Gabe Wachob Uncorked - Technology

Barcamp

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:03:58 -0400

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to attend Barcamp, a great technology grassroots get-together. Kudos to all the folks who brought it together - the best 6 hours I've spent geeking out in a long time...

My new IRC Channel - #GabeW

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 02:16:17 -0400

In blatant imitation of #joiito, I hereby announce my own IRC channel, #GabeW. This is on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net).

If you don't know what IRC is, or how to connect (try clicking on the link above first - it may just work depending on software you have installed), go see the #joiito intro to IRC wiki page.

California SB 682 - The Identity Information Protection Act of 2005

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 01:14:00 -0400

My state senator, Joe Simitian has authored a bill which is intended to keep the state or any local government entity from using or issuing identity cards with contactless communication facilities that don't meet strict security standards. It also outlaws completely the use of contactless data communications for certain types of identity documents (e.g. drivers licenses) for a period of 3 years.

The bill has the support of EFF, ACLU, and a number of other organizations. It also has my support. Please visit EFF's Action Alert for SB 682. And if you are a fellow consituent of Joe Simitian, please do contact his office and express your appreciation!

Link Technorati Tags Using XRIs instead of Technorati URL?

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:10:15 -0400

Tags: xri, technorati

Kevin Burton and a few other folks make a good point in talking about problems with the new Technorati tagging system. One thing that bugs me in particular is that it's basically a technorati-only solution that is a metadata standard based on a site-specific URL pattern. This seems brittle and more than a little hackish. I mean, great start, don't stop, but lets come up with a better solution.

Technorati Tags and XRI

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:17:11 -0500

Tags: xri, technorati

Seems like using XRIs with Technorati tags might be an interesting fit, especially with the "+" XRI namespace reserved for "concepts". For example, xri://+love xri://+war xri://+vanilla - things that aren't really meant to be "resolved" but are either used "as-is" (ie to refer to the thing everyone commonly knows the identifier to be - ie "love", "war", or "vanilla"), or used in the context of something else xri://=GabeWachob*(+father).

OK, so now I get to try to put in my first technorati tag(s). Lets see if this works.

Upgraded to Drupal 4.4

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 02:11:53 -0400

Well, I upgraded to Drupal 4.4

I don't see any new features, maybe there'll be some speed or bug fixes... I'll have to get some modules and play around with them.

Time for me to go to sleep.

ATOM feeds, fission and fusion

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 00:34:04 -0400

ATOM is the specification for syndicated content feeds.

One could say that creating a feed is the "splitting" of the original content from the blog, hence FISSION.

Putting the feeds together in an aggregator is therefore FUSION.

Hows that for slick wordsmithing.

Dean forms Internet Advisory Network

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:57:23 -0400

Wow!

The Dean campaign announced the formation of an advisory panel for policy issues surrounding the Internet. And the list of members is impressive: Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks to name a few.

Its about time these issues got addressed seriously at the presidential level. I'm waiting for other campaigns now (of course, they'll have to pick from the rest of the experts - Dean's got many of the best already!).

Radically simplified XRI resolution

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 03:24:04 -0400

I proposed a radically simplified XRI resolution mechanism that relies only on HTTP, leveraging caching for efficiency, and providing a clear path for using a REST architecture to use XRIs. In other words, this resolution is RESTful, and could be used in a RESTful application.

I've gotten fairly positive feedback about it so far and I'm hoping its now within the comprehension of mere mortals. While I was really jazzed about DNS and especially DDDS, its become clear to me that the newness of using DNS for generic identifier resolution is proving to be an impediment to any serious review of the XRI resolution document.

HTTP: Its good for a lot more than you may think

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:17:10 -0400

Did you know that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) defines the HTTP protocol to operate on any type of URI? This opens a lot of possiblities how different identifier schemes can be used.

In my role as co-chair of the XRI effort, I do a lot of research into existing specifications. I want to reuse them. Specifically, I want to reuse HTTP since its probably the most widely implemented specification out there (except maybe TCP/IP).

The Realization

According to my reading of RFC 2616, the on-the-wire protocol can use any URI. For example, this is legal according to 2616:

RDF as universal cross-application context

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 21:36:50 -0400

In a modern GUI (lets take Windows), you should be able to right click on any window and be able to grab some rdf from any app (like an mp3 player and the rdf would be what song it is playing)and be able to paste that rdf into another app. What that "other app" does is independent of where you got the RDF - though of course, presumably some of that RDF that is recognized by the receiving application. Unrecognized RDF assertions would just be ignored.

And then maybe even the apps can let you configure how to map application-specific state into RDF (and back to application-specific state or functionality).

A good simple XML-Schema validating XML Editor

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:16:30 -0400

I don't think I have unreasonable requirements. I want an XML editor that does validation as I edit, that validates against XML Schema, and validates documents with elements and attributes from multiple namespaces. It should run on Windows.

I'm doing this for producing a document with SOAP 1.2 messages and various extension headers. I've had all sorts of problems with what used to be my favorite tool - XMLSpy. I just can't get it to reliably validate documents across mutiple schema.

Today, I found XRay2 from Architag. A free download (with registration). I'm still trying it out, but it does just what I need in an intuitive way. Load all the schema in the validator, and it builds a catalog from the declarations in the schema, and you can then build an XML document using all the namespaces defined in that catalog. Simple, intuitive, and just what I need.

Using WikiWords to make topics more findable

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 19:47:24 -0400

Kevin Marks suggests using BlogTags to make topics "emerge" from the wild wild-web. The idea is neat. Simply insert a WikiWord (that is unlikely to get confused with a normal word, because it is at least two words smushed together) into your blog entry, or web content.

Then, when others want to find links on this topic, they use the same WikiWord in their favorite search engine. The search will have both high recall and high precision! Great idea!

New Blog

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 03:14:37 -0400

I've decided that this blogging thing is something I should really try out.

Since I've decided to actively support the Dean 2004 campaign, and specifically the Hack4Dean effort, which uses Drupal, I'm trying out this Drupal thing.

We'll see how it goes!