Daniel’s Blog

Hi all,

This morning I received a free bag of Walkers SunBites - Oven Roasted Onion and Rosemary flavour. I was very disappointed because I really wanted to try them, but they were not suitable for vegetarians (they have animal rennet in them)… so I went onto the SunBites website, and wrote a little email to them saying how disappointed I was as SunBites are supposed to be really nice and healthy with no artificial colours, preservatives or flavourings. They are also made from wholegrains. All these things are great for vegetarians, as most veggies do try to follow a healthy lifestyle.

I received an email back from them (excellent response time!!!), here is what they said:

Many thanks for your email.

Our focus for the SunBites launch was to use only natural seasonings. We have now found a way to achieve the same delicious seasoning for the Oven Roasted Onion & Rosemary flavour in a way that is both natural and suitable for vegetarians. As we are committed to providing vegetarians with a wide choice of products, it is a logical decision to re-formulate the seasoning next year so that vegetarians can enjoy them.

However, currently, the Original flavour and the Sour Cream and Cracked Black Pepper flavour are both suitable for vegetarians and we do hope you will give these a try.

Thank you once again for contacting us.

- From Walkers/Pepsico

I am very very happy that they responded, especially so quickly. I may try the other flavours, but it is really the oven roasted onion and rosemary ones that sound awesome (Beki ended up enjoying the whole bag). I won’t moan that the email sounds like they make people on a vegetarian diet a completely different species (see the bit that says “…we are committed to providing vegetarians…”), and the fact that they should have developed them veggie in the first place… I am just happy that companies do recognise the vegetarian diet as an important diet.

As I always say:

“If you can make something ’suitable for vegetarians’ then do, and then mark that it is”

Technorati Tags: sunbites, walkers, pepsico, vegetarian, diet, wholegrain

This app is very closely treading near my area of interest - using the semantic web in a social web way. This is Twine, its currently in beta testing… and even Tim O’Reilly has blogged about it!

I’ll be keeping a very close eye on Twine and Radar Networks over the next few months, I’ll want to know as much about what they do as possible! I would be interested to talk to anyone that works there, especially Nova Spivack.

Ciao for now,

Daniel

Technorati Tags: web30, semanticweb, socialweb, twine, radarnetworks

I had heard that something was stirring at Google in regards to a Social Web app, they already have Orkut (which has changed a bit since I last viewed it) and in the past few months they have acquired a few socially-orientated web companies/systems such as FeedBurner, Zingku and Jaiku.

So whats going on? Recent leaks from Google have pointed to something called:

Google Maka-Maka

Blog posts about it available: On Blogoscope and On Techcrunch

Now this might be a bit of a fake thing going in, spread by Google to throw people off the scent to what they are actually doing… or it could just be Google wanting a share in the popularity seen by Facebook. To me, I have a feeling that if everything already said by the above links is true, then this isn’t going to be revolutionary at all - I don’t even think it will be evolutionary. Sorry Google if it is all true, but you’re going to have to do something special.

plug: If anyone is looking for an easy to use Social Web tool then have a look at Elgg, which recently came joint second with Drupal in the Packt Publishing Best Open Source Social Networking Tool Award. Elgg is going to have a very interesting future, watch out for it!

Technorati Tags: google, socialweb, socialnetworking

Everything I work on right now is self taught (I am a semantic and social web developer - well, just a “developer” officially to my employees). I didn’t learn PHP or Ruby at uni, I didn’t do (much) about the semantic web, I did nothing about the social web, didn’t do much about standards (esp. not on the web). Yet its what I do, so did uni actually help?

Well thinking about it more, yes it did help, in all of my job I use my knowledge of:

• Sequence
• Selection
• Iteration
• Procedural/Structural, Object Oriented and Functional programming theory
• Object Oriented Design Patterns (inc. Model-View-Controller and others)

To be honest it feels very weird. Oxford Brookes University, like many other Universities, focuses on the more practical/vocational aspects of software development and computing - yet the stuff that I have actually got from them is the theoretical/academic knowledge. Maybe its just my love of theory and research, and maybe its up to the individual to extract his/her own bits and pieces from the lectures, seminars and practicals. So is it good for a university to focus on the practical side of things? well I have mixed feelings about that, on the one hand theory holds everything together - on the other hand we need to practice somehow.

Daniel

Technorati Tags: university, learning, webdevelopment, softwaredevelopment, webdev

My inspirational quote of the day:

I’m so glad. I’m glad to have many friends, black and white, indians and colours. National and International.”

- “Black is Beautiful” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Peace and love to everyone.

OK, its Sunday… Sunday being traditionally a Christian day of Worship. Many of the readers of this blog are not religious in any way, and don’t see “faith” or God as being rational…. and I can understand this, but I chose not to follow that school of thought, I choose to be a Mystic Anglican Christian. I know my beliefs, I don’t need to have faith because I feel.

To me, God is a rational thing because I define God as being the Explanation and the Being of Love itself. If you have ever experienced love then you will know that its a really odd sensation. There are many forms of love of course (and in Greek there are many ways of saying these forms of love), one form of love seems like it springs from nowhere, another form of love is the love for and from family and friends. These are unexplainable things, but they exist, and we need love. To me, God is the Being and the Explanation of Love.

Another rational thing is Life. Yes there are scientific explanations of Life, but who developed the equations and algorithms for the scientific explanations. Scientists follow these equations and algorithms with faith. God is the Being and Explanation of Life and Scientific Explanations.

Another rational thing is synchronicity and power. Isn’t it weird how everything just works together, synchronised, flowing with energy and vigour. God is the Being and Explanation of Life and Synchronicity and Power, which we can see within Nature.

To me, the following is what God is not:

• A guy in the sky
• Somebody that has created everything in the world and universe within seven (literal) days

Now for a section on Interreligion:

And another question is, why so many religions? My answer is: we are just following the same entity really, no matter what religion or path. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Pagans, or whatever, we all see that there is something else in the world that is unexplainable in human thought and speech - I say we are all following the same thing, doesn’t matter if you go to a Church, a Mosque, a Synagogue, a Temple or even if you stay at home and do praise or ritual.

Now for a conculsion:

So I hope that I have given some rationality to those who feel that God isn’t rational, and I have also given my thoughts that we should accept others. It all comes down to: try to understand others religions/faiths/beliefs/creeds/rules-of-life, and get along with each other.

These are my thoughts for today.

Today is for the following feasts within Christianity:

• St Simon and St Jude (Western Christianity)
• Nostra Aetate - 1965 (Roman Catholicism - Christianity)
• St Job of Pochayiv (Eastern Christianity)
• St Godwin of Stavelot (Western Christianity)
• St Fidelis of Como (Christianity)
• St Edsige”Edward the Confessor” (Western Christianity)
• Abgar V of Edessa (Eastern Christianity)
• Abdias of Babylon (Christianity) <- First Bishop of Babylon, consecrated by St Simon and St Jude

Love and Blessings,

Daniel

Technorati Tags: rational, religion, christianity, God, science

Here is my blogger code:

B8 d++ t+ k s u f i++ o+ e l c-

(not answering x)

Here is my Geek Code:

GCS d- s+: a- C+++ UL+ P+ L++ E- W+++ N+ o- K- w— O M++ V- PS+ PE Y PGP++ t+ 5 X+ R tv- b DI D- G e++ h+ r++

(not answering z)

I also have this personality type:

INFJ

Now you can probably work out exactly what I am like from all of those codes! Somethings I refuse to answer though.

Technorati Tags: geekcode, bloggercode

Some of you readers may remember me making a post about HTML5 - its available here

I am have been thinking about it recently. I am not going to take back the things I said about it before, but I wanted to add some suggestions.

To the guys developing the spec:-

If you really want HTML5 to succeed then it is absolutely necessary that you:

• Really push the standard and adhering to validity. Validity is the key, without validity then that makes things awkward to parse and therefore harder for the search engines and screenscrapers
• Must create validation tools and parser libraries
• Push XHTML5 just as much as you push HTML5 - which will allow parsing/validation from both HTML5 parsers/validators and XML parsers/validators…. we then have bonus points.

I ask the above of you because I am a great believer in semantic code - code that gives meaning. To win with the standard; you are first going to have to win over the techies/researchers then you can try to win over the users. I also want to be able to embed RDFa and/or Microformats into my XHTML5 too, so if you can make that possible then I am willing to work with you on HTML5.

Many thanks,

Daniel

Technorati Tags: html5, html, xhtml, xml, web

Apple Laptops are really lovely, except for one thing:

Electric Power

The Reasons:

• The iBook and PowerBook (G4s) had a lot of trouble with the connection into the laptop, the plugs easily broke. Two of mine had the same problem, although one still worked.
• The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have the “MagSafe” connections… which fixes the easily broke problem. However, Apple have now had endless problems with batteries. They have a scheme to replace some of the early battery models, and a “battery update” patch for some of the new ones - but they still exhibit problems. Which brings me to the reason I am blogging about this:

My Apple MacBook battery is playing about, at least I think its the battery. It seems like many people also have similar problems, and they also think that it might be the power unit. Here is the status:

• Battery doesn’t charge when I have power plugged in, this is true when system is switched on or off
• Power unit manages to power the laptop when the battery is in and when the battery is out
• Battery LED flashes when I press the button on it
• Laptop recognises that the battery is in. When it is in it says 0% charge. When I take it out it has an x, and says no batteries detected.
• The power plug LED is solid orange when it is plugged into my laptop. This is when the laptop is on and when it is off, this is also when the battery is in and when it is not in.
• Resetting the PMU doesn’t fix the issue
• Leaving the power supply to get rid of static doesn’t fix the issue
• Leaving the battery to charge over night doesn’t charge the battery

So if you happen to be one of the Apple Genius Bar guys or an Apple Technician then could you let me know what is wrong. You can leave a comment on here or email me danieljohnlewis -at- gmail.com.

Technorati Tags: batter, apple, powersupply, problems

I have now got a new WordPress theme, its better for standards than the previous one - although it does mess up if the code generated from post writings are invalid. But hey-ho, I can’t be bothered to edit WordPress itself… although Fantastico hasn’t caught up with the latest version of WordPress yet…. maybe soon.

Feeling quite tired at the moment: have been ill, had some not very good sleeps, then had quite a complex task to do for work and also having Beki being a little stressed about her coursework and working.

But all will be ok in the end! I’ll manage to get some good sleep, I’ll complete my work task (hopefully before deadline) and Beki will get through all of her coursework and starting part-time work.

Thats all for now.

ciao

Daniel

Technorati Tags: wordpress, validation

Hello everybody,

Got a bit of a hectic November coming up, with the Semantic Web Day at HP (where I will be doing a talk (including questions) will last about 30 minutes) and I’ll also be at the Oxford Geek Night (as a viewer - although I have asked for a 5 minute microslot). I’ll be talking about Social and Semantic Webs.

If you’re going to either of them then let me know, and I’ll look out for you.

Daniel

Technorati Tags: semanticweb, socialweb, oxfordgeeks, oxford