Category: Jon’s Online Currents Articles

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents 18 (3), April 2003

By Jon: First published in Online Currents – 20(9) November 2005

Computer people are good at inventing things, not so good at naming them.  Daft names from the history of computing include CD-ROM, which has nothing to do with ROM, PCMCIA card (allegedly People Can’t Manage Computer Industry Acronyms) and USB (Universal Serial Bus), which makes a sophisticated data handling package sound like an under-25’s road trip through Thailand.  A more recent entry in the daft name stakes is podcasting: the automatic transmission of sound broadcasts to a user’s computer in a form they can then listen to on a portable music device. read more

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents 23 (2009)

By Jon: First published in Online Currents 2003 – 18(7):25

Another day, another set of initials. This time the initials stand for Resource Description Framework. This is closely associated with XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which in turn is a subset of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). But what does it all mean?

RDF, like XML, was developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium. It is designed to provide for the expression of semantic information –information about things. At the core of RDF is the notion of a resource description. A resource is something: it could be a document, a book, a company or a person, or any other object or concept of interest. A description is a set of information whichrepresents the resource. The information is obviously selected to be of value to users or searchers; thus your resource description would probably include information about your position title and phone number but not whether you can waggle your ears. read more

By Jon: First published in Online Currents – 20(4) May 2005

April 1st is approaching as I write this, and I can’t help thinking what wonderful April Fool jokes could be played with this software. Give your computer ESP! Amaze your friends! Computer remote control products should be right up there with whoopee cushions and itching powder in the magic shop window. But for the serious-minded among us, here are the facts.

Remote access to another computer can take place over a local network or through broadband Internet connections. It allows technical support staff to fix broken PCs without having to be physically present; it also allows users to show each other documents and applications, and to take over and run programs on someone else’s PC. The computer which is accessed is called the ‘host’; the one doing the accessing is the ‘client’. The types of access provided by these programs are listed below. read more

Reading RSS

How can something be really simple when its proponents can’t even agree on what the acronym stands for? RSS stands for ‘Rich Site Summary’ or perhaps ‘Really Simple Syndication’, or possibly ‘RDF Site Summary’. Let’s go with ‘Really Simple Syndication’ since this focuses on the distributional aspect of the system, which is what makes it potentially important. It would be nice to report that Really Simple Syndication was developed from ECS (Extremely Complicated Syndication) but, alas, the name and the concept seem to have sprung into being in 1997 fully formed, and the underlying structure is simply our old friend XML. read more

Abstract

Mailing lists provide an inexpensive and efficient way to keep in touch with large groups of people. From a few dozen subscribers up to tens of thousands, there are many tips and technical solutions to make setting up a mailing list as easy and stress-free as possible.

Setting up a list

1.         Has someone beaten you to it?

Before setting up a new public mailing list you should check whether one already exists for that particular area of interest. At present there is no central registry of mailing lists, but a search of traditional groups across the Internet can be done through the Tile Net listing (www.tile.net/lists). Web-based mailing list systems like Yahoo Groups, MSN Communities and Topica (see below) usually provide a within-system search facility. Generic web search engines like Google (www.google.com) and AltaVista (www.altavista.com) will also help in the search for mailing lists. Another strategy is to contact some of your potential subscribers and find out what lists they already belong to. read more