A few days ago I re-released the Java, JRuby, Clojure, and Scala example code for my JVM languages edition of my Semantic Web book under the LGPL. I just did the same thing today for the Common Lisp edition of this book: Github repository

Here is the github repository  for the source code and all required libraries. My open content web page" where you can download a free PDF for my book or follow the link to Lulu to buy a print version. Enjoy!

I really enjoyed Steve Yegge's long post last week about the shortcomings of Google's architecture. Google provides great services that I use every day but building systems as Amazon does of composable web services (AWS) to build more complex products and services seems like a better approach. I have been experimenting with Semantic Web (SW) technologies since reading Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila's 2001 Scientific American article. I have not often had customer interest in using Semantic Web technologies and I think that I am starting to understand why people miss the value-add: Just as AWS provides composable web services SW helps information providers to provide structured and semantically meaningful data to customers and users who decide what information to fetch, as they need it. These consumers of SW data sources must have a much higher skill set to build automated systems compared to a user of the web who manually navigates around the web to fi...

Hello family and friends, Democracy in our country is dead, but you would not know it from reading the highly censored corporate-owned and controlled "news"/propaganda media. If you look to foreign news or youtube or the general Internet or talk to friends in foreign countries that have a free press, you will understand that is is not rank and file cops, but their supervisors commiting what I think can only be called illegal brutality against the "occupy" movement. The high-ranking police do this because they are ordered by their puppet-masters to do so. There is a huge disparity between what the general public wants and what the corporate lackeys in Congress and the corporate lackey Obama (following in the ubber corporate lackey W.Bush's footsteps) do. As Warren Buffet said in a recent interview, the USA is now a plutocracy, and that is a shame. Good writeup on a writer's arrest: I enjoy Naomi Wolf's work - a writer with reasonable views. Our ...

First: my condolences to Steve Job's family and friends. He was an awesome guy who lived on his own terms and made the world a better place by doing things that he loved and was proud of. I would also like to give a shout out of appreciation to the broad spectrum of Americans who are taking part in "Occupy Wall Street." They are facing state sponsored brutality: the elite class doesn't like the legal protests so they put pressure on the government and government influences police to do things that in their hearts they know are not right. I have been reading a lot of strong criticism of the police for their brutality in New York City against mostly peaceful American citizens exercising their first amendment rights - I personally try to not blame the police because I think it is more accurate to blame the people who control them. There are shocking videos on youtube of police brutality against US citizens in New York City during these protests and I thought...

Noir is a Clojure "mini framework" that is built on top of Compojure. Chris Granger released a new version today that is updated for Clojure 1.3. After working mostly in Clojure last year but using Clojure not very much this year (lots of work for a Java shop) I decided to check out both Clojure 1.3 and Noir 1.2 this afternoon - and I liked what I saw. The Noir example application uses a recent version of clj-stacktrace and stack traces are much better: Noir prints a well formatted stack trace on any generated web page if an error occurs. This stack trace is very good, filtering out information that you really don't want to see, identifying where the error occurred, and with usually a useful error message. This eliminates the only major complaint I have ever had with Clojure. Very cool! The Noir web site had a link to an article written by Ignacio Thayer on running a Clojure Noir MongoDB app on Heroku, using a free MongoDB account. Worked great. I made a trivial c...

First, in Ruby-land: I am a huge fan of both Datamapper and ActiveRecord. Here I am only going to talk about ActiveRecord because it is freshest for me because I have been reading through a few Rails specific books that Obie Fernandez's publisher Addison-Wesley sent me review copies of earlier this year: these books use ActiveRecord 3.*. Recently I created two small throw-away learning apps using Rails 3.1 to kick the tires on new features and I used ActiveRecord for each. One of my customers is a Java EE 6 shop (although we now do use SmartGWT for web apps) and I have been using JPA 2 (Hibernate provider) a lot. In Java-land, I can't imagine using anything else to access relational databases unless you want to use the Hibernate APIs directly, and I would not be inclined to walk that path. I used to approach object modeling and design differently in Ruby: I would usually start with a relational database and use ActiveRecord's (fairly) automatically generated wrapping AP...