Earle's Notebook

July 28, 2008

Ordnance Survey Ontologies: Accidental Trojan Horse

As a Semantic Web wonk with a strong interest in geospatial issues, I was pleased to discover the Ordnance Survey's ontologies, which appear to be beautifully detailed. Until now, the OS have been little but the enemy of geospatial hackers in the UK, so it came as a surprise to me that they'd made a public-spirited effort like this.

Then I saw the license statement.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

And right there at the top of each ontology's source code is the line

<dc:rights>Crown Copyright 2008</dc:rights>

The license confirms my misgivings about the Ordnance Survey, in spades. Why? Because non-commercial licenses are not free. By using the OS vocabularies, you taint all your data. It is no longer open data (part of the wider field of open knowledge). And if someone uses it, thinking that it is, in a commercial project, they open themselves up to attack from the Ordnance Survey's lawyers (who have proven themselves time and again to be unsympathetic, confused or worse).

What a pity. Clearly a lot of work has been put into the project, but as currently licensed, these ontologies are data plague. Keep your information well away.

Posted by Earle Martin at 2:18 AM in: Ordnance Survey, Semantic Web, data, freedom, licenses, maps |

May 13, 2008

Minor niggles: inconsistent Firefox add-on options

I love Firefox, and have for many years. One of the best things about it is the ability to use add-ons to extend what the browser can do, or modify the way it already does things. However, this bugs me:

Would it be too hard for some of the authors of these add-ons to get together (possibly even mediated by someone from Mozilla) and agree on what their Tools menu entries look like? I think having them all in an Add-on options sub-menu would be a start.

Posted by Earle Martin at 2:09 PM in: firefox, niggles, software |

May 12, 2008

Drive-by OpenID advocacy

Of late I've been noticing movement in the OpenID world, with more and more sites beginning to take part. Unfortunately, more often than not, this has entailed sites setting themselves up to provide identities, but not accept them (as well critiqued by Chris Messina a few months back).

As the contented owner of an OpenID identity, I've come to appreciate the facility of being able to log into multiple websites with a single username and password. Who wouldn't? The legacy model of having multiple user names across different sites - am I hex, downlode, earlemartin, or earle? - to remember, and worse still, multiple passwords*, is looking increasingly outdated and confusing. Sites that don't give you any option but to enter your details (and often way too many details at that), and then not letting you transfer any of that data out, are disparagingly becoming known as identity silos.

An identity silo has been defined (interestingly, by the Information Commissioner's Office of the British Government) as:

An identity that is used to represent an individual in that person's dealings with a particular application and is not integrated with other identities that the person has.

So I decided the other day to make the rounds of some projects that I use on a regular basis, and ask them what they think about OpenID.

First up was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is where OpenID began, and an early first place to allow OpenID logins in some form. However, it is still impossible to link an OpenID identity with a LiveJournal account. In this post to the lj_dev community I ask what's happening. Official response comes there none; and some interesting replies point to much earlier (two years earlier, in fact) discussions in which, allegedly, promises were made to go further (and volunteer patches received) but nothing was done. Conclusion: LiveJournal no longer cares.

Next I stopped by the Wikimedia Foundation's wikitech-l mailing list for MediaWiki developers. The situation there appears to be that once they've concluded their work on unified login for all Wikimedia projects - which is close; as an admin on Wikipedia I've beta-tested it and it seems good - they can look into it. Which is great.

A query to FriendFeed's newsgroup got an enthusiastic user response, but nothing from the developers. The same for this thread in the Ohloh programming site's forums.

Asking the del.icio.us mailing list got no response at all.

Get Satisfaction are working on it (they already have OAuth support, which is good). Brightkite will "probably" do it, but they don't have a timescale for implementing it yet. Twitter have yet to reply a month after someone asked them in this GS thread.

I also asked the wiki-standards mailing list, which is comprised of wiki engine software authors, if they were looking to implementing support, and got a generally positive response.

So that's what I did. You can help out, by asking the people whose software you use if they're planning to implement support. Be sure also to stop by OpenID, please! and vote for your favorite applications.

*Or even worse than that, having a standard password for web stuff (come on, most people do) that varies in some small way across sites due to local restrictions on possible passwords. Ugh.

Posted by Earle Martin at 6:04 PM in: Brightkite, FriendFeed, MediaWiki, OpenID, Twitter, identity |

August 31, 2007

Making Mac OS X more bearable

At my new job I was, to my surprise, issued an iMac (the white kind, not the new metal model) to work with. Way back in the mid-90s, my first main home computer was a Power Macintosh 7100/80. I fell in love with it for the interface and ease of use. However, around 2000 I discovered Linux, and switched over to it by degrees - first running Mac-on-Linux, and then eventually just Linux itself. I never looked back.

When Mac OS X arrived, in 2001, I immediately disliked the glossy new interface that replaced the crisp, almost cartoonish GUI of the old OS. More than disliked, actually; I experienced an immediate, visceral repulsion from a number of facets of the new look. As a result, I stayed away from Macs for a long time, until, in fact, this month. However, my current place of employment contains a large and, for the most part, inscrutable systems department, who for reasons of their own decided to give me an iMac. It took me only a few minutes to discover a range of irritations within it, and start looking for fixes. Here's what I found. Software is free unless otherwise mentioned.

Essential fixes

A non-Apple keyboard and mouse

Essential. Even though I was a Mac user for years, and have no problem with the key layout, there's something about the key spacing that's just wrong. I found myself making way more typing errors than I do usually (which isn't many, I'm a good typist). So I got a typical Windows USB keyboard instead. Setting it up to work properly is not as easy as you'd expect, considering Apple's otherwise rather good hardware support. Luckily, Phil Gyford has produced a handy guide to using a British/UK Windows keyboard with an Apple Mac in OS X, including a keyboard layout file you can install.

In addition, Apple's mouse (with the cringe-makingly awful name of Mighty Mouse - pass the sick bag) is abysmal.

• Instead of having buttons, it does left- and right-clicking by detecting when you press on the left or right side of the mouse. Sounds great in practice, but for me it caused unexpected "right-clicks" on a regular basis.
• They've also replaced the scroll wheel with a sort of mini trackball thing. It's horrible to use - too small to get a decent roll distance, and with an itchy, tickly physical feedback instead of the ratcheted rolling sensation of most modern scroll wheels. Plus, the "360°" aspect of the ball is totally useless in 99% of applications (I'm being generous, here; I have yet to actually see anything that supports it).
• It has a shiny, slippery surface. Call me crazy, but I like using objects with a texture.
• The pill shape just doesn't suit my hand at all.
• Finally, it has these "squeeze buttons" on the side. You have to press them pretty hard for a button. I didn't use them/it - they both act as one button - at all except to see what happened when I did (some unnecessary zoomy thing appeared).

Solution: I bought a cheap but perfectly good mouse. My comfort level just shot up.

FruitMenu

The new Apple Human Interface Guidelines say: "The Apple menu provides items that are available to users at all times, regardless of which application is active. The Apple menu’s contents are defined by the system and cannot be modified by users or developers." Well, in the old days you could put whatever you liked in it, because that was useful. This handy "haxie" from Unsanity restores that behavior. For me, having all the control panels - I'm sorry, "System Preferences" available as a sub-menu justifies the $10 cost of this software alone. I also put my Applications folder in it.

TinkerTool

I don't like the Dock much. It took about a day before I turned off the zoomy stuff. Shrinking the icons down helped a bit, as did sticking it on the right-hand side of the screen and turning on auto-hide. But it still insisted on being vertically centered, and I'm a corner kind of guy. Happily, TinkerTool, a sort of PowerToys for the Mac, allows you to stick the thing wherever the hell you want it to be.

WindowShade X

Another feature that the new OS X lost was WindowShade. In the classic System, double-clicking a window's title bar would cause it to "roll up" into it. It was a very useful way of temporarily moving windows aside without actually moving them, or letting you "stack" lots of windows on the screen at once. In OS X, you can only hide windows away on the Dock. No thanks. WindowShade X, another $10 Unsanity haxie, brings that back, as well as a great "minimize in place" feature that lets you turn your windows into live thumbnail versions of themselves with a keypress.

ShadowKiller

Another Unsanity haxie - free this time. Kills those bloody awful drop shadows (on three sides of windows and even menus - what the hell?) stone dead.

Enhancements

Growl

Displays application event notifications in various attractive but low-key ways.

Mail.appetizer

Displays excerpts from new mail arriving in Mail.app in Growl notifications and lets you read it, delete it or mark it as read on the spot.

Hey Folders!

Colors labeled folders' icons as well as their names, as it used to look pre-Mac OS X. (Can you spot a theme in my suggestions developing?)

VirtueDesktops

Virtual desktops for Mac OS X. Not being developed any more as virtual desktops ("Spaces") will be a feature in Mac OS X 10.5, but useful until then.

Essential applications

Firefox

Obviously. The downside is a slightly awkward set of key shortcuts (for example, Command-shift-H for History instead of Command-H, since the latter triggers the global "hide application" shortcut), but I can live with it. Safari just isn't good enough, and Camino, which is essentially Firefox with a more Mac-like appearance, is crippled by the fact that as a native Mac application, regular Firefox extensions (many of which are essential, and I may write an article on these later) can't work with it. You might as well buy a sports car with a V8 engine and rip out half of the cylinders. I'll stick with the real thing, thanks.

iTerm

A terminal emulator and big improvement over the default Terminal.app included with the system. For one thing, it has tabbed windows.

Adium

A great multi-protocol instant messaging client.

After all this, I finally have a Mac I can use comfortably. And who knows, I may even get one for myself at some point. Five months later: No. I'd rather shoot myself in the face.

Posted by Earle Martin at 5:43 PM in: GUI, Mac OS X, software, usability |

August 30, 2007

Was Chairman Mao a programmer?

Probably not. But even for a mass murderer, he was a surprisingly clear thinker. Here's some advice of his that all programmers should take to heart:

It is well known that when you do anything, unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well.

Posted by Earle Martin at 2:07 PM in: axioms, philosophy, programming |