I recently read ‘Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams‘ by M.J.Simpson, which to be honest was pretty dull, but it did get me thinking about the thing Adams is most famous for, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘.
Posts Categorized: IT & the Internet
Controlled vocabularies and why you should be interested in them
I’ve mentioned metadata in a few of my previous postings, and something else that is related to metadata is the concept of a ‘controlled vocabulary‘. This is a term that suffers from many misunderstandings so I’m going to try and define what it is and where it sits in the grand scheme of things, using… Read more »
OSGeo and DCLite4G
Regarding my posting of a few month’s back, ‘The curse of metadata’, which was quite negative about the current state of web-related metadata initiatives in general, I thought perhaps I should provide a more positive counterweight so here goes.
‘Free’ software, the open-source planet and Plone
One of the more indisputable advantages of the Internet as it exists today is the abundance of software on it that is ‘free‘. It is free in the sense that it is available to download and use without a financial fee. Some software, as well as being free, is also ‘open-source‘ meaning that the source… Read more »
Don’t give Pickaweb Internet Services your money
Ever since January 2003, I have used the services of Pickaweb Internet Services to host my website, but a few days ago experienced such poor service that I immediately cancelled my account with them. The behaviour of their technical and sales support would be comical if it wasn’t for the fact that it was me… Read more »
The Ordnance Survey: evil or angelic?
Ever since I can remember, the Ordnance Survey (the OS; the National Mapping Agency of Great Britain) maps (particularly the Landranger 1:50 000 scale maps) have been the passport to many things that I do in my spare time: from cycling through cities to driving through countryside, they have been, and remain, invaluable and as… Read more »
Google Earth and other geobrowsing tools in the environmental sciences workshop
On Monday I travelled to Cambridge University to attend the ‘Google Earth and other geobrowsing tools in the environmental sciences workshop‘, organised by NIEeS and ReSC. The workshop consisted of one day of presentations and one day of practical sessions. I only attended the first day, which entailed an early morning easyJet flight to Stansted,… Read more »
The curse of metadata
For the last seven years of my professional life, one issue has dominated above all others, and that is metadata. Metadata is a simple notion really, that of describing things in a summarised fashion so that they can discovered by searching catalogues and then used in a practical way. A library book index is an… Read more »
What ‘mashups’ are exactly, and why I hate the term ‘web 2.0?
Following on from my post ‘Why I love Google Maps‘, the data from the Google Maps service is also very commonly used to create ‘mashups‘. This is becoming a fashionable term for commentators to bandy about when talking about interesting new websites, in much the same way as the label ‘web 2.0′. Unlike ‘web 2.0… Read more »
Making websites accessible is very inaccessible
One of the issues a software engineer who develops HTTP interfaces (i.e. websites) as part of their code has to consider is ‘accessibility’. This catch-all term covers many things but essentially means that a website must be implemented in such a way that no-one is excluded from using it. It’s often thought of as purely… Read more »
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive