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Friday, March 14 2003

Conflict in Iraq

A WBUR Weblog Special

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Just so no one is confused, Mont Royal and St. Laurent are perpendicular to one another.

Which makes it kind of hard to take in the great vintage stores on your way to Schwartz's. Especially if you're coming from Carrée St Louis which is equidistant from the deli as the deli is from Mont Royal. And the part about it being hard to imagine [Richler] more loved and admired by an entire community is factually correct so long as you understand that the community in question is the island's tiny and woefully insular anglophone population, many of whom like to pretend that they are an oppressed minority. Anyway, people who really do ask themselves What would Barney do? will be happy to know that "the British one" is on the radio, every Friday night at eight.

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Matt Biddulph : The Semantic Web, RDF and perl

, lightning talk (pdf). Meanwhile, the BBC are modelling the Eastenders in FOAF which will probably prove to be RDF's killer-app...

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The Many Date and Times of Perl

Efforts in the past to herd all the existing module authors towards a common API have failed, so rather than try that again, I decided to just write even more datetime code. As we all know, the best way to put out a fire is to pour copious amounts of gasoline on it. In order to make my project sound cool, I'm calling it the "Perl DateTime Suite", which sounds much better than "more date and time modules".

I am so with the Idea of RDF but it's never going to happen, certainly not the way people who wax poetic about it seem to imagine. RDF strikes me as the datetime problem writ large, an increasingly pendantic debate to define what the meaning of is is. By way of example, a careful reader will note that during the discussion of Daylight Savings Time in article cited no mention is made of the fact that Saskatchewan doesn't bother with the practice at all; most farmers are bit too busy for that kind of thing and who can blame them? So fine, go ahead and add another ruleset your RDF thingy but sooner or later all RDF thingies are just going to be little more than a collection of monster if/else statements (because the farmers aren't going adopt DST just to make your whiz-bang network enable font of knowledge happy. In every essay I've seen about RDF, the author say something to the effect of why is something so simple, so hard for people to understand? The answer is pretty straightforward : because, for good or ill, people are hell-bent on making it difficult. Why, if RDF is so simple, does it have all this baggage? What the hell is a Class and why do I need to care? Why, if all this nonsense, is meant for machines do people push as something that humans should feel all warm and fuzzt about? RDF is a perfectly good framework for exchanging data and describing things. Period. But please stop thinking that it is a suitable vehicle for condensing all of human experience and automating human interaction. see also : strikes me as more event-like than freebusy-like and banque de déppanage linguistique which, with a name like that, ought to tell you something.

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Thursday, March 13 2003 ←  → Sunday, March 16 2003