This post is a summary of some ideas for a lightweight semantic interoperability framework It is mainly a composition of existing open standards to form a framework for organisations to be able to ensure that semantic and technical descriptions stay connected over time. The idea is to provide a framework that allows for an increasing semantic interoperability emerging over time without having a large centralized organisation defining vocabularies.
Implement open data for EU institutions
Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation participated in a conference of the Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. In a great post about the meeting at the OKFN blog, he recommends two improvements to the current PSI work; 1: Broaden the scope of the PSI Directive to include publicly funded cultural heritage organisations and 2: Broaden the evidence base for opening up PSI.
Joining the Swedish eGovernment Delegation
A while ago I was offered a position with the Swedish eGovernment Delegation.
I will be working with IT standardisation issues and the next revision of guidelines for public websites.
Solving Project Euler Problems With Ioke
For those of you that have been following Ola Bini’s work on Ioke, the dynamic language for the JVM, I am happy to report that the current release 0.1.1 is usable enough to solve Project Euler problems with. I wanted to learn more about Ioke and the best way to learn a new language is to use it on your own. So, here is some example Ioke code for some of the simpler Project Euler problems.
Building your own Twitter client with Fluid and jQuery
Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow).
Reducing distractions, increasing productivity
I have been trying to reduce distractions in my computing environment lately. Apparently, our brains aren’t wired properly for task switching:
Beta testing the Ballmer Tee
My son has the dubious pleasure of being the primary beta tester of T-shirt messages. This time it is the first draft of the model that will be called “Ballmer”. Turned out pretty OK…
Dear lazyweb, please pimp our balcony
Spring is in the air and it is time to start using the balcony. Currently it is in a state of decay and mainly used to store old furniture. I am out of ideas what to make of it. Can you help? Measurements below.
The day the Routers Died…
This pretty much speaks for itself. If I am not mistaken our own packet pro Patrik Fältström is visible in the audience at the end of the clip.
Intricacies of PHP compared to Ruby
Via Tim Bray’s blog I found zestyping’s “Why PHP should never be taught”. In it he provides some interesting PHP code that will be difficult for beginners to understand.
Re-enacting Video Transition Effects
Please note the video progress bar. Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.
Content-aware Image Resizing
I am guessing this would be a valuable addition to web browsers in the future. With this technique it is easy to target an image for viewing in multiple displays (e.g. a 4:3 screen or a 16:9 TV).
“Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces).
The video shows some intresting results when using this method too much, but the overall result is very impressing.
Hackzine has more details.
MySpace Layouts and Markup Quality
I have received an increasing number of advertising inquiries from MySpace layout sites. Apparently the term “MySpace layouts” is a very popular search term these days. Looking at the default MySpace layouts one can unserstand why. I am confident that they didn’t hire a designer to create the default MySpace look and feel. Looking at the MySpace HTML, they certainly didn’t hire a GUI developer. The markup looks like it was ripped from a teenage fan site from the early nineties:
- There is no doctype declaration. Not that it would have mattered anyway…
- The markup starts out nicely with divs and spans and then freaks out with some classic table layout. I though that went away in the nineties…
- Inline styles are used all over the place.
- Headings start at level 5. And continues to level 4…
- Images are missing an alt attribute.
This contributes to making MySpace an inaccessible mess. What does it prove? That you can be successful with a crappy site? Maybe the laugh is on me.
The iPhone cult and self criticism among followers…
So the iPhone is out and the Apple cult followers are going crazy all over the place. Unpacking porn and disassemblies are being posted.
When the iPhone was announced I had my doubts about the touch screen keyboard. I had been using a HTC phone for a while and did not really see how they would be able to make a decent touch keyboard. Especially not for us in the norhern hemisphere that use gloves during winter. TUAW is reviewing the touch keyboard and concurs that there is “nothing wrong with the keyboard”. The error seems to be the “meat mittens” of the user. How is that for self criticism? The user is to blame instead of the phone…
What happened to plain old HTTP redirects?
So, I was looking for an offer on IP telephony and thus decided to point my browser to one of the larger ISP:s. I get a blank page back (blank as in “all white”). A couple of years ago, this wasn’t uncommon if you were brave enough to use a non-mainstream browser. But today it is 2007.
A brief look at the HTML source gives:
…which safari doesn’t follow. Interestingly, search engines won’t be following that either. What happened to the plain old HTTP redirect header? There can’t be a single programming language for the web today that doesn’t support output of HTTP headers. Or are there still web developers that don’t know about HTTP? Apparently so.