@edent 
Twitter’s over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn’t a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub1! Anyway, that means there isn’t one Mastodon website. There are many. There is … Read more
To understand this blog post, you need to know two things. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal. There … Read more
Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol is, by some measure, the most popular way for computers to talk to each other on the Internet1. Generally speaking2, clients (like browsers) talk to servers using a set number of HTTP “verbs”. This tells the server … Read more
I’m concerned about the longevity of the domains I register. I want my domains to be available for as long as possible. But it seems that every year prices rise – and the discount often provided for a new domain … Read more
Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster. While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper … Read more
11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years … Read more
As part of my new job, I’m learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS … Read more
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like “Alice is married to Bill” and “Bill is Carol’s child” and … Read more
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won’t have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef’s vision for organic cuisine – instead, they’ll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: “hasMenuItem”:{ “@type”:”MenuItem”, … Read more
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents … Read more