Tom Morris

I've put up opmltools.zip - it's two scripts. One to backup stuff from your hosting.opml.org account, and the other to delete everything on your hosting.opml.org accont. Be sure to run the former before the latter. The backup script isn't particularly new or anything - coriHacks did it before me, but coriHacks can be a bit messy, since the OPML Editor may start trying to delete or upload your files.

It's designed for Unix OSes (Linux, OS X etc.) and you need to have a reasonably recent version of Python (with xmlrpclib), and you need to have curl installed for backup (OS X has it).

If you use Mike Kaply's excellent Operator plugin, I have created Skype.js - it takes hCards that contain telephone numbers and lets you dial them from Firefox by selecting the Contacts tab, choosing the person and then choosing Call with Skype.

It supports multiple phone numbers per hCard, and will show you the 'type' (eg. "cell", "home", "work" etc.).

To install Skype.js, download it to your hard drive, then choose "Options", then "User Scripts", then "Add". Choose the file from your hard drive, and add it. You can then delete the downloaded file.

I've made a modified version called Gizmo.js which does the same thing for the Gizmo Project VOIP client. Install it in the same way.

Today, I attended BarCamp Cambridge - or BarCamb. It was pretty good. One track with about ten presentations. The chairs were a bit hard, but otherwise it was a great event.

I gave a talk about microformats, the Semantic Web and GetSemantic, plus some of the things we are working on - non-human profiles and GenderHack. Of course, the guiding philosophy behind both is that we need to be less serious on the Web. A design principle for the next web: Silliness is Good. We'll get around to building the Semantic Web once we've finished smoking this blunt and playing this Tower Defense flash game.

There were some great talks - bioformats is a fantastic idea, and AlertMe could be the UK version of Ambient Devices (based in Cambridge's Massachusetts namesake) in turning your house in to a gadget laden ambient information router thing. The site promotes a very strong security angle, but there are a ton of other interesting uses for the technology they are building. There was some other cool hardware stuff too like the guys who were building thin clients for the developing world, so that you can have multi-user terminals based on Ubuntu. Hardware is the new software, or something.

A mental thread started today which still needs work on whether the university is dead (in the Steve Gillmor sense of the word of having lost it's unique position of value). Like a decayed tooth, there is something quite rotten in the modern university system. On the one hand, we have universities conducting brilliant work - at the venue for today's BarCamb was the laboratory in which a significant chunk of the human genome project was worked on (the result - in printed form - looks only a fraction less readable than the average Perl script). But, science departments are closing because they cannot get students for undergraduate study. Schools are neglecting their duty to prepare educated citizens, with courses outside of the ICT / business studies "sit in front of a screen and push the buttons we tell you to press" mould are dropping like flies. Try studying Computing at school. Or Philosophy. You'll find it quite difficult.

Humanities courses are leaving students even less understanding of their subject. Having only been required to read one Platonic dialogue during three years on a philosophy course, I am currently autodidactically reading through the whole lot. Combine this with tuition fees standing at £3,200 a year.

I'm already seeing programmers grabbing a copy of Dive into Python or PickAxe, and spending the three years they'd spend slaving away at Java finishing school teaching themselves.

I have a funny feeling that in these postmodern times, BarCamp as undergraduate humanities training may turn out better people than universities are. Something to ponder. I was going to talk about this, but it's a bit too rough and unfinished even for BarCamp.

Austin Cline: According to Chuck Norris, then, it's apparently unnecessary that someone teaching about the Bible have "appropriate academic qualifications" or any training on "legal and constitutional issues" related to such classes. It's unnecessary to use texts that are rigorous or scholarly. It's unnecessary to protect the religious freedom of students. It's unnecessary that classes be monitored to ensure that academic and legal standards are being upheld. It's unnecessary for schools to have the choice to offer such classes."

Not only is Chuck Norris a raving idiot, he's a lying propagandist too. Shawn Wilkinson has the juice on why. Who needs God when you've got the Google Cache?

The headline for this article: Hips extended to three-bed homes is quite incomprehensible, and quite amusing for those of us not blessed with knowledge of British property regulations.

The BBC seem to have an in-house style of not capitalizing letters in abbreviations (I cannot confirm this since their style guide doesn't seem to be online). The above article would suggest that people's hips were somehow being extended, but instead the article is about the Home Information Pack Scheme - HIPS, and how the scheme is being applied to more property transactions.

The BBC has a history of doing this with abbreviations and acronyms which really ought to be capitalized. We don't write "Usa", we write "USA". We don't write "Vat", we write "VAT". "DVD" not "Dvd". But why, when it comes to government practice to the BBC insist on 'word-izing' them. ASBO becomes 'Asbo'?

You cannot even argue - as some have - that it's the difference between an acronym and an initialism based on pronunciation. VAT is pronounced both as separate letters and like the word "vat". That is capitalised (rightly) even though the BBC should write it as Vat to be consistent with their barmy style. The same is true for CAD, DOM (admittedly, the BBC do not discuss the Document Object Model on their news site too often), DOS, EULA (here the BBC reporter notes that people pronounce it as to rhyme with "fool-ya"!), FIFO, FLAC, GIMP, GUI (often pronounced "gooey"), JPEG ("jaypeg"), LAN, NAT and many more.

The trend in British publishing towards using lower-case for all acronyms except initialisms and other exceptions is barmy. It leads to unreadable copy and we should stop it now. We don't have to get to the situation that the N.Y.T. is in where every single acronym is water-bombed with punctuation (I mean, W.T.F.?), but when you cannot easily distinguish a government procedure for house-selling from a body part in a news headline, you know there is a problem. Upper case letters give important context for the reader, and help them distinguish between words and abbreviations. It's not like there is a shortage of capital letters. The BBC need to find their shift keys.

For a while, I've been intending to write about Hans-Georg Gadamer, and never quite getting round to it. I've started more than a few articles about the man, but today realised that the only way I will ever publish anything about Gadamer is through my blog. I have had difficulty putting thoughts to paper. I hope that my blog will have more transience, and have more opportunity for conversation about the late Professor Gadamer's work. An ongoing conversation is, of course, more interesting than a dead article - and hopefully publishing my thoughts will purify them in a way that my notebook cannot.

Gadamer is an interesting 'character' - if that word is appropriate to describe a philosopher. I don't want to provide a cartoon version. There are good biographical accounts out there. Start with Wikipedia and then work up to Grondin's biography.

When I was first introduced to Gadamer's work, I was sceptical. It looked like nothing but another chapter in the ostentatious pomp that is an unfortunately large swathe of "Continental philosophy". From this early introduction, I kept 'accidentally' finding myself working on Gadamer's writings again and again. Essay after essay. And it became clearer and clearer, although it is unlikely to ever completely click inside my head. Like a lot of good things, it takes a long time to appreciate it properly.

Gadamer's prose is not at all bad. He grasps clarity more often than a lot of philosophers, and his style even occasionally soars. Gadamer's magnum opus (and it is certainly not cheesy to say that) is his 1960 book, Truth and Method. It deals with the broad subject of how we understand language, and how we interpret. Gadamer's philosophical project is a lot more conservative than many other modern philosophers - although a broad subject, he does not engage in the sort of free-flowing radicalism that we have seen from some left-wing philosophers in the last fifty years. There are few of the sort of self-referential language games that we see in his peers. This gives it a certain attractiveness in English, where tricksy language is not nearly as welcome.

Where shall we start? How about what it is to do philosophy, or to be a humanist. Gadamer here seems to pine for a previous generation of humanism. Gadamer tries to reintroduce us to some concepts that can seem quite alien to modern ears - the concept of Geist, on which Hegel's famous Phenomenology is a study of, is one of these. Geist is a word that does not translate to English well, and can mean both a 'spirit' or 'ghostly' type presence, but also can signify 'mind', and more broadly 'motivation' or 'drive'. Gadamer claims to criticise the natural sciences (the Naturewissenschaft) for an overreliance on the inferential method. The problem with inference, then, is that it lets us say a lot of interesting things about large groups of people, but does not help us say interesting things about individual things - specifically work by individual human beings. There is a particular, idealistic perspective that the concept of Geist can give us. You don't have to agree with this concept, but to drink it in and try to understand it is potentially a useful way to understand the path ahead.

Two of the skills that the humanist must have are an appreciation of culture and the skill of judgment. Judgment is the more difficult of these to fully comprehend, and it's one which we shall return in the future as we hop around inside Gadamer's work. Here, though, in the prefaratory remarks, a short remark from Gadamer will hopefully set the tone. Judgment, Gadamer writes, "cannot be taught in the abstract but only practiced from case to case" (p. 27). Again, we have something interesting going on here. There is some distance to be travelled here, and we shall move on to it soon. As for culture, this is another interesting point. Gadamer writes of culture as a process of formation, but not a universal one. It is necessarily bound to the context of time, and is a similarly developing trait to judgment.

We shall go on from here in the future. The process of blogging about Gadamer is to try and straighten my thoughts out about his work. They will not be at all like academic essays, nor like blog entries to any real extent, but kind of meandering personal notes. No guarantee is placed on their accuracy or on them being an accurate reflection of the work of Gadamer. They are an exploration. Hopefully, I shall have another chapter up soon.

Right, I'm done. You can go back to your Twittery, Web 2.0, hyper-spherical thingy now.

Following a conversation with Tantek and Kevin Marks on IRC, I have patched the OPML Editor (and, by extension, Frontier) to produce XHTML with embedded XOXO (the outline microformat) using the "View in Browser" function in the File menu.

To install xoxofrontier, you can get the code here. It contains three files - a README, and then two 'fstc' formatted patch files - xoxo-1.fstc and xoxo-2.fstc. Open them in that order and it should patch the code in your OPML Editor. You may want to just restart OPML after doing so in case they don't compile or something. It's licensed under the GPL (whichever version is used by the existing code), so if you are compiling a distribution of Frontier, feel free to include it.

For future reference, the code that is changed is: system.verbs.builtins.Frontier.tools.data.windowTypes.outlinerFile.saveAsHtml and system.verbs.builtins.html.getOutlineHtml

I have marked up my changes using comments and clock.timestamp().

All the usual stuff - no guarantees that it'll work, use at your own risk. Have fun XOXOing.

Today, I ran across this post about social networking sites and gender identity, which is pointing to a campaign on MySpace to make the gender option more open and fluid so that people who fall out of the male/female dichotomy can feel welcome and utilise the site without having to 'hack' the metadata fields. This applies to a lot of sites and services, and it's something we ought to think about.

I think this kind of thing is important. It really is a choice between whether the Web is going to be put together by programmers or by users. And it's one of the reasons why I think the Semantic Web is important - because it allows the freedom for communities of people to say "I disagree with all your presuppositions, I'm going to chuck them all away and start afresh". In other words, in using URIs for extensibility, you decouple social policy from technology, because anyone else can grab another URI and start using that.

The example I always use is marriage. If you don't like the way that an ontology defines 'marriage', you can simply create a new one - pulling in the bits you like from others and just patching over the bits you don't like. That way, SouthernBaptist.rdf can define marriage as being between one man and one woman only, while TolerantLiberal.rdf can define it as "just a word that some people use backed up by a contract that the government can change at any time without any forewarning" (my personal definition of marriage). If you don't like either of these, you are only a short way away from encoding your values into the Semantic Web.

Let me point out another great aspect of FOAF - the gender property. It is a string literal. It gives two predefined strings "male" and "female", but allows you to put in other strings also. It does have a cardinality of one (the specification says so, I'm not sure whether that's implemented in any machine-readable code though), meaning that you can only specify one gender property for each Person or Agent. This is a bit limiting, as I could foresee people who may wish to list, say, "male" and "transsexual" or some other kind of category.

I'd like to invite anyone who cares about gender on the Semantic Web to make themselves known. I did a quick check on Swoogle, and there's nothing really too close to what we need, which is a way for people whose categorisation with regards to sex, gender or sexuality is not a straightforward male or female. Who's up for GenderHack - a fun new GetSemantic project where we work out the details? GenderHack would put together a list of general guidelines for programmers, standards-setting individuals and groups, and web application designers on setting policies relating to gender, sex and relationships, as well as privacy and social concerns.

It's up and going - see the wiki page.

If I were to tell you that since most people don't vote for third-party and independent candidates (or rather, candidates that are not from one of the two main parties) in the United States presidential election and, as a result, the Federal Election Commission or other government agencies dedicated to running elections had decided to block them from running, you would be somewhat outraged. This is practically, if not intentionally, the case with the complex situation over ballot access in the United States. Nobody really thinks it's a good idea. At heart, we have a sort of Darwinian-democratic idea that if someone wants to run for President, it should be a level playing field. If that means Bob Smith from Nowhere, Iowa, goes on the ticket next to big-name politicians like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, so be it. The price of democracy (and capitalism) is that there's never any deficit in choices.

In the adoption of "pave the cowpaths", a difficult philosophical position has been taken by certain people involved in standards design with which I have to strongly disagree. It mirrors quite closely the situation with ballot access.

The "pave the cowpaths" philosophy can be a good thing - if one realises it's limitations. If there are no existing standards, and it's a choice between a path which a lot of people are using and a path which nobody is using, then it's definitely a good idea to pave the one which most people are using. This can be through the official process of an organization like the W3C or the IETF, or perhaps through an unofficial but well-respected process like microformats.

But there are situations where you are not making a choice between two otherwise uncharted routes. If you have a standard already in place, you have to make decisions as to whether to deprecate features. Here, pave the cowpaths has some use, but it needs to be held in balance with other design philosophies. If the continuation of a feature or design pattern will dramatically increase the value for the end user, that's a good point. If the deprecation of a feature or design pattern will make the lives of users better, that's also a point in it's favour. If something is actively causing harm to the user's experience, then perhaps it should be dropped.

If there is already a paved highway there, and users have chosen not to start using it, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to dig it up. It may be a perfectly good road, and all that is needed is for some advocacy and good design. The example the usability people bring up is MP3 players. The early MP3 players like the Diamond Rio back in the strange old years of MP3.com and so on, were not that usable or popular. Eventually the iPod came along, and, well, we all know the story. Thankfully, this potential cowpath was not shut off, and the market was free to come up with more innovative products. One of the most boisterous and clumsy standards body in the world - the U.S. legal system - could have shut down this particular cowpath before it happened.

Another example is CSS. From the time when CSS was first touted and the initial standards began to be drafted, there was a long way before it finally became popular. It would have been quite easy for those in charge of the process to say "Meh, nothing's really happening with this CSS thing, so let's just shut it down now". Thankfully, they persisted. It's not all the way there yet - there are still browser implementation issues and crazy, irritating bugs - not to mention sanity-deprived teachers who, well, penalize students for using web standards. If you went back to 1998 and paved the cowpaths, you would have paved nested tables. If that which is popular is, by definition, good then we don't need to work for standards. If a strong version of "pave the cowpaths" is what you work to, then you should be advocating shutting down WaSP, SpreadFirefox and any other organisation or effort to advocate for making the Web better. I mean, the cows have chosen FONT tags, inaccessiblity and Internet Explorer 6, so why bother trying to advocate for anything better?

As Mike-O-Matic puts it: "New programs are a chance to get things right and should be used as an opportunity to ask the challenging questions about why things are the way they are and what can be done better."

What this is driving at is that something's popularity is not sufficient to merit it's continuation, nor is it's unpopularity sufficient to deem it irrevocably evil. One would have thought that this would have been figured out by anyone who has left their teenage years. Sometimes doing the right thing will make you unpopular.

Which brings us back to the profile attribute. I've spilled enough electronic ink over this little beauty. It allows anyone to extend the semantic capabilities of (X)HTML. It means I can come up with an idea, and I don't have to persuade the W3C or Tantek in order to put it out there. And if you prefer to do it differently, you can grab yourself a different URL and do it your way. XML's extensibility brought to the Web. It's the same kind of freedom that voting for a third party candidate brings - it may make no difference in the end, but not being able to do so frankly sucks.

Sure, profile isn't perhaps the most widely used of features in HTML. But that doesn't matter. No harm comes from it's continued existence. It's use cases may be niche - at the moment - but keeping it around is another hook for scalable innovation - that is, innovation without having to get permission. Close up those little pokey holes where people can play and experiment, and you lose a lot of potential future cowpaths.

If we wish to have a design philosophy for the next generation of the Web, may I humbly suggest: Pave the cowpaths, but don't close off access to potential cowpaths. The great strength of HTML is that it's flexible and allows you to extend it using class-names, attribute values and URIs!

This little implementation of the OPML blogging system written in PHP now supports the XML-RPC based MetaWeblog API (another creation of Dave Winer), meaning I can now post to my blog from a variety of devices and platforms.

It uses the Incutio XML-RPC Library for PHP, an old library put together by Simon Willison.

I wish there were a library of test cases for MetaWeblog API based on the real-world behaviour of weblog posting clients. It's difficult to fully implement MetaWeblog unless you know exactly what the client is going to give you.

Perhaps what we should do is have a few sample blog posts which people would try to enter using their MetaWeblog (or Blogger or Movable Type or Atom Publishing Protocol - such being the nature of standards that you have four of them) clients, then we might be able to have some test cases.

As for the OPML blogging engine in PHP? I will release it quite soon - I just want to clean up the code and make it a bit nicer to use.

The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has passed two smart resolutions. Recommendation 1805 and 1804 both specify a reasonable perspective which European governments ought to take to the little embarrassment that is our social policy towards the Godly. They aren't perfect, but they aren't too bad either. Similarly, the 'strictly personal' bit of Rec. 1804 is not really so. Since the Godly deem it acceptable to take public money to teach superstitious myths to children, I'd say it's slightly more than "strictly personal". As for the education helping to combat ignorance about religious leaders, here is my contribution. For too long, people have excused the acts of religious leaders - and those leaders have benefitted from the misplaced trust of their followers.

Within Catholicism, there has been widespread and systematic child rape and other abuse with complicity from higher ups. In no other organisation would such sexual abuse be dealt with similarly, nor would governments tolerate the malfeasance of any similarly-sized secular organisation. If a multi-national corporation or large government agency had members of it's staff committing serial child rape, it would investigate these claims and sack anyone found to be responsible. It would also collaborate with the Police. It would not just shunt off such a person to a different regional office, nor would it use it's power to try and hide evidence within the organisation.

But, perhaps I'm just ignorant. Perhaps it really was God who told Oliver O'Grady to rape a nine month-old baby. And if God demands you rape a baby, are you going to refuse? Or perhaps it really was God who told his Cardinal to move this child rapist to a different church? Perhaps God demanded that they put in place policies specificially designed to protect the guilty.

I'm sure it's just ignorance of religion that makes people think that Islam is a tolerant, peaceful, loving religion. Reality check. Saudi Arabia - a country which both the United States and the United Kingdom has as an ally in the War on Terror, is a state with a homophobic, crazy fundamentalist government based on Wahhabist Islam. The punishment for any kind of sexual activity other than missionary position, heterosexual sex within marriage can include the death penalty. Look out, America, some of your citizens rather like this idea!

This kind of treatment is, of course, a complete aberration, and nothing to do with Islam. Not like it's in the Qu'ran or anything.

Still, thankfully, compared to the Stone Age ethics of large swathes of the faith-based, at least those in Brussels have their heads screwed on - even if they could do with tightening up occasionally.

Francis Sedgemore has all the links on how Independent journalist and part-time "cultural critic" Johann Hari has threatened legal action against David T from Harry's Place. It's quite worrying indeed, and proof again that the mainstream media feel threatened by the blogging tykes.

It's all rather convenient actually. Certain people can point to blogs as a way of actually avoiding conversation. User-generated content as distraction from the workings of power. If, for instance, you have a major politician coming to speak, you ask everyone to keep their questions as non-critical as possible and use their blog to rant from.

You stand up and preach about how "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" stuff is all fine and dandy and the future of everything, with cheese on top. But bloggers don't get press passes. Bloggers are far easier to freeze out of "the conversation" than the mainstream media.

And, if Mr. Hari had tried to use the lawyers from the Indy to shut down mainstream media coverage, there would be howls of outrage.

For more, here are links from TailRank to full coverage of the Hari affair.