Older blog entries for edd (starting at number 23)

Yesterday was a big Semantic Web hacking day. I spent a lot of it hacking on Redland's Python interface. Redland's a great C-based toolkit for RDF processing, written by Dave Beckett.

My current project using Redland is noodling with rdfweb.org-based projects, like "friend-of-o-friend." Currently I have a Python program that can figure out where pictures of people I know are. Lots of fun.

Well, XML Europe has come and gone, and I think it went OK.

Now I'll have some weeks with more hacking time. Various candidate ideas include more Bluetooth work, some RDF-based work, interfacing with Evolution.

Or maybe I'll stay in bed a bit more.

Back from WWW2002. Despite getting sick and a few other down points, it was a good conference. I guess the headline news as far as I'm concerned is that I think the Semantic Web idea turned the corner. It's something worth spending time on, for sure.

The other good news is that the iBook held up well to the travelling. Even had chance to do dialup via bluetooth and my cellphone while on the move.

Now, back to the grind and last minute panicking before XML Europe. The garden needs some attention.

Got a nice email from kroah in response to me talking about a GUI for BlueZ. Thanks Greg, I appreciate that you take the time.

thom will be sponsoring my BlueZ packages for Debian. He's just got a job with Positive Internet: their Debian hosting service looks pretty nice, I might check it out later this year.

Whew. A long day of hacking on the beginnings of a GNOME 2 interface for Bluetooth devices. So far I've achieved a basic device browser, but even doing that took me on a whirlwind tour of learning about GTK threading.

As usual at this stage, it doesn't look like a whole bunch of anything, but there's some tidy stuff under the hood that should make the software more manageable in the long term. Honest.

More BlueZ work today. I made Debian packages for the latest release, and sent in a couple of patches.

Also spent a short amount of time porting my gnome-vfs module to gnome-vfs-2; it's just a simple toy module to view the USB bus from Nautilus and doesn't do a great deal.

Still loving GNOME 2. Can't wait for it to be finalized!

There's something curiously comforting about avoiding the work you're meant to be doing and doing something completely different instead.

This morning I posted Debian packages for the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack utilities. I've also mailed debian-mentors, asking for a sponsor for these. With a bit of luck, we'll see Bluetooth tool support hitting Debian Linux soon.

In the afternoon I got distracted by learning about developing applications for GNOME 2. I ported over "gmaed", which is a little toy for editing alias files suitable for use with the mutt mailer. It's not a lot of use on its own, but it enabled me to do things like subclassing objects and use unit testing.

GNOME 2 is nice: one of the central ideas behind it is to make the UI easier and simpler. Unfortunately for developers, it is a bit more complex than GNOME 1.4. I needed 4 browser tabs open on the API docs, and another window in the GNOME source tree. I managed, but I think there should be some helper classes for the tree view widget. They made it a lot more powerful, but they've also made it a lot more trouble to set up for simple applications.

Back in the SOAP wars I find that Jon Udell thinks I'm wrong, too. I wouldn't mind all this disagreement if people actually spent the time to argue against what I was saying, rather than a strawman constructed from what they presumed I was saying without actually reading that carefully. Oh well. I don't really have time or energy to write responses to them.

Yesterday I switched to GNOME 2 for my main desktop. After needing to hack a few things, and compile gdm from CVS, it's going well. Kudos to hp for the metacity window manager, which I'm enjoying using (after I patched out the Alt-1, Alt-2 etc. keybindings).

Under lots of pressure in putting the final touches to the proceedings for XML Europe. Errors always wait until the final moment before rearing their heads, it seems.

iBook update -- looks like I'm pretty stuck for getting the iBook external video to work under Linux. As just enabling the mirroring in the video chip doesn't work, the solution seems to be figuring out how to fill the external framebuffer. MacOS X does this without a problem, of course. If anyone's reading this and fancies help from me with testing the necessary changes to aty128fb driver, please get in touch (oh futile hope!)

Yesterday I opined that web services development would be better off outside of the W3C. So far I've been heralded as "harsh", "paranoid", anti-innovation and a slave to the W3C party line. I guess my fans are deep in hiding. I've been discussing the web services issue a lot with simonstl recently.

Sometimes the web services/SOAP hype makes me mad.