Tom Morris: 2007-09-30

2007.09.30

RDF Convenience Class 2007-09-30T12:51:49Z

I was just looking through the RDF Primer (what used to be the Model and Syntax document). It's pretty good, actually. It doesn't use the convoluted XML syntax - instead it uses N-Triples. Whoever said the W3C weren't evolving?!

Anyway, I had a thought arising out of yesterday's work on adding OpenIDs to FOAF documents. Wouldn't it be cool if RDF/XML had the 'class' attribute from HTML? It wouldn't contain any semantic value - but would simply be used to make manual parsing easier. If you are using a language framework which doesn't support the full set of SPARQL syntax (which is, to be frank, quite a lot of them), it'd be cool to be able to address chunks of the document through classes, like:

rdf.class['profile'][0].predicate

How would this be useful? Well, in combination with rdfs:seeAlso, you could use it to selectively pull in other graphs. It’d almost become like the ‘rel’ attribute - specifying the relationship of the current document to another document, so you can more narrowly specify rdfs:seeAlso parsing. Save bandwidth and all that.

Just an idea - probably no more than a passing fancy. If there was a way of boiling it down to 140 characters, I wouldn’t have even bothered blogging it…

Old-fashioned fix for MacBook Pro annoyance 2007-09-30T16:54:11Z

I’ve been having problems with my Apple MacBook Pro, regarding burning DVDs. I’ve been burning data DVDs mostly from the Finder’s burning interface and having them time out. I thought I’d bought some duff, cheap DVDs (‘Intenso’ brand, on special offer in my local Maplins).

It became really irritating, and I have a stack of maybe 15 DVDs on my desk which I thought were coasters. I got an odd error while trying to burn some MP3s on to a DVD today, in iTunes. It said “The attempt to burn a disk failed. The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.” I Googled the message, and found a fair few Macintosh forums discussing other people who had suffered this problem, and mostly they were saying it was because of unclean heads.

I tried a rash solution today. I borrowed from my dad a “Premiere”-brand CD laser lens cleaner. It’s a disc that you put in your CD drive that has little brushes on it that clean the laser head, with a goofy-sounding woman telling you. I didn’t think it would work, as the MacBook Pro has a slot-loading CD drive. It does now work. At least, the iTunes disc is now burning without any problem.

Phew. There’s always this nagging fear when something goes wrong with my Mac that it’ll cost me a bloody fortune to fix it. That’s because AppleCare just don’t care about this kind of thing. Apple desperately need to improve their warranty repairs. If you buy a Mac, you pay UKP100-200 for AppleCare and it doesn’t actually cover many of the problems you’ll have as a Mac user. Not that you should have problems, considering you are paying a premium for the bloody machine anyway. (This is less relevant to the desktop machines like the iMac, which I’ve never had any problems with - only laptops, which I always have problems with.)

I’m tempted to set up a blog called Apple Annoyances. There sure are a lot of ‘em that I can reel off at the drop of a hat. Not nearly as many annoyances as I can list for my Windows box, but too many nonetheless. And a lot of them don’t get addressed because (a) Mac users can get a bit too zealous when confronted with problems and (b) Apple have an incentive not to actually see problems that have arisen.

An aside: I wonder if anyone has ripped the Laser Lens Cleaner discs and put them up on BitTorrent…

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