Bagel Belly Blog

Separated at birth?

This guy's modified XBox looks suspiciously like Orac from Blake's Seven...

XML vs SQL, RDBMS vs NXD

What do you do when your data is a mix of structured content and relational?

This is something we've been struggling to come to grips with in our latest projects. Much of the content for these projects is quite obviously suited to an XML database, and yet we still have all the mundane things that call for a relational database (or worse - perhaps we should have a relational database and an LDAP server?).

Splitting content across more than one repository or store leads to headaches. You suddenly find it difficult to handle issues such as referential integrity and atomicity - things that you often get for free in a good relational database.

The real problem is perhaps that there simply aren't any good Free relational databases that provide for XML in quite the same way as the big commercial players such as Oracle or DB2. Postgres certainly seems to lack XML support.

I don't think I'm ready to give up XPath and store my XML as big chunks of text in an RDBMS. But neither will I give up SQL. What to do?

Jon Udell seems to suggest a mixed economy is best, while Dare Obasanjo says:

Sometimes I wonder whether developers would prefer an über-language with everything and the kitchen sink integrated into it. Would developers really prefer that instead of having divergent query languages we just had one (i.e. SQL) with proprietary extensions for the different data domains which was used ubiqitously everywhere to query XML documents, in-memory objects, relational databases, text files, etc?

There's a lot to be said for an über-language, but I don't think that's what I want. All I'm looking for is a sane way to handle complex markup and relational data in one application, without having to run two different database systems.

Hmm.

RoadWarrior Notes

Today was the first real day of being a "roadwarrior" with the powerbooks. What a joy! I was hammering away on it all the way from Norwich to London - about 1.5 hours, I guess - and the battery was still half full at the end. This thing claims it should last around 3.5 hours. Compare that to the Intel laptop I had which would kill a battery in one hour ...

Doing a presentation on the laptop was also a life-changing experience. Plugging the laptop into the projector, it automatically extended my desktop onto the new screen. A quick tweak of my PowerPoint settings, and the presentation was displayed on the projector perfectly. Compare that to the Intel laptop, where I'd have to right-click on the desktop, go to "Display Settings", select "Extend my desktop onto this screen", and then tweak PowerPoint. And on the Intel laptop, my projected display was always offset to the left by around 100 pixels, meaning most slides looked decidedly weird.

Before the presentation, I realised my battery might not last the scheduled length of the meeting. I closed the laptop, took the battery out, put the new one in, and opened the laptop back up - and it simply resumed from suspend in about a second like nothing had happened. Why don't all laptops do this? Compare that to the Intel laptop, where I'd have to force Windows or Linux to suspend to disk, and then wait a minute or so while things resume.

While in London, David and I took the opportunity to hit the Tottenham Court Road (TCR) computer shops in search of neoprene covers for the powerbooks (given how much the laptops cost, we're going to make sure they stay in good shape). We found them in a branch of Micro Anvika. They don't call TCR "geek heaven" for nothing.

To end a useful and productive day, I managed to use the computer almost all the way home as well by swapping batteries again. I managed to catch up on all my aggregated news sources in NetNewsWire, and many of the mailing lists that I've not had a chance to read in recent months. This is what mobile computing should be like.

Nokia 3650 GPRS connection with Mac OS X

As I cycled home this evening, I thought "I really must set up my powerbook to make a connection via the mobile phone". I'm off to London tomorrow, and there's no guarantee I'll have the opportunity to use a hotspot. All my linux-based 3650 connection scripts are sat on my old laptop in the office, so I figured I'd copy them over when I got home.

Imagine the amusement when I got home to find the NTL cable connection dead. After several minutes of head scratching, it transpired to be DNS problems rather than truly dead - which I could get round by bouncing off our server - but there was a brief pause while I cursed Murphy and all his laws for striking down my network connection right when I needed to set up the fallback.

Anyway - it's now up and running. Here's the information I used:

• Vodafone Internet Access Settings
• Apple's How to Use Your Mobile Phone as a Wireless Modem
• MacOSX Hints Use Nokia 3650 as a Bluetooth (or IRDA) modem

... and it works.

Does Steve own shares in hard drive manufacturers?

Dear Apple,

I own an Epson C60 printer. I need to install the printer driver for it, because I deliberately didn't install the printer drivers when I installed Mac OS X to save space. It seems you've only provided me with two rather large bundles of Epson drivers - one weighing in at 275MB and the other at 361MB. I only found them by digging around the DVD you provided - the DVD itself wanted to install not just printer drivers but also more languages and the whole Mac OS Classic bundle too.

Can you explain why you do this? It can't be because it's easier for the user, because it will be pretty difficult tracking down things to delete when my hard disk gets full (and it will, if 1% of it is allocated to printer drivers alone). Does Steve Jobs own shares in a company that makes external hard disks?

What's wrong with borrowing a little from Windows now that you've proved you're better? Downloading just the driver I need would be a lot easier than waiting for 432 drivers to install.

Oh, and while I'm at it... Epson, get with the programme: MacOS 10.3 is out now, you know.

Diary of a switcher #10

Due to a combination of a hard drive failure, the volume control breaking on my usb mp3 player, and the purchase of a powerbook, I find myself ripping my CD collection once more.

So far, I'm up to 447 songs, 1.2 days, 1.70GB ... that's one of the things about iTunes: it's not afraid to give you pointless stats that are nevertheless amusing. There's a long way to go, as I've only ripped about 20 CDs of a possible 150 or so. Before the hard drive failure I had approaching 30gb of music, though much of that was borrowed from other people's collections...

Other things I like about iTunes: it just gets on and rips when you put a CD in. Integration with CDDB for retrieving track information is sweet (but a mixed blessing - I'd rather use the more ethical freedb). The playlists are cool, the ability to rate music even cooler, and the smart playlists are fantastic. Play all the songs you played last week? All the least frequently played songs? Everything by artist, year, genre? Nice!

When I was pulling out another stack of CDs from the cupboard to rip,
it did amuse me to find a copy of a Leonard Cohen album amongst the more mainstream music. I'm not sure what possessed me to buy it, but now I know why one of the tunes in The Secretary sounded familiar when Nic and I saw it. That prompted me to go check out the film's web site - if you haven't seen it, you may find it a little "unusual"! Incidentally, the female lead is the sister of the guy who played Donnie Darko, another weird but good film.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to settle in to the Apple environment for actually getting some work done. The biggest problem is a total lack of decent editor. JEdit is ok, but has quirks on OS X and is poorly integrated into the Apple GUI. Eclipse is big and clunky, and wastes too much screen real estate on big fonts that I can't change. BBEdit is interesting, but at over £100 it is a costly proposition to deploy on all machines. SubEthaEdit is fantastic, mindblowing, cool, amazing and so on. We got to try it out for the first time this afternoon when David (who's maybe back in blogland) and I did some hacking on a future journal article. I'm not sure I'd want to use SubEthaEdit all the time though.

Diary of a switcher #9

One thing that amazes me is the neat way you can customise most of the GUIs in Panther - for example, in Mail, you can drop extra buttons onto the toolbar. Here's mine:

The "Redirect" and "Print" buttons aren't there normally, I just dragged them into place. I can't imagine Linux being that uniformly flexible.

Apparently you can do the same thing to Finder, too. Ken Bereskin explains the path menu. Nice.

OS X Startup Items

The OS X equivalent of the linux init.d or Windows Startup folder is something called StartupItems ... a directory containing scripts and files for each application. I'm figuring out how they work, partly to debug problems I had with getting a XIndice StartupItem working, but also out of interest.

Some resources have been quite useful - MacDevCenter.com's Start Me Up is a good step-by-step guide. The Apple Developer Connection also has a good article on System Startup.

Another page on the ADC explains how to Manage Startup Items (ie, start / restart and stop them), but SystemStarter start "XIndice" doesn't seem to work. Hrm.

Diary of a switcher #8

Phew. It's been a frantic couple of days installing, configuring, and generally trying to get the Mac up and running while at the same time frenetically developing on the other laptop. I think it's been worth it.

It's true what they say about the Mac "just working". Aside from a couple of obvious mistakes that I already knew about but made anyway (for example, swapping networks while using network drives caused a three-way race between Mail, Finder and "umount" which forced me to reboot), the Mac has been rock-solid. The extra memory (1GB) is definitely paying off too - I have several things running at the same time (see screenshot), and it just keeps on motoring along.

Quite a few software packages have made it onto the powerbook either because they form part of my regular development environment or because they've become indispensible in my time playing with the ibook. Here's what's installed so far:

• Eclipse (development environment, a customised OS X package by Stefano, via Jeremy)
• NetNewsWire (RSS aggregator for reading news / weblogs)
• XChat Aqua (IRC client so I can keep up with the luddites who don't have iChat)
• PostgreSQL and XIndice (databases, used by various projects)
• OpenOffice.org (the Free word processor/presentation/spreadsheet etc)
• JEdit (text editor)
• SubEthaEdit (distributed text editor)
• SSH Agent
• Windows Media Player
• Goliath (WebDAV client)

... and various other bits and pieces that I'll list at a later time.

Some negative observations:

• The case is not as ergonomic as it could be. I'm finding my wrists are getting raw from the very angular edges - all my previous laptops have had curved edges at the front.


• This thing gets REALLY warm - thankfully the heat is expelled at the back and the bottom, so it's not as uncomfortable to type on as the old laptop (which used to cook your fingers), but it's almost too hot to sit on your lap.


• Java and CPU-intensive stuff seems a bit slow - 18 minutes to compile a clean checkout of cocoon, for example. On the 2.4Ghz P4 laptop, it took significantly less time. I guess there's a trade-off to be made: usability vs. raw power. Hopefully I'll gain time spent in compiling elsewhere.

Oh, and I'm pleased to say that Mail works absolutely fine now, so looks like my problems with Jaguar's Mail and IMAP were just down to an unhappy conflict of software.

Cocoonery

Having a decent bluetooth connection is finally prompting me into uploading all the various pictures clogging up my phone. Here's one from a few weeks back of me testing out an HP Ipaq with a wifi connection. It shows Internet Explorer running under Pocket PC, accessing Cocoon running on a laptop.

It's really strange walking round with the iPaq. A handheld computer with much more power than my first PC, with a good internet connection and a web browser. From desktop to palmtop - that's a heck of a jump in less than a decade. I can't wait to see what we have next decade.

Powerbook pictures

Ok, so, we're over the initial rush of excitement now... or at least composed enough to get on and upload some pictures. These come by way of a bluetooth connection between the powerbook and the 3650 - look, no dongle! - although sadly I can't seem to browse the contents of the phone (lots of issues with Apple and 3650 it seems ... I'll be zapping the phone soon to try and rectify the problems). Anyhow, on with the show:

	We ordered a spare battery for those times when one or other of us has to make a long haul journey. For some reason it was sent in completely separate packaging.
	The boxes, front ...
	... and back
	Here's what's inside the boxes ... all the manuals, wires, cds etc neatly laid out.
	And here's what all the fuss was about - one of the new 15 inch powerbooks.
	The powerbook open. Look at those gorgeous keys. And the speakers, which sound amazing. And that beautiful widescreen LCD. And that stupid mouse with only one button. Hrmph ;-)
	It's alive! ALIVE! Alive, I tell you! Mwah-hah-hah-haaah!
	Check out that new computer smell .... mmmmmm! It almost smells good enough to ...
	... eat?

So there we have it. Two shiny new powerbooks (one with tooth marks). Were they worth the wait? Time (and productivity) will tell.

They are here!

The powerbooks are here!

Lots of pics to upload, but gonna keep track of thoughts as they happen.

• Packaging is brilliant. Fantastic presentation. Lots of "new" smell.
• After selecting "English" for the language on bootup, the status screen that follows was in chinese or japanese. Hmm. After that, English.
• Setting up wireless was less than intuitive - the manual was useless. I had to refer to Apple web support to learn I needed to prefix the WEP key with "0x".
• Why'd it default to Wales, Cardiff for my timezone?!
• Lots of software updates and reboots going on. Two restarts so far. Feels like Windows.
• Damn it's fast.
• The keyboard is almost an erotic experience, it's so nice to type on.
• I still prefer my Intellimouse
• Damn it's fast.
• System Preferences - Appearance - Font smoothing style is set to "Best for CRT" ... erm, no Cathode Ray Tube on this laptop. Shouldn't it already be set to "Best for Flat Panel"?
• How do I password protect the screensaver?
• I like the dock on the right, set to almost smallest size possible, with magnification. I like autohide. The weeks spent with the ibook have saved me time in learning the best way to set that up.
• Damn it's fast.
• Screensaver password is in Security
• Bluetooth - super range! Better than with the dongle on the other laptop. Uploading images in an instant. How do I send them to another computer though? I need to "Show Bluetooth Status" in the toolbar, then click on it and select "Send File". It'd be nice if Send File was an option on the right-click menu in Finder.
• 1280x865 is a weird resolution. It appears shorter and wider than the 1400x1050 even though it's not wider....
• Why isn't "Use trackpad for Clicking/Dragging" enabled by default?
• Default paper size is US Letter - excuse me, you imperialistic bastards? I said my locale was UK....
• Damn it's fast.
• Sosumi :-)
• Flawless networking... grabbing files off the other laptop without a problem.
• GraphicConverter! Bundled! For! Free!
• Finder is confusing me.

Time to migrate mail.

Tomorrow ...

Our Powerbooks are finally showing up on the TNT tracker this morning. A swift phone call to TNT confirmed that they should be with us some time before 2pm tomorrow. Hurrah!

Unsurprisingly, Apple didn't phone to tell me this.

It transpires that TNT are getting calls approximately every ten minutes from frustrated potential Apple owners. I'm told that Apple are using the cheapest possible shipping arrangement with TNT, and that delivery could have been made up to five days faster with a better contract between Apple and TNT.

I'm sure many Apple buyers would be happy to pay the extra (we actually asked TNT if we could upgrade and get them here today, but it was too late). To be honest, I think Apple should consider upgrading their contract.

It's all in the logistics. I've gone from enthusiastically waiting for the powerbook to being disenchanted and depressed by the whole customer experience of the last few days, being told many different stories and never knowing if the delivery van pulling up outside was carrying our kit or not. This means that when the powerbooks arrive, I'm going to be so much more sceptical and determined to make sure there's not a single problem with them. Hardly the sort of atmosphere Apple wants to create, I'm sure.

As David said, Apple have some amazingly talented people in their hardware and software divisions, responsible for churning out some of the best computers on the planet. What a shame, then, that they are let down at the very end by the simple problem of shipping a package from one place to another in a timely manner.

Rotten Apples

It's day 41 of Apple Watch ... the depressing experience of trying to find out from Apple when the two powerbooks I ordered back at the start of October will arrive.

Today's story is that they were going to be handed over to TNT today. I pointed out that yesterday, I was told they would definitely be given to TNT that day. The Apple guy hastily revised his statement to say they went to TNT yesterday. I asked why they weren't showing up on the TNT web-based tracker in that case. The Apple person hastily corrected himself again, and told me that in fact they had been handed over to Flextronics yesterday.

I asked him why we were told they were going to be given to TNT when they weren't, and when Flextronics would pass them on to TNT. He couldn't answer. Being an unreasonable sort of chap, I told him to put me through to someone that could tell me that, or to get someone at that end to pick up a phone to Flextronics and find out that information for me. He put me on hold for the "Logistics Team", but told me they weren't answering their phones. I'm not bloody surprised.

Bear in mind that at this point, we've been told a dozen different likely delivery dates and at least as many conflicting stories regarding where the Powerbooks are.

After holding for a further ten minutes, I was told that I couldn't hold up the telephone line any longer, and that the supervisor would call me back as soon as they had new information. I thanked the guy at the end of the line for doing his best and apologised for being a PITA.

I'm not expecting a telephone call, even though the information they have appears to change every ten minutes since last Wednesday. After all, they didn't phone me yesterday after I emailed them with an outline of the problem and an urgent request for help.

ApacheCon 2003

News just in from ApacheCon 2003 in Vegas: Steven Noels has been voted in as an Apache Software Foundation member! Congratulations, Steven, and good luck with the presentation!

Steven joins such illustrious members as Thom, Giacomo, Carsten, Vadim, Stefano and Pier. The list of members is like a veritable who's who of the software world.

Update: It seems Sylvain is illustrious too!

Thing One and Thing Two

Still playing with Fedora. A couple of things have bugged me about it since getting it up and running.

Firstly, after seemingly figuring out the network card, things went a bit awry (network not found when I switched to the home wifi connection; kernel panics etc). It turns out the best way to get the network up and running is to use the Internet Configuration Wizard in System Tools, rather than Network in System Settings. Don't ask me why.

Secondly, the package management system was a bit broken - it wouldn't let me install samba, and up2date had incorrect urls. All sorted now, but niggling. Having said that, the package manager looks so much better than many of the Debian equivalents. Redhat's commercial nature really had some benefits:

One last thing that's bugging me: constant disk whirring/clunking. I assume this is Nautilus keeping an eye out for media changes or something, but still ... grrr!

Software Patents are bad, says FTC

"Software and Internet patents are impeding innovation. [...] Such patents are impairing follow-on incentives, increasing entry barriers, creating uncertainty that harms incentives to invest in innovation, and producing patent thickets. [...] Defensive patenting increases the complexity of patent thickets and forces companies to divert resources from R&D into obtaining patents. [...] Patent thickets make it more difficult to commercialize new products and raise uncertainty and investment risks. [...] Hold-up has become a problem that can result in higher prices being passed along to consumers." -- FTC report on patents and competition.

The USA are in the unfortunate position of already having software patents, and are just finding out how bad they are. The UK government are set to make things worse for us - going against the will of the people.

See also software patents and patents postponed? and patents revisited.

Debian Installer

Shortly after installing Fedora, I came across an article with a first look at the new Debian installer - or "next generation" as it's referred to in the article. It's a review of the work being done on the Debian installer. Historically, Debian has always suffered from the install - although it is simple (often just requiring the user to hit Enter at the appropriate points), it never looked the part.

So, the new installer. What can I say? It's not what I'd call next generation. Take a look at how it compares to the Fedora/Redhat installer:

Debian installer	Fedora installer

The screenshots show Debian and Fedora at the point where you are asked to select what language you want to install with. It's the easiest like-for-like example I could find.

I'm sorry, but if Debian is ever going to get mainstream acceptance, they need to sort this out. Command-line installs are a great fallback position, but they really need a slick, visually-appealing installer to bring themselves up-to-date.

There seem to be a number of initiatives to do this, such as GTK frontend, but that seems stalled. And as the Debian wiki says: too little, too late.

I think Debian is still one of the best operating systems for a server, as the package management is second to none. It seems to me that Debian won't be seen on the desktop for very much longer as it's being obsoleted by SuSE and Fedora/Redhat. That's worrying, because less users will inevitably reduce the quality of Debian throughout, making it less viable on the server too.

Digging the hat

I thought I'd have one last try at finding a well-behaved linux distribution before I junk the old laptop and move over to the Mac. Alex had good things to say about the recently-released Fedora Core 1, and since his graphics card is similar to mine, I thought I'd give it a go.

I've had three basic problems with recent distributions (such as Debian, Knoppix, Libranet, and Redhat):

• Support for my ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics card
• Support for my Linksys WPC11 wireless network card
• Support for software- or hardware-suspend and resume

The Fedora installation was the slick experience I've come to expect from Redhat (which I wish Debian would adopt ... I hear the new Debian installer is available for testing now, about 2 years too late). One bonus is that the installation allowed me to configure my screen size - 1400x1050 - which many of the other distributions fail to list. 1400x1050 isn't that unusual, surely?

After a bit of fiddling to make Fedora boot (I already have Debian on the laptop, and didn't want to mess up that installation), I was up and running. The first thing I noticed was that my text console wasn't running at 1400x1050. The second thing I noticed was that X most definitely was. Great! My graphics card works. Unfortunately, sub-pixel rendering wasn't, leading to some unpleasant strobing of the text, which is hard on the eyes.

The first few setup screens looked good. My sound card was detected correctly. After completing setup, I was able to login. The default X desktop was well-presented. I headed straight for the Display program in System Settings, but I couldn't find any way to enable sub-pixel rendering. I finally found the option under Fonts in the Preferences.

I tried to get networking working. Unfortunately, whenever I clicked on "Activate" to get my wireless card working, I got "Cannot get driver information: Operation not supported". I figured out that by deleting the network card, then re-adding it but specifically selecting the "wavelan_cs", I could get up and running.

The only thing I can't get running is - no surprises - suspend and resume. But then I'm convinced the only reliable way to do that is in hardware anyway :-(

Other than that, Fedora is fast. I don't know if it's because of the improved support for my graphics card, because I haven't installed all my usual cruft on the machine yet, or because the Fedora binaries are optimised for Pentium-class machines (Debian is still built for 386 compatibility). Either way, it flies along.

Flying Apples

According to Apple's website which we've been checking daily, our new Powerbooks, the ones we ordered on 9th October, finally shipped on Wednesday. Hurrah!

Now the bad news. According to Apple's support telephone line, they are either in Taiwan or Luxembourg, and they will either ship today and take at least 5 business days to reach us, or they shipped on Wednesday and will be with us Monday or Tuesday next week. It depends which operator you talk to.

It's a farce.

TNT's online tracking service hasn't got any record of them yet (or the tracking number Apple supplied is wrong).

Another highly entertaining detail of this debacle is that Apple apparently emailed me on Wednesday to say they shipped. No sign of an email this end. The operator on the support line told me "Apple are a computer company so it must be a problem your end". I see. Just in case my filtering software got a bit too enthusiastic, I checked the mailserver's logs. This month I received 4851 emails so far, of which two were from Apple .... one to tell me they were going to bill me, and one offering £15 off my next order.

If I received 4851 emails without problems, and Apple can't tell me whether the Powerbooks shipped on Wednesday or today, what are the odds that the missing email from Apple went astray due to a technical fault at my end?

All will be forgiven if there's a Powerbook here on Monday ;-)

Update: I received the email this evening. It says the items were shipped today. I have no idea where they shipped from or when they'll arrive, and neither does the TNT site - it doesn't recognise the tracking number. What an insanely great experience.

Update 2: Spoke to Apple again today, the 17th November. Our powerbooks are probably still in Luxembourg with Kuehne & Nagel - or they may have been given to TNT today. They might have arrived in Luxembourg on 13th November, or today. They may arrive tomorrow, or the end of the week, or possibly on Wednesday. Gosh, I'm glad Apple are a computer company, otherwise they'd be getting all this wrong.

Social Software

Semantic web redux

Semantic Web activity, alright. This week's hot topic in blogland is the semantic web, which has to be a good thing - focusing attention on it may allow us to make some sort of progress. It all started with Clay Shirky's article on The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. This was an interesting article (although I don't agree with much of it), and Shirky concludes: "much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web".

Shirky's article certainly stimulated a lot of debate. Tim Bray's rebuttal, as always, hits the nail on the head: the idea that data.somecompany.com could be an XML representation (maybe in the Extensible Business Reporting Language, XBRL) of all the business data of a company. This would be a very good first step.

The Semantic Web is something I've spent a lot of time ranting about, in association with the idea that we must unleash dark data - making the incredibly useful back-office databases accessible via the web (and preferably augmented by machine-friendly formats, for example OAI).

I don't think any of us will get there by trying to tackle the big picture in one go. It'll take baby steps. And I propose Cocoon as your companion while you take those steps, as it's like a guide on how to walk. By building multichanneling, xml versions, RDF, and maybe even support for web services into your sites, you will suddenly find that the semantic web is a reality without noticing that you've built it.

Danny Ayers weighs in with his own rebuttal, concluding: "there are systems based on Semantic Web technologies working now. The web is working now". This is more or less the response I gave on the JISCMail web-support mailing list last month, when I started flaming a "there's no point in xhtml /w3c sucks / semantic web is nonsense" troll.

Dan Brickley, who I had the pleasure of meeting last year in Boston and who works with one of our customers, gave a very measured and informative response. In it he points out that there's more to the Semantic Web than ontologies and reasoning engines.

Marc Canter is much less forgiving of Shirky's essay: "Rolling up your sleeves, digging into one area [...] and working through the ugly details - is what it's all about. [...] The technologies that surround the Semantic web [...] are here today, while the dream of the semantic web is still years away.� But unless we start building NOW [...]". A pragmatic approach I fully agree with.

Other commentary on the issue comes from David Weinberger (who's not sure whether it's Semantic Web or semantic web), fellow Cocooner Guido Casper (who picks up on the potential of data.somecompany.com), Kevin Werbach (who doesn't get that Shirky's argument is a straw man, and supports him), Dave Winer (no surprises, Dave is typically more excited about the opportunity to be controversial than to analyse the argument), and Burningbird, who really gets it: "it will come about when people see the benefits of smarter data. Small pieces, intelligently joined". mamamusings is collecting a more comprehensive list of responses.

Ultimately there's no quick and simple solution to the Semantic Web. It'll take many more blogfests, rants and heated debates before we really figure out what's going on. In the meantime, we are quietly building the elements of the Semantic Web around us, and it may just happen sooner than we all think.

Lunch with Paul

I went into Norwich today to meet up with Paul Russell for lunch. It's always interesting to chat with him and compare the world of big business with the world domination machinations of Luminas.

Some of the things we covered were Open Source in business, Grid computing buzzword or brilliance, and technolust in the form of the iPod.

Paul's still not convinced that Open Source is necessarily the right way to go about software development. It's not clear to him how to bootstrap large development projects without some form of proprietary funding model. To be fair, this is the problem I have with Open Source too -- funding large R&D or new product developments are difficult the Open Source way.

I think the answer to this is that business these days is more than just products, and Open Source development needs to go beyond the traditional idea of "build a tool and sell it". It's the "product halo" - shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation - or at least, spreading the burden of revenue generation more evenly across product and service.

We did manage to agree that Grid computing is mostly marketing and hype, with very few really valuable demonstrators. And we also both agreed that I should go and get an iPod as soon as possible ;-)

Look what's coming ...

Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! Shrek2 is on it's way!

In other news, I got to see Finding Nemo on the big screen yesterday. Another masterpiece from the Pixar guys.

Talking XP

Via Curtis Cooley comes these principles of lean software development from Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck. They are worth repeating:

• Eliminate waste.


• Amplify learning.


• Decide as late as possible.


• Deliver as fast as possible.


• Empower the team.


• Build integrity in.


• See the whole.

CSS rage

I'm getting CSS rage. It's the overwhelming feeling of frustration, irritation, anger, stress and futility that hits you when you realise that your so-very-simple requirements are nigh-on impossible to implement in a way that will work on multiple platforms, in multiple browsers.

The challenge: to display three images centred on a page, with even spacing between them. Not too difficult, surely?

In the "good old days" of pre-CSS HTML, the solution was simple: throw the images into a <table>, and put the table in a <center> tag.

In order to achieve the same effect without the <center> tag, it seemed obvious to give the table an ID and style the ID to centred. Which works in Netscape, but not in IE. To fix it for IE, you need to wrap the table in a <div>. Which doesn't work in IE on a Mac. And don't even ask what happens to the spacing between the images :-(

Thankfully Mozilla uses the same rendering engine on all operating systems, but I mustn't forget pre-mozilla Netscape 4, which is broken but still insisted on as a requirement by some customers. Then there's Opera, which seemed to behave differently at least on Windows and Linux. And Safari on Mac/Konquerer on Linux, which have similar rendering engines (and seem to do a pretty good job). And Internet Explorer, the big daddy of the bad boys, which behaves differently with each and every version (3, 4, 5, 5.5, 6) and depending on whether it's on Mac OS or Windows NT, 2000, or XP.

Taking into account browsers and operating systems, it could be argued that there's at least 10-15 different sets of bugs to deal with at the very least.

I remember why I spend most of my time on back-end stuff now. Writing deliberately broken CSS that exploits bugs in specific browsers on specific platforms to try and get universal standard presentation is bad for my health and sanity.

Have you done your backup today?

Practical advice on backups is an excellent, comprehensive document covering most of the issues relating to keeping your data safe. After my recent email problems, I can't extol the virtues of good backups enough. Of course, synchronising the three different copies of my mail archive was an interesting experience.

And the irony of my post where I thought IMAP would save me from losing email has not been lost on me...

Device Independence and Forms

The W3C just released the first public draft of Authoring Techniques for Device Independence: "this Note presents an overview of many existing techniques and best practices that may be used to deliver tailored content and applications to a wide variety of devices. It shows, in practical terms, how one might address the problems of content creation, content maintenance and content adaptation. It explores the issues associated with managing an application's interaction with a user where different devices and modalities are present".

This note is aiming to solve the challenges of device independence.

The note seems to rely heavily on "using techniques based on XForms", which I think means it will ultimately fail. There's not nearly enough support for XForms in current browsers, and a quick look at the mozilla bug database would seem to indicate XForms support in Mozilla is a long way off at best, and extremely unlikely at worst. (Actually, that mozilla bug database reference is a great example of a good old-fashioned flame-fest, with rampant advocacy on all sides.)

I wonder if anyone on the Working Group is familiar with Cocoon? The Cocoon community decided not long ago to forget about XForms in favour of a home-brewed forms implementation known as "Woody". It would be great to see some recognition of this as an alternative.

A good introduction to XForms can be found in XForms for HTML Authors. A good introduction to Woody is in Woody: Cocoon forms.

Some useful links:

• Stefano on why not XForms


• xml.com on 10 Favourite XForms engines


• Woody vs. XMLForm

Diary of a switcher #7

Ok, so I'm feeling a little happier about Mac OS now that I've stopped trying to use it for email (which has gone back to Pine on Linux, until I can test the OS X Panther release of Mail).

Ugo ordered a powerbook today and looks set to get it on 17th November - less than two weeks! Obviously I should have opted for leasing in order to get mine in less than 6 weeks :-(

Looks like Torsten has made the switch too, with some issues related to networking. For me it worked pretty smooth connecting to a samba share. It definitely takes time to get used to the OS X interface though ... I found that by the time I'd figured out how the Home/End keys worked, I'd cracked the rest of the interface.

The Meatrix

I don't consider myself to be a vegetarian, an animal rights activist, or any of that stuff that I usually associate with dreadlocks, lentils, flatulence and organic foods. (Apologies to those offended by the sweeping generalisations and bigotry. I don't claim to be politically correct!) I eschew organic products (why should we let supermarkets charge us more for what we should already be getting?), but my conscience pricks me into trying to buy free-range whenever possible.

So last night I was talking to Nic about the packaging-mad society we live in today, and trying to reconcile the difference between our modern shrink-wrapped, plastic-packed, glossy, shiny, prewashed lives and the life we led not much more than 10 to 20 years ago. I'm wondering if we're really better off buying our meat in massive polystyrene cartons instead of wrapped in greaseproof paper. Is it really better that our milk is in plastic cartons and not in re-usable bottles? Do we need bread packaged in celophane rather than paper bags?

Anyway, I finally got round to looking at The Meatrix this evening, and I think it makes a point very, very well. Hmmm....

All gone

I've been using email since starting university in 1992. That's 11 years and 2 months.

In all that time, I have never lost an email through anything other than my own carelessness or through deliberately deleting it. Can you guess where this is going?

This morning, the mail client built in to Apple's OS X "Jaguar" managed to delete most of my new incoming mail for the day.

Goodbye, Apple.

Diary of a switcher #6

I've given up on Jaguar's Mail program, as it simply would not stop playing silly games with concatenating folder names all over the place. According to Thom, Mail works well in Panther, the new version of OS X. I'll wait until then.

In the meantime, this laptop spent all afternoon compiling and installing Pine 4.58 while I got on with other things. In the process of moving my mail across to pine, I discovered some very unpleasant behaviour by OS X.

Given a directory called "mail" on my local machine, running a secure recursive copy of a directory called "Mail" from another machine onto here behaves case-insensitively - that is, the contents of the remote "Mail" were put in the local "mail". I'm sorry, but that's NOT sensible behaviour! Subtract 50 kudos points from Apple for that, go to jail, do not pass go.

Another lovable glitch I discovered was that if in Printer Preferences you tell OS X not to list networked printers, it doesn't give you a list of printers connected to your laptop, it gives you no printers at all. And nukes currently-printing jobs. The only way I got things back to normal was to conceed to listing all network printers, and to reboot.

I hope Apple get the powerbooks here soon, before I find more reasons not to bother switching and to cancel the order :-(

Notwork Rail

My sympathies go to Edd Dumbill who had the misfortune to get stuck at Cambridge and Peterborough train stations for a prolonged period of time.

I used to regularly do the Norwich-Peterborough-Huntingdon trip when I was at university, and came to loath the inevitable 20-30 minute wait for connections at Peterborough. There's nothing at Peterborough station, and annoyingly the nearest shopping centre is just far enough away to put you in risk of missing your connection.

I've always wondered why these stations don't have better facilities - Peterborough and Cambridge must have significantly more through-traffic than Norwich station, and yet they are definitely lacking in comparison. Surely they'd make enough money from grateful stranded passengers to make good comfortable waiting areas / coffee shops a viable proposition?

(Heck, if they just provided wireless internet access like at Norwich station, I'd be happy!)

Software development secrets

From Gus Mueller, a write-up of a session at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference on Incredibly Obvious Software Development Secrets. Some great stuff there - it's amazing how easy it is to forget the obvious, so it's always good to be reminded.

Embrace and extend

Via Tim Bray, Jon Udell's Replace and Defend analysis of new technologies pouring out of Microsoft HQ prior to the release of their next operating system, Longhorn.

As Jon says: "if the suite of standards now targeted for elimination from Microsoft's actively-developed portfolio were a technological dead end, ripe for disruption, then we should all thank Microsoft for pulling the trigger. If, on the other hand, these standards are fundamentally sound, then it's a time for [...] sustaining rather than disruptive advances. I believe the ecosystem needs sustaining more than disruption."

This is what is known in some circles as "evolution, not revolution" ... the idea that Darwinian evolution very rarely throws out a line of development in favour of starting from scratch, prefering instead to continually improve things. CSS, XML, Relax-NG, SVG and so on are far from end-of-life standards. We're only just beginning to really take advantage of them and just starting to discover what we can do with them. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and start over.

It would be nice if Microsoft would work with us for a change, instead of continually looking for ways to lock us in or lock us out.