Well I've finally got this blog going. I'd been keeping a log for the last few weeks in my .plan file, so I was able to use that to seed this. AN tells me that he's linked to it from his own blog, so hello to anyone who's come here from there.

Yesterday was a public holiday for ANZAC day, hence no post.

Spent the morning working on why fixing Jena code seemed to have broken other parts of the system. Had AN going through it with me, which had the benefit of showing him the modifications I've made lately. Turned out that everything was going fine. The failed tests were all known errors, and had nothing to do with my modifications. However, I did spot a mistake where I always created missing JRDFFactories and JenaFactories even when the graph was already in a cache and no new factories were needed. This would not have caused a problem, but it was unnecessary. It was a trivial fix and all seems to be running fine.

Spent a lot of time running tests, and making tweaks to things like unclosed Answer objects as I heard others talk about them. Finally got it all checked in. This has left me free to get back to reading Ontology documentation, which is what I plan on doing over the next few days with AN. We'll be working out just where we're going with OWL and Jena support in Kowari. After seeing the unscalable mess in Jena, I'm looking forward to putting an efficient Jena API over the top of Kowari. OWL support will be much more efficient too, which is what has me really excited about this approach.

As for the long weekend... I finished "Ringworld" (by Larry Niven) which I've been meaning to read for years. Quite enjoyed it. The plot wasn't really inspiring, but the technical description of the world was really wonderful. Now I've moved onto "Fast Food Nation". This book is about the effect that fast food has had on american society, and not simply the effect on their waistlines. Of course, a lot of this applies equally well to Australia, hence my interest. Some of it is quite disturbing, but much of it is to be expected. It forms quite an indicting list when you see it all in one place. I'm grateful that many of the comments on food safety (about how it is controlled by industry) are not quite as applicable in Australia. Most of it isn't really about fast food per se, but rather about how corporate giants in America have run roughshod over the general population. For the companies mentioned, this has been enabled due to the success of fast food as an industry. I've yet to read anything about the health effects of this food, but I'm sure it's there. It has me more interested to see the movie "Super Size Me" now.