I just noticed that my latest article on the Semantic Web has just been posted to DevX. This is a short article, dealing mostly how to use the Sesame library with Java and JRuby with some background material on RDF/RDFS (using N-triple and N3). One interesting thing that I do not really cover in the article, but include code for with the ZIP file for the article, is that I produced the sample RDF data using Open Calais. Enjoy :-)

My wife Carol and I are starting a virtual publishing business. We are seeking a few authors to work with. Carol is a world class editor and I am going to help authors with book content planning, technical editing, and marketing. We are aiming for the niche book market. I have noticed that the large book chains now have very little shelf space devoted to computer books. With fewer books sold through the major book store chains, instant on demand printing is looking more attractive since print on demand books can still be purchased from Amazon and directly from the printer. Additionally, traditional publishers must consider the size of market for any proposed book project to offset their high overhead per book while the cost is relatively constant for instant printing. We are planning on flipping the royalty split differently than traditional publishers: authors will get most of the profit from each book sold. The profit from on demand printed books will probably be around $10 to $15...

I just released a new version of my KBtextmaster Natural Language Processing (NLP) Java library. Free for non-commercial use, with a small fee for commercial use. Should also work fine with JRuby :-)

Except for Ruby and Rails (where I use a combination of NetBeans and TextMate) I am switching over just about all of my projects to Eclipse and Mylyn because of Mylyn's task management functionality: if you have not given Mylin a try, please do :-) I am working on the 3rd edition of my Java AI book and I set up Eclipse with TeXlipse today. Now, I have always liked using TeXShop on my Mac, and I still really like TeXSHop but the ability to have my book code examples and my Latex files in one working environment with Mylin task management makes it well worth the effort to switch setups.

I have been using Netbeans this year for most Java, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails development. Except for Ruby on Rails development, I think that I may switch back to Eclipse because of the Mylyn sub-project . I blogged about Mylyn a year and half ago (when it was called Mylar) and I recently gave the latest versions of Eclipse and Mylyn another try with Java, plain Ruby, and plain Python projects. Mylyn treats tasks as first class objects that aggregate developer experience with specific source files, emails, web sites visited, bug tracking systems, etc. In the simplest use, you create tasks and let Eclipse know which task that you are working on. Mylyn remembers which files you edit, etc. and only shows you working material that you use most for the current task. You can easily switch back to a "show me everything" mode. Switching tasks immediately changes Eclipse to show you only the working materials for the newly selected task. As a developer it feels very comfortable to see ...