Ah, the simple joys of contributing to an open source support mailing list:
Hi, Richard
I have solved the problem! Everything is working well now.
Thank you so much for your help! I am so happy!!!!(^-^)
“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent.”
—Edsger Dijkstra
Update: There’s a much improved version.
This is a half-finished result from the gnowsis workshop. It’s a little AppleScript that dumps some information from the Mac OS X address book to RDF/XML, using the FOAF vocabulary. It’s severely limited:
Anyway, maybe it’s useful to somebody, or I may revisit this at a later date. Download ab2foaf.osa, and run it from the command line:
osascript ab2foaf.osa > ab.rdf
This will run the script and store the output in a file called ab.rdf.
I just noticed that David Best, whom I know from university in Berlin, and who currently studies in Eindhoven, has a blog. Subscribed!
A good thing: the Washington Post’s Congress Vote Database.
It’s a database of all votes cast in the U.S. parliament. You can see who voted for and against which laws and even get RSS feeds for the votes of individual politicians.
Transparency is good, and this seems to be a good way to keep tabs on the actions of your elected representative.
Any fellow Germans know about similar projects (or possible sources of data for this) for our country? I think this would be much harder here because votes in the Bundestag are not recorded individually. Politicians just raise their hands or stand up and a tally is taken.
[Update: Added missing link.]
This experience reinforced my belief that my MBA gave me a better understanding of markets than my verbal sparring partners got from doing bongs and thinking as hard as they could.
It’s true. Adium, the premier open source instant messenger for OS X, is a phantastic little application.
Valentin Zacharias writes how his vision of the Semantic Web changed:
I always tend to think of the Semantic Web as a web of personal homepages where everyone annotates his stuff. […]
But actually I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees (not seeing the Semantic Web for the data?): Why do the semantic web notes need to be so small, if this causes inconvenience? Why not have one large node for pictures (or five for that matter), two for events, ten for reviews … ? […]
Large database driven website may eventually become their own node in the Semantic Web. Everyone else (who’s currently using some simple shared web hosting or does not yet have a web presence) will not host their own Semantic Web data, but put their data on a few Semantic Web Ãœbernodes.
He’s right. Here’s something I realized when I built the FOAF crawler for our Google Base upload experiment: Most RDF geeks hand-craft their FOAF files, or use RDF tools like the FOAF-a-matic or FoafMe. There seem to be around 500 of these profiles out there in the vast wilderness of the WWW. Then, there are two million FOAF profiles created automatically by LiveJournal for their users. Five hundred! Two million!
RDF information published by individual hackers is important in this early phase of RDF adoption, but will be irrelevant in the big picture.
This is not really different from how the web works. The vast majority of people who publish on the web do so through large sites, like blogger.com, Typepad, Livejournal, Flickr, Wikipedia and special interest discussion forums.
To me, the Semantic Web is not so much about decentralization as about integration. If your information is published or described as RDF, then it won’t really matter where it is hosted, just as it doesn’t really matter if your RSS feed is published from your vanity domain or out of an anonymous blogger.com account.
Semantic Desktop Workshop. Today was the food and beer kickoff. Discussion quickly drifted to highly philosophical spheres. Why have folks so different visions of the semantic web? Should artifical agents make decisions, or should they help us to make better decisions? What’s a concept? Tomorrow we’ll build some stuff.
A thought …
How did man move from the agrarian age to the industrial age? By replacing muscle with technology. Machines are better at providing power and energy.
How did man move from the industrial age to the information age? By replacing repetition with technology. Robots and computers are better at performing repetitive tasks.
How will man move from the information age to the next age? By replacing memory with technology. Machines are better at providing information when it is needed.
What kind of machines? I’m calling them retrieval machines. Some examples for technologies in this category:
Do you know this feeling when you temporarily don’t have access to something you use all the time, and it makes you feel as if parts of your brain had been amputated? That’s when you’ve hit on one of these.
So what will be left for us to do in this age? Making decisions. Recognizing patterns. Finding abstractions.
Or maybe I’m just making this up because I have really crappy memory.
