Some Linked Open Data cool applications

In no particular order, more as a personal reminder, I list below some of the coolest LOD mash-ups I've seen on the web. Other suggestions are more than welcome (please add links in the comments).

Enjoy!

• Where does my money go Launch the Flash Dashboard for an incredibly effective view of how UK public money was spent by the British governments in the last years. Source of data: data.gov.uk
• DataMasher Many mash-ups of US data (from data.gov). You can also create, and save, your own personal mash-up
• Health Maps Wales Plenty of very detailed analyses regarding health-related issues in Wales. Try the Analyses tool: select an issue and view the map. Very effective! Source of data: data.gov.uk
• Comparing US (USAID) and UK (DFID) Global Foreign Aid Interesting mashup of foreign aid data (represented in US Dollars) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and UK Department for International Development (DFID) for the 2007 US Fiscal Year. DBPedia is also "mashed-up" in some way.

Any good Project Accounting software to recommend?

I urgently need a Project Management software with a good and effective accounting feature. Basically I need to:

• define a project in terms of tasks/work-packages (WP)
• provide an estimation for each of these WP
• allow personnel to insert the hours worked on each WP
• a decent (and extensible) reporting module.

I need to track project costs/progresses on a 360° basis, so not all the WP will be directly related to the production of software: e.g. I'd like to keep track also of the hours spent in managing the project, in the contacts with the customer, for installing and configuring the hardware and the software I need to develop on, etc.

It occurs to me that a huge number of companies are using for this job a software built in-house or tailored made (like it was the case with Ksolutions, the company I've been worked with for 15 years). The fine guys of Hyperborea are now, apparently happily, using Teamwork, a project management software that, amongst many others functionalities, seems to have also a decent project accounting feature.

Teamwork seems an OK product, only a bit too "one size fits all" kind of software for project management: in fact it sports a remarkable number of features to cover all main aspects of PM. Its cost is quite reasonable anyway: also the company behind it (Open Lab) is Italian too (it is based in Florence) which undoubtedly helps.

Anyway I'm more than open to suggestions. Please let me know, commenting here or via Twitter (my account is "lucadex") any opinion that you might have on the topic, including software suggestions or experiences with Teamwork.

TIA!

Maven free e-book

For those who are going to use Maven, just for the hype surrounding this project or for real need: the Definitive Guide book, published by the great guys of O'Reilly, is also available on line free of charge at the Sonatype web site.

If you are interested, go and visit the Maven: The Definitive Guide page and download the PDF edition or directly browse the on-line version.

UPDATE: The Definitive Guide is not available anymore but on the Sonatype web site there are two other free books on Maven, Maven by Example and Maven: The Complete Reference.

VideoLectures.net

Just a quick post to recommend this site I discovered a few hours ago. VideoLectures.net provides for free videos of presentations given at several international conferences (mostly in Slovenia where the project started).

Quite impressive is the list of the available lectures and interviews, that span from Architecture to Politics, even if the great majority of them are related to Computer Science in general (almost 1.400 when other categories at present only include a few dozens of videos) and in particular to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Semantic Web and Data and Text Mining. 

Conferences of distinguished international personalities can be seen, including lectures and/or interviews of Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and Tim Berners Lee.

I gave a quick glance to a couple of Semantic Web related lectures that seem quite interesting. Especially this very complete Introduction to the Semantic Web, taken at the ISWC 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany, deserves to be mentioned, since it provides a quite detailed explanation (9 parts for about 5 hours and half overall!) of the basics of this technology plus an analysis of the state of the art at present.

Google Chrome: a browser or a runtime environment?

Google Chrome has received a lot of press from the date of its release, even on mainstream media: from a technological point of view there are several interesting innovations that undoubtedly will "inspire" similar solutions in other browsers. Amongst them those to deserve a mention are the "multiprocess" architecture (which is a very interesting - yet nerdy - topic and would deserve a post of its own), the high performance JavaScript runtime (on which I already commented here), the Gears plug-in and development framework (also available for Safari on Mac OS X) plus some neat Human Interface solutions like the new "blank page" with the most visited sites, a simple but really effective concept.

Everything is really interesting especially for hackers but I doubt that these single innovations in themselves will make the average Internet user go wild. It may be interesting therefore to think for a moment about the whys behind this move by Google, leaving conspiracy theories aside. 

I do really think that Chrome shouldn't simply be seen as a browser but more fully as a runtime environment. Google is providing first class services that are becoming crucial for the life of people. Mail, calendaring, document management and editing, photo sharing, blogging, web traffic analysis, maps, web application hosting, web advertising management, not to mention Internet searches, for which the Mountain View company name has become a verb in the English dictionary ("To Google"), are just a subset of the services Google provides, services that have become essential, if not strategical, for the life and business of million of users worldwide.

These services are becoming more and more sophisticated and powerful, so much to become real contenders to "desktop" based applications. At the same time broadband Internet connections have become faster and widely available, even for mobile users. The motto "The Network is the Computer" by Sun Microsystems has become a reality these days. But every computer to be really useful needs first-class software. 

Every browser can be seen as a runtime environment for web based applications. But, as Microsoft and Apple know well, you can really guarantee the best possible experience to users if you have the chance to control "both" the runtime environment "and" the software that runs on top of it. I think that the Google move behind Chrome should be read this way. Web based applications must be fully accessible to everyone, perfectly compatible with the most common browsers (Internet Explorer, like it or not is the most used browser in the world) and fully compliant to W3C web standards. But of course Google people can't control how their web applications run on these browsers: they could have simply advocate their cause on open source projects (Firefox and WebKit to start with) but by creating Chrome they are indirectly pushing others to follow on their path.

Microsoft has fully acknowledged the threat of Google web applications and is trying hard to answer with various on-line services (Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Live Mesh) that promise to run in a multi-platform/browser fashion (Windows and Mac OS X - but not Linux apparently -, IE and Firefox). Another Internet war is on the horizon...

Google Chrome/Chromium on Mac OS X (not _for_ Mac OS X!)

For all the macheads over there: even if Google Chromium isn't officially available on Mac OS X there's a nice port (also for Linux) based on Wine. CodeWeavers, the company behind Wine, has prepared an easy to install package for Mac OS X. It works nicely: of course the look is very windows-ish (having Wine behind, it couldn't be different) but at least you can experience first-hand the latest web sensation! Enjoy!

JavaScript gets faster

JavaScript these days is getting increasingly important and strategic in Web applications design. AJAX frameworks significantly improve users' experience, changing the balance of code development from the server to the client side. Meaningful in this sense is the SproutCore framework whose goal is to allow the development of web applications that look and behave as close as possible to desktop apps.

In this scenario JavaScript performance becomes crucial. Again some open source projects raised the speed bar higher, in a significantly short time. Two projects must be cited here: one is v8, the by now ultra-famous JavaScript interpreter in Google Chrome. For a quick and nice explanation of its major "tricks" you can also give a look at the Google Chrome Comic Book (impatient JavaScript fans can directly jump to page 13).

The second project is SquirrelFish Extreme, the new generation JavaScript interpreter of the Safari browser (or better, of the WebKit open source web browser engine). Benchmarks should always be taken with a grain of salt but performance gains of this new implementation are really astonishing.