I have been thinking about migrating from MediaWiki to Semantic MediaWiki for my personal wiki. As I’ve written before (1, 2), I use MediaWiki as a personal document management system as well as a personal information system. I use it as an electronic filing cabinet as well as a notepad where I make notes to remember for later, brainstorm ideas for future projects, etc.
It actually has worked out really well, but a lot of the information in the system has semantic attributes. Unfortunately because it’s a free text wiki that metadata and the relationships between the data in my wiki is not available.
I haven’t really spent much time looking into Semantic MediaWiki and I won’t have time in the near future due to some projects at Communications Tool & Die, but I do want to find a way to leverage the semantic qualities of the data in my personal wiki. I’m not sure if Semantic Wiki is necessarily the correct solution but I’m going to look into it further.
If anyone has any experience with Semantic MediaWiki I’d love to hear it!
Back in August, I wrote a post on some of the caveats with syncing Google Contacts to the iPhone. Owen Cooper left me a comment suggesting the iPhone Apps Store application Sync in a Blink. It’s only $5 so I decided to purchase it and give it a try. It was $5 very well spent!
The application allows wireless over the air (OTA) synchronization between the iPhone and Google Contacts. It works with GMail contacts, but I use it with my Google Apps account for the secretelite.com domain.
Aside from the benefit of wireless OTA syncing, Sync in a Blink also addresses the issue I wrote about in August where Google uses the email address as the key for the contact entry and so it doesn’t do a good job of syncing phone contacts that don’t have email addresses. It also supports the syncronization of contacts that don’t have names, which is important for me since I tend to add businesses that I frequently contact into my iPhone contacts and now they can sync well with Google Contacts.
The other nice feature of Sync in a Blink is that it keeps a sync history and shows the details of what exactly changed, including before and after views for each contact that has changed.
If you are an iPhone user who syncs with Google Contacts this is a “must have” application. Very well worth the $5.
I voted on Tuesday. Sadly Bob Barr didn’t win the presidency, but I’m hopeful that the Libertarian Party will make a strong showing in 2012. Or, perhaps, not. That’s a subject for another day. Today I want to share my view on ballot measures for local bond initiatives and why I won’t vote for them when I have no information about them.
Google Earth is now available on the iPhone, which is awesome. Something about sitting in a coffee shop in the Washington, DC area and flying around Sydney, Australia on my phone is just very cool. One frustration though. No street names overlays.
I can understand that the iPhone version of Google Earth is necessarily more limited than the desktop version. They provide the Wikipedia and Panoramio overlay layers. Why not street names? Google Maps for the iPhone certainly includes streets. Hopefully this will come to Google Earth shortly.
After several months with my iPhone 3G, it’s still my favorite phone that I’ve ever owned. There are really only two or three things that I find ridiculous and frustrating.
The first is the lack of MMS. From what I’ve read, the Apple opinion is that since you can email pictures on the iPhone you don’t need MMS. Unfortunately real life doesn’t work that way. If everyone had an iPhone then emailing pictures around would be fine. But they don’t. And sometimes I want to send or receive pictures from other mobile phone users. It cannot be all that complicated to implement MMS. Please do so, Apple!
The other feature that’s missing is video recording. This is a lifestyle/entertainment phone. Why can it not record video? It has plenty of internal storage. And the processor can clearly handle it, since there are video recorder applications for Jailbroken iPhones. Why can’t we have a legitimate video recording application?!
The other feature I’d like to see is the ability to use the 3G networking via Bluetooth networking on my laptop. It would be great if I could use the iPhone as a cellular modem. I would not pay any more than I’m paying now for an additional data plan, though. Perhaps that’s why AT&T doesn’t offer it the option.
Despite these relatively minor annoyances, the iPhone is still the best phone on the market for me. I’m happy with my purchase, although I do need to decrease my voice plan as I’m sick of paying $170/month for phone service.
Several weeks ago we installed the Disqus comment system and Twitter Tools Wordpress plugins over on the blog at Communications Tool & Die. I decided to install them here as well. I’m using slightly different settings in that I have told Twitter Tools to create a blog post here every time I update there. I’m not 100 percent sure that I really want to do that, but I’m going to try it out.
I’ve also removed the inline Google Ads on this site since nobody ever clicks them and they’re just ugly. I think the banner image ad at the top is sufficient advertising on an incredibly low traffic site.
Also I had a link to an Amazon Unbox promotion which is no longer active, so I removed that link as well.
I still would like to completely overhaul this site, but I haven’t decided exactly what I want to do so I am in a holding pattern on that.
I realized that my about:michael page lists my old old old gmail address that I almost never check any more. So I’ve updated it to my current email address that I actually do read. Let the spam begin. Or, better yet, not.
I recently set up Nagois to monitor our Dreamhost sites in support of Communications Tool & Die. I ran into a mysterious problem, however. When I would set the nagios check_http to point to the blog URL it would always return a status of 301 (permanent redirect) and say everything was OK. When I updated the check options to include -f follow it would complain about reaching the maximum number of redirects and bailing out.
After looking into the problem I realized that the issue is that the Apache server is listing the port in the virtual host address in the HTTP header. For whatever reason, the version of check_http that is bundled in the nagios plugins 1.4.12 release can’t handle that and bombs out. A bug has already been filed and the version in the subversion repository trunk/ has the patch to fix it. So the solution was to check out the subversion copy and build my own version of check_http. This should be fixed in the next bundled release of the nagios plugins package, but if you can’t wait that long all you have to do is recompile from source.
I’ve been using this theme on my site for ages and ages. But when we set up the company blog at Communications Tool & Die it was clear that any kind of standard theme would not be acceptable. We needed something that integrated into the rest of the site layout. So I took our existing CSS and modified it to fit the needs of a Wordpress theme.
But now that makes me unsatisfied with this site’s theme. Alas I’m so busy with Communications Tool & Die that I really don’t have any time to change this site out. Plus my focus here has always been on content rather than on design. But we’ll see…it may be time for a change soon.
I’m still really enjoying my iPhone after having had it for a week. I upgraded the software to 2.0.2 and despite the mixed reviews I’ve seen on the Internet, I haven’t had any problems with it.
There is a feature I’d like to see in the iPhone software. I’ve been running around taking pictures of my contacts so that I can have a pretty image pop up when they call. But what I’d really like to be able to do is turn the phone sideways and get a “coverflow” view of my contacts with images, as I can do with albums in the iPod interface.
While I doubt Apple reads this site, I figured I’d put it out there.
