Blog for March 2008
29/03/2008: Cognition 0.1 Alpha 6
Tonight I’ve released another alpha version of Cognition, my semantic web parser. Changelog includes:
- Microformats:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require
<head profile>for microformat support. Microformat profiles are treated as opaque strings! Supports the following profiles:- http://purl.org/uF/2008/03/
- http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard or http://purl.org/uF/hCard/1.0/
- http://dannyayers.com/microformats/hcalendar-profile or http://purl.org/uF/hCalendar/1.0/
- http://purl.org/uF/hAtom/0.1/
- http://purl.org/uF/rel-tag/1.0/
- http://purl.org/uF/rel-license/1.0/
- No profiles required for rel-enclosure, adr or geo (yet).
- Support for hAtom, WebSlices.
- In addition to hAtom 0.1, rel-enclosure is supported within hEntries.
- Improve include-pattern support to prevent some infinite loops.
- Add option (disabled by default) to require
- GRDDL:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require for GRDDL.
- Add option to check profile URLs for…
29/03/2008: Earth Hour
The Sydney Morning Herald has just (about 2 hours ago) reported that:
This year, 26 cities joined Earth Hour as official partner cites, including — along with all of Australia’s capitals — Atlanta, Bangkok, Chicago, Christchurch, Copenhagen, Dublin, Manila, Montreal, Odense, Ottawa, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Toronto.
In the US, the lights were going out on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island, and Chicago’s Sears Tower. North of the border, Canada was turning off the lights at Toronto’s CN Tower and the floodlights at Niagara Falls.
In Britain, Brighton Pier was blacked out, and Prince Charles gave Earth Hour royal approval by turning off the lights at Highgrove House, his Gloucestershire home.
Now I do appreciate that it’s very late in Sydney now, and the SMH’s reporters want to be tucked up in bed at home, but that’s no excuse for such…
28/03/2008: Friday Evening: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings
OK, so Amazon kindly delivered my copy of Counting Crows>' Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings this morning. I've made a point of not listening to any of the new songs that have been floating around the Internet, except Cowboys which Lisa sent to me ages ago. I waited until I finished work this afternoon and am currently listening to the album — I thought I owed it to the boys to listen the whole work so I can judge it as a whole.
23/03/2008: Best… News… Story… Ever!
Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.
23/03/2008: Easter
According to the venerable Bede, the term “Easter” comes from the Old English word for what we now call “April”. “Eostre-Monath” was “the month of Eostre”.
Of course, back then months were calculated based on the lunar cycle, which is why Easter is calculated using a thoroughly pagan method: it’s the first weekend on or after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Eostre is the old Germanic equivalent of the Roman goddess Aurora, or in Greek, Eos. According to Greek legend, Eos is the sister of Helios, the sun. Every day, she opens the gates of heaven so that her brother can ride across the sky — Eos represents the dawn. It is not surprising that April, the time when the long nights of winter are ebbing away should come to be associated with Eos.
Nor is it surprising that at this time of year, when animals are starting to breed again after the winter, symbols of fertility such as eggs, chicks and bunny rabbits are frequently seen.
What is surprising is…
09/03/2008: The Semantic Web
One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the Web into a huge mine of interconnected data, free to be queried by everyone.
As an example of what I mean, searching for the keyword “train” on Google brings up results related to:
- trains, as a form of transport
- the band Train
- IT training courses
- toy trains
In the semantic web, the search engine and my computer would inherently understand the difference between these concepts, so if I wanted to know about the new Train album, I wouldn’t get any result related to locomotives!
What I’m particularly interested in is ways of embedding semantic data in ordinary web pages, so that we have a single web that can be…
09/03/2008: The Great IE8 Meta Tag Climb Down
Yeah, so I know I’m about a week late in mentioning this (I’ve been busy — let’s hope nobody is using this blog as their primary source of news), but the Microsoft Internet Explorer team have backed down on their ridiculous META tag idea.
Read about it on IEblog.
09/03/2008: Monkfish with Pancetta, Fennel & Saffron
Here’s a recipe I’ve reverse engineered after having eaten it at the Jolly Sportsman last month.
Ingredients
- 2 monkfish fillets
- 8 slices pancetta
- 2 medium potatoes
- ¼ savoy cabbage
- ½ bulb fennel
- ½ tsp ground saffron
- 30g butter
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 100 mL milk
- 100 mL chicken or vegetable stock (optional)
If monkfish is not available, any other white fish will make a reasonable substitute. Haddock works well. What is important is that the fillet must be long and thin, with a cross-sectional area of about a square inch (say, 2 cm by 3 cm), and should be boneless.
Method
Clean the fennel and slice very finely. Heat about a quarter of the butter and a tablespoon of the oil in a small frying pan, and sauté the fennel until it starts to brown. Stir in the saffron, then add the stock, or a little salted water. While the other parts of the meal are cooking, keep an eye on the…