Planned downtime notice

This blog will be down for the next two weeks in order to facilitate the rebuilding of the tattered synaptic interconnections of its author.

Normal service will resume third week in August.

Microformats : Watch this space

The Progress and the Promise of Microformats.

For decades now, well meaning theorists, architects and engineers have struggled with the problem of allowing electronic content to serve two needs : human readability and machine readability.

For decades now, initiatives to create structured content vocabularies have come into existence, burned brightly in the full glare of enthusiasm+publicity only to then fade away into obscurity. I would guess that of all the SGML, XML vocabs I've come across over 20 years, 0.001% of them have actually made an impact.

Now, you could argue that it is still "just a matter of time" until the tools improve to the point where the glorious future of semantic content creation/publication - as originally envisaged - can be ushered into the mainstream.

Or, you could argue (as I do) that maybe - just maybe - there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been trying to enable the creation/publication of semantic content.

Right now, people - ordinary people - are getting excited about microformats. For the first time *ever* ordinary folk are now motivated to start adding semantic information to their content.

We SGML/XML folk should welcome it with open arms and help out where we can rather than look aghast at how microformats work.

Semantic markup is happening at last. Surprise surprise, it is not taking the shape that we had anticipated.

Thats life.

Viva la vie.

Master Foo on Web Mashups

"The true key to expressive power - in any medium including computing - is combinatorics." -- Master Foo on Web Mashups

PyPy sprint in Ireland

PyPy sprint in Limerick in August. I might try to get there for a day if I can.

XML Summer School

The XML Summer School in Oxford starts Monday. I'm speaking in the WS/SOA track on Thursday and I will be asking the key question : "If you had an SOA, how would you know?".

Ubuntu 6.06 - a mixed bag upgrade

After my recent up-close-and-personal encounter with the Second Law of Thermodynamics I took the opportunity to upgrade to Ubuntu 6.06 on my Thinkpad T42P.
First the bad news:

• Printing to my trusty HP1100 now stops between jobs for no obvious reason. CUPS errors messages cryptic, malfeasant, childish - take your pick.
  
• Sensing my external monitor in the docking station does not work well. Claiming that 1600x1200 at -21992 Hz is the only available setting.
  
• Very occassionally the mouse locks up when in the docking station. Threatening to shut down by pressing the off switch on the laptop seems to bring it to its senses reliably. (Yes, I discovered this 'fix' by accident.)
  
• Sound and video is giving me plenty of grief. Somehow ALSA PCM got disabled. (Thanks Vish.). I now have MPEGs playing and sounding okay on the laptop screen but now I have sound but no video when in the external docking station. Sigh.
  

Now the good news:

• My VMWare setup is better that it ever was. I now have network access + paralell port printing working under VMWare for my Windows XP Image. Very useful for the occasional foray into Windows I need to make. I could not get either to work before. Unclear how much of my woes in this area were down to VMWare funnies or Ubuntu funnies.
  
• Lots and lots and lots of packages available. It will take me years to properly even survey all the stuff out there. Also, KDE-shaped apps seem to install under plain Gnome Ubuntu with less apt-get loquacity than before.
  

Who are you?

(A wee experiment in asking a direct question soliciting straight answers. Possibly yielding raw material for a future ITWorld article and/or a blog post.)

Bloglines tells me that there are at least 456 of you at the moment. 456 subscribers to the feed for this blog that is.

Trouble is. I don't know who you are or why you are here. (Okay I know a little bit about some of you via haloscan, sitemeter and SYO). Maybe that is the way you like it and that is fine. If not, you could help satisfy my curiosity by dropping me a note on e-mail. (sean mcgrath. Replace the space with a '.' and append @propylon.com) or adding a comment.

I will post anonymized stats here so that you can find out who everyone else is.