Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
There’s a school of thought that URIs should be opaque identifiers with no inherent meaning or structure. I think this is clearly a bad idea on the human-facing web, but it is more reasonable for computer-facing web services. However, I’ve been generating a lot of RDF lately, trying to organize piles of metadata in AltLaw.…
Let’s have the database models strut down the runway: Relational (SQL): Data consist of rows in tables. Each row has multiple columns. Each column has a fixed type. Queries use filters and joins. Fixed schema is defined separately from the data. User-defined indexes improve query performance. Robust transaction/data-integrity support. Graph (RDF): Data consist of nodes…
See image:
I couldn’t sleep last night. So I designed a RESTful interface for version control. Yeah, that’s weird. We already have a nice model for RESTful document storage in Amazon’s S3. But S3 doesn’t do versioning. What if it did? A PUT to a previously-unused URI creates a new resource with version number 1. Any subsequent…
Well, it happened. I ran out of space on the 250 GB drive I use to develop AltLaw. Not all that surprising, although it did happen sooner than I expected. I’m deleting gigabytes of cached data — file conversions, mostly — just so I can get enough space to work again. But this makes me…
I can’t help it. I just love big, complicated systems that let you get really precise about what you’re talking about. Types, classes, ontologies, schemas, normalization, denormalization, XML, RDF, XSLT, Java, … It’s all so cool. I can happily spend hours scribbling pages of hierarchies, interfaces, specifications, file formats, and the like. But at the…
Since I started working on AltLaw.org a little over a year ago, I’ve struggled with the data model. I’ve got around half a million documents, totally unstructured, from a dozen different sources. Each source has its own quirks and problems that have to be corrected before it’s useful. When I started, I was using MySQL…
The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things in common: data structures…
I finally found out how to do this, from the Rails Routing shortcut by David Black. In the Rails console, do this: include ActionController::UrlWriter default_url_options[:host] = ‘whatever’ Then you can call your named route methods directly from the console.
I am happy to report that AltLaw.org‘s switch to Solr has worked very well. Solr is a RESTful search engine, built on Lucene. The setup was more complicated than just using a search library, but the rewards were worth it. Before, I was using Ferret, which I still like. It’s a great library, and Dave…