Older blog entries for connolly (starting at number 22)

Grokking Triples from Spreadsheets

Sean notes that there are lots of triples in spreadsheets. Yup. After my Aug 2003 trip to Montreal for Extreme, I used gnumeric as an RDF authoring tool to collect all the gas receipts and such; then the Makefile has this stanza to convert it to RDF:

triplog.rdf: triplog.xml grokSheet.xsl
	$(XSLTPROC) --novalid grokSheet.xsl triplog.xml >$@

I haven't scrubbed the data, so this is somewhat incomplete as a demo.

Yes, this is another GRDDL style transformation.

A comment on Sean's blog said "don't forget RDBs". Of course not. See Relational Databases and the Semantic Web; I hope to update my implementation, dbview.py to use SPARQL before too much longer.

Hmm... where are timbl's slides on RDF, trees, tables, and such?

WordPress Struggles

Famous 5-Minute Install "2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL username to access it." Umm... that step alone is taking me a lot longer than five minutes. The debian package doesn't seem to get along with Dom's installation:

Installing new version of config file /etc/wordpress/index.php ...
ERROR 1007 at line 1: Can't create database 'wordpress'. Database exists

IntegrityIsJobOne does gnome blog know this? they advertise... "Entries can be written gradually over the course of a day, popping gnome blog open and closed as you have thoughts to jot down and then posting at the end of the day"

What if my computer crashes in the middle of the day?

testing gnome blog

My son is supposed to keep a reading response journal. I wonder about having him do it with a blog... maybe using livejournal's friends-only authentication stuff... or better: is there an easy-to-administer blog thingy for zope?

I keep bugging TimBL and EricM about blogging (esp with trackback and comments) too.

This posting got kinda mangled; the title got thrown away.

Hmm... hypertext UI? my home page hmm... klunky dialog interface, but the resulting text is OK.

Suppose I drag n drop from my web browser? Ugh. lose. Where's paste link when we need it? Hmm... recoverable... gnome blog

taking the plunge to Ubuntu Hoary

For those of you who have missed the daily churn of new packages, Hoary is for you.

-- GuideToHoary

They've got me pegged. I've been scratching the itch with some 3rd party repositories and having trouble. If Hoary is just two months from release, I'm sure it'll work well enough for the kids' PC.

OS X keychain trustworthy?

Every time I log in with SSH Agent, that little "add to keychain" checkbox is staring at me, but I don't know if keychain source is open to the security community, and I don't understand its architecture. Any reading recommendations? Maybe drop them in the del.icio.us keychain tag.

postscript: yes, it's trustworthy. under the hood of the OS X keychain -- 19 Feb 2005. Love having a separate keychain for financial stuff. Camino groks, but Firefox doesn't. But Camino doesn't grok type-ahead-find... BrowserChecklist

Building a PC... end of an era?

The kids' PC was noisy and slow. The Mac mini buzz was very tempting, but after going over Micro Center specials and a linux hardware buying guide with Brennan, we chose to build/upgrade our own, for under $150.
-- Building a PC

I wanted to pass on this experience to my son before Hollywood makes it illegal (due to DCMA++, Trustworthy Computing, ...) or something else destroys the commodity PC hardware market.

When I eventually got the thing working, the boot time is long enough and it's quiet enough that I'm thinking of leaving it on all the time. And it's orders of magnitude faster than the machine it replaces, making me wonder what to do with all this compute power, beside cartoon network games and tuxracer...

Family Finances and Entertainment, Ubuntu, and Debian

I think the machine should make a nice PVR (or at least to convert VHS tapes to digital video); too bad there are no Ubunutu packages for freevo nor mythtv. There are external debian repositories with freevo packages, so I went to install debian on the 2nd disk, using a netinst CD I burned just a few months ago. It tried to get a DHCP lease using the ehternet controller on the motherboard, but the connection to this machine is wireless, thru a Microcenter: D-Link DWL-G520 that I got for $27.99 after rebate. It's listed among the madwifi supported hardware; of course, the madwifi HAL isn't open source; Ubuntu supports it via a restricted-modules package, but the debian installer does not. I considered building a kernel module from source, but I have a bad taste in my mouth maintaining a WinFourLinOnDebian kernel. You see, I still rely on Quicken for family finances; the open source alternatives are missing features that I rely on (budgeting, quick-zoom reports, ...).

I once dispaired that open source would ever produce a competitive web browser, and that day has clearly arrived, so I remain hopeful that open source will conquer the wifi and PVR applications, though the challenges are formidable.

End of year giving

Hmm... which to give to... EFF? SPI? United Way?

Why did eff.org take forever to respond? spi-inc.org is refusing connections. debian donations prolly works.

Ubuntu rocks!

dajobe told me about Ubuntu during a break in our meeting, ironically, when I asked him for tips re my new PowerBook.

I tried a live CD but it's not really working yet. Then I tried to squeeze an installation in the unused 1.5GB of the 4GB disk in my kids' games PC. No joy. Disk full.

Then I talked to my kids about what they want their machine to do. "Connect to the Internet," they all said. No way I'm going to administer a win98 box connected to the net. So I asked if it was OK if their Disney games didn't work anymore, and they said yes. So I wiped the disk and finally got Ubuntu working.

Ubuntu rocks. gnome rocks. My kids love the gnome games. This is the most progress toward the debian jr. goals I've seen in a long time.

madwifi hardware support rocks. I got a DWL-G520 for $30 after rebates, and it worked 1st time, after installing the ubuntu restricted-modules package.

There's a bit of irony in that mostly my kids want to play cartoonnetwork.com games. The macromedia flash install process is pretty painless, but it stands out in contrast with the integration of the rest of Ubuntu. That's as it should be, I suppose: you should be very conscious when investing in software that's not open source.

OpenCroquet is... coming?

Alan Kay rides again... I grabbed the OpenCroquet release by bittorrent. It works, I guess... the UI doesn't pass the "can I figure it out in 30 seconds?" test required of, say, video games. I'll stay tuned...

bottles is on hold until the customer resolves a legal issue with a developer of an earlier version of the project. Sigh.

raph... say it ain't so.

How do I certify MisterMC as spammer?

bottles is really starting to come together... to the point where I'd like to publish the code in the normal way so that I can show it to people. Hmm... gotta revive webtechs.com, I think.

twisted and nevow are working really well, along with sqlite, mx.DateTime, and, of course, python.

Broken CSS support on safari sucks, meanwhile. Or maybe these centering tricks are abusing display: table. I haven't checked the specs in detail yet.

I bit the bullet today and explored deployment on Windows. Boy was I surprised! All these dev tools have easy-to-use windows installers. Open Source rocks!