Daniel’s Blog

I’ve got into using Google Health and Livestrong.com… both are good services and both are interlinked (in terms of sharing medical profiles). It’s quite useful using these systems as they provide some very useful information on the medication that I take and the lifelong disease which I suffer from (Dilated Cardiomyopathy). Just look at this nice little “Health Byte” movie provided by Livestrong.com:

cardiomyopathy_health_byte — powered by https://www.livestrong.com

The only downside is that it’s doesn’t expose Linked Data, there would be a lot of benefit to interlinking these services with Linked Data services such as DBpedia. Maybe in the near future.

I am quite irritated/upset….

I just had a phone call from the BBC, they are recording at about 5:30pm today (it is 4:35pm as I write this) for Newsnight tonight. They will be doing a piece on Data Sharing and the Semantic Web, and they were looking for an expert to come into the studio and be interviewed…. because I live in Bristol it would have taken me at least 2 hours to get there. So I’ve missed out on that one, it would have been fantastic to go on a National/International BBC 2 show!!

Oh well. Guy’s at the BBC (or any other TV/Radio Production Company): if you’d like me to come in for a chat, then I am more than happy to do so. I live in Bristol, but I am happy to travel elsewhere, you’ll have to let me know in advance though. Many thanks to the guy that called me.

I can’t believe that just happened…

I haven’t been posting much lately, and its partly due to figuring out how to write something in a certain way (aka linguistic overload) and partly because I am really really irritated at Technology! I get so annoyed that I can’t look at some information in a certain way, and so annoyed that I can’t express something in my terminology and then have my laptop rearrange it into a way which is good for everybody. I suspect that there will be a way of solving this someday, probably involving Linked Data or the cool but wacky idea of Universal Network Language (likened to Esperanto but for Networks by Tom Morris). I get these irritations quite a lot, especially over the past year and a half… I keep thinking “well, maybe its a good sign”.

Just a quick note to all the Americans… Happy Independence Day!

Don’t just celebrate, but also think about some of the wonderful people who contributed to the independence:

• George Washington
• Benjamin Franklin
• Joseph Hewes
• William Ellery
• and the many others…

Have a good day.

From Daniel

(in Bristol, part of England)

Computer Weekly Blog Awards Nominations are over, and I have now been shortlisted!!!! (You may have noticed that I now have a different badge on my blog site (on the right hand sidebar)).

You can now vote for me to win!

How to vote for me:

Click on the link in the badge on my blog page, or click on the following link: “Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 08”

Scroll down to the bottom of the page that loads up, and you will see some drop down menus. Where you see the “Programming and Technical blogs” category and select “Daniel’s Blog by Daniel Lewis“from the drop down menu.

Vote in any other category for whoever, and then click “SUBMIT”, and your vote will be counted.

Thank you ever so much for voting. If someone else wins in the category then well done to them.

Voting is open from the 30th June 2008 until the 31st July 2008. Winners will be announced in August (2008) on the Computer Weekly Website and in an August edition of Computer Weekly.

Recently, various people keep telling me:

Listen to your body

The general idea is: If I need to sleep then I should sleep If I need to eat then I should eat. If I need to go for a walk then I should go for a walk. This kind of saying is also taught in Reiki, Taoism, Buddhism and all kinds of other spiritual paths, and we have the (UK) government telling us to eat at least 5 pieces of fruit per day ( the 5 a day campaign ), keep warm ( keep warm campaign ), keep clean, don’t drink too much ( drinkaware campaign ), don’t gamble ( gambleaware campaign )

It is incredibly hard to do this in a modern age full of demands from all over the place… but it is incredibly important to achieve some kind of balance between being a “servant of humanity” (e.g. loving kindness to other people, hard working for organisations) and being a “servant of ones own body” (e.g. get enough relaxation, sleep, food, drink, spirituality, learning and exercise).

Some of you already know, but for those who don’t know.. I am now back from my holiday in Edinburgh.

It was a very nice holiday, we had a very relaxing time and acted quite touristy.

Places we went to see:

• St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral (A Scottish Episcopal Cathedral)
• Rosslyn Chapel (A Scottish Episcopal Parish Church, but better known globally for its supposed links to masonry popularised by books such as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code)
• St Johns Church (A Scottish Episcopal Church in the centre of Edinburgh, it has really really lovely stained glass windows)
• St Giles Cathedral (A Church of Scotland Cathedral. The café sells good lunch for good prices)
• Freemasons’ Hall (Grand Lodge of Scotland)
• Royal Mile (from Castle to the Holyrood Abbey)

We did, of course, see Edinburgh Castle… except we didn’t go in because we didn’t see the point in paying about £25 in total to have a look inside. We really didn’t mind, we looked around the Castle Shop instead.

We didn’t take many photos, but I am sure we’ll upload them soon.

Back to home and work

During my time in Edinburgh, I didn’t check any of my emails or web feeds. This was because I just wanted to get away from it all… and I succeeded. Anyways, I checked it all this morning. 188 non-auto-archived non-spam emails (of which about 30 had some kind of interest) and 278 spam emails in my personal email box… and about 38 in my work email box (a couple of which were spam). I’ve also been trawling through the various web, semantic web, social web, artificial intelligence and other web feeds that I subscribe to. Theres a lot of stuff to catch up on, but I’m getting through it!

A note on Rosslyn Chapel

Thank’s to the trip to Edinburgh I have a *signed* copy of Robert Cooper’s “The Rosslyn Hoax?“. It is an awesome book, written to bust all the myths about Scottish Freemasonry, Knights Templar and their (often suggested) relationship with Rosslyn Chapel, the Kirkwall Scroll and the Sinclair family. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the subject!

Beki and I will be going on holiday to Edinburgh from late tomorrow (10th June 2008) evening until the 18th June 2008. Which means that we’ll both be a bit “out of the (information and communication) loop” over the next week.

It will be nice to have a proper bit of time off… Moving from one city to another has been quite stressful, but very much worth it. Plus I’ve had to work since day one of moving in. Although, I did have a week off last month, but even that week involved a lot of packing up of my stuff and a lot of sorting out of my old place. So it really will be nice to have a holiday where Beki and I can just relax and enjoy the sites available in and around Edinburgh without having to worry about any work or home issues.

We’ll be visiting various places, hopefully we’ll get a chance to visit Rosslyn Chapel and St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. If anyone has suggestions about where we should definitely visit while in Edinburgh, then theres a comment box on the blog post page

Just a very quick blog post to say…

I am pleased to announce that Beki and I will be at Greenbelt Festival this year. It is (probably) the UK’s biggest Christian festival, with lots of music, services and mini-events. It is happening at the end of August (it will be August Bank Holiday weekend).

I think a few people from both my church and Beki’s church will be attending as well, but if you read this blog, will be attending and (with the remote possibility) see me then please do say hello

I hoped to have a mini reports done day-by-day, but a restricted Internet service at my hotel and the venue meant that I wasn’t as able to as I wanted. So here it is, a bigger report. I’ll do it in an interview style.

What was XTech 2008 generally about?

XTech 2008 was about “The Web on the move”. It brought together innovators, researchers, developers and entrepreneurs to talk about the current state of the web, how its evolving and where its going in the future.

General Topics included:

• People being social on the Web… aka the “Social Web“
• Client Side development, particularly JavaScript/AJAX
• Semantic Web: Linked Data, FOAF, Microformats, RDFa, Ontologies, New Platforms from various businesses
• DataPortability: APML, FOAF, SIOC, XMPP

Oh! That sounds awesome, I wish I was there. When and where was it?

It was between 6th and 9th of May 2008, at the Radisson SAS Royal hotel in Dublin, Ireland. It was a nice looking hotel, although the food was quite poor. I didn’t stay in that hotel, I was in a hotel next to Christ Church Cathedral which was only a few blocks away from the event.

OK, so what were the highlights of the event for you?

Discovering jQuery in one of the first tutorials, a JavaScript library which is perfect for Unobtrusive JavaScript (which means that the JavaScript is only an enhancement to interaction on the page, and the page is still usable if you have JavaScript turned off). I really wish I had more time to play with it. It is, however, just a page manipulation library (although there are plugins available for it)…. I suggest that you check out OpenLink AJAX Toolkit (OAT) if you want eye-candy as well as page manipulation, it would be interesting to compare OAT and jQuery one day in terms of feature set and compatibility with browsers…. although theres nothing stopping you from using them with each other.

Simon Wardley talked about “why open matters“, he had hundreds of slides which he managed to get through in time. It was the best presentation that I have ever seen.

Hearing from Rattle Research about their work with the BBC to provide contextually relevant content, and doing so by using information provided by DBpedia and other Linked Data Sources. This was in their presentation “Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives“.

The “Building the Real Time Web” was great also, it was supposed to be by Blaine Cook but he couldn’t make it to the event so a few people (from Yahoo Brickhouse and Dopplr) made a quick presentation in the form of a discussion. It was a very innovative discussion which talked about APIs and the XMPP/Jabber protocol.

Hearing about the wonderful projects at the BBC where they are building Semantic Web / Linked Data platforms. Two things they are doing are:

• Putting all of their TV and Radio programme information on the Linked Data Web.
• Using the programme information, some clever attention profiling and coupling that with XMPP to send you messages of programmes which you might like a certain period of time before they start.

The UK Government also have some interesting Semantic Web based platforms that they are building, including turning the London Gazette into an RDFa based site.

And finally Uldis did a great job talking about how FOAF and SIOC fit into DataPortability ideals, which I mentioned briefly in my talk also.

How did your talk go?

It went well, I had a few questions and comments after. My talk “Linked Data Deployment” was chaired by Brian Suda of TM Software and Microformats.org…. which was interesting because my talk was essentially on how to exploit HTTP procedures like Content Negotiation and URL Rewriting to provide Linked Data… which clears up network mess of providing huge documents of HTML with RDFa or Microformats because you can provide HTML and RDF at the same location and provide it depending on the requested MIME-Type.

I think it went well, even though I was incredibly nervous because of this being my attendance and talk at a real conference, and the first time I had been to Ireland, and the first time I had been on a plane without anybody else that I had known… so the whole event was a completely new situation for me!

Did you meet any interesting people?

Of course. Just to name a few:

• Ian Forrester is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, he is from BBC Backstage.
• Patrick and a few of the other guys in the various technology depts at the BBC.
• Richard from lastminute.com labs
• Uldis Boj?rs from DERI
• Aral Balkan
• Brian Matthews of e-Science at STFC (who also guest lectures at my old university: Oxford Brookes University)
• Simon Wardley

Also saw a few people I have met before, including Dave Beckett, Andrew Walkinshaw, Keith Alexander and Ian Davis.

And the event overall?

Was very much a success, lots of interesting topics and it certainly got people talking about possibilities. I would definitely consider going again in the future.

How about Dublin?

I managed to get the change to look around Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, which is incredibly beautiful (I took some pictures of the cathedral).

If you ever go to Dublin, then I highly recommend that you go visit the ISKON restaurant called Govindas, very good vegetarian food all set out in a canteen style, not too expensive either. I also went to another vegetarian restaurant in Dublin called Juice, that was very good and a little ‘posher’ than Govindas. Other than that, it was quite hard to find vegetarian food in Dublin.

I had a good look around the Temple Bar area, which I consider to be the student central. Its effectively the oldest part of the city.

It’s a lovely city, and I’d love to visit Dublin again…. maybe as a holiday instead of on business.