Updated: 3/4/2003; 3:19:20 PM.
Patrick Chanezon's Radio Weblog
P@'s links, comments and thoughts
        

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Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Commentary article in Nature about the role of pictures in science. [Jon Schull's Weblog]


Commentary article in Nature about the role of pictures in science. [Jon Schull's Weblog]

This echoes Stephen Wolfram's numerous quotes about how creating Mathematica was what made it possible for him to make the discoveries in A New Kind Of Science.


5:35:14 PM Google It!      comment []

How to Keep Your Job: Pgragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas explains you how to take care of yourself


How to Keep Your Job a presentation by Dave Thomas, one of the The Pragmatic Programmer author (I loved that book) gives some good advice about how to take care of yourself as a programmer: neither your government nor your company will do it for you.

I liked this quote:

“The half-life of engineering knowledge, the time it takes for something to become obsolete, is from 7 to 2.5 years”
William Wulf, President, ? National Academy of Engineering

This figure seems in line with my own experience.

And the SUNW stock chart about the danger of reliance on a company at slide 10 made me laugh a lot: I work for Sun :-)


5:31:39 PM Google It!      comment []

Microsoft: Open source threatens our business model [InfoWorld: Top News]


Microsoft: Open source threatens our business model [InfoWorld: Top News]
5:12:00 PM Google It!      comment []

In Radio, making Jon Udell's channelroll macro a little bit more resilient to dummy data


Since I've discovered Jon Udell's excellent channelroll macro last year, I never managed to make it work on my Radio instance. I kept receiving a message about channeltitle not being defined. I've had no time to debug it to determine the cause of the problem.

Today I finally tackled it and found it after 2 hours of trial and errors, discovering UserTalk while doing it.

The roor cause was not in Jon's macro but in my subscription data: in my early discovery of the News reader I had subscribed to http://www.soapware.org/discuss/reader$4.opml, because it had an orange XML icon, like the RSS feeds usually have.

But this dummy is an OPML file, not an RSS feed !

Thus in my aggregatorData.services table, adr^.compilation for this entry had a format unknown, and no channeltitle and no channellink elements.

The Radio subscription page is foolproofed against this kind of problems, because the feed does not show up in my Radio subscription page.

Looking at the code that is called in radiowwwsystempagessubscriptions.txt, radio.html.viewSubscriptions, it is:

if sizeof (adr^.compilation) > 0 {
 local (title = adr^.compilation.channeltitle);
 local (channeldescription = "", channellink = "");
 if defined (adr^.compilation.channeldescription) {
  channeldescription = radio.string.decodeEntities (adr^.compilation.channeldescription)};
 if defined (adr^.compilation.channellink) {
  channellink = adr^.compilation.channellink};

Jon's macro just doesn't perform these checks and it failed when adr^.compilation.channeltitle was not defined.

I modified Jon's macro a little to add these checks and finally got it running.

I also added a counter for the number of channels in the channelrooll, something I wanted to know since a while.

It's not perfect code, I have no time to delve further in UserTalk, but it may help those who got the same problerm I met.

Thanks Jon for this neat little tool. I had no expectations about it beign completely foolproof. This little addendum will help those who have the same problem I encountered, and in doing it I learnt a few things about Radio's underlying implementation.

on subs()
{
 local (t);
 local(numberOfFeeds = 0);
 new (tableType, @t);
 for adr in (@aggregatorData.services)
  {
      if defined (adr^) {
        if defined (adr^.compilation) {
          local(title = "problem");
          local(channelUrl = "problem");
            if defined (adr^.compilation.channeltitle) {
              title = adr^.compilation.channeltitle;
            };
            if defined (adr^.compilation.channellink) {
              channelUrl = adr^.compilation.channellink;
            };
            numberOfFeeds++;
              local(rssUrl = nameOf(adr^));
              local (l);
              new (listType, @l);
              l[0] = channelUrl;
              l[0] = rssUrl;
              t[title] = l;
        };
      };
  };
 target.set(@t);
 table.sortBy("Name");
 target.clear();
 local(s = "<p class='realsmall'>currently subscribed to " + numberOfFeeds + " feeds:</p>");
 for adr in (@t)
  {
  local(title = string.replace(nameOf(adr^),"&apos;","&#39;"));
  local(l = adr^);
  local(channelUrl = l[1]);
  local(rssUrl = l[2]);
  s = s + "<p class='realsmall'><a href='http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=" + string.urlEncode(rssUrl) + "'><img border='0' src='http://radio.weblogs.com/0105673/images/tinyCoffeCup.jpg' alt='Radio UserLand users: click to subscribe. Other folks: use the RSS link to acquire this channel.'></a> <a href='" + channelUrl + "'>" + title + "</a> (<a href='" + rssUrl + "'>rss</a>)</p>";
  };
 s = s + "<p class='realsmall'>Here's <a href='http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/02/24.html#a88'>how this works</a>.</p>";
 return (s);
}


3:39:37 PM Google It!      comment []

OntoWeb web site is really half baked


I tried to register to the OntoWeb Portal described in  Use Cases and Requirements for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) 1.0 and got this Zope error page.

Among other quirks: The news page does not give any date for the items, and there's no RSS feed for the News.

Not very appealing ! I wonder why they list such an unfinished demo in the use case draft ? This does not add any credence to the semweb initiative and invites the usual criticism that it is an accademic unpractical effort.

At least they should state on the main web site page that this is an unfinished not fully functional site.

Zope Error

Zope has encountered an error while publishing this resource.

Error Type: AttributeError
Error Value: setMemberProperties


Troubleshooting Suggestions

  • The URL may be incorrect.
  • The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
  • A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

For more detailed information about the error, please refer to the HTML source for this page.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.

Traceback (innermost last): File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Products/Hotfix_2002-04-15/__init__.py, line 51, in publish_module File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 114, in publish File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 159, in zpublisher_exception_hook (Object: OntoWeb) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 98, in publish File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/mapply.py, line 88, in mapply (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 39, in call_object (Object: register) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/FSPythonScript.py, line 90, in __call__ (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Shared/DC/Scripts/Bindings.py, line 252, in __call__ (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Shared/DC/Scripts/Bindings.py, line 283, in _bindAndExec (Object: register) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/FSPythonScript.py, line 124, in _exec (Object: register) (Info: ({'script': <FSPythonScript instance at 92c3400>, 'context': <CMFSite instance at 9db7eb8>, 'container': <CMFSite instance at 9db7eb8>, 'traverse_subpath': []}, ('password', 'confirm'), {}, ('password', 'confirm'))) File Script (Python), line 10, in register File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/RegistrationTool.py, line 130, in addMember (Object: portal_registration) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/MembershipTool.py, line 407, in addMember (Object: portal_membership) AttributeError: (see above)
11:34:39 AM Google It!      comment []


OWL Use Cases and Requirements Published. 4 February 2003: The Web Ontology Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) 1.0. The draft defines "ontology." It outlines six use cases, design goals, requirements and objectives for a language which can describe the semantics of classes and properties used in Web documents. Read about the W3C Semantic Web Activity. (News archive) [World Wide Web Consortium]

It is good that W3C documents these use cases, especially with links to examples: this will make it easier for manager types in tech organizations to understand the value of the Semweb standardization effort, and what it could bring to their products if they adopt it today.

Most relevant to my current main professional area of interest:

2.1 Web portal

...

One example of an ontology based portal is OntoWeb. This portal serves the academic and industry community that is interested in ontology research. Another example of a portal that uses Semantic Web technologies and could benefit from an ontology language is The Open Directory Project; a large, comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. RDF dumps of the Open Directory database are available for download

 


11:15:14 AM      comment []

SVG Open 2003: Call for Papers and Early Bird Registration [World Wide Web Consortium]


SVG Open 2003: Call for Papers and Early Bird Registration. 3 February 2003: Early bird registration has started for SVG Open 2003, to be held in Vancouver, Canada on 15-18 July 2003, with additional half-day workshops and tutorials on 13-14 July. Co-sponsored by W3C, the SVG Open conference series is the premier forum for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) developers to share ideas, examples and implementations. The call for papers is open through 28 February. (News archive) [World Wide Web Consortium]
11:00:57 AM Google It!      comment []

Finance sector throws arms around blogging [Marc's Voice]


Finance sector throws arms around blogging. [Marc's Voice]
10:54:33 AM Google It!      comment []

Barlow and the Dead benefited from taping


Barlow and the Dead benefited from taping.

interviews. Mother Jones interviews John Perry Barlow. [JD's New Media Musings]

[Marc's Voice]
10:53:29 AM Google It!      comment []

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