darcusblog

So I’ve for awhile now been thinking I need to get more serious about a storage and backup solution for my personal and household data. After casually looking around at alternatives, I finally decide on a solution. I effectively took this information about hardware, with this and this information about using OpenSolaris and ZFS for software, and now have 1 TB of mirrored networked storage (and automated snapshots when I get to it), all for less than $500.

It was far more of a PITA getting OpenSolaris running as I wanted than I’d hoped, but I think the end product is both better and cheaper than the commercial alternatives.

I mentioned in my previous post on the HTML 5 microdata draft that it included a use case from me; it’s this one:

A scholar and teacher wants other scholars (and potentially students) to be able to easily extract information about who he is to add it to their contact databases.

This is close to my description, but significantly narrower. Compare my words:

I want to be able to add structured data to my web site to denote who I am, what I have published, and what I teach in such a way that other scholars (and potentially students) can easily extract that information to add it to their contact databases, or to their bibliographic applications, or whatever. This involves contact data, for sure, but also other, domain specific, data, as well, and so presumes a flexible and extensible model and syntax.

The distinction is important because it makes clear that fixed encoding formats like hCard are not close to adequate; this is not just about a one-size-fits-all profile format, nor about possible integration into one particular kind of application (a contact database).

I’ve been following the discussion about extensible metadata in HTML 5 from afar, not really having the time to get any more involved. The bottom line for one of the primary use cases I provided was, can I represent what’s embedded in my home profile and publications pages? This isn’t just about data relating to me and my pages, but linking them to other data, elsewhere. For example, I will be changing my subject pages to link to the new Library of Congress id service, such as subject headings. Can I do that in HTML 5?

The group (well, let’s be real, Ian Hickson) released a first draft of a proposal today. I haven’t really looked at it carefully and thought through all the implications, but my initial take is it seems an attempt to split the difference between RDFa and microformats. So one can encode metadata properties, for example, using either plain string tokens (the microformat way), or using URIs (the RDF/RDFa way). I might well prefer to use RDFa, but perhaps with some tweaks, the microdata proposal might well allow the most important pieces of RDFa. At least I hope so.

But there are places where there seem some arbitrary restrictions. For example, I see no way to define a microdata item’s identity as anything but local to the document (the spec only allowing local IDs; not global URIs). If I have that right, that’s a critical and arbitrary flaw, and needs to be changed.

And, as Shelley Powers points out, it’s really, really strange and arbitrary to allow one to use a “reversed DNS identifier” as a global identifier alternative to an HTTP URI, but not allow other prefix mechanisms (such as CURIEs), particularly when the common argument against namespace prefixes in general and CURIEs in particular if they are too difficult. I’d rather see all three, or only URIs.

Finally, the “item” attribute is odd. It’s effectively equivalent to the RDFa typeOf attribute, in that it allows one to type the related properties. But then a) why not just call it typeOf?, and b) related to my point about identity above, the notion of an “item” is quite ambiguous, and seems to confuse identity and type.

I’d really love if the relevant open-minded experts in this space could find time to have a f2f meeting over this proposal, and iron out these sorts of details.

I recently learned that, as part of their lawsuit regarding Zotero, Thomson Reuters has successfully forced GMU to release the contact information for all 286 people who have SVN and Trac accounts at zotero.org.

I don’t personally care, because I’m sure these lawyers already know my name. But this seems nothing more than yet more thuggish intimidation.

It’s hard not to notice MIcrosoft’s new add push against Apple. The punchline is that buying a “PC” (the ads never mention Windows, oddly enough) tends to give a consumer more choice and better value compared to buying a Mac.

As a longtime Mac user, I tend to agree. Except the logical extension to the argument is to point out that Windows isn’t the only non-Mac OS in town, and that Linux-based alternatives such as Ubuntu offer the same value proposition: more choice and better value (not to mention “free’).

So it’s with that thinking in mind that I finally bought a new laptop after casually looking around for something to replace my aging Mac iBook G4. I wanted a machine with the following characteristics:

1. good battery life
2. good screen
3. excellent keyboard (since I intend to use it for writing and notetaking)
4. light weight
5. rugged
6. inexpensive
7. decent performance

I seriously considered one of the recent larger netbooks, but ultimately went with a Thinkpad X61s. I got a refurbished model for less than $700 direct from Lenovo, complete with 3 GB of RAM, a 9-cell battery, and a free bag.

Is it quite as elegant from a design standpoint as a Mac alternative? Not in the least! But despite being last year’s model, it’s really fast, it’s really light, it has very good battery life (haven’t really tested it, but I expect to get over four hours of real use out of it), and a great keyboard and screen. It’s also really nicely built.

So what about the OS? Some version of Linux was clear (I did boot into Vista at first in order to prepare the USB boot image, but subsequently wiped it out completely; good riddance), but which one? I started out with Arch, but gave up when I couldn’t establish a network connection to finish the basic installation. I then moved over to Ubuntu, which installed and configured without a hitch; everything simply worked: wireless network connection, suspend and wake, etc., etc.

But one thing I really like about Mac OS X is the design aesthetics. There’s something nice about working in a beautiful environment. Sadly, Ubuntu is not that for me. But xubuntu, on the other hand, is right up my alley! So a quick addition of the xubuntu packages and I’m happy.

The only thing that makes me a little hesitant to do a wholesale switch off of the Mac OS is it’s superior support in the image editing arena. If and when GIMP catches up to the ease-of-use and resolution-independent editing of Lightroom and Aperture, that will probably be it for me.

Shelley Powers, on a rather typical IRC conversation on RDFa in HTML 5:

Unfortunately, too many people who really don’t know data are making too many decisions about how data will be represented in the web of the future.

As usual, Shelley nails it.

I’ve had an idea for awhile that it’d be a really useful thing to have metadata about periodicals (journals, newspapers, etc.) available as linked data. After some informal chats about this with some people at Talis (and Ed Summers), Chris Clarke decided to throw out a somewhat more concrete idea for wider input.

The most important initial step is to find sources of good, clean data that can be issued under an open data license. If you have any ideas or would like to help, please followup on the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group.

Kris Oldes posted a link to an interesting article about an effort to use a multi-user WordPress-based blog with social networking functionality (BuddyPress) to integrate four different courses around a broader theme. This is the sort of thing that’s impossible to do in any LMS that I know of, but which has the potential to be a really valuable experience for students and faculty alike. Moreover, the intellectual work embodied in the course can endure beyond the semester, and the small group of students involved.

I’m interested in doing something like this (though more modest; only one class) next term for my Global Change course. At some point, though, I need to talk to people about the technical (how best to do it; Elgg vs. BuddyPress) and privacy issues involved in such an effort. I really like the idea of doing public blogging and comments, for example, but am not sure how to deal with privacy issues around that

So I just got this note from Thomson Reuters in my inbox, regarding their new ResearcherID service:

When you register with ResearcherID you are assigned a unique author identifier that expressly associates you with your work, helping to eliminate the common problem of author misidentification.

I’m presented then, with an ethical dilemma: do I participate because it’s probably in my personal interest to do so, or do I boycott this in favor of larger principles because of Thomson Reuters’ otherwise reprehensible activities (the Zotero suit)?

My tentative answer: boycott. I already have something that identifies me: http://bruce.darcus.name/about#me.

A public answer to a question about my experience with/thoughts on Sakai or Moodle …

I have not used Moodle or Sakai except for playing around with demos, which does not really qualify me as an expert. But that aside, in each case I came away feeling something like Michael Feldstein; that all LMS’s are pretty good/bad. On my superficial look, however, I would give the nod to Moodle for three reasons:

1. Usability: notwithstanding absolutely atrocious default design aesthetics, Moodle seems to be pretty clean and intuitive.
2. Hackability: Moodle is built on PHP, not Java. While I really dislike PHP, there’s no denying that it’s widely used, and easy to find people that can work on it.
3. Community: there seem more people contributing to Moodle’s development; I suspect this goes back to my ‘hackability’ point. OTOH, when I read comments like this from people I respect, I have to wonder about Sakai. Projects without strong communities tend not to do well.

So I’m not exactly supremely impressed with Moodle or Sakai, though I think either are at least as good as Blackboard.

In my ideal world, however, I’d really like a seamless melding of the traditional course-centric LMS, with the more free-flowing learner-centric model enabled by social networking applications like Elgg. This is the vision behind the in-progress Sakai 3 effort (try the demo; promising, but not as nice as Elgg). It is also surely what will be at the core of the nascent Pinax-LMS effort (Pinax is a new generic social networking and site development framework, so the LMS features would just be added as modular applications). I would expect that the best way to achieve that now is some sort of integration of Elgg and Moodle, though I am unsure of how seamless that integration can be technically.

Anyone with more direct experience with any of this have feedback?