tola

• Knoodl
  Knoodl facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases. It also serves as a semantic technology platform, offering a JAVA service-based interface or a SPARQL-based interface so that communities can build their own semantic applications using their ontologies and knowledgebases.
• Catalogablog: eXtensible Catalog NCIP Toolkit
• visualvm
  Java "troubleshooting" tool
• Lambda Probe
  Monitoring and management tool for Tomcat
• The Rasoi - Restaurant & Bar
  somewhere to try for food in Leamington
• nexus Maven repo manager
• sventon - subversion repository browser

I recently upgraded the hardware of my old desktop PC, with the aim of providing the house with a new-ish Linux machine for watching movies and using the internet, and a Windows machine for writing music and playing (old) games. My plan was to use two hard disks: one for Linux, another for Windows, and choose which to use at boot time.

Normal procedure is to install Windows first, then install Linux into a spare partition on the same hard drive (Windows tends to overwrite any disk you put it on). But it's easier to get a Linux machine up and running, see what hardware you've got, and get a decent system without needing to go and find loads of old drivers. So I decided to install Linux first. I plugged in a drive for it as the Primary IDE drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux onto it.

Then, I unplugged the Linux drive, plugged the other drive in, and installed Windows 2000 onto the second drive (just to make sure Windows couldn't overwrite Linux). Got that working too.

Then I plugged the Linux drive in, as the first drive on the IDE cable; and the Windows disk as the second.

The trick then is to get grub (the Linux bootloader I'm using) to present you with both disks as options as boot time. There's a sample configuration in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that didn't work for me: it looked like it was working, then just hung. I tried a couple of things, but nothing which worked.

Finally, I found this blog entry and used the configuration there. The trick is to make Windows think it's installed on the first disk on the IDE cable. I added this to the bottom of menu.lst:

which does the trick! Now I get a working Windows 2000 option in my grub boot menu.

• Qimo
  Linux distribution aimed at 3+ year olds

• Bundlor
  Generate OSGi manifests from a jar file; automatically detects dependencies

• How to fstab - Ubuntu Forums
  Hopefully help me work out how to mount my SATA drive
• Fstab - Community Ubuntu Documentation
  "sudo blkid" to list hard disk devices by ID (now the default way to specify disks in fstab on Ubuntu) or (if that doesn't work) "ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/"

• It is okay to use POST (Roy Fielding)
  Updating resources using the POST method can still be RESTful: "the methods defined by HTTP are part of the Web’s architecture definition, not the REST architectural style"
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• The Readability Testing Tool
  For testing readability of web pages

• sharp-architecture
  ASP.NET best practice framework

• Growls Garden by Clark

• Linux tips every geek should know

• IT HUGS BACK, Now + Again - Boomkat music download

(This is extracted from my Apache course materials, but it's a useful howto in its own right.)

To generate a self-signed SSL certificate, you will need openssl installed first.

Then follow these steps:

1. Generate the server's private key; we'll use a 1024-bit key using the RSA algorithm:
   openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
2. Generate a certificate-signing request:
   openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
3. Fill in the required information at the prompts:
   Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:GB State or Province Name (full name) []:. Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:Birmingham Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Talis Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Library Products Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:prism.talis.com Email Address []:. Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:. An optional company name []:. The really important one is the Common Name: this must match the domain name which will serve the SSL site; otherwise connecting clients will get a prompt about a mismatch between the certificate's host name and the actual host name of the server.
   
   Note that we left the password blank. If we don't do this, Apache will prompt you for the certificate password each time you start the server, which is a pain in the arse.
4. Create a self-signed certificate from the certificate-signing request (.csr file):
   openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
5. rm server.csr (you don't need it any more)
6. Put the .crt and .key files into Apache's SSL directory and configure Apache to use them

If I get round to it I'll do another entry explaining how to make Apache use them.

(This is extracted from my Apache course materials, but it's a useful howto in its own right.)

To generate a self-signed SSL certificate, you will need openssl installed first.

Then follow these steps:

1. Generate the server's private key; we'll use a 1024-bit key using the RSA algorithm:
   openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
2. Generate a certificate-signing request:
   openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
3. Fill in the required information at the prompts:
   Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:GB State or Province Name (full name) []:. Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:Birmingham Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Talis Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Library Products Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:prism.talis.com Email Address []:. Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:. An optional company name []:. The really important one is the Common Name: this must match the domain name which will serve the SSL site; otherwise connecting clients will get a prompt about a mismatch between the certificate's host name and the actual host name of the server.
   
   Note that we left the password blank. If we don't do this, Apache will prompt you for the certificate password each time you start the server, which is a pain in the arse.
4. Create a self-signed certificate from the certificate-signing request (.csr file):
   openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
5. rm server.csr (you don't need it any more)
6. Put the .crt and .key files into Apache's SSL directory and configure Apache to use them

If I get round to it I'll do another entry explaining how to make Apache use them.

• apd - Advanced PHP Debugger
  profiling/debugging tool for PHP
• Sonar
  Automated build environment
• Resource Description and Access (RDA) homepage
  New cataloguing standard built on FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data)

I've been struggling for a while to understand FRBR. It's basically (I quote) a conceptual model for the bibliographic universe. At its core are concepts describing bibliographic "things": books, works, scores, audio books, novels, all that litter. But there are two odd vague things sitting in between Items (physical things you can hold) and Works (the broad idea of "a work of art", separate from how it occurs in the world): Manifestations and Expressions. I kind of understood the difference, but they seem to have smudged boundaries.

This comment on the futurelib wiki by jrochkind cleared up some of the confusion for me:

A manifestation is the set of all items that are identical (or close enough) in physical form as well as content.

An expression is the set of all manifestations that are identical in textual or information content. (or close enough for our purpopes; an archeologist would consider the coffee stain on the back to be distinguishing information content; we do not).

Thanks Jonathan.

Also ran across Ian Davis' translation of FRBR concepts to RDF. He's my boss.

And the Resource Description and Access cataloguing standard, which I hadn't encountered before. And by coincidence, a recent UKOLN guest lecture on RDA just appeared in one of my RSS feeds.

Most of this was triggered by a colleague tipping me off to eXtensibleCatalog, a new open source discovery layer for bibliographic data, built on Drupal (amongst other things). It has its own metadata format, plus tools for translating out of common library metadata formats (like MARC) into their own format.

It's quite fascinating, this whole library metadata lark, once you get your teeth into it.

I've been struggling for a while to understand FRBR. It's basically (I quote) a conceptual model for the bibliographic universe. At its core are concepts describing bibliographic "things": books, works, scores, audio books, novels, all that litter. But there are two odd vague things sitting in between Items (physical things you can hold) and Works (the broad idea of "a work of art", separate from how it occurs in the world): Manifestations and Expressions. I kind of understood the difference, but they seem to have smudged boundaries.

This comment on the futurelib wiki by jrochkind cleared up some of the confusion for me:

A manifestation is the set of all items that are identical (or close enough) in physical form as well as content.

An expression is the set of all manifestations that are identical in textual or information content. (or close enough for our purpopes; an archeologist would consider the coffee stain on the back to be distinguishing information content; we do not).

Thanks Jonathan.

Also ran across Ian Davis' translation of FRBR concepts to RDF. He's my boss.

And the Resource Description and Access cataloguing standard, which I hadn't encountered before. And by coincidence, a recent UKOLN guest lecture on RDA just appeared in one of my RSS feeds.

Most of this was triggered by a colleague tipping me off to eXtensibleCatalog, a new open source discovery layer for bibliographic data, built on Drupal (amongst other things). It has its own metadata format, plus tools for translating out of common library metadata formats (like MARC) into their own format.

It's quite fascinating, this whole library metadata lark, once you get your teeth into it.

• The D2RQ Plattform v0.6 - User Manual
  Treat Non-RDF relational dbs as virtual RDF graphs

• Rose, My Rocket-Brain by Stereolab
  not sure when this was released
• Kyberneticka Babicka by Stereolab
• The First of the Microbe Hunters by Stereolab

• Popcorn Hour A-110 | ripcaster.co.uk
  network media server

• Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan