A Semantic Web shoebox – annotating photos with RSS and RDF
January 31st, 2003 | Published in photos, rdf, wordnet, xml
I’ve had a proposal for a paper on RDF and annotating photos accepted for XML Europe 2003. Yay! Here’s what I submitted:
Archive for 2003
Template for Java projects
January 24th, 2003 | Published in java
Every time I start a new java project, no matter what size, the first thing I do is go hunting through my java directories looking for one to use as a template. Over time I’ve gathered some pretty useful ant targets and settled on a fairly rational directory structure. Today I got round to building a skeleton set of directories and files that I can reuse in the future. Here’s a tarball of the results.
Cron is my TiVo
January 20th, 2003 | Published in hardware, linux
One thing I’d like to do with a silent PC is make a homebrew TiVo-alike. Well, I would if I watched any TV. Which I don’t. But still, the idea interests me beyond any use I’d actually make of it. Anyway…
In the past, this idea has been beyond my means since recording analogue TV to MPEG on a hard disk in realtime requires a great deal of CPU (or dedicated encoder hardware). The general availability of digital TV in the UK now means that the MPEG encoding is already done for you by the broadcasters; you just need a way to get it out of the airwaves or cables and into a PC. Happily, there’s now a range of cheap digital WinTV cards for cable, terrestrial and satellite. I’ve been checking out a NOVA-t (terrestrial) card on a linux box this week.
Triplequerying CPAN implementation
January 15th, 2003 | Published in perl, rdf, sql
Today I discovered that a new module, Triplestore.pm, has appeared on CPAN. To my surprise, my triplequerying algorithm is cited at the end of the documentation. Looking through the code, it’s not directly built on the sample code I provided. The implementation looks way cleaner, and has many more features beyond querying. I’m overjoyed to have had some part in this.
Photo-annotating bot
January 9th, 2003 | Published in bots, java, photos, rdf, rest
A background project for a while has been to write a bot to help me annotate the fairly large number of pictures I post to picdiary (1496 at the last count). Creating a document of RSS-based metadata is a slightly cumbersome text-editor job every time I post a new set of pics.
Making a silent, tiny, diskless PC
January 7th, 2003 | Published in hardware, linux
For a while I’ve wanted a home PC that I can leave on all the time without the noise bugging me – I’ve become quite sensitive to machine noise over years of working with computers. I’d use it to play MP3s off my network, then I’d think up other projects. It wouldn’t need a monitor or a keyboard. It would just sit attached to the network, appliance-style, in the manner of a slimp3 but with the flexibility of a full linux system. Now the off-the-shelf hardware I need to make such a thing is available.
Latest from Picdiary
January 3rd, 2003 | Published in perl, photos, rdf, rss
New in the right-hand sidebar on the site front page is a little lineup of the 3 latest pictures from picdiary, my photos website. This is created by parsing the RDF in the latest photo collection RSS feed and extracting rss:title, dc:date and foaf:thumbnail information via an MT plugin (src).
A Java utility class for the Wordnet namespace
January 2nd, 2003 | Published in java, rdf, wordnet
To support the work I’ve been doing with Wordnet and RDF, I wrote a utility Java class to handle URIs from the Wordnet ontology for RDF devised by Dan Brickley.
MAC-address logging/blocking for linux iptables
January 2nd, 2003 | Published in hardware, linux, wireless
Here’s a little script I wrote that checks incoming wireless requests for a known MAC address. I’ve been using it on my Linux gateway/router/wireless-bridge.
If it doesn’t know you, it transparent-proxies all your outgoing port 80 traffic to the local webserver’s port 81, where you could put a redirect to a polite message or something.