mnot’s Web log

Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames

Tuesday, December 30 2003

The Semantic Web’s Dirty Little Secret

Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms: Additional support for this activity has been provided by DARPA under the DAML...

( 5 comments )

Monday, December 29 2003

Comment Spam and Google

Hyperlinks have been disallowed in comment bodies on this blog for a while now, and I've just removed the link associated with comment authors as well. This is based on...

( 11 comments )

Sunday, December 28 2003

What I want in a digital camera

Before all of this “Web” stuff came along, I was a photographer; I designed an… unusual university program that had me study fine art photography, photojournalism, aesthetics and the physics...

Saturday, December 27 2003

Next trip: Molvania

Inger put me onto a new travel guide, and I’m already planning the trip. Molvania (“A land untouched by modern dentistry”) looks like a really interesting country. For example; Molvania’s...

( 7 comments )

Friday, December 26 2003

What’s after Red Hat?

Shortly after I moved to Melbourne in 1995, I set up a Red Hat Linux box in a little corner of our apartment on Flinders Lane. Shortly after that, the...

( 7 comments )

Travel Notes: Vienna, Venice, Bolzano

We’ve lived in California for more than four years now, and Anitra grew up in Melbourne, with the result that she first saw snow falling from the sky when she was 25. When we had an opportunity to take a week’s holiday right before Christmas, we decided against somewhere sunny; why more of the same? Instead, we booked some tickets to Washington (so as to drop off the kid), then to Munich, and spent some serious time researching our advent travel opportunities, with the help of the Die Bahn Travel Planner, a couple of DK guides, and Google. Here are my notes from planning the trip, as well as my thoughts on what’s good if you go. See also the pictures.

( 16 comments )

Monday, December 15 2003

Cool OS X Software roundup

Small apps that make my life much, much easier: Kung-Log — Weblog writing and management, off-line (thanks, John) Shrook — RSS reader extraordinary Address Book — Yes, it comes with...

( 7 comments )

Saturday, December 13 2003

For those who've had kids recently.

Anitra turned me on to what happened to Steve from Blue’s Clues. As he would say, “Cool!”...

Friday, December 12 2003

Now I remember why I switched...

The other day, I bought a copy of an extremely nifty piece of software, Virtual PC. It didn’t come with an OS, but that’s OK, because I have a copy...

Notes on Atom

As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the...

( 7 comments )

Thursday, December 11 2003

Tim and Sam talk about offline content

Tim Bray's latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS; But, pointed out Sam, think of it as a synchronization/offline problem. If I stick the whole essay in the feed,...

Wednesday, December 10 2003

Oh, for shame, Apple, for shame.

mnot-laptop:~> uname -a Darwin localhost.local 7.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0: Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc mnot-laptop:~> echo "<a href='/'>test</a>" > ~/Sites/test.txt mnot-laptop:~> chmod a+r...

( 3 comments )

Tuesday, December 9 2003

Python for the CLR

IronPython is an implementation of Python for the CLR with some intriguing initial perf numbers. [ via Jeremy Hylton’s Weblog ] Shame I don’t have a Windows box where I...

( 1 comment )

Monday, December 8 2003

Why Do Web Server APIs Suck So Much?

HTTP provides considerable benefits to Web applications that take advantage of it; everything from scalability (through caching), client-integrated authentication, automated redirection, multiple format support and lots more. I’ve been drafting...

( 11 comments )

Perspective Enhancement

The BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UN warns of population surge" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3302497.stm">BBC reports that the UN is a bit concerned about population growth. Pretty much everybody knows this, I’m sure,...

Sunday, December 7 2003

A Description Format for REST

Adam asks if there’s a description format for REST. I don’t know of any that have wide acceptance (and I think the hard-core RESTafarians will answer “REST is self-describing, that’s...

( 3 comments )

The New RDF

I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading...

( 1 comment )

Saturday, December 6 2003

QNames are Evil

How's this analogy: Putting QNames into your XML content is like using TCP packets as delimiters in an application protocol. Both can be technically done, but they force an awareness...

( 3 comments )