Midwest Web Sense

no shatner. wild!

W3C and other standards organizations are in the business of defining languages -- conventions that organizations can choose to follow -- and not in mandating operational behavior -- telling organizations and participants in the network how they are supposed... Larry Masinter http://larry.masinter.net

Structured data on the web got a boost this week, with Google's announcement of Rich Snippets and Rich Snippets in Custom Search. Structured data at such a large scale raises at least three issues:SyntaxVocabularyPolicyGoogle's documentation shows support for both microformats... Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

I had a pretty small data interchange problem the other day: I just wanted to archive some play lists that I had compiled using various music player daemon (mpd) clients. The mpd server stores playlists as simple m3u files,... Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

T-SHIRTS SIGNS BANNERS DECALS AUTO MAGNETS & LETTERING OLATHE, KS (913) 636-9647 spotter: M on craigslist

d'oh! the XBRL folks were in my back yard and I missed it!

I'd like to share the full article, but the newspapers are too busy digging their own grave. sigh. I scanned our copy from the KC paper

I'd like to share the full article, but the newspapers are too busy digging their own grave. sigh. I scanned our copy from the KC paper

The W3C TAG has worked on the general issue of "versioning" for many years, and many TAG members may be worn out on the issue. However, undeterred by past history, I'm taking another run at it, this time trying to... Larry Masinter http://larry.masinter.net

not sure I was in the mood for this kinda movie, but it was a fun outing anyway

more on music collection and office organization

I'm still not sure how to manage my music files. Now that I have most of it on one big disk on a linux always-on machine (I hesitate to say server as I don't have a clear back-up strategy), I put our mac mini under the TV in the hearth, replacing the XO-1 laptop, in order to do video as well as just sound.

It doesn't make much sense, after all, to try to stay open-source-pure when it comes to listening to RIAA music and watching hollywood movies; I might as well have Steve Jobs negotiating my sharecropping deal.

mpd uses .m3u files. They're pretty simple, but for archival purposes, I try to stick to XHTML. I wrote another little python ditty to do the conversion: see m3uin.py in r423:4a5a8b2d237c of palmagent hg repo.

I run it like this:

$ python ~/projects/palmagent/m3uin.py /var/lib/mpd/playlists/Three\ Chords\ and\ the\ Truth.m3u >three_chords.html

and out comes:

1. from A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1]
   by John Denver
   Poems, Prayers And Promises

2. from WOW Worship (orange)
   by Compilations
   Did you Feel the Mountains Tremble

3. from Family Music Party
   by Trout Fishing In America
   Back When I Could Fly

Not only can us humans make sense of that, but it's got RDFa attributes sprinkled here and there that make it yummy Semantic Web Data so that we can delegate processing to machines:

Jukebox$ xsltproc --novalid http://www.w3.org/2008/07/rdfa-xslt three_chords.html >three_chords.rdf Jukebox$ rapper three_chords.rdf -o turtle | less rapper: Parsing file three_chords.rdf with parser rdfxml rapper: Serializing with serializer turtle rapper: Parsing returned 77 triples

and out comes:

@prefix h: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> . @prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> . @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> . @prefix mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/> .

<three_chords.rdf#album1> dc:title "A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1]" ; mo:track <artists-popular/John%20Denver/A%20Song%27s%20Best%20Friend_%20The%20Very%20Best%20Of%20John%20Denver%20%5BDisc%201%5D/1-04%20Poems%2C%20Prayers%20And%20Promises.mp3> ; a mo:Record ; foaf:maker <three_chords.rdf#agent1> .

<three_chords.rdf#agent1> a foaf:Agent ; foaf:name "John Denver" .

In my March 2008 item, hAudio for microformats mixtapes, in progress, I tried using microformats but struggled since hAudio was still sparsely documented and changing. In contrast, RDFa and the music ontology were pretty easy to work with.

As I said in my Aug 2008 item, The details of data in documents; GRDDL, profiles, and HTML5, one of the options is that "People who want to put data in their HTML documents use RDFa".

I'm looking into getting metadata from the audio file, not just the path name. In particular, using the mutagen library I can see that iTunes stores CDDB IDs when it rips music and I'd like to use those to ground my data globally:

MPEG 1 layer 3, 160000 bps, 44100 Hz, 246.81 seconds (audio/mp3) COMM=iTunNORM='eng'= 00000550 000001F3 00002A22 00002F25 00021A29 000219F5 0000707F 00006A4C 0003536D 0002B40A TPE1=John Denver TDRC=2004 TIT2=Poems, Prayers And Promises TENC=iTunes v4.7 TRCK=4/20 TPOS=1/2 TALB=A Song's Best Friend: The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1] COMM=iTunes_CDDB_IDs='eng'=20+F0DCFC688BB846194D1DA27AC6EAF16D+4607205 TCON=Country TCOM=John Denver

Yet ToDo: connect this with ImmPort/PDB in neurocommons/science commons/creative commons work (pdb-immport code in SVN), Linked Open Data for the U.S.A. recovery IT infrastructure, and maybe XBRL stuff.

See Also:

• 2007-07-22 Music Collections and Office Organization

• 2009-01-01 Still struggling to catalog CDs

still outfitting this netbook... well, I brought the acer back and got the msi Wind U120 that I asked for in the 1st place.

The . key is tiny and shifte over a little. I regularly hit / when I mean . and I don't know whether I'll be able to retrain myself.

I'd like to try the Ubuntu netbook remix; Ubuntu recommends putting a jaunty jackalope daily build on flash drive; I tried that, but (a) it took forever to write 1GB+ to a flash drive and (b) the machine won't boot from flash drive.

Wubi worked, but having my Ubuntu world live inside NTFS doesn't feel right.

I have an external USB CD drive; I'll eventually use that to re-install, I think.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu doesn't seem to grok the wireless card. (There's a bug in launchpad and I subscribed to it. IOU one link...)

So I'm trying out Windows for the 1st time in years. I want to update one of my hg-backed web sites. TortoiseHg seems like a good approach... the 1st N attempts to download it yielded "file is corrupt" when I tried to run it; I didn't think switching from chrome to Opera would help, but it did. Hmm... could chrome really screw up downloading that badly?

Now I'm trying cygwin and ssh and such. Wish me luck...

showcase 25 Apr conflicts with startup-weekend, but they have other opportunities in their calendar. spotter: M via KC star ad.

read a b+w paper copy of their "Growing Green Together" flyer

by Rachel Metz via AP, KC star.

I'm trying out a new netbook

The keyboard is quite small; at first, touch-typing didn't work at all, but I seem to be getting the hang of it. It's a good thing clicking on the trackpad works; the button is hopeless.

I hope/plan to have it run Ubuntu as well as the WinXP that came on it, but I'm really struggling to get Ubuntu on it:

* The ubuntu "jaunty jackalope" image (@@link) is 1GB, which takes quite a while to download and even longer to write to the SD card (I seem to get 1.1 Mb/sec sustained). * This machine won't boot from its media card slot (@@cite source)

I managed to boot debian-from-scratch with an external CD, but it couldn't recognize the ethernet card. What's the equivalent of lsusb under WinXP?

I'm using Opera rather than firefox just now; I figure if I'm gonna use a closed-source operating system (Win XP) I might as well try Opera while I'm at it. Boy, is Internet Explorer bloated with ads and such.

The google toolbar seems to bind a bunch of keys that I accidentally hit on occasion. Annoying.

This machine is an Acer; I could swear I asked the guy at Micro Center for an MSI Wind.

The USB disk enclosure is wrong again too: it's IDE when I need SATA. And the $20 wifi router won't play nice with my Brother HL-5250DN printer.

Let's try copying the image to a Lexar SDHC 4BG card and see if it's any faster...

connolly@pav:~/Desktop$ dmesg | grep Attach

[82241.020775] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdk] Attached SCSI disk

connolly@pav:~/Desktop$ sudo dd if=jaunty-netbook-remix-i386.iso of=/dev/sdk bs=1M

wow! MUCH faster!

692+1 records in 692+1 records out 725796864 bytes (726 MB) copied, 14.9489 s, 48.6 MB/s

burn, choderbug, burn!

spotter: Harry H. where: Cruciform Lecture Theatre 1, UCL, London, UK (another map) when: Saturday 28th March 2009, 1030-1830

Master David Johnson. spotter: Zach