New podcast on way
Managed, after about an hour of flailing and cursing, to get a podcast recorded with Ian. We chatted about RDF, microformats and other good stuff. I’ve got it in MP3, and I’ll upload it tomorrow. I’ve got a pretty swish way of doing the podcast thing. You better wait and see.
Warning - it’s long, it’s geeky, and it’s got the same kind of rough hewn production values you’ve come to expect from the late, great Gillmor Gang, albeit without the four minutes of waffly commercials at the start of each of the nineteen component parts.
It’s all about the attention economy. And gestures. And how links are dead. If that hasn’t put you off enough, check back tomorrow and you can listen. Probably.
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Brian Benzinger has a profile of Footnote, which is a Web 2.0 site that isn’t a total waste of time. It’s got pictures of lots of historical documents. It’s like Google Maps but for (chunks of) culture. As a card-carrying British Library reader, I love the idea.
XML geeks! Celebrate! XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 have all gotten the W3C equivalent of confirmation or bar mitzvah - Recommended status. Now the hard work begins - getting the tools, getting adoption, getting developers not to turn their noses up. I have Michael Kay’s XSLT 2.0 book, but since the only XSLT 2.0 processor I know of is Saxon, it’s unlikel I’ll be putting any XSLT 2.0 out in production. It’ll be XSLT 1.0 for a while.
Let danah boyd free you of your moral panics. Teenagers will always be safer than what the media and/or their parents think they are.
Talk about hyperlocal content that’s useful - Londonist has reviews of bagel shops in London. Brick Lane and Golders Green Road both seem like a long way to go for bagels, but both seem more tempting than the super-expensive bagels for sale in the West End. Someone needs to make a London bagel map mashup.
Sometimes I wonder why I subscribe to Lee’s blog, but then he comes out with statements like this: “The government makes money from them, therefore we’ll never get rid of them. Thus it follows that if drugs weren’t revenue generating we should be rid of them. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my main problem with the contemporary conservative movement in this country. Anyone remember back in the good old days, when being a conservative meant believing in limits on state power and the primacy of the individual? It has not become a part of social authoritarians who still claim the noble mantle of limited government. John would swear up and down that he still believes in freedom, liberty, and limited government, but then he’d also be perfectly fine with a SWAT team kicking down your front door, throwing in a flash-bang grenade, then charge in wearing paramilitary gear and pointing MP5’s at you just so you couldn’t smoke a joint. That’s not freedom, it’s not liberty, and it sure as hell has nothing to do with limited government. It’s doing exactly what liberals do, use the awesome might of the state to guarantee that everyone acts in accordance with the narrow strictures of their own set of social values.”
Les has found an article which notes that the Upgrade version of Vista won’t allow you to do a clean install. You better hope that your Vista installation never needs to be reinstalled. Someone at Microsoft dropped the ball. Windows licence does not equal Windows installation.
Moderate Muslims, my arse. 31% of British Muslims aged 16-24 want to kill apostates. If that’s moderate, I can’t wait for the extremists.
I just launched a new little site called Opiumfield Mobile. It has a tiny little mobile Twitter application (which is a bit half-finished, but will be finished very soon), and a London Tube Status page. I’ll be adding other pages that pull data from the ‘net and display them in tiny mobile-friendly XHTML pages.
If you missed the excellent Louis Theroux show yesterday, read this article. I’m not sure what my favourite Weird Weekend show was - it’s probably a toss-up between the muscle worship episode and the Ann Widdecombe episode. If he’s making a come back, he ought to do a show on furries.
The Times has an excellent article on university education from a somewhat more sober perspective than usual. I do find it a bit strange that so many people are coming to university with the belief that it’s going to get them a job. I know that my Philosophy degree isn’t going to help me get employment. That’s why I spend my time hacking web projects and open-source bits and pieces, and that’s why I’m applying to do Computer Science at graduate level next year. But I’m interested in the subject, and I’m getting a lot out of it. It’s hopefully making me a better person. A significant rethink is necessary on the position of the ex-polys. They really do suck. I say that as someone who has been to one for just under a year and left to go to an old university.
The Tom and Ian Show
I’ve just put out the first episode of a show I recorded with Ian Forrester. You can download the MP3 here or subscribe to the feed. I’ve got a cool way of doing show notes which will be arriving soon.
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