - Top CPU Benchmarks & Comparison Scores
• The Register
• Sharky Extreme - PC - Articles - Intel Pentium 4 Unveiled
• The Register: Intel 'Going for AMD's balls'
• Pentium 4

  There will no doubt be a plathora of industry comment about the P4 so I'll start to keep a list of links brought to my attention or I've stumbled on myself.

• emulators.com - Pentium 4

  This article will be a great starting point for my CAD students forthcoming Pentium 4 assignment!

• The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

Planet IT Mobile & Wireless TechCenter: Java Silicon 55 Times Faster Than Software

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intellectual-property developer InSilicon Inc. has developed a hardware coprocessor for Java that can run at up to 200 MHz, giving portable systems such as personal digital assistants and smart cards up to 55 times the performance of a Java virtual machine in software.

Interesting link from http://www.scripting.com: OpenCola Technology Overview

Brute-force computing solutions are not appropriate for many of the problems facing the Net as it expands. OpenCola represents an approach where simple technologies are used to enable a particular side of human nature: the tendency to form communities of interest. As an enabler of activities that people pursue naturally, OpenCola puts humans back into the loop of finding and refining resources on the Net, while not presenting this activity as "work". The result is projected to be an internet that presents itself to the user as an organized collection of relevant documents, instead of an amorphous Web.

Must remember to keep an weather eye on Python.Scripting : Python, XML-RPC and SOAP

Ars Pentia News

Special thanks to Seth of Macrobyte Resources for offering to update the old www.free-conversant.com/arspentia domain to my newly registered www.arspentia.org domain.

ViewFromTheHeart : That Lonesome Road

ViewFromTheHeart Reviewed
Somehow I found VFTH firmly in the crosshairs of a couple of ''Weblog Critics'' with the unlikely names of Ed Champion and Tom Working, who have a website called Blog You.

I am not going to link to Blog You because I disagree vehemently with their assessment of ViewFromTheHeart. It's one of the few weblogs that I try and read every day. More often than not after my daily 'dose' of that site I am left in awe of caring professionals like Al Hawkins, the weblog's author. Al started weblogging about the same tiime as I started. ViewFromTheHeart is a perfect title for the site. Weblogs like it are not things you can just dip into and judge at face value. Regular readers are drawn into Al's life and work and certainly in my case become bound to the real-life drama that is Al's life. It's his experiences as a critical care nurse - and the truly honest way that he writes about them and his reactions, etc., that makes VFTH compulsive reading. Sure, it'll not be to everyone's taste but I for one am delighted that Al takes the time and effort to write about his thoughts and deeds. I am not ashamed to say that sometimes his weblog entries reduce me to tears and at other times I have been known to ROTFL and/or curse at the antics of the patients, family, nursing staff or the hospital management. Al does us all a service by making us confront our preconceptions about the sick and dying and those that care for them and the situtation they find themselves in.

Al, don't take the criticism to heart. Please keep on weblogging. The world's a better place because of you. I don't think I could say the same thing about these so-called critics.

Best wishes,

Duncan

PS Later: Al's reply seems to suggest that he's bearing up ;-). Nice one, Al!

Wes [HtP] Felter linked to The Register: Intel's Jackson will offer 2 chips for 1 before I'd caught up on my Register e-mail backlog:

Intel will be introducing SMT into their Foster chips in the summer, sources close to the project have confirmed to The Register. And with Project Jackson, its codename at Satan Clara, Intel will break with its traditional approach to microprocessor design by introducing SMT, or 'simultaneously multithreading', which presents two "virtual" processors to software application.

How any of my students can claim Computer Architecture and Design is boring is beyond me ;-)

A version of this posting will appear on the http://www.arspentia.org Conversant site once I have done some house-keeping over there - and once its DNS records have propogated fully so I can deep link into that site. Whilst at Wes' site I noticed that he's moving his server too. Fortunately, I normally reference his site using a Conversant resource - invoked as |htp| - so all I'll need to so is change the URL in the resource and when pages are served from this site the new URL will automagically be used. Some of the deep-linking URLs will break unfortunately but I'll update these by hand as and when the need arises.

A List Apart - This HTML Kills: Thoughts on Web Accessibility by Jim Byrne:

WHEN I STARTED OUT as a web designer, accessibility seemed quite a simple and achievable goal: provide alternative descriptions for all your graphics, and make sure the background colour and text color have good contrast. Accessibility was easy, took little extra work, and the resulting page didn't look different from millions of other first-generation web pages out there, i.e., dull, grey and unattractive.

It ain't easy

Time has moved on and accessibility on the web is no longer simple. From being a largely text-based medium that was easily accessible via a variety of high- and low-tech devices, the web has now become a rich multimedia environment.

Jim is the Director of the Making Connections Unit at Glasgow Caledonian University - just down the road from my workplace. I must arrange to meet him one of these days.