A virtual hack summit conference is happening soon. An almost virtual world of programmers getting together to share the knowledge within the world community of like minded individuals. A Dzone member can obtain a free promo code. However, a donation for admission is highly advised to support such worthwhile non-profit coding charities. Virtual summits make it accessible for everyone around the world to get together from the comfort of their own surroundings and the pressures of the daily lives while saving themselves from the travel expense. Further details can be found at the below links.
21 November 2014
11 November 2014
Small Business Finance
These days small businesses have it hard when it comes to getting financing or even refinancing from banks. However, peer-to-peer is offering newer possibilities. Individual investors or should we say angel investors are also becoming a possible option for many start-ups. However, the market for small business start-ups for continued finances is still rough terrain with many obstacles and at times more people to side track. Going public for investment should not be a necessity for small to large businesses either. Private funding can still provide lucrative financing and even continued financing options for many. Perhaps, more venture sites need to be sprung up in a semantically linked manner so more individuals can gain opportunities to invest and for small business owners to drive more cash injection into their ongoing projects. Banks these days provide limited savings options and even pensions are a forgone conclusion. Investment opportunities for individuals needs to grow in the often limited options. Even small investments need to be made available over high street investment banking which often drive bad investment decisions. Businesses need to be more connected with financing and allowing individuals to take small chunks of ownership in exchange for driving cash injection without having business to force themselves on the market exchange. Market exchanges are often also institutionally driven and are mostly a road block for the small time investor. Individuals investing opportunities into privately held start-ups before they go public should also be possible. Small time investor focus markets and opportunities really can be the next big thing for economic gains for all. They are also good opportunities for low-income earners looking for realistically plausible breaks that could provide significant returns later on. Although, nothing is guaranteed but publicly traded companies are almost always traded in bulk which would side track a small time investor looking for a possible break. Perhaps, opportunities could even arise as linked with stocks and shares ISA and other non-taxable investment plans. Even the common market exchanges need to open up more to the public in a linked data perspective with semantic web compliance.
8 November 2014
Poppy Choice
Wearing a poppy on remembrance day should be a choice not a requirement. War should be remembered not glorified. And, who is going to honor and remember the lives of the civilians that were lost at the hands of the soldiers and in middle of such wars without just cause? Soldiers make a choice of taking part. Who gives civilians the choice to live or die in such a charade? Why should we remember soldiers that took part in unjustified wars? Wars that the public did not have a say in whether we sent our soldiers or not? Do we get a say in the cause of such wars? Many wars could have been avoided if the public had a say in it. So, no remembrance day has become a glorified event and a disrespect to the many lives that are lost in conflicts. Soldiers also have families just like civilians have families. And, one can't be forced to partake in such activities. People have different ways of remembering for which they should be allowed the freedom and personal space.
Semantic Representation
Representation of semantic data is a computationally expensive process with a lot of embedded metadata for building semantically contextual graphs. However, such representation also comes at a storage and processing cost. XML standard has always been a more complete representation option on basis of which other standards have been developed. However, the introduction of JSON-LD provides further options for flexibility. Unfortunately, flexibility of semantic data processing also comes at a cost from loss in fidelity. Representing JSON-LD maybe a plausible option. But, storing the raw form of RDF in XML compatible native form is always favorable. This loss in fidelity may arise during content negotiation and during conversion. But, RDF is quite a memory intensive representation format which requires a separate processing requirements. Even viewing RDF from property graph perspective may not be sufficient. And, utilizing triple stores and even quad stores have always been the best option even of today, while such options still provide issues with vendor lock-in at times. Although, RDF and semantic web have come along way, there is still a lot that can be done both in terms of standardization as well as better distributed semantic graph storage. Semantic integration is again a core aspect of Linked Data requirements which is another aspect that requires more standardization and advancement. JSON-LD appears to be a useful option for front-end client processing in a lightweight integration. It also has some fundamental limitations in comparison to RDF. A question arises as to why the W3C gave up on the idea of RDF/JSON standardization. However, this is a case of what is more important in the semantic web community and for an application context, whether the representation should be in computer readable or human readable form. Nonetheless, the core representation format of semantic web for storage, in most domain contexts, should really be maintained in the native form of RDF/XML and associated derivatives for obvious reasons.
6 November 2014
Packer
Packer is another useful tool for machine image configuration management as well as an alternative to Dockers for virtualization. With Packer, identical images can be produced for machines and multiple platforms using basically a single configuration which is useful for Devops work in the cloud environment. Parallelization in cloud for Big Data has also become important aspect for handling Big Data requirements. Additionally, plugins provide further extended flexibility in the tool. Even Packer images can be converted into Vagrant compatible boxes. As a template one can then build multiple Packer images which does not include the life cycle management of such image builds from how and where they are run.
Metadata Standards
Library and Book Publishing metadata standards have come a long way and they are still in a state of flux and evolution as cataloging and publishing take on emerging new forms for further standardization and universal interpretation. Data science and Data Mining are also providing new ways of harnessing information and knowledge about classification of both data and content. However, metadata are still the epitome of differentiating and exposing data in all its transformations. XML is often seen as the mainstream format for most metadata standards. However, JSON and RDF have also emerged to break into a strong hold in developing more flexible and universal standard formats. Metadata is categorized in fundamentally three different types: administrative, descriptive, and structural. The following handbook provides further details on the book publishing structures and evolving metadata trends.
5 November 2014
Open Source Licensing
Choosing the right open source license for one's project can be a very confusing experience at first especially as new versions are derived. One's priorities can often dictate the choice of the license. A tabulated comparison also helps in deciding the most effective and suitable for a project. The below links provide some further insights when deciding for an appropriate open source license for a project.
4 November 2014
Python Testing
Python testing has gained sheer ground in the last few years as influenced from the Ruby and Java communities. Agile approaches to Python development works seamlessly within teams even with adaptable test-driven and behavior-driven as active methods. There is a growing amount of libraries and frameworks for testing now becoming available for Python and even directly integrated with web frameworks. The below list highlights a few interesting options outside of just the standard library. While more and more libraries are looking to support the evolving Python 3.x versions.
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