Semantics are all the rage these days, to make sure we include a lot of information about information in our website code for example, but what the heck are we talking about, what is syntax, what is semantics, and why do we need them?

Both are in fact basics of informatics, and are related to information (no surprise there). Syntax is the form the information is seen in, while semantics refers to what it is about. I am in now way a professor in this subject, so my terminology might not be up to par, but here is a short example, so you can see the distinction better. Take the following piece of info: “10011″. What does this mean? It could be the answer to a true or false series of questions. Question 1 was true, the second and third were false, and the fourth and fifth were also true. However, this series could have a different meaning as well.

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Whenever I criticize something, I always take some time to take a look at weather I’m the one who is wrong and I am never aggressive when commenting, since that would make me just as bad. I find the following situation just so incomprehensible.

I was reading some local news, and I saw a video at the bottom of female circumcision, which I just heard about a few months back, so I had a look. It has some graphic scenes, but nothing direct, a little blood, if you’re very sensitive though, just read on. The point of the video is, that certain tribes practice quite brutal circumcision, think razors and 2 year old babies. Also, it’s quite obvious that female parts are quite a bit more prone to infection, so this is way more unsafe than doing it with boys, and of course these “operations” are not done in hospitals.

Anyway, one of the comments (translated) was this, which is a perfectly sensible one, just so I start on a good note here.

“This is really heavy, but you have to notice that the guy who speaks fluent English would never do such a thing, this says a lot about the importance of education and enlightenment”.

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If you’re a freelancer, or you have billable side-jobs, your organization and productivity can benefit a lot from a project management and billing application, and today’s offering, Project Bubble, won’t take anything out of your pockets since it’s free.

Project Bubble is an online hosted solution and works like AJAX-heavy applications should (but many fail nevertheless). Data input forms are big, user friends, easy to use, they work quickly and efficiently. If you click in a date field, a calendar pops out unobtrusively, so you can easily choose a date, while also being able to view all other fields. Overall the application is a joy to use, it’s built up in a logical fashion and can actually be used to work, as opposed to just input info and then find it to cumbersome to continue with.

Projects, tasks and to-dos

Project List in Project Bubble

The basis of inputting data into Project Bubble is the project-task-todo method. You add a task, which can have any number of tasks linked to it. Each task in turn can have any number of to-do items linked to it. This structure enables the app to scale pretty well, you will be able to use it with small and large projects alike. In reality you can also add separate to-do items to projects which can be useful sometimes, although I would prefer not to, for clarity’s sake. The way all this information is presented is great from a visual, UX and workflow point of view. A project’s page lists all the tasks, and viewing to-do items is optional. This is ideal, since your workspace won’t be cluttered, but you can zoom in to see the fine detail if needed.

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Have you ever tried to reserve a lunch reservation and a dinner reservation in a different city, wishing you could find something to do in between? Have you ever gone out to play some bowling, had so much fun you decided to go to a Korean restaurant, but had no idea where to start looking? An app for the iPhone, Siri, is here to help, and judging by the previews, it looks like the next generation of automated personal assistants.

You just open it up and talk to it, ask for restaurant listings, show times, and so on. The great thing about it is that you can build upon a previous reservation (which it can automatically create for you with OpenTable), so it knows it has just reserved a table, and you don’t want to see movie show times at that time, since you will be sitting in the restaurant. Anyway, take a look below, and thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.

Isn’t it weird how sometimes awesome things become iconic in the world, but sometimes equally awesome things don’t quite make it? The iPhone and Google Wave are two such products, and while I think the iPhone has become an international “thing”, Google Wave hasn’t, and probably won’t, despite being a great product.

Part of the problem is that Wave is too new. People are used to email, and I’ll grant that Wave does have some similarities to that medium, it is so completely different that people are deterred from using it. I think it gives the impression that this is a social tool like Facebook, rather than a productivity tool like email. To those of us who are tech savvy, we know that both are true, but appearances are everything in this case. However, this is only partly the story, if this were the only problem it would just take Wave longer to break through, while I think it never really will (loads of people will use it, but it won’t be a phenomenon like the iPhone).

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Reinstalling Windows can be a pain sometimes, but in reality, it doesn’t have to be. When you do your next reinstall, take some time to set things up well, and your next one will be a breeze, 5 minutes of work.

The first step to take is to isolate windows on a hard drive or a partition, and don’t use that part of your hard disks for anything else. I typically give windows 45Gb of space, and all I use that for is Windows itself and applications I install. If you don’t do anything else on this drive, you should have a healthy 10Gb free all the time, meaning your system performance will not be hindered by lack of space.

Windows stores all your stuff on its own drive, so things in “My Documents”, “My Images” are all stored, by default, on the same drive as Windows is installed. It is pretty easy to relocate these folders though, just right click on “My Music” for example, select properties, and in the location tab, specify a different location. I actually create a separate drive for the “My XYZ” folders, as these are files I might need any time, so being able to easily back them up or take them with me is essential. Once you’ve completed the above two steps you have eliminated about 80% of the work, since there will be no copying 30GB of files from one drive to another so you can delete your Windows installation. Now, how about going a step further?

Another time waster when you reinstall Windows, or any system, is the process of restoring all the applications you’ve used. This need not be such a task, you can use portable versions of your most used apps like Firefox, Filezilla, Thunderbird, GIMP, and a LOT more. Take a look at PortableApps to download tons of great portable apps. I have a separate partition for these as well, about 10Gb, but I rarely use more than 1 GB here. If my laptop fails on me, I still have a copy of my apps in the state I left them, I can resume work on another laptop or desktop PC in a few minutes. When reinstalling Windows I don’t even need to do anything, my apps are just there. Now I think we’ve eliminated about 90% of the work you need to do, let’s take it another step further.

I haven’t looked into Windows 7, but there are Windows automated install tools available for XP and Vista called nLite and vLite respectively. These apps are great for slimming down your OS, and for making installs as hassle free as possible. First of all, you can get rid of all the cr*p installed with Windows, like 1GB of printer drivers, in fact, if you’re content with few features you can slim down Vista to fit on a single CD. More importantly for our purposes here, you can also set up automation, like automatically filling out your name, serial, language options, etc. You can also add drivers and integrate fixes onto the installation. This means that apart from pressing any button if you want to boot from the CD, and setting up the drive to install the OS on, you won’t need to do anything else.

If you have any tips for reinstalling Windows in a flash, please let us know! Also, why not follow us on Twitter?