I was chatting the other night with Jeff Bailey and Robin Millette in the Freenode #mlug channel (the channel for the Montreal Linux Users Group). Jeff gave out the good news that Ubuntu will be building a support centre here in Montreal, which will mean Linux- and Debian-related jobs right here in Quebec.
The jobs that he wants to fill are junior support engineer jobs -- helping people with Ubuntu support contracts wend their way through common problems, and escalating those that look like bugs or feature issues. I think this is a great job for people starting out in the Linux industry, and a good way to put Ubuntu Linux knowledge to use.
I haven't seen a job posting yet, but I'll try to add a link here when I do.
tags: ubuntu montreal quebec linux jobs
RDFa vs Microformats roundup
I had a lot of good responses on my essay concerning RDFa vs microformats. Ben Adida (RDFa chair and co-author) noted the article in his list of People writing about RDFa in the new blog RDFa.info. (He also pointed out Benjamin Nowack's good article comparing various semantic XHTML efforts, which is comprehensive and includes eRDF.)
Mike Linksvayer suggests that RDFa may form a long tail of metadata. He argues that microformats could cover the base cases of important semantic markup, with RDFa covering the edge cases -- the long tail. It's a compelling argument, and I think it might make a good one for RDFa and microformats.org people if they choose to make it.
Finally, I posted on RDFa and microformats in the microformats-discuss mailing list. I think I may have given the wrong impression (that I was trying to decide between RDFa and microformats) early on, so I posted a second email on RDFa and microformats soon after. To quote myself:
I think it's possible to nip such disruptive competition in the bud. There is still an opportunity to influence the development of the W3C standard such that whatever is created will be backwards-compatible or near-backwards-compatible with current microformats.org formats. That is, such a requirement could be baked into the standard-development process.
I think that would be a win-win situation.
- The W3C RDF-in-HTML effort wins by piggy-backing on growing microformats popularity.
- microformats.org wins by defining a long-term future for itself.
- Implementers win by getting the security to use de facto standards today with upwards compatibility with future de jure standards.
I was happy to see some support for the idea. There's been some suggestion that discussing RDFa on the microformats-discuss list is "off-topic"; I'd think that the future of microformats and their long-term tenability is probably on-topic for that forum. At least for me, I'd be much more interested in implementing a long-term viable standard than a short-term one.
Most of all, I'm glad to hear that there's been some contact between the RDFa and microformats.org teams, and I hope they can come to some satisfying conclusions about the relationship between the two efforts. Interoperability would be fantastic; future compatibility would be great; even dividing the market between the 80% "base case" and the "long tail" would be satisfying for me from an implementation point of view. Mostly, I just want to know that some effort was made.
tags: rdfa microformats rdf semantic web xhtml html standards compatibility
I wanna be a DVD writer
So, this is probably showing my stripes as a Linux-using old fogie, but I didn't really get into writing my own DVDs and CDs until very recently... like, last year. It's mostly my own fault; my first few times trying to write CDs with Linux back before 2000 were hours-long frustration fests, and I finally just gave up. "These new-fangled DISK WRITERS are not for me."
Now, Nautilus does a real good job writing DVDs and CDs. I think it's been pretty easy for about 5 years, but I've been too scared and distracted. Actually, I'm not sure how Nautilus got off the ground again. What went down with that whole Eazel thing, anyways? When did Nautilus escape? How'd that happen? Whatever it was, thanks, because I sure enjoy the ease of use.