Compared with the overt structure of ISO Topic Maps, the better-known RDF is free-wheeling anarchy. To make sense of RDF you need to impose additional structures on top of RDF itself; these can be conventions embodied in your program code, or specifications layered on top of RDF like RDF Schema and OWL. I have found that the concepts of topic maps are useful in understanding the work I have been doing with RDF. Here’s an example. Read more
It is reported that Steve Ballmer said, on the subject of whether Windows 7 will succeed where Windows Vista has failed, ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’ This is strange, because ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ is one of the rare proverbial phrases that actually makes sense without gloss from a scholar of Semi-Early Modern English. (That said, it makes more sense if you know that ‘proof’ used to be used to mean ‘test’.) Read more
We use Windows desktops at work, but naturally nowadays even our customers expect web sites to be deployed to Linux servers. Here’s a couple of things I learned in the process of deploying a Django app from my workstation—running Windows 7—to a development server running Debian GNU/Linux 5 ‘lenny’. Read more