Latest updates

It has been a while since I have scribbled any personal notes, but the last few weeks have been fairly quiet. Politics is entirely off the cards, life is back to exam-normal, and things just keep ticking over. I have had some sporadic moments of interesting conversation recently, but have probably been as dull to everyone else as boatie or medic talk is to us.

One of my escapes at the moment is reading a chapter of a random book in the library every hour. Five minutes off each hour from nine to midnight allow me to comfortably get through a book and feel guiltily enriched.

I have begun tinkering with some interesting web software to have my own stab at elegantly managing online semantics. More details on that will follow in the summer I expect. As a minor note, I updated my home church’s website the other day.

Finally, the major piece of news for the day (to me at least) is the exciting announcement the VP8 codec has been released after what seemed like a long wait. One more good element just dropped into place, though Apple has everything gain by dissuading adoption given the effort they have just put in to hardware accelerating H.264 on the iPad. Regarding HTML5, following up on some interest I had over the Microdata proposal (a bit too technical to explain briefly; I am sure my mother, the most avid reader of the blog, will forgive me). After adding a dozen or so feeds to Reader and trying to work out what is going on, I find it fascinating the way different blogging communities of friends and co-workers comment on each other. I have enjoyed the diversification in the one or two techie feed items I get each day. The different groupings get polarised very quickly and stop listening to each other. I am a casualty in any case of their difficulties getting RDF straight in HTML5 because it is impossible for me, given the practical difficulties with each model proposed, to do anything useful with extra semantic information.

On the other hand of new design to markup and tagging is new protocols, and a lot is emerging there too right at the moment. I like the look of PubSubHubbub, ActivityStreams, and Salmon a lot at the moment, but it all means more implementing. Best stay busy on the maths for the moment though.