I stumbled upon this new company in SA which is to supply PLC (Power Line Communication) called GTS. Oh, how exciting! Now we can give Telkom the finger, right? WRONG!!! One thing we must not forget is that Telkom controls whatever bandwidth goes out of this country. So Telkom will charge what Telkom charges. Whoever or whatever solution we choose, the money is going to end up in Telkom coffers one way or another.
Lets have a look at the costs for PLC. This is a price matrix on GTS’s website:
R500 for 5GB, no line rental or binding contracts. Not too bad, but neither is it earth shattering good. Speed is a bit shoddy considering that Telkom now offer 4 Mbps lines. My main concern is, is it not a case of “rather the devil you know than the one you don’t”. How stable will it be? There is little way of telling. Is it even for real? There has been little to no hype around it. Why? We are all so desperate to give Telkom the finger, one or two big advertising campaigns and they’d have more work than they can manage. Why then enter the market silently? It makes little sense. We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled to see how this one pans out.
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I’ve been a fan of Thinkgeek apparel for as long as they’ve existed. I haven’t been there for quite some time. Found this new gem of a t-shirt with an even better write-up next to it:
Sure, you can ogle her <BODY> - stare at her <FORM>, but for crying out loud, use your <HEAD>!
<A> woman doesn’t want to be treated as an <OBJECT>. You’ve got to have <STYLE>. Work on your pickup lines, don’t read from some <SCRIPT>. Be <BOLD>, and take chances! Make sure each <BUTTON> on your shirt is done up right. <SELECT> a nice cologne, but not too much!
Follow these simple instructions, stay in the right <FRAME> of mind, and <I> am sure you’ll soon be a <LEGEND> in dating.
If you made it this far, you clearly know HTML, and this shirt tells the world. White and gray lettering on a heavy weight cardinal #FF0000 reads “I Know <HTML> <!–how to meet ladies–>”.
I’ve recently became a Mac Zealot (to endless irritation of Windows users …). This time I’m going to stick up for Windows Vista. There has been lots of allegations that Vista “used” a lot of OS X ideas. This is simply NOT true. Have a look at this video from the NY Times. It still does not mean I like Windows, I just thought I’d come up for you boys…
Blegh. I do not like statements like this. According to some tests ran Django is the top performer. Yet there is a lot more production sites out in the field developed on Ruby on Rails than there is on Django. So surely this adds weight when looking at the success of a language? Same for PHP and PERL. Lots of production sites there. A lot more than RoR and Django combined! Still people LOVE to gun down each other. What is extremely ironic is that Rails is (secretly) the benchmark whenever a MVC Framework is developed. No one would ever admit that, but we all know that is true…
One comment made sense in it all:
Up is better than down! Blue is better than Orange! Six is better than ‘Z’! Django is better than Rails!
No, seriously… It doesn’t matter. For most things, the advantages to
one or the other come down to very minor things. (My Django app runs 4%
faster than the comparable Rails app!)
Next… Ruby was only unknown to you. Just because the mass of
mediocre programmers had never heard of Ruby until recently proves
nothing.
Heres what it comes down to… Are you ready for this? …Which one do
you like more? You like Django? Bitchin’. I like Rails. Actually, more
specifically… I like Ruby, and don’t like Python. Its personal
preference, trying to ‘prove’ that one is better than the other leads
nowhere.
Want evidence? Try to find an argument where one side proves that
their language is ‘better’ than another. It doesn’t happen. Its a waste
of time and energy.
Go program something.
Full marks for this remark! True to the bone… So if you are an upcoming young developer, follow this guy’s advice and ask yourself the question: Which one (language / framework) do
you like more? That is what matters in the end…
I’m still a bit old fashioned. I love reading magazines and newspapers. Why? Simply put, carrying your laptop everywhere is not always so comfortable. PDA would be a good other option, the problem is that its display is a bit too small.
So last night I was laying in bed reading an old Intelligence magazine (the April 2006 issue to be exact) in which they featured e-ink and e-ink devices. Now this looks like a nice alternative!
Imagine that you don’t have to go to the store to buy today’s paper. You simply download today’s edition and save it on your Sony Reader for example, and there you go! In a nice 600×800 display with clear contrast so your eyes don’t get too strained reading it. And to top it all, you could actually have a couple of past editions saved on your reader. So if you don’t get everything read today, you can always read it tomorrow.
Same with novels. Store a couple on there and as you finish reading them in the most obscure places (always happen then) you won’t be stuck without another one to read.
For me a biggy is technical documents and guides. If I develop it is not always so nice to minimize my editor to read about something then go back and maximize the editor again to try it. Its a lot simpler to simply have a book next to you and read what you need and do what you must simutaniosly.
Problem is that these e-ink devices are still a bit pricy and that is only for the paper. Then you will still need to pay for the content/text! Never simple, eh?
In our quest to learn more about the Semantic web, we’ve found that there is lots and lots of non-South African sites and blogs that publishes content in microformats, but very little sites that actually utilises these formats. Technorati Kitchen is utilising it, but I think its only experimental. (I actually pinged them with two hCalendar formatted posts yesterday and it did not index it. The microformats do validate, so there is nothing wrong with them. Maybe its a bug?). If you know of some sites, we’d appreciate it if you’d let us know. There might be more, but if so, they are not being promoted very well. So me and Charl decided we’d like to remedy that. As Charl so eloquently put “we’re doing what Google is not“.
Now please take note that it is not our intention to be better than Google, Grabble,Gargoyle or any other non-microformat service. Our mission is to get you guys to start using and implementing microformats and to produce kick-ass and relevant search results based on those microformats you implement. No other content will be indexed. ONLYmicroformatted pages will be indexed. When the time comes, we’ll help all of you to adopt these formats and publish them in a series of guidelines we’ll publish. We’re even planning to develop some tools to make it easier, but that would happen much later. Oh, and if you develop web sites, it would be a good thing to consider implementing some formats in all your future endeavors!
Introducing Kupa. We’ve set up a blog for you to keep track of what is happening, how far the development process is and when it will go live. Go to http://kupa.co.za/blog/
Currently we are in the pre-alpha stages. We are still busy documenting the project still so it will be a while before we can start coding and releasing the project. Once we’ve determined the first milestone, we’ll stick it up on the blog with a (possible - its a labour of love project ) release date, so keep your eyes peeled!
At the present time, if you are looking for a new job, you will go to sites like PNet,Career Junction or Monster and register with them. You will have to spend quite a lengthy time creating your CV on their site. Every 6 months or so you’ll have to go to all these sites to update your CV just so things are looking current. Hmmm… not ideal is it?
Introducing hResume!hResume is a microformat that defines a standard for your CV. Now lets suppose everyone gets with the times and support microformats. Lets say someone created a site where you can create your CV in the hResume format and distribute it from the particular site. Or you can create it using this Wordpress plug-in! You will now have one CV in one place which you need to keep updated.
Now lets pretend all the eRecruitment web sites can parse and read the hResume microformat. All you now need to do is go to the eRecruitment web site, submit the URL of your CV and viola! Your CV is updated in all the sites you register with! Wouldn’t THAT be something.
One problem with existing eRecruitment web sites is that ALL of them thats been established for a long time have their own proprierty CV format. In other words, PNet’s CV looks a lot different to Career Junction’s. These sites have got thousands and thousands of CV’s. For them to change their proprierty format is going to be a BIG pain in the butt and can prove a costly exercise… Unless they can find a way of extracting data they need and convert the hResume to their proprierty formats. That could work.
LinkedIn is the front runner and already formulates profiles in the hResume microformat. There is one international site I’ve came across that supports the format called emurse. How long will it be before South African sites adopt these technologies? I’ve talked to some prominent recruiters and their feeling towards Career Junction is that you would sooner squeeze blood from a stone than getting them to play along… I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
So lets look at an exmaple that hits close to home. Lets make a cherry pie using hot ingredients off the shelves today. So you take 250ml of chopped Cherrypicka, mix in a pinch of your own blog and deep fry it in some boiling Muti.
Cherrypicka is a local new service that allows you to buy products at way below the retail price, use the product and then review it to tell others and the guy whose product it was what you think. Kick-ass idea!
Now instead of you reviewing it by sending an email to the Cherrypickas or doing it on their site, you use the hReview microformat to create a blog post (that is if you have your own blog). You then send your permalink using a pingback API (much like Technorati) to notify Cherrypicka that you have reviewed a product bought from their site. Cherrypicka’s API then parses the post, picks up the hReview and saves it to their database for display on their site. Now the product is getting double the exposure. Muti comes along and build in something that scans submissions for the hReview microformat and should it find one it “files” it in a special section on the Muti site dedicated to reviews. We can now go to Muti and read the reviews there and vote it up or down. Now the product gets triple exposure.
Google decides to implement a microformat search engine, indexes your blog post, picks up the review and saves it to their microformat seach engine. Someone goes to microformats.google.com (hypothetical, remember?) search for reviews on condoms for example and picks up the Pronto Condoms reviewed by someone who bought it from Cherrypicka. Who knows how much more exposure the product can get now?!
So how does the dish taste?! Leaves a subtle sweet taste in my mouth. HMMMM…
This is a simple example. Apply the same concept to movies that you might want to review or events that you attended. Really powerful stuff! All we need now is a local Microformats search engine…
So now that you all know exactly what microformats is (read: Web3.0 (The Semantic Web) building blocks), it is time to look at some of the practical benefits thereof.
Before I start, I should mention that Google is actually a slow adopter of the technology. They probably have good reason for not adopting the technology yet, but if you look at the benefits below, I really hope they change their minds soon! Yahoo! Localsupport it already, so I’ll play with it and do another post later when time allows for it. (Unfortunately, Yahoo! Local does not include much of Africa…)
So lets take the analogy of the 27dinner with their events published in the hCalendar microformat format. We add a new microformat called hReview which is used by all the Uber Geeks blogging about 27dinners. (From the microformats site: hReview is a simple, open, distributed format,suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses,events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is oneof several microformats open standards.)
Google now indexes the web sites and sees, “w00t! Here is some microformats on this page! Better save it somewhere special…” So it picks out the formatted data and stores it for use in their microformat search engine page. (Lets just make believe that they have a thing called microformats.google.com, since there is not such a thing yet, its only MAKE BELIEVE! Clear? Right!)
So you have heard of this thing called 27dinners and want to know a little more. You go over to microformats.google.com and you enter 27dinner. Instead of returning all other blog’s results with 27dinner in it, it will return only the results formatted. It could return a page with subcategories for formal reviews about the past 27dinners and a subcategory listing future events of the 27dinners. If it really wants to be fancy, Google will allow you to save the future 27dinner events there-and-then to your Google Calendar so you don’t double book for that date and all that without even typing anything but your search words.
In other words, microformats will allow Google to UNDERSTAND that the event details on the page is an EVENT and that REVIEWS on other’s blogs is formal REVIEWS and not random rants of how good or bad the events was or simply someone that said, “Hey, Killroy was here (at the 27dinner)”.
Oh and before I forget, my favorite browser Flock has a cool microformats extension called Flocktails. Go and install Flock then install the extension and check it out!
After our last discussion about Web3.0 or if you prefer, the Semantic Web, I had frequent discussions with Charl about microformats (he is the maven on this subject!). Microformats can be considered one of the building blocks on which Web3.0 is being built.
“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set
of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted
standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats
intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors
and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).”
Now that I’ve confused the crap out of you, let me quickly explain in plain old english what it is and what you can do with it.
Lets look at a quick example. Lets suppose the Geek/27 dinners announce a dinner that is going to happen on a specific date at a specific place in a month’s time. They go on their wiki page or on their web site and announce it. Instead of simply typing up the details on the page, they mark it up a little based on the hCalendar and hCard formats. The hCalendar format will “explain” the details of the dinner event while the hCard will “explain” who I can contact where about the event. It will still look EXACTLY the same as it looks now on the wiki page.
The difference is because they have marked it up based on the particular microformat standards, I can have a Firefox plug-in that will recognize the data and extract the details from the page without me having to do the ol’ copy-n-paste thing. So my plug-in extracts the event data (the where, when, what, etc…) and show it in my sidebar. From my sidebar I can now take the data and simply import it into my calendar and take the organizer’s details and import it into my email client’s addressbook. (Lets say you will right-click on the event data and say “Schedule in calendar” and it will save the event data to your calendar and the same with the organizer’s details)
The basic idea is that data can be recognized by software. In the old days (well, today still. We are still living in the old days, I suppose! ) people use to do “screen-scrapes”. They would write software that would parse a web page and try to predict what data/text on the page is the relevant data they want. With microformats implemented, it would not be necessary. Your browser will know which is the relevant data by simply parsing the page. So it would not matter how your page is laid out and designed, the software will know what data is a microformat and what is not, because it is marked up that way.
So how do you “mark it up”? Here is a hCalendar example:
As you can see it is plain old (X)HTML. Nothing special. Due to attributes that is added like id=”hcalendar-27-dinner” and class=”location” and class=”description”, the data gets defined and will enable software to “recognize” the data and use it to integrate it with other software.
Oh, and this is not the only thing that Web3.0 is about. Its one of the things. (just so we’re clear…)
Oh, note to Vincent: I’m starting to warm up to labelling it Web 3.0!
) release date, so keep your eyes peeled!
We add a new microformat called 
