Stick with Relational Databases

Meta Group talk about the approaches that IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are making to store unstructured data. They also talk about content management vendors differing approaches. Their overall suggestion is that for the next two to three years the architecture and infrastructure is too immature for deployment. Also, that document management vendors will be increasingly commoditized by larger players.

""The war over database structure has been won by the relational database
vendors," says META Group analyst Doug Laney. "Therefore, unless users
have some exotic data types or accessibility needs, they should reject
the blandishments of object-oriented and pure-XML databases in favor of
extending their RDBMS management schemas to encompass these unstructured
data types.""

"Existing content management vendors must realize that the semistructured and unstructured repository market will be commoditized by the RDBMS due to existing presence and costs. Users will increasingly want to standardize on one of the large vendor solutions (IBM, Oracle,
Microsoft, or, to a lesser extent, Sybase), and the content management
vendors must begin supporting these databases as repositories for
content in addition to metadata...User organizations should recognize that enterprise-wide unified management of semistructured and unstructured data and information infrastructure/architecture will remain impractical for the next two to three years, but is moving increasingly in that direction."

http://www.metagroup.com/cgi-bin/inetcgi/search/displayArticle.jsp?oid=31477

.NET is...

I only recently saw that .NET (or rather Rotor) has been ported to Linux (well 94%) - much more complete than Mono.

What is .NET and how do you get a language to run on it?  The first article is about the changes made to C/C++ to make it work on .NET (called "Managed C++").  I'm surprised by Betrand Meyer's support of .NET. It really does sound a lot like he's had to make a lot of cludges to Eiffel to get it to work on .NET and all the while defending that .NET breaks Java's one language, one platform stance. I don't think that people have said that at all.

"The language openness of .NET is a welcome relief after the years of incessant Java attempts at language hegemony. For far too long, the Sun camp has preached the One Language doctrine. The field of programming language design has a long, rich history, and there is no credible argument that the alpha and omega of programming, closing off any future evolution, was uttered in Silicon Valley in 1995. Microsoft's .NET breaks this lock." 

His second article goes further on how he modified Eiffel. Even though he explains that the source code looks like normal Eiffel - it just doesn't look like a normal Eiffel library when it's compiled.

His last article importantly lists the rules that you have to follow in order to produce a .NET language. He says that language interoperability is either impractical or involves more work:

"It's not realistic, in an application containing C++, C#, Eiffel and Cobol elements, to expect them all to talk to elements written in one or more of the other languages. A project is multilanguage because it consists of a number of subprojects, each written in a particular language; in practice, each subproject will usually include a few bridge modules that talk to other languages. CLS compliance affects only these bridge modules; typically a small subset of the software. Everywhere else, each subproject can behave as if it were a single language."

He still contends that .NET is the future:

"This exciting architecture holds the potential of a programming language renaissance, enabling languages to compete on merit, not political prejudice, and the field to blossom as never before."

Switch

In Australia we're only getting the iMac shop window ads. I'm sure I saw a "Sex in the City" episode where the Mac crashed. Oh that's because she didn't have Zip disks. Wrong product placement.

The original ("true stories"):
http://www.apple.com/switch/

Selling PCs with integrity:
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/damonwright.html

Switch to MS Windows:
http://www.macboy.com/switch/

Gartner says 40-60% in converting from VB to VB.Net and more to C#:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-938394.html?tag=fd_top

But can't you use Gartner to prove anything?

JDK 1.4.1 Beta

I thought Sun was slowing down in its releases of Java but just after releasing the JDK 1.4.0_1 update they've released 1.4.1 Beta. Not a blip on the Developer or normal Java web site.

The best feature is the Java logo while applets are loading.

Itanium support (Windows XP and RedHat Linux), Web Start integration (8MB JRE), bunch of javac bugs fixed (some of which I'd come across), ctrl-\ now shows deadlocks, and even more bugs fixed (notably NIO Linux bugs).

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/index.html

Assembling Complexity

Written in parrot assembly and probably going against the author's copyright notice. The Mathematica version is found in the notes starting at page 865.

From "A New Kind of Science" copyright:
"The source code may be reproduced varbatim for the non-commercial purposes so long as it is identified in each instance as a Mathematica program and this book is cited as its source. Derivative works such as modified or translated versions may not be made available without prior written consent of the copyright holder. Consent will normally be granted for non-commercial purposes so long as the original version of each program is included, together with appropriate copyright and other notices."

Any triangle you want as long as it's between 0 and 255:
http://andywardley.com/parrot/automata.html

Information wants to be expensive?

After looking at the cost of the notes for the first Semantic Web Conference I thought I would use Google to route around the 56,00 Euros that it cost. Is it ironic that a conference on making information more accessible is hidden behind a torturous e-commerce system? Anyway I did a little googling and found most of the papers here's a quick attempt:

Semantic Web Enabled Web Services:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter/wese/presentations.html

The Grid, Grid Services and the Semantic Web: Technologies and Opportunities (no paper but plenty of others):
http://www.globus.org/research/papers.html

Matching RDF Graphs:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-293.html

Layering the Semantic Web: Problems and Directions
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter/ftp/paper/layering.pdf

Notions of Indistinguishability for Semantic Web Languages (no link to the paper though):
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marx/papers.html

Har har:
http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t2342.htm

Paying the Price

In recent weeks Australia made the news for Optus finally punishing high bandwidth users. So I had a look at New Zealand to see how it's done better. Basically, 128K is going to be the standard access speed. Raising the bar at the lowend seems to be a much more intelligent solution.

NZ Unlimited/NZ$29.95 per month/128Kbit donwload

NZ 500Mb/NZ$49 per month/2-8Mbit download
AU 300Mb/AU$59 per month/256Kbit download

NZ 1Gb/NZ$69 per month/2-8Mbit download
AU 1Gb/AU$76.95 per month/512Kbit download

NZ 3Gb/NZ$310 per month/2-8Mbit download
AU 3Gb/AU$94.95 per month/512Kbit download

Installation is free at the moment for NZ. However, it's usually $99 with no contract requirement. They don't include a modem you pick one (hmm market forces). $189 is for Telstra on a 18 month contract. If speed falls below 2Mbit on the limited usage plans it's considered a service fault in NZ. The big jump from 1 to 3 GB is that there is no personal plan above 1Gb as it's considered business usage.

http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,2502,200345-200555,00.html
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/adsl/pricing.asp

Duopoly - a game for 2-2 players:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/15/1023864366695.html

Scary Anthems

No wonder everyone picks on these countries they need to put a couple of girts and abounding and take out some of the fighting and guns.

Afghanistan
"So long as there is the earth and the heavens;
So long as the world endures;
So long as there is life in the world;
So long as a single Afghan breathes;
There will be this Afghanistan.
Long live the Afghan nation.
Long live the Republic.
http://www.copcity.com/anthems/afghan.html

Libya
God is greatest!
(repeat)
He is above the plots of the aggressors,
And He is the best helper of the oppressed.
With faith and with weapons I shall defend my country,
And the light of truth will shine in my hand.
http://www.copcity.com/anthems/libya.html

In a similar vein may-be a small rim of plenty surrounding uninhabitable desert in the middle, more dangerous bitey things than anywhere else, drought stricken lands, expensive high speed bandwidth etc:
http://www.copcity.com/anthems/australia.html

More Boring Copyright

I still think that the right to refuse is not up to the owners of the copyright. As given by the following news article which is all about the BSAA being a shell for the the BSA and America extending its copyright laws across national boundaries.

"As it turns out, the BSA figures have nothing to do with the Vietnamese legal recognition of copyright, which protects software copyright for a period of 12 months. According to Vietnamese law, Windows 3.11, 95, 98, ME and any other edition brought out more than a year ago is no longer protected. Hence, while piracy may well be prevalent, it is nowhere near the 94 percent the BSA is quoting. To put it in context, if we had similar laws in Australia, Microsoft would not have been able to sue the PC for Kids charity out of existence for providing under-privileged families with access to a computer with software that was by and large out of date."

"Recently the BSA(cough, cough)A, thought it in our interests to warn Australia we may well end up on the US Government's "watch list" for illegal software use. As it turns out we weren't included - although the poor old Kiwis made it. So New Zealand gets to be compared with countries including the Bahamas, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Malaysia and Thailand, for failing to follow US directives regarding the implementation and enforcement of copyright laws."

"The fact that this so called "watch list" flies in the face of the right of every sovereign nation to draft and enforce its own legal system was apparently totally forgotten, as every bunny IT media outlet scrambled to interview BSA godfather Robert Kruger – as he toured the world in support of local lynch mobs."

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/enterprise/story/0,2000025001,20265924,00.htm

Get Rid of the Book

As I've been reading a "New Kind of Science" I was struck that it would be much better using the web, some applets, the kind of stuff I thought was a good idea about 5 years ago. Hypermedia or whatever you want to call it. That way the 400 pages of notes would actually be useful and I could read it more comfortably in bed (using the iBook). I don't hold much romance for a storage form when it hurts my forearms and can kill my dog if I dropped it on him.

The thing I enjoyed most about the whole fractal and chaos exploision was stuff like Fractint and of course James Gleick's svelte "Chaos : Making a New Science".

Something like Cafun is much better than page after page of static triangles:

http://www.cafun.de/

Better Programming Through Pictures

I am currently looking again at the RUP and UML. There are several new tools that looked interesting to me as a developer for designing pictures. These are also handy if your boss hasn't been coding for a while and finds UML easier to understand a bunch of code. I especially like the idea of applying patterns to code or seeing if code requires modification to fit a certain pattern.

Project ACE:
http://research.sun.com/features/ace/

Rational Java/XDE
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=7147/sdm0206d/0206d.htm

MC Hawkings

Not quite a funky as that rapping hipster MC Escher but close.

F*ck the Creationists:
" Ah yeah, here we go again!
Damn! This is some funky shit that I be laying down on your ass.
This one goes out to all my homey's working in the field of
evolutionary science.
Check it!"

Entropy:
" Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law."

http://www.mchawking.com/multimedia.php?page_function=mp3z

Secure Future

Yeah, closed source software is more secure. The Register put a gigantic list of security flaws that Microsoft having been saving for a lazy summer day.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25716.html

Cyclone just like C but without the jagged edges?

http://www.research.att.com/projects/cyclone/

CPU Upgrades for Macs up to 1GHz (for Cubes too)

Well this made me happy (as well as the article about some Australian Uni finding that Macs were cheaper).

That and the rumour that OS X 10.2 will be out August 22nd.

http://www.macgamer.com/news/item.php?id=5366

I want to believe:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=535

Starlog

The University of Waikato continues to develop really interesting text and semantic web projects.

Starlog is like Prolog, but:

* Starlog is purely declarative: there are no "side-effects." This makes it easer for tools to verify, analyse and optimise Starlog programs.
* Starlog has the added capability of explicitly representing time (and thus state changes).
* Starlog's basic execution mechanism is bottom-up, like most expert systems.

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/Research/starlog/index.html

3G and Startups

The killer suggestions to get 3G into the mainstream include e-mail, MP3 and video. The Virgin Australia managing director says, "It’s not whether it’s GPRS or 3G technology; the challenge is to develop a service proposition that consumers find valuable," he explains.".

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?catid=14&articleid=571&homepage=yes

Whatever happened to kozmo, theglobe, etc?

http://www.startup.wsj.com/financing/public/20020611-fowler.html

It seems with lack of money comes inner peace or at least comfort. It sounds like a lot of people in this article were just doing it for the money. Did there really need to be a economic downturn to make people realise that isn't enough?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/05/28/xdotcom.DTL&type=printable

Weird

Everyone seems to be posting about the MS funded report on open source being bad for security. Even after the fact that the US DoD said that it was better. My favourite is this:

"Experts differ on whether the primary focus for security should source code or binary code. Andrew Sibre, a programmer with over twenty years of experiences insists, "Having a license for binaries only gives you a black box : you don't know what it's doing, or how, unless you want to go insane trying to reverse-engineer it with a debugger (illegal under the term of most licenses)"

So they're trying to say the same people who think that it's okay to irradiate America or fly a plane into a building will go, "Oh no, we won't reverse engineer Windows, that's just wrong".

Security through obscurity works real well:
http://www.adti.net/html_files/defense/
http://www.adti.net/html_files/defense/samir_dec_23_2001/pages/

SMH Article:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/11/1022982836568.html

FLORA

FLORA is a declarative object-oriented language for programming knowledge-intensive applications. It is based on F-logic, HiLog, and Transaction Logic. Applications of FLORA-2 include intelligent agents, Semantic Web, ontology mananagement, and more.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/flora/

// TODO

"One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to "Do-Re-Mi," from The Sound of Music. It doesn't exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn't be that difficult to sort it out.

But it is.

Consider.

Each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives its meaning: "Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun," etc..."La, a note to follow so..." What? Excuse me? "La, a note to follow so..." What kind of a lame excuse for a line is that?

Well, it's obvious what kind of a line it is. It's a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can't think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he'd better put in something and come back and fix it later. So I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in "a note to follow so" and thought he'd have another look at it in the morning.

Only, when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn't come up with anything better...One can imagine rehearsels looming. Recording dates. Maybe he'd be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on."

- Douglas Adams, Salmon of Doubt.

A New Kind of Copyright

After reading the Wired article about "A New Kind of Science" I thought they potrayed Wolfram as very arrogant and very showman-like; especially the interview at the end. The copyright notice on his book reads:

"The author, copyright holder and publisher wish to encourage further development of the science in this book, while maintaining its intellectual integrity and preserving the value of their substantial creative and financial investments..."

"...Discoveries and ideas introduced in this book, whether presented at length or not, and the legal rights and goodwill associated with them, represent valuable property of Stephen Wolfram, LLC, and when they or work based on them is described or presented, whether for scholarly purposes or otherwise, appropriate attribution should be given.

...Illustrations (including tables) may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. Most individual illustrations in this book represent substantial original works in themselves, and their reproduction is not a fair use... Permission to reproduce illustrations will normally be granted for scholarly purposes so long as the illustrations are not modified...[and] are used and explained in an appropriate way... "

While the hype surrounding the book probably means that he will be financially successful, I wonder if he squashed, rather than stood upon, the giants (and their ideals) that came before him.

Btw, I like the book a lot and is immediately readable and accessible. The Rule 30 stuff is a great introduction.

You know you're procrastinating when you start reading the copyright notice:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1506

Luckily Wired is never wrong:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/wolfram.html

Open Terrorism

I read about this on ZDNet and was quite alarmed about the results of the study. The Register have something with a bit more healthy cyncism:

"We say that because we know they can't possibly try to argue that MS offers inherently more secure products. Although they might; as our friend Richard M. Smith points out, the Institution takes money from Redmond."

"This could explain why a group purportedly devoted to the 'perfection of democracy' would, with a straight face, recommend the MCSE as a qualification for adult participation in a democratic economy superior to a university degree."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25569.html

Parka Search

Parka DB comes out of the vapour.

http://iama.rrecktek.com/cgi-bin/apps/parka/parka.pl

And Germany is looking increasingly like a place to go with its decision for Linux. Avoid the monoculture!

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-931027.html?tag=fd_top

2 3 Letter Acronyms Meant for Each Other

UML it seems is not only for producing code and integrating databases together but also for RDF. I'm fairly convinced now that will be an important use in RDF. Unsuprisingly, the University of Otago in New Zealand is over a year in front. Sun's JMI

http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i08/Cranefield/

Standford Uni's RDF API with UML support:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/api.html

Adobe is 4 years ahead:
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-uml/

This is the second time I've come across Lockheed Martin's UBOT:
http://ubot.lockheedmartin.com/ubot/intro/index.html
http://ubot.lockheedmartin.com/ubot/details/uml_gui.html

DUET (DAML UML Enhanced Tool) with ArgoUML support:
http://grcinet.grci.com/maria/www/CodipSite/Tools/Tools.html

RDF vs XML

One of the continual failures of RDF is it's lack of acceptance in RSS. Having a look at Syndic8's statistics again it is still a 8:1 ratio in favour of XML.

http://www.syndic8.com/stats.php#RSSVersion

Perseus

One of the few tools where it's quite fun just to search to see what results you get back. The enjoyment comes, I think, because of the context. It links things like place names or people with documents. It not only works across their document set but also other open archives. This gives interesting results like who had classical Greek names in the American Civil War.

The "dynamic clustering" is alright in that it finds similar documents by phrases appearing in the document. As names are also given similarities such as "hercules" and "herakles". It doesn't work so well for "io" getting very weird results. Searching on "hecuba" for example doesn't find "Agamemnnon" or "Odysseus" but finds "hector" and "priam".

Open Archives Initiative:
http://www.openarchives.org/

London over 400 years (a shame there's no Quicktime panoramas for the 1600s):
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/city-view.pl

Text Searching:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/vor

Early JMI implementation

As part of the Netbeans project Sun has released its Metadata Repository.

Homepage:
http://mdr.netbeans.org/

Standards used:
http://mdr.netbeans.org/standards.html

What's XUP?

The world has gone SOAP mad. I've been working with XWT and I recently came across XUP from MartSoft.

"XUP is a protocol for delivering events and user interface updates. It is independent of the actual UI or event model. It places no restriction on the UI component set, or the attributes or events associated with each component. Furthermore, it supports both delegation and capturing/bubbling event models."

"XUP provides a model that bridges between the traditional desktop based and web page based user interface paradigms. With XUP, events are delivered from user agent to server as SOAP messages. Programmers implement event handlers on the server side. They no longer need to process form data as URL-encoded strings. User interface changes are delivered from server to user agent as incremental updates, so end users will no longer experience slow page refreshes, and network bandwidth is conserved."

While most of this can be achieved without SOAP I guess the industry's will must prevail. I also think that relying on the network for user input/output for responsiveness and consistency is mad.

As the note says:
"Because events are dispatched over the network, to conserve network bandwidth, the user agent should not send certain types of high-frequency events, such as mouse movement and key press."

While the specification doesn't dictacte the UI model they do mention XUL an awful lot.

W3C note:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xup-20020528/

MartSoft:
http://www.martsoft.com/

XWT:
http://www.xwt.org/

Submit

This is a bit of fun. Games written in Javascript on submit buttons.

Asteroids:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2002.05.25

50 yard dash (literally):
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2002.05.27

1D Tetris:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2002.05.29

More button fun:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2002.05.22

Link Annotation

Metalinker takes a very simple approach - every time you put a link into your website, metalinker uses javascript to add a link to the page on blogdex that lists other people talking who have mentioned that link. And so with just a couple of mouse-clicks people reading your site can read a webful of opinion and debate..

http://www.thinkblank.com/metalinker/

Kartoo

Take the worst from metasearch engines like Vivisimo, the presentation aspects from something like RDFViz, implement it in an appallingly slow Flash interface (or a broken HTML one) and you have Kartoo. Initially, I was pretty impressed with this little flash bestie but it's slower and more cumbersome to use than Google and provides less information per screen than any search engine. If you are going to show what's related you need more information displayed than a tradition search engine not less. It also does literal words and not concepts. Also, the size of the balls and some of the other graphical qualities seem to be meaningless.

http://www.kartoo.com/flash.php3

Suckers aren't we all?

The scam is best known as the "Nigerian email scam" or "419 scam," a reference to Nigerian penal code against fraud. Authorities now call it "advance fee fraud."

According to an FBI report, about 2,600 Americans said they were victims of the scams in 2001. Sixteen reported losses totaling $US345,000 ($A626,000); two individuals lost over $US70,000 ($A127,000) each.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/24/1022038469314.html