Older blog entries for edd (starting at number 28)

The latter half of this week has been taken up with hacking on my IRC/Semantic Web bots.

The Daily Chump is nearing a new release, incorporating a lot of features designed to adjust how chatty the bot is, requested by external users of the bot.

FOAFbot now understands how to read FOAF files that have been encrypted for it, allowing sensitive information to enter the FOAF web and only be readable by certain parties. It also now merges on SHA1 sums of mailboxes, meaning that people don't have to expose their email address in a plain text file, but can put it in an encrypted file.

I expect to release new versions of both these pieces of software at some point this weekend.

Great news. Thanks to thom, my packages for the BlueZ Bluetooth project have made their way into Debian unstable.

26 Jul 2002 (updated 26 Jul 2002 at 21:26 UTC) »

G3 day

So, the beige G3 300 arrived. And so did woe.

Well, it's not quite that bad. The thing is that I'd wanted to set the machine up standalone, so it wouldn't need MacOS. Unfortunately I've been unable to get Open Firmware to boot quik at startup time. So, I've had to resort to booting into MacOS and then quickly dropping back to Linux via BootX.

Everything else about the Debian PowerPC installation went just fine, fine. I'm a bit disappointed that I can't currently keep the box running without proprietary software though. I described my woes to the debian-powerpc list, but I'm not so hopeful of finding a way out.

Hardware-wise, I like the box. It's very easy to get inside and add or remove devices. I've got a USB PCI card and a Firewire PCI card inside it. They're working with kernel 2.4.19-rc3 just fine.

Maybe, if I close my eyes and wish hard enough, someone will know how to make it boot from Open Firmware. Just maybe.

Again, been off in the wilds when I should have been updating my diary here. So, some updates:

Debian

I've passed all the tests required of a new maintainer in Debian. I'm now sitting in the queue awaiting DAM approval, this could take a month or more. Soon hopefully I'll be a fully-fledged Debian developer. This should mean that the state of Bluetooth support in Debian improves. Meanwhile I'll keep bugging thom to upload my packages...

Semantic Web

I've created a new bot, FOAFbot, that acts as a "community support agent." It spiders people's FOAF files and answers questions on an IRC channel about them. It's based on top of dajobe's redland toolkit. Talking of which, it's nice to see dajobe land here.

Hardware

Troubled with news of Palladium and my Intel dependency, I've decided to make a shift to PowerPC processors. The first step in this direction is to snap up a G3 300 from eBay which should be arriving soon. I'll be making a gradual progression to non-Intel dependency as funds allow.

One benefit of running PPC Debian is that a lot of non-free stuff just isn't available, it really helps you transition to 100% free software.

Long time no update. More Bluetooth hackery recently. The BlueZ packages are now dribbling their way into Debian. I've just packaged up sdpd, too, debs can be found in the usual place.

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.

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