Murray Woodman

It’s with much pride and relief that I can announce that Uriverse, a site I have been working on for a few months, has been launched on the web. Uriverse is a site which aggregates content around certain well known subjects, namely the subjects found in Wikipedia. I have imported version 3.4 of the DBpedia data set (semantic version of Wikipedia) into the Drupal content management system. I have then attempted to present the data in an interesting way: faceted search, timelines, ratings, maps, photos, etc. If you are interested in how it was done please read the case study. There a fan page set up at Facebook too if you are interested. Cool, that’s stage one. Future iterations will incorporate more content from external sources into each of the pages. Enjoy.

I have just launched a new website which will handle all of my work and tech related comments… cruncht.com. It will hold any technical articles which I may write from time to time as well as showcase any sites I have worked on. If you are looking to hire me for some web development work you should head over there.

As I was watching the recently completed Ashes series this year I began to ponder the issue of how a bowler’s average is calculated. Is the current a bowlers average the only measure we can use? How can we accommodate the quality of the batsmen dismissed. I think that the current method could be augmented so that we have a more insightful way of discriminating between bowlers.

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I’ve been getting into the “Night Walkers” thing a bit lately. I walk a marathon with a small group of like minded individuals (nutters) on the full moon of every month. We have a Night Walkers group at Facebook if you would like to join up. A week or so ago we completed a 32km walk from Cronulla to Coogee which was very enjoyable. It took around 8 hours to complete. The kebab shop at Brighton le Sands was a highlight of course.

In the back of my mind though I had been wanting to complete a longer walk which would take up the entire night – from sunset to sunrise. I was aiming to undertake such a walk during the winter solstice but I had a cold back then and so was unable to attempt it. Anyway, it’s still pretty close to the solstice so there is still a lot of night to walk through… 14 hours of it, 4km/h… that’s around 56km. I calculated that a Penrith to Bondi walk had a nice ring to it. It came in at around 60km according to Google maps. If I timed it right I could get to Bondi at sunrise. Also, if I got too knackered and the call of bed got too strong I could always wimp out around Camperdown, making the walk 52 km.

OK. That all sounded good and so I decided to give it a go. Rang Mike and Steve up but wisely they were suffering colds or had better things to do. Smart move.

There was trackwork on of course. Luckily there was a direct bus out to Penrith which was pretty quick. I got the arround 4.45 and made it to the river just on sunset. Right on. All up it went pretty well. My feet held up OK and the pace was pretty good. Managed to solve a few technical problems which I was ruminating on…

It wasn’t without unpleasantness though. I really had underestimated the desolation of the Great Western Highway. In my mind I had sort of imagined a continuation of Paramatta Road but boy I was wrong. What was I thinking? That road is by no means pedestrian friendly. For a lot of the way I was creeping along the edge of the roadside barrier with cars whizzing by. At its worst it was through knee high grass. Sometimes the median strip was best. There were a few times where I really did consider it all a bit ill conceived. I got that kind of creepy feeling of there only being one way out of it and that was forward. You know – when you have to rely on yourself alone. I think Steve Waugh calls it a “comfort zone” In a funny kind of way that is why I do these walks. Eventually some lights appeared on the horizon and Wentworthville emerged. Footpaths. Street lights. Service stations. Street signs. The very occasional person. And a bit of hope. Oh joy.

I must have been pretty scared because I clocked up that 30km in about 5 and a bit hours – way faster than my usual 5km per hour. The next 20 km was pretty uneventful. It was great to be back in civilisation. I’ve now seen every car sales yard in Sydney. Memos kebab shop really makes a tasty kebab BTW Heh. Anyway, for the last 10 clicks or so the blisters were getting a bit bad and so I did decide to call it a night at Camperdown. Bondi would have to wait for another day. 52km all up in a little less than 12 hours. I won’t be doing that walk again anytime soon. Glad to have done it though.

I have been interested in RDF and Topic Maps for a while so I thought that it would be interesting to see how some of the concepts in these specifications could translate across to WordPress. I had recently moved my topicmap.com site across to WordPress and was wanting to wring some more semantic goodness out of the standard install. Specifically, I wanted to add metadata which could be linked. more…

The Sydney Institute publishes the Sydney Papers, a quarterly publication of the various speeches given at weekly events. The Sydney Institute required a CMS which would allow them to maintain a subscription list where paying members have access to protected content. This was implemented as a WordPress site with a subscription manager. more…

The other day I took a couple of friends visiting from the UK for a trip up to the Northern Beaches of Sydney. We dropped by Cottage Point for lunch and then made our way up to Palm Beach and Pitwatter for a bit of a dip and an ice cream. On the way back to Sydney I noticed the roadsign which was to be the genesis for the Night Walkers group: Sydney 40km. more…

New Leaf Publishing is a small publishing house providing editorial and production services. It required a website outlining its services and contact information. more…

Here are a few ideas I picked up from browsing images in Flickr. I just went for a bit of a hunt through the interesting images until I found a good image and then documented the arresting feature. What I ended up with was a list of hints to try to remember next time I’m out and about taking photos.

If you have any photographic techniques then I would love to hear about them in the comments.

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Australians are being pressured financially as resources (water, oil) become more scarce and expensive. There is a confusingly wide range of options available to households and consumers to help them become more green. more…