Tom Morris

Dave Winer wrote a while back about Apple's terrifying hard drive replacement policy, which seemed completely absurd. I have good news though

I took my MacBook Pro into the AppleStore at Lakeside (a shopping centre outside London) for repair recently. Now, I've got a lot to complain about AppleCare - namely that they can just declare your repair to be 'non-warranty' without providing evidence and then charge you an arm and a leg for the repair to happen. It's going to take some time for me to find anything positive to say about Apple until my bank account gets replenished. But I did find out in the process that Apple has now changed their policy regarding user's hard drives. Apparently, the new policy is that if you ask forcefully enough with the Genius, they'll note on the form "Customer would like to keep HDD."

My advocacy for keeping my hard drive was extremely simple - "Security! That hard drive contains my bank details, credit card numbers, SSH private keys and GPG keys. Even though it's been formatted once, that's not enough to prevent someone - whether my ever-more-observant government or an identity thief from recovering data from it. When it comes to such a huge box of interlinking personal data, the only person I trust to dispose of it with any degree of competence is myself. I don't want it being shipped off to a Chinese factory where some kid being paid tuppence to open up toxic computer hardware decides that he's going to sell the stupid Westerners' user hard drives to crackers on the black market - I'd much rather take it home, do a format-to-nil forty or so times, then keep it in a shoebox for ten years until the data is outdated and then knock it to shreds with a sledgehammer. It's my data, damnit, and I'll dispose of it myself". Okay, I didn't say exactly that - but a slightly more mumbled version, but I did make a point that it was my data and that not getting it back would be a security risk.

The assistant manager bought the argument, noted it on the form and I now have my broken hard drive in a little silver bag to do with whatever I want.

If you are going to have a replacement HDD in your Macintosh, be sure to argue with them and make sure they know up front that you wish to keep your hard drive. And if they refuse to service the machine and return the drive, go to a different store or AASP. However paranoid you are about security, you probably are not paranoid enough. Which reminds me - I need to change a few hundred passwords, setup some Keychains, put my SSH certificates back in place and install GPG again. One day all this will work seamlessly...

I've been working on writing a Ruby RDF implementation. It's been quite good fun. Just thought I'd blog about some of the things I've been doing in building it and thinking about how to develop it.

First off the bat, I have to say I absolutely adore Ruby. It is, along with Python, one of the sexiest languages ever created. It's amazingly relaxing and pleasant. When I'm writing Java or PHP, I usually end up swearing and shouting at my monitor and getting all negative. Even if Ruby is slow or Rails doesn't scale or whatever, it lowers stress levels and probably blood pressure. We should teach it in schools, for chrissakes.

Second thing is I've been using RSpec (pronounced "Arr Spec", not "Arse Peck"), the tool for behaviour-driven development, which is a fancy reformulation of test-driven development. I like it a lot. TextMate gives me a pretty window filled with green boxes when I do things right and an informative window filled with black and red boxes when I fail. More than that, though, it actually makes you focus on writing the important tests - rather than just a test to ensure that the class exists (yes, it probably does!), it makes you do object-oriented programming in a way that solves problems quickly and efficiently. I'm probably not in a great position to judge, but I think I'm turning out reasonably pretty code that's no more than is required to solve the problem. Development becomes quite easy - I have a printed copy of Concepts and Abstract Syntax on my desk, and I then work through it turning it into RSpec code, then finally coming back, rewriting the RSpec and the tests, then finally writing a small bit of code that solves the problem.

I've been committing all this code and pushing the updates onto Github, but in a new branch called 'new'. You can take a peek. It's not yet functional, but the tests all run and pass.

The folks on the #ruby IRC channel have been helpful too - I found out about method_missing on there, which turned what could have been quite painful (namespace support) into a 14 line class. Namespaces in Python's rdflib look a bit like this FOAF['name'], but in Ruby, I've opted for foaf.name instead - using the method_missing to return a uriref for any method call on a namespace class.

This is how I want my code to end up looking:

graph.add_triple x.tom, foaf.knows, x.dan
graph.add_triple x.tom, foaf.firstName, "Tom"

It’s pretty damn close to N3 in beauty, and it’s certainly better than - oh - let me think:

String fullName = "John Smith";
Resource johnSmith = model.createResource(personURI).addProperty(VCARD.FN, fullName);

Heh, no offence meant - we all love Jena really, but it’s not exactly beautiful.

I was then thinking more broadly about where we go next with this. I’m probably going to pull most of the parsing and writing out of the existing Rena tree - it supports RDF/XML and N-Triples. It’d be nice to be able to push out Turtle and N3 too. And if I’m working on those, I’m going to need to group things by subject. Which led me to thinking about whether resource may be a good way for non-experts to access data inside graphs. danbri promptly explained the problem with the use of a pair of inverse properties - namely foaf:maker and foaf:made. You can’t expect every resource will do these the same, which means you either bite the bullet and accept data loss, or you perform some magic where you look for resources as being both subjects and in-graph objects. Madness lies that way.

More madness lies down other paths though. We could look write some kind of extensibility method into the Ruby library which means that people could basically define a class for, say, FoafPerson, which would be a sub-class of a class called Resource (which would not be used tremendously often on it’s own). That way, someone who wanted to read FOAF data could simply import FoafPerson and then read data out of it like they already do with other classes that hook up to web services. But this seems a little bit of a let-down. Isn’t the point of RDF that one doesn’t need to have any domain-specific code (as is required in, say, parsing XML or microformats where the parser needs to know what it’s looking for).

Then the other approach is to have it look for an RDF Schema or OWL ontology, pull that in and use that. That’s also good, but that’s more code to write, more classes for people to understand and we are trying to keep this simple enough to be usable.

Still gotta think about this. I know that Chris Bizer’s RAP library has a three-pronged approach - statement, resource and ontology models. That’s good - as you can have it at whatever level you like it. I’m hoping that some of Ruby’s flexible language will mean we can have a simple Graph class that has all the possible approaches joined together in a more seamless way. The average user doesn’t want to have to think “I want to browse this data in a statement-centric way”. They think “I want to iterate through all the people and do x with their names and e-mail addresses”.

Which brings us to SPARQL. SPARQL is cool and amazing, but I think it’s too complex for most people. That’s why I think cracking the model problem and making a really usable data model for people is going to be a good way to go.

But here’s the thing. I will not and can not build this on my own. I need collaborators to make it all work. That means people with Ruby experience and experience parsing RDF. I’m still making myself familiar with all the cool, sexy Ruby stuff like RSpec and Rake and Capistrano and so on, and need people to make sure I don’t do anything stupid. So I’m throwing open the gauntlet - come and help fix the code. Clone my repository and hack on it. Doesn’t matter if you break it, you can always revert your changes. Send me patches. Come and chat on IRC about it. Poke people you know who are good at this stuff and get them to break and fix code and send patches. As a little bonus, I’ve got some Github invites to give out to people who want to help out. Send me patches and you may just get an invite to the sexiest repository service ever.

Anyway, over and out. Time for a little late-night PlayStation crack and then to bed. I’ll be at Geek Dinner tomorrow, so come and bug me about Ruby. If my laptop weren’t still in the Apple Store getting fixed up by a Genius (or not), I’d suggest pair programming.

P.S. You can interpret the title any way you like. Personally, I think beauty and beastliness are not disjoint properties. Beasts (in the sense of animals) can be beautiful, and even moral beastliness can be aesthetically pleasing too (think Nazi uniforms, propaganda films and posters and horror movies).

I’ve been meaning to do a post-SemanticCamp blog post since Sunday, but have been distracted both by sloppy train services and the death of my laptop’s hard drive (don’t worry, the vast majority of the data is backed up!). Quite a few people beat me to the punch - including Jeremy Keith, Frances Berriman, Cristiano Betta, Andrew Walkingshaw, Benjamin Nowack and Gareth Rushgrove (among others). There was a steady stream of fun on Twitter and Flickr.

Quite a lot of those pictures are related to Semantopoly, a creation of Jon Linklater-Johnson which takes Monopoly, mixes in a lot of nice, open web technology like CSS, XML and Microformats, social networking sites like Dopplr and Facebook, a fair few in-jokes and references to well-known geeks, designers and developers for maximal win. This may be even better than Werewolf.

Okay, on to more practical matters. Did the event go well? I think it did. It’s more of a good first attempt at something we can improve and iterate on. I didn’t make my goals for the event clear up front but didn’t hide them from people who asked. One of these was to try and get the the microformats crowd in the same room as the SWIG people so they can see that the others aren’t insane, evil or malevolent - and that we all believe in One Web. I guess what I was hoping for was a sort of interfaith dialogue for the Web. This was partly achieved, although I think we could have done it slightly better by guiding the sessions slightly and maybe having a whole set of beginners sessions. I hastily slapped together a session called “WTF is RDF” at the request of a number of people asking on Saturday night. I’m glad that Frances and Ben Ward did a similar talk about microformats (even though they invited me to hijack the middle of it and talk about GRDDL and the profile attribute, which probably bored everyone silly).

What would I do if I were organising another one? Firstly, I’m not sure I’d do it over a weekend - I’d maybe do it on one day rather than two, and have a mixture of a few pre-planned sessions for novices and a bulk of free slots. I know this goes against the rules of BarCamp - I don’t intend to replace BarCamp, but rather have a lot more events that are marginally more structured than BarCamp but still keeping their essential spirit. I’d like to see us tweak the SemanticCamp model and for other communities to put on similar events. I’d like to see niche ‘Camps about everything from Rails and Flash to design and philosophy. I’d certainly recommend organising a ‘Camp - although there’s a lot of work involved (and even more hard work being done by Ashok and folks at Imperial College), when it all works, it’s tremendously fun and rewarding.

Thanks again to all the sponsors, all the attendees and the people following along live on the streaming video and everybody who showed support for the event. When is the next one? Well, I’m quite enjoying not having to check my e-mail for a few days. We’ve got BarCamp Brighton 2 coming up very soon, which I’ll definitely be at. I might also do a repeat of the RDF introduction session sometime soon. As for SemanticCamp 2? I haven’t ruled it out at all, but we’ll have to wait and see.

The other day I modified my Git setup for pulling in remotes. Before I was following the advice on this blog post about how to git pull in remotes, but after reading the manual decided that there is a better way:

mkdir Ruby\ on\ Rails.tmbundle
cd Ruby\ on\ Rails.tmbundle
git init
git remote add drnic git://github.com/drnic/ruby-on-rails-tmbundle.git
git fetch drnic
git checkout -b drnic/two_point_ooh

This code makes you a new folder and initialises a repository inside, then it adds a remote source, fetches the remote source’s full repository and then checks out (and in the process creates) a new branch for the remote. Then updating is as simple as using the git fetch command followed by either checking out or merging.

Git really is the source code management utility of winners. I’m using it for updating Rena, the Ruby RDF library.

A while back I wrote out a RELAX NG schema for OPML. It’s very simple - it defines all the core constructs in the two OPML specifications (1.0 and 2.0) along with the provided example files. You can use the schema in tools like James Clark’s nXML mode for emacs or the excellent oXygen XML editor to write OPML by hand.

The schema is available on a Github repository that I have set up called opml-schema.

I welcome patches to the core schema and to the Schematron rules which exist to supplement the RELAX NG schema. We still have an issue over how to codify extensions to OPML, which are permitted using a mixture of XML Namespaces and the ‘type’ attribute as per the Extending OPML section in the OPML 2.0 specification.

The question for OPML users, developers and tool vendors is whether this unofficial schema should contain descriptions of third-party extensions. The alternative is we could use something like NRL or NVDL to point people towards namespace-specific schema documents. It’s a reasonable solution, but I am not wild about it. RELAX NG tool support is better than NRL or NVDL, including a number of important languages which I am using for my own personal use.

It seems like we can cover third-party extensions in the schema following some rules: the schema describes but does not prescribe; start using first, put it in the schema later. Of course, the schema is open source (GPL) so you can take it and change it yourself. I only have the power to say what goes out in my repository. Git is rather humbling like that. Subject to figuring out the best way of laying out the schema for this purpose, I will probably allow third-party extensions to the schema into the repository - but I do so at my own discretion following the principle of description not prescription and not including things in the schema before they are out there and being used (sorta like microformats!).

I’ll also be a lot more likely to include patches and third-party extensions if they are sent to me as a Git patch! If you aren’t using Git, you should be. It’s simply version control done right. Go watch the Linus Torvalds video.

Anyway, I hope that you like the schema and I especially hope it helps you publish better data.

The protests outside Scientology churches are attracting international media attention and they’ve barely even started yet. Take a look at News.com.au on photos of the Sydney protests, coverage and the Adelaide protests. There’s also YouTube video and Flickr pictures.

Keep an eye out on the Evil, Evil Scientology Pool.

There has also been an fake story circulating of violence at the anti-Scientology protests - see here (and on Digg).

Other media coverage so far includes Wikinews.

I’m fully in support of these protests. Scientology is a dangerous organisation which uses the credulity of it’s members to extract cash in a way that goes above and beyond almost any other religion. Humanity would be greatly improved if the Church of Scientology were to disappear. Have a look at Xenu.net and Whyaretheydead to see why. They use tactics to silence critics - as we saw today with the publication of fake news (which has pretty much failed!).

Photos from Berlin protest. There’s been live video all morning from London, and it’s still going. About 300-400 people turned up in London - more video here. And lots more pictures are up here and on Flickr.

Looks like the East Coast is about to start.

danah boyd says she is going to be boycotting academic journals that aren’t open access and wants other academics to do likewise. I’ve always thought it insane that we as the public are subsidising universities to produce research that is almost totally inaccessible. Glad to see that danah is pushing for this.

I hope that universities and funding bodies start insisting that the move is made towards complete open access. I actually think that open access and web access are of primary importance into inculcating undergraduate students into the mechanics of academia. Plagiarism and paid essay sites are increasing in popularity among students, and academics are having spasms over Wikipedia (perhaps for good reason) - perhaps what we should do is actually inculcate academic values in students by trusting them enough to read current research publications from when they first enter the university. Of course, for that to happen, it’d help if they could actually read the research over this zany Interweb thing, rather than have to jump through the utterly pointless hoops placed there to shore up the failing business model of journal publishers.

A publicly-funded university system should exist to enlighten, not to make money for publishers.

I’ve finally gotten the Git TextMate bundle to work. It’s really cool.

And the first thing I’ve done is made a git repository for it and added a new command - ‘Add All’. Often I’m working on a branch and want to bulk add a load of files. With the bundle as downloaded, you either have to use the commit dialog (which I found slightly ropey) or go to the command line. I’ve patched the version that’s in the SVN so that you can have an Add All command - git-tmbundle-add-all.diff is my git-diff for it.

TextMate and Git are like chocolate and strawberry - great-tasting flavours that are even better together.

Google have made an API which they call the Social Graph API. I think the very phrase social graph is bullshit, so I won’t say that any more. From now on I’m calling it the social network data API. Stupid name aside, it’s a pretty good product.

I haven’t bought into the OpenSocial hype. Too much rubbish about Facebook-style apps and widgets. Not interesting. It made all the investors and VCs cream themselves in an orgy, and all the business bloggers go on and on about Facebook vs. OpenSocial, as if that actually mattered in the long run (the social network fight is doomed to one winner - the Web - and that’s harder to monetise than closed off stuff, the portals of the current web).

What Google’s product does is quite simple. You provide it with a URI and it’ll return a list of linked resources - either other facets of your own identity (other pages you control, other social network profiles), connected friends and contacts or both. It uses a combination of XFN and FOAF.

The XFN performance is stunning. If you put in details of people who are big users of XFN (Tantek, Kevin, Jeremy etc.), you get tremendously accurate and useful results. In the case of XFN, it functions much as Plaxo’s Open Social Graph tool, only more useful and a lot quicker (it’s not probing each page - it’s Google, remember).

Now, for FOAF, it’s less accurate in a number of ways. It’s not parsing FOAF in the way that most folks probably would. I haven’t quite pegged the problem yet, but there’s something slightly weird going on with it. We’ve been discussing it on swig (logs: yesterday and this morning). And Danny is quite concerned about the SGN pseudo-URL scheme that Google are using, and says it’s breaking some fundamentals of Web Architecture (see his comments on Brad Fitzpatrick’s blog post).

To be honest, I’m not too bothered about the SGN thing. You can specify in the API call whether or not you want SGNs or proper URLs. Yes, it may technically be a breach of Web architecture, but it’s not one that really concerns me too much. It seems slightly silly when we already have a method in FOAF of specifying account names (the OnlineAccount class and it’s subclasses, combined with the holdsAccount, accountServiceHomepage and accountName properties - I use all of these in my FOAF document to describe Facebook friends who don’t have URIs but have unique numbers), but it’s not the end of the world.

What’s the new Google tool going to do then? Well, some people are going to use it for the fairly obvious first use - letting you import friends from other sites and prove one’s identity etc.

This evening I’ve been figuring out how we get the data back out again and on to the Linked Web of Data. I’ve been prototyping an RDFizer. It’s pretty simple to do - nothing that is of any real difficulty. I’m using Python to prototype it, but hope to have it available in a few different languages very soon (Python is a given, PHP is too - maybe Ruby, and Java if I feel masochistic - and most definitely available as a web service). Okay, so we get the data out as RDF, what then? Well, there are two things I can see which would be really cool. One is desktop caching. This is not hard. You could have a really neat little application that uses, say, SQLite and librdf as a little triple store. That way, when you run across a page on the Web, you could have a little sidebar or pop-up in your browser that would show you “this person knows five people whose web pages you’ve browsed recently”. Okay, you could do that without the RDF and triple-store, but it’s a cool use case nonetheless.

A slightly more practical and useful point is that we can use it as a scutter plan in order to pull in data about our whole social network. The combination of the Google Data plus some shareable rulesets and scripts could be a useful scutter plan. It’ll be interesting to see how else this can be used as part of Linked Open Data.

What else, then? I’m pretty sure that a simple mechanism for XFN ‘completeness’ will mean that OpenID whitelisting for expanding hCards can become more popular, as I described back on 2007-11-05. Mine is still based on FOAF though - just because we haven’t got the full stack together for XFN (it’s almost there, and one could do it, but FOAF for me already does everything that’s needed).

I’ve gotta say, SGNs aside, a big thank you to the folks at Google for making a big contribution to making XFN and, to a lesser extent, FOAF more useful. This is in the long-run more interesting than all the vampires and zombies crap on Facebook put together.

PZ did a radio debate with a creationist Intelligent Design advocate Teach The Controversy!-ist called Geoffrey Simmons - incidentally, from the Discovery Institute, that noted scientific research laboratory. You can listen to an MP3 recording of the debate here.

Just so you aren’t too surprised - Simmons turns out to be as pathetically ham-fisted as is to be expected from creationists, about as learned on scientific matters as a used pretzel. Why even bother listening to a creationist get an intellectual denunciation from a scientist? Well, what did it for me was the adverts for the chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to Focus on the Family (including lunch with Dr. James Dobson!), as well as the faux bonhomie that evangelical broadcasters always adopt during these debates. I guess they hope that the very fact that they are hosting the debate is supposed to make them look good.

PZ also pointed to some other amusing news from the Discovery Institute, surely the greatest living collection of scientists to ever walk the earth. Apparently, they have time in their busy schedule of ID research to trawl YouTube and issue DMCA take-down notices to their obviously misguided critics.

In other news from the ignorant, I got my first threat of physical violence over something I’d written yesterday. I was on a forum explaining exactly why conspiracy theories about One World Governments and New World Orders are inane and pointless. My argument is very simple against these people. Firstly, if the world is being run by a secret conspiracy who are slowly poisoning their own people, flying planes into buildings to bring about mass panic and fear and mercilessly suppressing dissent, why exactly do they allow conspiracy theorists to flourish? I mean, it’d only be a matter of flipping the switch on their websites and message boards and, oh, releasing some deadly nerve gas during conspiracy meetups (sadly, these people congregate in real life to exchange information about how the world is just a puppet on the string of the real masters! etc.). Secondly, these people are rightly concerned about personal freedoms and civil liberties. But their reaction to these issues isn’t effective. While normal people who are concerned about this do things like write to their elected representatives, lobby, protest, sign petitions, contribute to lobby groups, try to push their political parties to change their views and try to do outreach to their fellow citizens and the media, what do the conspiracy theorists do? Make videos about how the Bush administration masterminded the September 11th attacks. This leaves one’s credibility wavering somewhere in between that of young earth creationists and child molesters, which is hardly the best state of affairs if one is trying to push for change on civil liberties issues. In fact, the sheer idiocy of these people almost makes one have to consider the possibility that conspiracy theorists are simply a plot by authoritarians to make those people who support civil liberties seem like fringe wackjobs in order to push their agenda. Oh, wait. Maybe we should look for some evidence first rather than looking for the Secret Puppetmaster.