going SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)

I’ve just SIOC enabled this blog using the SIOC Exporter for WordPress by Uldis Bojars.  Quoting from the SIOC project web site:

The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF.

This means you can explore the blog as an RDF Graph including this post.

<sioc:Post rdf:about="http://www.alandix.com/blog/?p=176">
    <sioc:link rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/?p=176"/>
    <sioc:has_container rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=site#weblog"/>
    <dc:title>going SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)</dc:title>
    <sioc:has_creator>
        <sioc:User rdf:about="http://www.alandix.com/blog/author/admin/" rdfs:label="alan">
            <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.alandix.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=user&amp;sioc_id=1"/>
        </sioc:User>
    </sioc:has_creator>
...

Crash Report

You would think crash reporting would be made as seamless and helpful as possible, after all your product has just failed in some way and you wish (a) to mollify the user; and (b) to solicit their assistance in obtaining a full report.

You would think …

In the following I will reflect on what goes wrong in Adobe’s crash reporting and some  lessons we can learn from it.

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Descartes: Principles of Philosophy

I have just read Descartes‘ “Principles of Philosophy” – famous for “Cogito ergo sum“.  I have read commentaries on Descartes before, but never the original (or at least a translation1, I don’t read Latin!).  Now-a-days “Cartesian thinking” is often used in a derogatory way, symbolising a narrow, reductionist and simplistic world-view.  However, reading “Principles” in full reveals a man with a rich and deep insight of which his rational and analytic philosophy forms a part.

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  1. René Descartes, 1644, Principles of Philosophy, trans. George MacDonald Ross, 1998–1999[back]