Archive for February, 2004

Connecting to Fedora’s X Server

Friday, February 27th, 2004

Connecting to Fedora’s X Server

Running Fedora and trying to connect to its X server, only to continue to get a can’t open display or cannot connect ot display?

Turns out Fedora has TCP connections to its X server disabled by default. I like how they default to more secure, but isn’t that what xhost is for?

I am blogging this so that google can push this link up to the top. Hopefully save someone else the time.

XHTML and RDF

Wednesday, February 25th, 2004

XHTML and RDF

We have two standards running parallel with each other; HTML is the de facto standard for document markup, accounting for millions of items on the web. RDF is a standard for expressing metadata, which in turn provides a foundation for making use of that metadata, such as reasoning about it. Yet the former is very rarely the subject of the latter; meta information placed in the HTML family of documents is often encoded in such a way as to make it difficult to extract by RDF-related parsers. And if it cannot be extracted, then it cannot be used.

Our intention here is to make more of the information that is contained within HTML-family documents available to RDF tools, but without putting an unnecessary burden on authors familiar with HTML, but not with the subtleties of triples and statements.

AOP in the Container

Wednesday, February 25th, 2004

JSR 175, JBoss and AOP

Some of the themes echoed by Spring will by found elsewhere. The idea
of the container providing services via AOP is gaining ground. Here is
a brief example of JBoss 4 and it’s AOP handling.

Note that Spring can also handle transaction management declared as
metadata right now, though not through xdoclet (spring uses some commons
functionality for reading javadocs). Spring also handles txn declared
in the spring configuration.

VERY cool stuff. J2EE without the EJB!!

SOAP and REST: Round 323523

Friday, February 20th, 2004

mySpotter.com - Web Services Links

Just bringing back some SOAP and REST discussions and articles. I still have a soft spot for REST.

FOAF Activity

Friday, February 20th, 2004

Lost Boy: FOAF Activity

Lots of interesting FOAF activity lately, seemingly spurred on by the ETech presentations.

One thing I’m afraid of w/ FOAF adoption is the same trap RSS 1.0 fell into. All the RSS tools I know of treat RSS as XML instead of a RDF model. This is A Bad Thing for using the data as a RDF graph. If FOAF adoption is to really deliver on its promise, it should be used as a RDF model. Treat it like the graph it’s meant to be. FOAF is RDF, it just happens to be serialized as XML. Let’s not forget how to interact with RDF!

WS-Discovery

Wednesday, February 18th, 2004

Metadata Specifications Index Page

Call me jaded, but here’s another attempt to solve the problem of link local discovery. You know, since Jini, JXTA, UPnP, Rendezvous, and others did it so horribly. Oh, I know… their downfall was that they didn’t use bloated SOAP! Ah ha! Luckily, we now have a discovery protocol that uses XML and SOAP. Can’t wait to try to fit all that XML into a single datagram.

I dig XML. But there might be a better way to ask “Is there a printer here?” than a huge SOAP message.

Trust in the SemWeb

Tuesday, February 17th, 2004

Trust and Reputation in Web-based Social Networks

This project is designed to build and maintain a trust network on the semantic web. Using an ontology that extends FOAF, you can assign trust ratings to people you know.

Fabl

Tuesday, February 17th, 2004

Fabl — A Native Programming Language for the Semantic Web

A native programming language for the Semantic Web

JDK 1.5 Sample Code

Friday, February 13th, 2004

JDK 1.5 Sample Code

JDK 1.5 has some very useful enhancements. Thanks to Josh Bloch of Sun Microsystems for helpful hints.

Lots of great examples of new JDK 1.5 features. Looks like some really useful capabilities.

It’s All About Graphs

Friday, February 13th, 2004

Stefano’s Linotype ~ It’s All About Graphs

The more I discover RDF and RDF query languages, the more itseems to me that it was all about that stupid RDF/XML syntax that prevented people from getting what RDF really was. RDF is a model for describing labelled directed graphs. That’s it. You can add typing (RDFSchema) or inference (OWL), but the real deal is that you now have a way to describe graphs.

I always had a hard time explaining RDF to people because everyone saw RDF through XML glasses. I see now that, deep inside, people wanted XML to do what RDF does. That is, describe graphs of information and the relationships between the nodes. Once I got people thinking “RDF is not XML” it was a bit easier.