A few small fixes over the weekend:
To do:
Look at the problems with the PhotoPost-based albums section and see about upgrading our DNewsWeb software for the USENET section.
I was in Paris at the weekend and went to the launch of the Star Wars trilogy in FNAC on the Champs Elysees after midnight on the 21 September. Had to queue for three hours from 10 PM but did manage to get my Empire Strikes Back DVD signed by R2D2 (Kenny Baker) and Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch) which was cool. Funny thing was that I was unknowingly sitting beside the same Kenny Baker on a hop-on hop-off tour bus that very afternoon, not knowing that I’d be queueing up to get my DVD signed by him later on.
I was also in the Virgin megastore on Champs Elysees earlier that day. They also had a Star Wars theme going with a number of stormtroopers (both episode I and IV variations) patrolling the store, looking pretty sinister and peering over people’s shoulders. I didn’t notice one of them beside me until I had picked up a Battlestar Galactica box set (shaped with a Cylon’s head) to look at; no doubt I’ve now been marked as a rebel in their files.
I’ve just submitted the FOAF export from boards.ie and boards.jp to a new crawler, FoaFSpace. I’m looking forward to when the community graph feature works… Here’s the announcement from creator Gene McCulley:
RDF folks, I have built a foaf search engine and put it at www.foafspace.com. I have not yet finished the smushing mechanism, so the engine currently returns more entries than desired. It still has some problems with the occasional RDF file. Other than that, it is mostly stable. I would appreciate any feedback regarding desired features and bugs found. Thanks.
I’ve begun work today on a semantic web-enabled social and professional networking system for boards.ie and boards.jp, which will simply be called the “Boards Network”. This will incorporate the previous vBFriends social networking module and the vBFOAF semantic web exporter for vBulletin 3, as well as my old Likedis functionality for vBulletin 2 which I will resurrect in a more advanced form shortly. I’ve made some changes to vBFriends and vBFOAF, giving more statistics to the former and opening the latter’s export to aggregators such as Plink and SECO.
Here’s a cute image; the little person evolved from the O and star of my Cloud logo.
I had to laugh at this one from today’s The Register:
There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft. — Bill Gates
Found this useful reference today on Wikibooks: an introduction to the Irish language detailing its origins and structure.
Wikibooks (and the whole Wikimedia foundation) is a great idea, and I liked the annotated texts they have too (indeed, there is probably lots of material available at Project Gutenberg that is ripe for annotation).
Made two appearances on RTE Radio 1 last week, firstly as part of a discussion about “Social Networking and the Semantic Web” on Future Tense with RTE’s Peter Mooney and DERI’s Brian Cummins, and secondly for a brief overview of the “Friend Of A Friend” project in the business news segment of Five Seven Live.
The Irish are not Celts, say experts 05 Sep 2004 The Sunday Times
THE long-held belief that Ireland’s population is descended from the Celts has been disproved by geneticists, who have concluded that they never invaded Ireland.
Apparently the genetics of the Irish didn’t change that much 2500 years ago when the Celts were supposed to have invaded Ireland and wiped out all the natives (no significant Celtic genes were found in samples from modern-day Irish by Brian McEvoy et al. from TCD), but rather genes can be traced back at least 9000 years to people who migrated from Spain and Portugal after the Ice Age thawed out.
With my recent acquisition of boards.us, I hope to expand the boards brand across the Atlantic shortly (the Pacific has already been targetted with boards.jp).
The co-owned venture boards.ie (with ex-Spin Solutions staff) is still increasing its online-at-once numbers, with the latest record standing at 569 from 1st September. The boards.jp online record is still considerably lower at 189 from June, but that represents 3.5% of boards.jp’s 4782 total members as opposed to 2.25% of the 25191 member base of boards.ie.
I didn’t realise that Father Ted had any known links to the Semantic Web, but when I went shopping for a Ted video on Amazon today, it informed me that “Customers who bought items in your Shopping Cart also bought: The Semantic Web by Michael C. Daconta et al.”, so perhaps this purchase was influenced by the recent FOAF Galway workshop 
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