Seth Ladd's Blog

Connecting to Fedora's X Server Running Fedora and trying to connect to its X server, only to continue to get a can't open display or cannot connect ot display ? Turns out Fedora has TCP connections to its X server disabled by default. I like how they default to more secure, but isn't that what xhost is for? I am blogging this so that google can push this link up to the top. Hopefully save someone else the time.

XHTML and RDF We have two standards running parallel with each other; HTML is the de facto standard for document markup, accounting for millions of items on the web. RDF is a standard for expressing metadata, which in turn provides a foundation for making use of that metadata, such as reasoning about it. Yet the former is very rarely the subject of the latter; meta information placed in the HTML family of documents is often encoded in such a way as to make it difficult to extract by RDF-related parsers. And if it cannot be extracted, then it cannot be used. Our intention here is to make more of the information that is contained within HTML-family documents available to RDF tools, but without putting an unnecessary burden on authors familiar with HTML, but not with the subtleties of triples and statements.

JSR 175, JBoss and AOP Some of the themes echoed by Spring will by found elsewhere. The idea of the container providing services via AOP is gaining ground. Here is a brief example of JBoss 4 and it's AOP handling. Note that Spring can also handle transaction management declared as metadata right now, though not through xdoclet (spring uses some commons functionality for reading javadocs). Spring also handles txn declared in the spring configuration. VERY cool stuff. J2EE without the EJB!!

mySpotter.com - Web Services Links Just bringing back some SOAP and REST discussions and articles. I still have a soft spot for REST.

Lost Boy: FOAF Activity Lots of interesting FOAF activity lately, seemingly spurred on by the ETech presentations. One thing I'm afraid of w/ FOAF adoption is the same trap RSS 1.0 fell into. All the RSS tools I know of treat RSS as XML instead of a RDF model. This is A Bad Thing for using the data as a RDF graph. If FOAF adoption is to really deliver on its promise, it should be used as a RDF model. Treat it like the graph it's meant to be. FOAF is RDF, it just happens to be serialized as XML. Let's not forget how to interact with RDF!

Metadata Specifications Index Page Call me jaded, but here's another attempt to solve the problem of link local discovery. You know, since Jini, JXTA, UPnP, Rendezvous, and others did it so horribly. Oh, I know... their downfall was that they didn't use bloated SOAP! Ah ha! Luckily, we now have a discovery protocol that uses XML and SOAP. Can't wait to try to fit all that XML into a single datagram. I dig XML. But there might be a better way to ask "Is there a printer here?" than a huge SOAP message.

Trust and Reputation in Web-based Social Networks This project is designed to build and maintain a trust network on the semantic web. Using an ontology that extends FOAF, you can assign trust ratings to people you know.