I wanted to learn more about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service (wikipedia), and perhaps also figure out how I feel about it. Named after a historical faked chess-playing machine, it uses the Web to allow people around the world to work on short low-pay ‘micro-tasks’. It’s a disturbing capitalist fantasy come true, echoing Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific […]
Tag Archives: Amazon
XMPP untethered – serverless messaging in the core?
In the XMPP session at last february’s FOSDEM I gave a brief demo of some NoTube work on how TV-style remote controls might look with XMPP providing their communication link. For the TV part, I showed Boxee, with a tiny Python script exposing some of its localhost HTTP API to the wider network via XMPP. […]
Linked TV (part 1): Why APIs and identifiers matter
In the NoTube project, we are exploring the use of Semantic Web technology in Television and Web-TV scenarios. By making use of richer and linked descriptions of content and users, we hope to help users better find (and annotate, tag, cross-link etc.) content that is interesting to them. The growing amount of linked RDF data […]
Site recovery
Busy sysadmin week. The main FOAF site is back, now hosted on Amazon EC2. Thanks to Stephane Corlosquet for all the time he spent fixing up the Drupal installation, after the recent server compromise. I’ve also moved over danbri.org (well, DNS is propagating), and migrated my blog into a completely fresh WordPress installation. The FOAF namespace […]
Small databases, loosly joined
Over the last month or so, I’ve had a SPARQL store (just an ARC instance plus a loader script) running on the Amazon EC2 sandbox I set up for FOAF experiments. Yesterday I installed a fresh SparqlPress bundle into my own blog, which runs on another server. So how to get the data across? Since […]
Amazon EC2: My 131 cents
Early this afternoon, I got it into my head to try out Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2) service. I’m quite impressed. The bill so far, after some playing around, is 1.31 USD. I’ve had the default “getting started” Fedora Linux box up and running for maybe 7 hours, as well as trying out machine images […]
CheckRDFSyntax and Schemarama Revisited
So I meant to write about a 1-line piece of Javascript, but ended up with a 5000 word freeform essay on the nature of RDF, XML, validation and so forth. It could probably do with some editing, but for now the words are in pretty much the order they came out of my brain. A […]
Four notions of “wishlist” for FOAF
After the recent SWAD-Europe meeting on ImageDescription techniques, I made some scribbled notes in a bar on different notions of “wishlist” that might make sense to use with FOAF. At the ImageDescription meeting we talked a lot about the difficulty of scoping such technical activities, since problem spaces overlap in ways that create opportunities and […]