Jeni's Musings

Update: The Ogbujis have also set up a charitable fund called The Kingdom Kids to “help provide families with information and support to help protect other young children from the hazards of house fires.”

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Some of you will already know that Chimezie Ogbuji (Uche’s brother) lost two of his daughters (aged 6 and 2) at a fire in his house over the weekend. I gather that his third daughter (aged 14 months) has now also died.

A more devastating loss is hard to conceive, especially for those of us with small children of our own. There are two addresses for donations, to help with funeral expenses and to help Chime and his wife Roschelle to eventually rebuild their home and their lives:

Ogbuji Family Fund, c/o Dr Linus Ogbuji, 2737 Green Road, Shaker Heights OH 44122

and:

The Sussex Association–Ogbuji Family Fund, c/o Mrs. Margaret Dobbins, 3632 Rawnsdale Road, Shaker Heights, OH 44122

You can get a lot of fire safety advice from the web, but this tragedy is also motivating me to get a free fire safety check (UK only).

There are times I wish I believed in God, and could offer prayers. Blogging just isn’t the same.

Questions of identity and privacy are rather topical at the moment, especially here in Britain where last week a database dump including the names, addresses, bank details of half the country, along with our children’s names and dates of birth, got “lost in the post”.

So what better time to announce a new online identity metric? My PhD supervisor, Nigel Shadbolt is the CTO of Garlik, so earlier in the week I got an invite to the launch of QDOS.

Like the online identity calculator that I wrote about before, QDOS gives you a score based on your online presence. However, this score isn’t just based on a Google search. It has four components (which are each represented by a different colour, and are combined to give a very pretty pictorial “fingerprint”; check out Tim Berners-Lee’s QDOS, for example).

A Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a box that you plug into your network which crawls and indexes your data, and serves up the results of searches. Search results come in an XML format, and there’s a built in XSLT engine which means you can convert that XML into as many different views as you like. So you can have HTML-based search results, summaries, feeds, and so on.

My task recently was to debug some XSLT that transformed the GSA XML into an Atom feed. Easy enough, right? The GSA XML format is pretty hideous – most of the elements max out at three capital letters in length (whatever happened to human-readability) – but logical enough, and the mapping is hardly complex.

But all was not as it seemed. The GSA’s XSLT implementation is… how can I put this politely?… “non-standard”. This post describes some of the problems and workarounds.

IE7 gives you a really quite nice view of an Atom feed. Take a look at the one for this blog, for example. You can filter by category, sort by date or title or author, and search for particular words or phrases. Pretty neat.

But it’s only a partial implementation. I’ve been having to create some Atom feeds recently, and getting them to display nicely in IE7 has proven a bit tricky. I couldn’t find any documentation about this with a quick google, so thought I’d blog it for future reference.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a RDF sceptic for a long time. Perhaps it’s precisely because of my knowledge engineering background: in my experience, the field is about equal parts academic optimism, sales-related exaggeration and plain old information management. In other (un-minced) words, unrealistic aims with unproven technologies that are sold as being much cleverer (and more innovative) than they are. It’s not just RDF, I should say, but the whole Semantic Web pitch (typified for me by the idea of halting global terrorism using the power of Topic Maps) that seemed ludicrous to me.

Time moves on, and I might be changing my mind.