I _Really_ Don't Know

JISCmail - Alistair Miles releases some of his work on RDF, RDA, FRBR and LOC data.

AIISO, AIISO-Roles and Participation, ontologies I developed with others at Talis and at VoCamp are picked up by JISC's Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) : JISC.

I spent the afternoon today working with Sarndeep, our very smart automated test guy. He's been working on extending what we can do with rspec to cover testing of some more interesting things.

Last week he and Elliot put together a great set of tests using MailTrap to confirm that we're sending the right mails to the right addresses under the right conditions. Nice tests to have for a web app that generates email in a few cases.

David Merrill demos Siftables, the smart blocks | Video on TED.com.

Update: The NZ government have suspended the introduction of Section 92a (via MiramarMike)

An interesting campaign to 'blackout' your online presence to campaign for change to one of NZ's clauses started today. Protest Against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws in NZ — Creative Freedom Foundation (creativefreedom.org.nz). I spotted this a few days ago thanks to Mike Brown who tweeted about it.

I've been asked to be on the programme committee for LDOW2009. It looks set to another great workshop and the three papers I've been assigned to review all look brilliantly interesting. Unfortunately not allowed to blog about them :-(

This is a great post on agile development coming out from the JISC Dev8d days.

Example from the floor, Matthew: what worked well in a commercial company I was working for where we practiced extreme coding and used agile principles was: no code ownership (bound by strict rules), test-based development, rules about simplicity, never refactoring until you have to, stand up meetings, whiteboard designs, iterations so could find out when you’d messed something up almost immediately, everything had to have unit tests, there has to be a lot of trust in the system (you have to know that someone is not going to break your code)

While wandering around searching for interesting semwebby bits and pieces I stumbled across Webstock - New Zealand's web conference. The programme looks great, with Ze Frank, Matt Biddulph, Tom Coates, Toby Segaran and Heather Champ amongst others. This looks like an awesome line-up.

Shame it's on the opposite side of the planet in just over 2 weeks, otherwise I'd be trying to wangle a trip. I wonder if Matt Biddulph has space in his luggage for little old me?

For a long time I've felt uncomfortable every time I've written a class with a name like 'FooManager', 'BarWatcher' or 'BazHelper'. This has always smelt bad and opening any codebase that is structured this way has always made me feel ever so slightly uneasy. My thoughts as to why are still slightly fuzzy, but here's what I have so far...

Firstly some background, my perspective on object-oriented programming is deliberately naive. I don't like to create interfaces for everything and I don't use lots of factories. This comes, I guess, from my earliest education in C++, through one of the best books ever written on the subject. Simple C++ by Geoffrey Cogswell. While you stop laughing at the idea that you can learn something as complex as object-oriented programming from a thin paperback featuring a robot dog and the term POOP (Profound Object Orientated Programming), think about the very essence of what it is we're trying to do.