A sudoku solver in Python
My girlfriend likes to solve the sudoku puzzles in the newspaper, but I never bothered with it myself, thinking that I shouldn't spend time on something a computer can do for me. Writing a sudoku solver, however, sounded like it might be fun. And, so, since I had nothing better to do I decided to give it a shot. ...
Read | 2008-09-10 16:40 | 15 comment(s)
A CTM tutorial
The new compact textual syntax for Topic Maps being standardized by ISO, CTM, is now approaching stability, and so I thought it would be good to provide a little tutorial on it to show people what the syntax looks like in the current draft. With a little luck we might even get some feedback, which would be nice. ...
Read | 2008-08-31 15:02 | 1 comment(s)
Topic Maps, RDF, semantics, merging ...
Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote a blog post on RDF and Topic Maps where he brought up some interesting questions. I started trying to reply in a comment on his blog, but after writing two full pages I decided to instead turn it into a blog posting here. ...
Read | 2008-07-29 16:54 | 1 comment(s)
Finally solving the performance problem
I wrote about the performance problems the tmphoto application had suffered from, and my failed attempts to fix them. I decided that the problem was that I'd set out to solve the problems without really knowing what the cause was, since reducing traffic by 55% obviously wasn't going to rescue the site. So the solution must be to do some proper research first, and then try to solve it. ...
Read | 2008-07-06 14:49 | 1 comment(s)
On robots, URL design, and bad optimization
Over the last few weeks my photo collection application has been struggling seriously with its performance. The Tomcat server would sometimes crash, which isn't so serious, as my monitoring script would restart it at most 30 minutes later. What's worse is that often it would get stuck and also make Apache freeze, and this would kill the entire site (including this blog), and the monitor script doesn't detect that. Or, load on the server would soar into the double digits, and just stay there, basically making the server unusable until I did a manual restart. ...
Read | 2008-06-25 15:14 | 16 comment(s)
The cxtm-tests project
The cxtm-tests project has just released the first-ever release of a conformance test suite for Topic Maps implementations. The first release consists of 293 separate conformance tests using four different Topic Maps syntaxes, and more tests are being added all the time. It can be used by developers to check their implementations, and also by customers who want to verify that products which claim to conform to the standard actually do so. ...
Read | 2008-05-23 18:21 | 1 comment(s)
What is an information resource, anyway?
Robert Cerny asked me if I could write a blog entry on what an information resource really is, since the TMDM has little depth on it beyond the definition. So I figured I would dig into this a bit, since there is actually quite a lot to be said about it. ...
Read | 2008-05-21 16:48 | 6 comment(s)
Some thoughts on OOXML
I joined ISO's subcommittee 34 (JTC1/SC34) in 2001 to work on Topic Maps, and was somewhat bemused when OOXML burst upon the committee in 2007. I had more than enough to work on with Topic Maps, and so tried to stay as far away from OOXML as possible, since I sensed that it would be easy to pulled into spending lots of effort on this without really achieving anything. Now the story of OOXML in SC34 is approaching the moment of truth, however, and so I've been forced to make up my mind. Having done that, I figured I would have my say on the subject once and for all. (And I'd like to point out that this is my personal opinion, and very much not that of my employer.) ...
Read | 2008-03-27 13:55 | 5 comment(s)
10 tips on presenting a case study
One night I couldn't sleep I wrote a whole blog entry in my mind on how to do a good case study presentation on paper. I quite liked it, and so wrote it down on paper, and that paper has been lying around for a year or two now. Since the Topic Maps 2008 conference is coming up I figured this was a good time to finally post it, as the speakers are likely to be struggling with such presentations just now over the Easter break. ...
Read | 2008-03-15 20:58 | 9 comment(s)
Blog metadata in Topic Maps
I've been thinking for a while of representing metadata about the blog in Topic Maps, and Robert Cerny brought this up again with his request for a way to get metadata about the entries through a web service. This would of course be a very cool thing to play around with, and having someone actually use the result would be even more fun, so clearly this needs to be done. ...
Read | 2008-01-19 12:47 | 7 comment(s)
