Month: August 2003

TreeHugger

a tree hugger
Shellac (Damian Steer) has released a prelliminary version of TreeHugger, an RDFPath plugin thing for Saxon’s XSLT. Very cool indeed. The hope is that XML people will enjoy using RDF without having to see the syntax at all. What I want to persuade him to do now is a Squish to RDFPath converter; it’s not straightforward however – we will lose much of the functionality of XSLT which Saxon provides by passing off the RDFPath in one go to an RDF Query engine, although it should be much faster (and work with databases as well as files). At the moment it creates a tree out of the RDF file that Saxon can understand, so you get all the functionality. Much credit goes to Norm Walsh here for his RDFTwig which does something similar. I think it’s worth cloning the XPath syntax though, hopefully to persuade XSLT peple that RDF is actually very sensible. Unless it confuses them.

GPS and P800

Some trial GPS code works with my P800 and GlobalSat bluetooth GPS. Ish. Nice 🙂
so…I wonder how much it will be to buy and whether I can get my data back. And whether it can be integrated with, say, the image app on the P800. The developer seems pretty responsive, so maybe I’ll ask.

William Loughborough: better than anything :)

William and Aaron in 2001

William Loughborough emailed me today and said that the keyboardist of a jazz group, Duenna had emailed him asking for the lyrics of “Better Than Anything”, and he thought we should go check them out, as they were playing at Le Chateau in Bristol. Anyway, so we went, and I was braver than normal and went and told them the story and they were astonished and pleased – “did one of you email William Loughborough today?” “how did you know that?!”
And they were quite good…so hopefully William will let them have the lyrics. I can’t think of many people except him whose influence stretches so far away…

readin’

When it was too hot to do anything else: Top 10 by Alan Moore et al (who are the police when everyone’s a superhero? very addictive – thanks Matt), Harry Potter 4,5 (5 better than 4 for sure), bits of Robot (Alan Turing used to live near my parents 😉 and Disciplined Minds; Motherless Brooklyn (very funny scenes of Tourettes from the sufferer’s point of view) and the Best Democracy Money can Buy by Greg Palast (get riled really quickly. Really quickly…and stay riled). Also the Flanders Panel and Web Site Story (on a delayed flight. The former has some neat stuff about reverse chess. I think I’d be better at reverse chess than ordinary chess, since I always felt sorry for people I beat. Not that there were very many).