disobey.com

Last week, in #apache on irc.openprojects.net, we were goofing around when one guy came out of nowhere and said "i am, i am". We were talking about religion at the time, and another participant congratulated him on his religious knowledge. Me, one-time reader of the Bible, and curious explorer of religious culture, had no clue what he was talking about.

Apparently, when Moses was getting the ten commandments from the big guy, Moses asked "What should I tell the people downstairs when they ask who gave these to me?" God replied, "I am who I am" (thus circling back to the original guy's comment).

Now, I pride myself on esoteric knowledge, and I knew I would have remembered this if I had read it. A cursory hopping around on Google brought forth the answer. See, the Bible I read was the Jehovah's Witness version, a time of my life that, without a doubt, contributed to the messed up little person I am now. In the JW Bible, as the linked screenshot attests, God says "I shall prove to be what I shall prove to be" - semantically similar, but worlds apart from the original. The fact that such a hugely important phrase could be so different from Bible version to Bible version just kinda amazes me. Even more so is the conspiracy theory that Jesus Is God, based on some words that Jesus spoke.

Thanks aah and DrBacchus!

AmphetaDesk gets written up in The Guardian - which is rather nice, considering that's 800,000 print readers, and millions on the web:

One desktop reader with an increasingly vocal following is Amphetadesk. Written by the improbably named, and unnaturally helpful, Morbus Iff, Amphetadesk is free and runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is open source, and it uses a very clever way of exposing its innards for the so-inclined to tweak away at: programmers with just a slim knowledge of the Perl language will be delighted with it. It is wonderfully easy to use and the support is superb.

My first Apple article, Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar, is available:

The newest release of Apple's operating system, OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) is filled with many welcome improvements and additions. The integrated Address Book, improved Mail, System Preference tweaks

Dave asks: "Why is RSS 1.0 called RSS?"

I've always seen RSS 1.0 as a natural progression from the RSS v0.9x series. Whereas RSS v0.9x required a single brain to say "ok, here are the new changes", RSS 1.0 shifts those changes to the syndication community - allowing anyone to embrace and extend RSS 1.0 with the use of modules and namespaces. For those who don't need that flexibility, they don't need to use RSS 1.0 - plain and simple. This also puts the control back to the community - instead of waiting for someone to add their feature request to the spec, they can develop a module, and be done with it.

As such, RSS 1.0 takes less time (in the long run) to code for, since there's nothing that will say "well, there's a new version of RSS v0.9x out, so I've got to re-code to support the new elements". Instead of people *expecting* aggregators to support the new elements (as could be the case with development in the RSS v0.9x, since it's "in the spec"), people create their own modules for their own use, and often use that metadata within specific applications.

That brings this around to Ben's RDFS paper: the "benefits" of having a community-sponsored extension of RSS 1.0 (with modules) and the "benefits" of having a spearheaded effort with v0.9x can both lend themselves to some sort of auto-describing labeling, as per this RDFS. Most aggregators only support the very basics: items, links, and descriptions - and there's not much else displayed to the user (be they pubDates from the newer .9x's, or dc:date from 1.0). With RDFS, an aggregator can learn how to display newer features of RSS (be they new specs, or new modules) without having to be recoded.

In an everlasting attempt to be friendlier to the visitors of Disobey.com, I've recently enabled mod_speling. This should save a few 404s for careless typers. If you notice anything awry (or if the loadtime seems slower, as the module doc warns), be sure to let me know.

Anti-Press Ezine #33 is now available.

I stole some writing time yesterday and this morning to finish something I had been collecting for a while last month: The Semantic Web: 1-2-3:

This resource is also known as Stupid Berry Pickers Make Idiot Jam and that fact should add suitable weight to the following declaration: I'm new to the Semantic Web. I cobbled this fair piece together in an attempt to collect my thoughts, answered questions, path - of - learning, and requisite bookmarks so that other XML hackers may follow in my footsteps. All inaccuracies are purely my fault, so be sure to correct me.

This document is not intended to teach you RDF via my own words, but rather to hand-hold you through the "good" parts of the same journey I took. If it looks like a big link-list with menial comments from the peanut gallery, then you're not far off the mark of my intent. This is by no means definitive, nor was that the goal.

Whether I agree with 'em or not, it's always a pleasure to read Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow, and they both deliver with a Contrarian View of Open Source and What to Do About Spam? (respectively).

Wonderful set of UI Patterns and Techniques:

Each of these patterns (which are more general) and techniques (more specific) are intended to help you solve design problems. They're common problems, and there's no point in reinventing the wheel every time you need, say, a sortable table -- plenty of folks have already done it, and learned how to do it well. Some of that knowledge is written up here, in an easily-digestible format.

Man alive, I have an incredible amount of stuff to write, all under deadline, all due yesterday. Tons to read, myriads of explorations planned. My TODO list isn't getting any smaller, and my aspirations are rising up against me. Somehow, I have to find time to enjoy myself (maybe I can get a PSone for the bathroom... hMmmm.)