Potato I have

I found this interesting: there is a project to add semantics to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and lots of other wikis. The goals page is clear and concise, and here’s a sample of the kind of stuff they want to enable. There is a background page touching on RDF/RDFS and OWL, and how semantic wiki is different from semantic web.

There’s a ton of information buried in wikis; semantic annotation would make it explicit and more directly usable. One challenge is doing this in a way that doesn’t cause usability problems — hopefully anyone who can handle wiki syntax can also handle the annotations.

(via rw)

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.