On 2.6.2011, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced Schema.org. Schema.org is intended as a standard to mark up data on webpages. This brings these three companies one small step closer to the Semantic Web.

Many people should use the same format to markup data. The more people publish their data in the same format, the more people will be able to read the data using the same tools. Its an easy formula:

• more data = more applications = more benefit

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced their shared support for schema.org, and call for adoption of their new standard from all webmasters. If you follow their call, you should change your website and write your data in their format.

To give an example (from their website): Instead of writing "Avatar was directed by James Cameron", you would write:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">
<h1>Avatar</h1>
<span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span>
<span>Science fiction</span>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ">Trailer</a>
</div>
For the end-user, this looks the same as any other website: Avatar, Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) Science fiction Trailer

For a machine, or a search engine, the data would be readable and could be imported into a database, such as wikipedia or freebase. Or your personal movie-booking application could show you a trailer next to the ticket. Great! Benefits!

The message is: webmasters out there, adopt! For you who follow the blogpost by Google,Yahoo and Microsoft, you can start adopting!
But hang on, haven't some of us just installed Drupal 7 and used its RDFa generator to do the same? Didn't we markup your website with facebook's opengraph protocol a year ago? And what about those Good Relations markup that Bestbuy did use, and that Google used to bring prices to the search results? This was a good investment, and it showed that the general idea works - standards for metadata. We are heading in the right direction. Now the three big companies worked to continue further:

The FAQ on Schema.org say:
Q: I have already added markup in some other format (i.e. microformats, RDFa, data-vocabulary.org, etc). Do I need to change anything on my site?
If you have already done markup and it is already being used by Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo!, the markup format will continue to be supported. Changing to the new markup format could be helpful over time because you will be switching to a standard that is accepted across all three companies, but you don't have to do it.

They also say: We will also be monitoring the web for RDFa and microformats adoption and if they pick up, we will look into supporting these syntaxes.

Its a chicken-egg problem:

• You haven't been adopting RDFa as much as we liked,
• So we don't tell you to adopt RDFa,
• But we tell you to adopt microdata, which is nearly the same but different

Maybe giving the chicken a bit more time to hatch its old egg and supporting it could have helped. But maybe also the new egg is better and the chicken should really walk over and hatch that one...still, its a new egg and needs to be hatched and it remains a chicken-egg-problem.

In theory, RDFa could have been used as basis for schema.org, but wasn't. As part of HTML5, the microdata standard was developed. People will need to follow the schema.org bandwagon now. Less risky would have been to reuse RDFa as a markup and publish a schema on schema.org. But it seems the big three companies put their bids on microdata now. This is a signal that can be interpreted in two ways: if we look back we could infer from the RSS/RDF/RDFa/Microformats/Microdata story that it continues and we are facing an era of often-changing standards established by rivaling companies and continous investments needed by webmasters to keep up. If we look into the future, microdata (and its compability with RDF) could be the stable solution for the coming years.

I am still alive, but it seems facebook and twitter won over my blogging.

Today I found it odd that a 10 line newsletter mail had 848kb in length.
It seems those apple users have trouble formatting their mails, this is what I found in the source (here is the end of the mail, you get the picture):

auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; =
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--Apple-Mail-60-50075253--

Thats what I call Mathememtics: 2+2=2.5



If you know me, you know that my Lenovo T400 ThinkPad is quite slow. I have a slow disk and my 2GB main memory were not enough, so today I went to the shop to buy a whopping extra 2GB.

Directly in the shop I expectingly used my sweaty joyful hands to put the new thinking space into the machine and voila: Task manager reported:
2520 MB Physical memory
WTF? I had something like 1900 MB before, adding 2GB only results in 600MB more space?

Of course of course, you will now say: But Leo, you forgot that Windows 7 32bit can only address 3.5GB ram - silly you. But behold: thats still a GB short of my 2.5 GB.

I had no choice but to look for that missing GB. Note of sillyness: a 2GB RAM module costs 21€. As my windows lost 1GB I thought I may just go for the 1GB module to save a whopping 2€! - yes, the 1GB module was sold for 19€. So I rather decided to search for the missing GB.

So where is it?

Apparently, Lenovos have 2 graphics cards and once you upgrade, they decide to grab the extra mem for personal satisfaction.

• http://www.beezmo.com/ThinkPadT400Dir/TPT400WindowsDir/T400VistaUltimate.htm
• http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T400-Vista-only-2-5G-of-RAM-showing/m-p/55219#M598

User, I am your almighty graphics card. I appreciate your ridiculous sacrifice of 1GB ram to appease me, but you must give me your firstborn virgin daughter as next sacrifice.
This would be no problem would not be the other graphics card:
User, I am your almighty onboard graphics card. I take another 500mb of your RAM as sacrifice and take your second born virgin daughter. And bring some beer when you come home.
Ok, thats enough. Thanks to the great advice found on the internets I was finally able to get to 3066MB physical RAM on my Lenovo T400.

Boot, go to bios using the blue ThinkVantage button. I turned off switchable graphics and also switchable graphics detection and set the mode to "discrete graphics". This allegedly costs more battery but I don't have to reboot and tweak the BIOS if I want to play Starcraft II.

Funnily, it won't work after the first boot. I did set it in the BIOS and booted and it had 2554MB physical RAM. Then it installed some graphics drivers - it seems that fumbling in the BIOS activates a graphics mode formerly unknown - and after booting again it suddenly had 3066MB RAM.

The very motivating end of this otherwise very very well invested time (yeah, wtf, the first computer that did NOT have more ram when I put in more ram) is that I ended up with 3066 MB whereas the other folks on the internets only were able to squeeze 3065MB RAM out of their 4GB Lenovos. I feel so proud.

p.s. it seems that now my battery life is halfed. First, the extra RAM of course needs battery, and second the almighty windows cannot switch now between graphics cards to save power and I have the great opportunity to reboot and tweak the BIOS another day to find out how to do it. Time to buy a bigger battery? Well...you can guess yourself what a double-sized battery will do with a Lenovo...2+2.....

As all Farmville-Lovers in my neighbourhood already know (because Farmville makes sure you socialize) - I am evaluating the great game Farmville now.

To learn how to get rid of it, once I want to in the future, I googled for "Quit Farmville". Amanda Farrell posted some 10 rules there about how to quit. Quite interestingly, I already found the game mechanics to be seducing, and I reacted by looking for stuff that grows for many days and has a good return-of-invest (like peach trees...).

Amanda has similar observations, but it seems I found the keys after 60 minutes of gametime. Well, of course some years of real-time strategy gaming may help to learn a game.

And most important: this whole experiment reminds me a lot of my Ultima Online addiction which I nourished sometimes around 1997-2000 while I studied Information Science. Quitting Ultima was an amazing experience. Amanda's blog post contains the same strategies I found back then for myself: learn the effectiveness of the game and the motivation and use it in the real world.

going back to help Ingrid's farm...for science and to spend quality time on the couch together.

Damnit, modern bargain hardware. When our previous Canon s450 died and we went to the shop to get a heir for it, we were surprised by the low prices of consumer printers/scanners. So Ingrid and I went for a HP Photosmart C4780 printer/scanner (C4700 series). It is a nice wifi-enabled printer/scanner.

And today I had to print a contract and scan it and the damn thing did not suck the paper in. "Kein Papier mehr" - "No paper". Googling for the problem did not give an answer so I humbled myself calling the HP hotline for Austria. After 5 minutes of "whats the serial number, whats my name, whats my phone number, here is your HP customer number" the answer was: it seems the thing is older than a year, if not, scan the invoice and do this and that to talk to a technician OR pay 20 EUR credit card to talk to a technician".

OK, if the internet does not know it, HP seems also not to know. But I found notice that the "papierwalze" could be not "rauh" enough, meaning that a roller has not enough friction to suck in the paper. The printer did rattle and chunkle as usual when I pressed "print", so that was a good lead. I opened the back and saw a small wheel touching down on the paper. When I put my finger on it, the paper suckin-process worked.



So I made my printer suck ... paper by sticking a cardboard clip on the roller. If the printer wants to suck in paper, a gentle pull on this clip will help. Only trouble is: you have to press "OK" and pull at the same time for every page.

In German for other helpless googlers:

Wenn dein HP Photosmart C4780 "Kein Papier mehr" anzeigt, obwohl da Papier drin ist, dann kann das daran liegen dass die Papierwalze nicht rauh genug ist oder das sie nicht genug Druck auf dem Papier hat um es einzuziehen. Mit "Papierwalze" meine ich jetzt das kleine schwarze Rädchen was etwa 3cm von Rechten Rand weg am Papier liegt. Dann einen Kartonstreifen mit doppelseitigem Klebeband auf die Unterseite der Papierwalze kleben - wenn man an dem Karton zieht und gleichzeitig "OK" bei der Fehlermeldung drückt, druckt er wieder.

Its not pretty, but my printer sucks now again...the paper.