Tom Morris

I take my eye off the ball and all sorts of stuff happens at the W3C!

The biggest news is that SPARQL is now a Recommendation! The Data Access Work Group has done a stunning job - SPARQL is well-specified, has a comprehensive test suite and is tremendously useful. For all those people who are cynical about the W3C, I suggest they take a look at SPARQL. We also have a MIME type for SPARQL queries - application/sparql-query. Nice.

Also, Notation3 has been published as a Team Submission (a little known part of W3C folklore where members of the W3C Team formally ask timbl to publish a document on w3.org, which he then does if he wants to), as has Turtle. The N3 Team Submission is by timbl and DanC while the Turtle one is by timbl and dajobe. This is a good thing. N3 has made a baby step towards standardization - the spec is filling out, and it's a degree of formality higher than being part of Design Issues. I don't see any reason not to standardize Turtle and N3 - both are already widely implemented in a lot of different tools and languages. Interestingly, before Monday, the last Team Submission was GRDDL, and that's now a Recommendation also.

I'm currently working on a data portability 'thing' - namely, getting my data out from the clutches of my bank and making it more useful. I discovered today that NatWest allow one to get CSV data out, and to cancel printed monthly bank statements. This is great news. I don't need bits of paper cluttering up my life when I've got a computer that's a lot more secure. I now have a CSV file with the last 45 transactions on my current account and the last 48 on my credit card - including interest payments, direct debits, BACS payments, purchases, paid-in cheques and currency conversions. The data isn't great, but it's a start. I've already started writing a parser for it in Python. I'm going to basically try and turn it into something a little more useful and natural than CSV (possibly XML or even RDF - I can see a use for running Rules on the data with regular expressions), and figure out a de-duping process (quite important with financial transactions) - then I can start storing this in a data store and start running queries over it. It's difficult designing the data in a useful way - I wish NatWest (and, presumably, the whole financial sector) would provide better quality data.

For instance, it would be interesting to see spending graphs and so on in order to try and save money and stay on budget, look for recurring patterns (bills) and generally manage money better. I've also been playing around with Cha-Ching, a nice financial app for OS X. Call me cynical, but this is the kind of thing I'm not trusting to a 'beta' web app, however shiny the buttons are.

An amazing story popped up earlier on my aggregator about Ezra Levant, publisher of a Canadian conservative magazine called Western Standard which published the Motoons in their magazine, has been brought in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission to answer for how his publication of the Motoons is causing Muslims to feel all affronted and indignant. The fact that a human rights commission is prosecuting someone over the publication of cartoons means that the very concept of human rights has been destroyed by the 'positive liberties' brigade who thinks that if you pass laws forbidding people to have nasty thoughts, the reasons that those nasty thoughts happen go away (in short - religious victim wannabes and the sympathetic idiots who go along for the ride).

Which reminds me. Must order some Moo stickers with the Motoons on them - Mostickers if you will. I'd quite like my laptop decorated with the picture of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban.

Just a quick post to note that I've open sourced SemanticCampProfileDiscoveryServlet.java, the code that was running the FOAF importer on the SemanticCamp website. Sorry for the not-particularly snappy title - I guess Java forces you to be verbose, so I might as well have verbose class names too...

The reason behind the open sourcing of it is explained at the top of the file:

The reason I'm releasing this code is because I want to prompt the RDF community into improving it and making simple, off-the-shelf solutions to common "portable social networks"/"data portability" use cases (and I want the same to happen with microformats and other approaches). Running, tested, open source code over specifications.

This is how I think DataPortability and similar efforts needs to proceed - released code speaks volumes where mailing list posts don't. We need to sit down, write the code and solve the common use case scenarios so that people can start implementing it on public sites.

Anyway, I've gotta run. I'm hoping that when I get back home in an hour or so a whole open source ecosystem of portable data stuff has popped up. I should be so lucky.

Boo hoo. So, Ms. Nadia Eweida is not allowed to wear her ickle cross? That's capitalism, honey. Now, I don't support dress codes in public education (or other public services). Come to class naked, in a three-piece suit or in a leather gimp suit for all I care (which will get the most reaction, I'm not sure - probably context-dependent).

But in private sector employment, it's different - because of who pays. If you work in the private sector, you do not have free expression protection on the job - you trade some of your liberty to make money. If you are working at McDonalds, you don't have the right to tell customers that the burgers taste like shit, or express your right to free movement by walking off the job. These rules can be as arbitrary or barmy as employers want to make them. If you don't like the rules, resign and work for someone different. Once you've resigned, you can even use your right to free expression to complain about the company and ask people to boycott it - and if people agree, they will boycott it.

So sayeth Ms. Eweida: The judge has given way for BA to have a victory on imposing their will on all their staff. Yeah, that's because they are your employer. They tend to have the right to impose their will on you - otherwise, they'd just be some company out there.

Personally, the fact that they've wound up the burgeoning British religious right - including Anglicanism's lead buffoon Dr. John Sentamu - is all the more reason that I'm likely to fly on BA.

SemanticCamp London signup is now open! It's on the 16th and 17th of February at Imperial College in London, and it's going to rock! Signups are already trickling in at an increasing rate, so get your place before they all go (or the exclamation mark gets it)!

All that 'markets are conversations' stuff that bloggers talk about - Kent Newsome has a sad story of it going wrong. I don't get why it's taking so long for businesspeople to understand that they need to talk to us as human beings rather than as consumers. It's really not that complicated. I got a really nice e-mail this morning from a software vendor in response to something I'd written trying to solve a problem I'm having. I'm more likely to recommend this product to people now (in fact, I will: oXygen - it's a great tool for programmers who deal with XML frequently!).

If, in this case, PetSmart had dealt with this situation like human beings, would there be blog posts about them now circulating? I don't think so. It doesn't take a genius to realise that a family dog dying is not something you can solve with a cheque. You need to show some understanding and compassion, which are intrinsically human characteristics.

The Government have responded to the anti-circumcision petition. And, of course, they support circumcision. A small subset of the already small number of practicing religious believers have obviously bent their ears on the subject.

What is more interesting is how the government defend what is almost completely indefensible. Let us remind ourselves what circumcision is: a procedure that is medically unnecessary for the vast majority of people, which has a small amount of health benefit but for which the benefits are far outweighed by the costs (increased risk of infection in surgery). The vast majority of procedures are carried out for cultural or religious reasons rather than medical ones. Generally, surgery that is medically unnecessary is something that we ethically frown upon if it's done without consent. It is a fair conclusion that the reason circumcision remains legal in Britain is due to pressure from the religious lobby. Their reason for slicing off the foreskins of newborns? Well, God says so! A perfectly rational reason, I'm sure you'll agree.

What is more interesting is the government's response, and I quote: There can also be health and safety reasons for carrying out a circumcision on non-therapeutic grounds, including an identified risk from operations performed outside the NHS. And later in the passage: some doctors perform circumcision to prevent families going to lay circumcisers who may not be appropriately trained, or may operate out of premises that are not sterile.

The government here is justifying circumcision's legality out of harm reduction. Now, medicine has a place for harm reduction. In fact, I think harm reduction is a very good reason to legalise drugs. Much rather people were buying their cocaine and weed from Boots and for the drug equivalent of Which? magazine and Watchdog keep an eye on the quality than having to buy it from some scumbag who has cut it with drain cleaner (or worse). Anyway, I digress. Circumcision as harm reduction. Sorry, but if it's wrong - and, well, it quite plainly is for the reasons I've given above - it isn't a matter of harm reduction. I mean, why don't we just admit that rape is inevitable, and have rapist outreach where we give them condoms and lubricant and teach them about the birds and bees in order to reduce harm. I mean, they are going to rape people anyway, so we may as well reduce the harm. Why do we feel sick at the idea? Because harm reduction is about voluntary action by consenting adults to a greater or lesser degree. If someone has gender identity disorder, we consider it a greater harm to them to leave them at risk of suicide, self-harm and other negative effects of feeling a disconnection from their gender identity than we do the harm of putting their genitals under the knife. If we had people who were performing sex changes on newborns just because, oh, they want to be part of the tribe or do what God wants, we'd consider them delusional and their actions highly immoral.

I think we should do similarly for circumcision. That the government thinks that circumcision is something to tolerate and try and reduce the harm of by preventing unclean circumcisions rather than preventing all non-voluntary circumcisions, something is deeply wrong. No parent should be allowed to perform this kind of act on their child.

If a religion came along and told parents that they must castrate newborns, what reason do we have to tell them not to? It's their religion, their cultural heritage after all. Sorry, but human rights must trump religion and 'culture'. Anyway, there's plenty of time for them when they are grown up to do silly things with their genitals and sharp objects. If they do really well, they can get a Darwin Award!

One thing to be proud about - the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and most of the EU countries voted nay on the idiotic UN blasphemy resolution. The UK support is somewhat hypocritical since it is still against the law to commit blasphemous libel, which I can do by simply publishing this poem (James Kirkup’s The Love That Dare Not Speak It’s Name - a graphically explicit poem about a homosexual relationship between a crucified Jesus Christ and a Roman Centurion soldier).

In order to show solidarity for the true meaning of human rights and civil liberties, we need to fill the world with more James Kirkup, more material designed solely to irritate and offend religious people. You don’t have a right not to be offended. It’s a by-product of free speech that you get offended. I get offended when you say that I’m an amoral, godless heathen and that I’m going to have my skin repeatedly scorched off by demons for the rest of eternity because I think that the universe makes more sense without invoking magic. But I don’t try and legislate away your offensiveness.

The more religious types want to ban offensiveness, the more I will actively try and offend their sensibilities. It’s the only way. Which reminds me: Mohammed Image Archive, loltheist and gay Jesus.

On the upside, Latin teaching in schools has doubled in the last seven years, but that hasn’t been reflected in exams yet. I think this is good. I think a classical education is important - and not because I’m a snob. I think when we try to take a curriculum and make it more “relevant”, we are actually screwing the people who we are trying to help. For every education reform that the Government puts forward, there is a very simple question you need to ask - would this curriculum be one which the Prime Minister would subject his own children to? Or, in other words, how many Prime Ministers do you know who eschewed Eton and Oxbridge for an NVQ in Business Studies? Education - in this country - is about power, and we all know it. We just conveniently forget it in order to not sound judgmental.

Sorry, but I don’t think that intelligence falls along class lines. Government trying to make working and middle class kids do “relevant” or “practical” qualifications is a way of keeping their ambitions and horizons low. The government introduce these “practical” curricula on the basis that it’ll provide choice, but all it ends up doing is supplanting the harder, academic courses and, in the process, lower people’s intellectual horizons. Even if this is not the intent, this is the result - and it’s a damn good reason to resist the vocationalisation trend. I think people are smart - I’m actually an optimist, even though people accuse me of being very jaded and cynical - and can achieve great things if they set their minds to it. But I fear that a lot of people will be doing that in spite of their schooling.

Danny has a post that describes turning OPML into a “SKOSRoll” - basically a set of SKOS concepts with related resources. I hadn’t thought of SKOS as being an appropriate ontology for OPML mapping. I’m thinking that one could quite easily create what I call a ‘modal outliner’ - it could pull in an XML file that lists a set of semantic concepts and maps them to an outliner representation. Tree structures fit quite well for how a lot of people think. For instance, one could have a FOAF representation, which would simply be a file that explains that the outliner is dealing with people, their details (ie. name, contact details etc.) and that they are all ‘known’ by the creator of the outline. It would also define a simple transformation back into OPML and HTML so that it can be displayed in legacy OPML tools and in browsers. The transformations could be described using SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries, or perhaps using a pre-set list of query fields for a SPARQL SELECT.

Outliners force you to think in a certain way, and that is quite a good way of bootstraping a web of objects and relationships.

When I recently built the current incarnation of my blogging software, I decided against passwords. Passwords are quite ugly things. One of the things that irritates me most is people doing “password protection” on files. Access control lists is much more secure because you can revoke someone’s access to a resource without having to spread a new password to other users. So, no passwords.

I’ve solved this by using OpenID. I can login with any of my fifteen or so OpenIDs to post to my blog. But what about having a two-factor authentication instead? Why not use that gadget I carry around with me called a phone? People carry around these silly-looking RSA SecurID things. But I carry around a phone with me. Why not just generate a hash key on that?

To solve this, I wrote a J2ME midlet called CellFob that generates a new token using SHA-1 every one hundred seconds based on a pre-loaded seed key. I had put this together a while back, but for some reason my old Motorola V3 RAZR just borked on the damn thing, despite it working with the emulators. Then I changed my phone to a Sony-Ericsson W810i, so decided to reload the JAR file. It works great. There’s something really cool and magic when one loads one’s first J2ME app on to your phone. It makes the whole platform feel so much more open, just like a terminal window does compared to a DOS prompt on modern computers or a BASIC interpreter on old computers like the BBC Micro. Ah, nostalgia.

Anyway, I have implemented it on my blog’s management utility. Just took the hashing procedure from my Java client and rewrote it in PHP. Amazingly, it works! This is being used for me as a backup when OpenID fails. Which it does occasionally. Some portable devices don’t seem to support some of the major OpenID servers very well.

The whole thing isn’t terribly high security, alas. The problems that exist are mainly focused on ensuring that the client and the server are running with times relatively close to one another. When I was first testing it on my laptop, my phone was a few minutes behind my laptop and it wouldn’t work. More seriously, there are probable timezone issues. In order to get it to work reliably, one would have to make sure that the client and server are both hashing the same timezones. If one were to try and turn this into a product, setting it to use what it believes to be GMT would solve that problem. Similarly, what with rainbow tables and so on, one should remain cautious about the security of SHA-1. Hashing algorithms are a trade-off between all sorts of difficult factors. I read my Bruce Schneier fanatically, but I’m still not sure that widespread promotion of using SHA-1 tokens is the best way forward. Plus it needs to be easy for the user to revoke ‘fob’ identification - in case their phone is compromised.

Bug me in real life and I’ll show you. I may even record a video of it if you guys want it. And if there’s no glaring security problems, I’ll release the (alpha-grade) J2ME code. Open source developers should be ripping things like SecurID to shreds and replacing them with a simple two-factor authentication scheme that could be applied by individuals rather than large corporations.

Since Ian and Jeremy have blogged their new year’s resolution, I thought it’s maybe time to do the same thing. Think of this as a little bit of me-time on my blog -

First, though, 2007. I made one and only one resolution. I would not pay more than twenty pounds/Euros/dollars (delete as appropriate) for entrance into a conference or event. I succeeded. The most I paid to get into any event was fifteen pounds. The vast majority of events I went to this year were free. Although the formal requirement of last year’s resolution is satisfied, I will be keeping up the principle for this year. The reason behind it is quite simple - because the more conferences cost, the less they are worth. There was an event planned earlier this year called Ajax2007 which I blogged about here - it was going to cost over two thousand pounds for a two day conference in central London on a technology that you can learn quite well from a book that won’t cost you more than twenty quid or so from Amazon. Compared to BarCamp which is free (or close enough not to notice), what is the point?

That’s the formal book-keeping of 2007 out the way. What else happened? Well, the one thing I’m most gratified with is fuddling my way through my degree. I’ve always had a rocky relationship with formal education, but getting a high 2.1 degree from London and completely acing the dissertation makes me feel vindicated. I showed the bastards. So much so that I’m going back this year - hopefully - to go further into the realms of impractical ideas, dodgy cardigans etc.

That’s the first resolution then - kick arse academically and intellectually. No slouching. In the cloying and greetings card jargon of our times: be the best one can possibly be. Achieve - at least on the bookish front - some level of eudemonia. I’m thinking about how I can achieve this, and have a few ideas that are maybe too shocking for my geek friends to contemplate.

Second thing is I’m going to teach myself Java. Ian is teaching himself Python - being one of the few self-proclaimed designers I know who preaches that old time Tomcat religion! - but I’m going in the other direction. There’s lots to dislike about Java - and, boy, people sure don’t hold back. But for the things I’m working on in my spare time - centered, as they are, around RDF - it’s something I’ll have to live with.

Those are both quite academic - philosophy and Java - but crafting these New Year’s Resolution things requires one to be a bit more honest and personal, something I tend to avoid in my blog. And there are a lot of things I need to fix.

I need to calm down a lot. Some might say I have anger issues. London brings that out a lot in me. I take the train and everything and everybody on the train puts me on edge. I get off the train and start walking, and people get in my way, slow me down. Grr. Irritating as hell. Then I find out the Tube’s not running and I’m getting quite close to boiling point. I’m getting angry just thinking about it. I feel that I’m surrounded by people who are trying hard to irritate me at every opportunity. I don’t explode, though. I just feel huffy and quietly infuriated the whole day. I try hard to control it, and not be rude or discourteous to people. This is one thing I’ve got to fix. I’m a bloody grumpy old man, and I’m still in my early twenties. So, fix my anger issues. Don’t worry - even if I don’t fix ‘em, I won’t be going Falling Down or Columbine on you or anything. This is Britain, after all, so I’m more likely to send an angry letter to The Times (and have a cup of tea) than I am to commit mass murder.

Furthermore, I’ve got to exercise every single day and stop eating crap. This is pretty self-explanatory, and I’m expecting that quite a few people will be trying to push themselves towards healthiness in the next year. Rock on.

Another thing I’m doing this year - ensuring that SemanticCamp London happens and that it rocks. I’m still in e-mail limbo at the moment trying to get sponsors on board and so on, but I hope we’ll be able to start giving out tickets very soon. Watch this space.

Finally, I’m going to really knock my GTD-fu into overdrive (and mix Eastern and Western metaphors with gay abandon). Off to town it is to buy folders for paper-based reference. Or maybe I should rig up a scanner and scan all this stuff in. All my actions go into TaskPaper. All my e-mails get answered promptly (sorry to those still awaiting responses - it’s all pure laziness, I guarantee). Everything borrowed goes back. Every penny accounted for. Which goes back to where I started - kicking arse. That’s what all New Year’s Resolutions come down to - just being a better, more kick arse human being.

Right, now I’ve aired my laundry, we can get back to the business at hand: unbelievably cute pictures of puppies!