interface cobalt

My thesis work at the Knowledge Management Research Group at KTH is going to involve the Semantic Web, REST and some JavaScript. Because of that, I’ve been reading up on those technologies. These are some of the books that I’ve been reading:

A Semantic Web Primer by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen is a very good introduction to the Semantic Web for those new to the field. While I used it mainly to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything important, I did gain an improved understanding of some areas. Particularly the chapter on mathematical formulations of the Semantic Web was interesting to me, although perhaps not all that useful for my work.

RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby offers an architecture for RESTful web services: the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). What is and isn’t REST is a much debated topic.  Richardson and Ruby describe what they believe is RESTful and what isn’t. Thanks to their discussions, I was able to form my own opinions on what I consider to be good RESTful web services and what their advantages and limitations are.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford explains which features of JavaScript are good, and which are not that good and should be avoided. Everyone who’s programming in JavaScript ought to listen to Crockford (you can watch his talks at YUI Theater). And perhaps everyone who isn’t should listen to him as well; JavaScript is actually a great language once you get past the bad parts.

In today’s newsletter from Amazon Web Services, I found out that Amazon S3 is launching storage in Europe. Some of the prices are slightly higher (compare here) but for the potentially higher EU transfer speeds, it should be well worth it.

As of now, the code samples appear to have been updated to support creation of buckets located in the EU, but the documentation is still the old one. Some of the more popular S3 tools, such as S3Sync and JetS3t, are also yet to be updated.

Update: S3Sync and JetS3t now support EU buckets, and updated documentation on how to create them using the API is available here.

I just got five new Gmail invitations, which leaves me with a total of six invitations to send out, but I don’t know to whom. Everyone that I know who might be interested already has a Gmail account.

If you’d like me to send an invite to you, let me know! Add a comment or send an email. While supplies last, so be quick. And I could always go to Gmail Swap instead.

Update: It seems that everyone is getting six invites to send out, even those who just registered Gmail accounts of their own. I guess Google thought it was time to expand their Gmail user base more rapidly.