Jamie’s Weblog

The Semantic Web – a report Here’s a report produced by the EU and US National Science Foundation. The report is quite long but among the list of contributors are many of the leading semantic web experts including Ian Horrocks and Dieter Fensel.

The Penalty Phase Dave thinks the Microsoft thing has entered the penalty phase. I disagree. Sure, disentangle IE from Windows but that doesn’t help you when MS decides that their IM client or Media Player is integral to the operating system. And then they will decide that you must use their Passport authorisation service. What? [...]

On a related note… Microsoft probably won’t find things easier in the mobile phone market (at least not in Europe) as Siemems have just joined the Symbian consortium. Previously, Siemens have produced Pocket PC based phones and this will certainly be a blow to MS. The main Symbian product is the Symbian OS – basically [...]

Microsoft and the Unsettling States Why do we have to go through this lawyer-profittering nonsense? Frankly, I don’t care anymore whether IE is integrated with Windows. But please, please, please, lets stop Microsoft using the same tactics with Media Player, web services, .NET/Java, and all the other emerging markets they’re trying to monopolize. I can [...]

Java Source Beautifier I’ve just discovered the Jalopy tool for formatting Java source code. I’ve previously used the pre-commercial version of JIndent but it didn’t allow recursion into directories. Jalopy will recuse through a directory and beautify any file which matches a specified regular expression. What’s exceptional about this is the close integration with ANT [...]

Semantic Web Tim and Dave, in a nutshell the semantic web is about meaning. All that XML, RSS, OPML, SOAP and XML-RPC stuff you are doing is fine and dandy; a step in the right direction. But they are still machine-readable, human-understandable formats. The goal for the semantic web is to allow machines to understand [...]

Scary Robots Again, from the MIT Technology Review: iRobot is a company founded by Rod Brooks (among others). Take a look at their current research projects: DAMP, Swarm, and PackBot. All pretty cool but they leave you a little scared – Nightmares filled with swarms of these critters crawling out of the sea or around [...]

Python’s Indentation and using whitespace to show program structure Dave thinks Python’s compulsory indentation used to convey the program structure is excellent. I’ve never used Python (I’m trying to find some time to learn it) but at uni I used OCCAM, a language for parallel processing on transputers. This used whitespace characters (tabs I believe) [...]

Cheap Ad-hoc Network Nodes As mentioned in today’s technology review, Ember (a Media Lab spinoff) is producing small low(ish) bit rate radios for use in self-healing/configuring ad-hoc networks. It certainly looks extermely interesting but it also appears that the hardware won’t be available until July. For the applications I’m thinking of building this could be [...]

GPS for iPAQers Teletype seem to do some pretty good GPS receiver for iPAQs – now, if only I had a reason…