Archive for March 19th, 2006
Request for Feedback - Structured Recipes
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Cooking, StructuredBlogging.
If you’ve seen the various posts I’ve done over the past few weeks on structured blogging and it has all been a bit beyond you, please keep reading, this won’t be.
A discussion had started on the structured blogging mailing list about creating a format for structured recipes. The idea here is that all those people who publish recipes on their blogs would hopefully move to using a common format which provides structure where appropriate but still allows for each person to do things their own way. This provides benefits to both recipe writers and those of us who read and use them.
There are two reasons for this. One is that you end up with a nice simple form to fill out when typing up your recipe which will help ensure that you don’t leave out anything critical. But more importantly it will enable a new breed of search tool or recipe web-site which can trawl all of the blogs out there and provide recipes to end-users which are a much closer match to what they want than typing “chicken recipes” on Google.
With any approach which applies structure where there was none previously, the critical success factor is finding the right balance between structured information and free-form information. Add too much structure and it inhibits you, add too little and it provides no gain.
So I am throwing this question out to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you have written your own cookbook or have only ever read how to cook spaghetti from the back of the packet. What information do you think would be useful to have structured in a recipe on a blog or web-site?
To aid the thinking process, I have done some screenshots from a very nice Recipe Management Tool called Gourmet Recipe Manager. Even if you have no interest in this post, I recommend you check the tool out. The screenshots are of the windows it displays to enable you to enter a new recipe. So have a good look at those and let me know which fields you think are important to be kept “separate” from the main recipe description.
One way of thinking about it would be to imagine what you would search for if you were on a recipe search site. Is it “main ingredient” or “overall time” or “ethnicity” or “main vs sweet” or “ballpark cost” or “skill required”. There are a ton of possibilities but the idea is to find the really critical ones and work from there.
So all you lurkers who read this blog (including the 300 who suddenly appeared from the BBC2 web-site last Thursday - and I’m still trying to figure out why), de-lurk and post your opinions. This is one of those cases where no-one is wrong and all opinions are equally valuable.
There are some techie aspects to this which I will only mention in passing. Skip this paragraph if you are not technically inclined: An XML format was developed in 2002 called RecipeML to allow different software packages to swap recipes. Unfortunately, it looks like it never took off but that should not detract from the technical quality of the idea. It may form a strong basis for the under-the-hood aspects of this discussion. Having said that, Troy Hakala (one of the original authors of the format) pooh-poohed the idea of trying to do anything with recipes scattered across millions of blogs back in 2003! He does this as a comment to a post on the OxDECAFBAD Blog. it is worth reading that original post and his reply to see how much things have changed in the blog world since November 2003. Back then, Troy effectively came up with the same idea as Edgeio (but thought it made no sense).
Anyway, techies and non-techies, foodies and non-foodies, have a look at these, have a think and post a comment.
[tags]Structured Blogging, StructuredBlogging.org, RecipeML, Recipes, Microformats, Gourmet Recipe Manager[/tags]
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HDClone Hard Drive Copier Review
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Reviews, Technology.
HDClone
Year: 2006
Version: V3.1 Basic
Author: Miray Software
Platform: Windows
Category: Utility
Publisher: Miray Software
Price: €19.90
My Acer 2026 laptop has very few features I don’t like. But one thing which has always annoyed me is the 4800 rpm Hard Drive. It really slowed down an otherwise speedy machine. Ages ago I bought a replacement 5400 rpm drive of the same capacity (80GB) from dabs.com. Not being a complete idiot, I also purchased two 2.5″ to 3.5″ disk cable adapters so I could plug both the old and new drives into a spare desktop and clone one to the other.
I have always used Maxtor MaxBlast to do this in the past but this time it had serious problems with the source disk and I never managed to do the cloning.
Recently I saw mention of HDClone on Lifehacker and they recommended it as a free solution to cloning hard drives. Last night I assembled a desktop from spare parts, put the two laptop hard drives in it, burned the HDClone Free Edition to CD and booted it up. All looked well and both disks were visible. But when I asked it to clone, it returned with a message saying that the free version only supports copying to a bigger disk, it would not handle same-sized disks and I would need to upgrade to HDClone Basic. Bum.
I went on to the site and realised it was only €19.90 for the Basic Version. Not much more than the bottle of wine I was drinking. I paid via paypal but was confused as to how I got my hands on the software. I mailed the support address and got a reply at midnight their time (Germany)! The mail with the code would automatically follow later. It was in my inbox this morning. Now that’s customer service.
I burned the bootable image to CD and started up the old desktop again. This time, I clicked a few “nexts” and off it went. About two hours later it was done. Worryingly it reported 17 read errors off the source disk but no write errors to the new disk. Maybe this is why MaxBlast had such problems before?
I decided to chance it and plugged the new harddrive into the laptop and all has been well for over an hour (I’m posting this on the laptop). I’ll basically try every piece of software installed on the laptop over the next few days to make sure those errrors had no effect. Obviously I still have the original if anything goes wrong.
In summary, an excellent piece of software which only loses one star because it does not provide a list of the locations of the read errors so I could follow them up. Highly recommended if you need to upgrade your hard drive and don’t have the time to re-install everything from scratch.
Tags: HDClone, Dabs, Acer 2026wlmi, MaxBlast, structuredblogging, LifeHacker
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I will never slag off Audi again
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Motor Cars.
Jalopnik is one of the two best sites on the web for petrol heads (the other being Autoblog).
Earlier this week they had a link to a wonderful video of Ayrton Senna taking a Honda NSX for a blast around a race track. Just watch his right foot blipping the throttle. Is that what you call toe-tip control? The world really is a more boring place with him gone.
But Jalopnik went one better yesterday. They link over to a story and actual footage of an Audi TT being flattened by an out-of-control articulated lorry. Somehow (and no-one really knows how), the driver escaped with scratches and bruises. You have to check this out.
[tags]Audi, TT, Crash, Jalopnik[/tags]
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