Morbid Fascination

Seems that a couple of odd web pages have come my way today. The first one was a list of all of the characters, guest stars, voice actors etc. that have died and appeared on the Simpsons. It includes people like Phil Hartman, Doris Grau, Steve Allen, etc. You can now date the episode based on which characters speak or not or the guest star that appeared.

The next is the Top Earning Dead Stars including Elvis at number 1 and J.R.R. Tolkein and Robert Ludlum. It's cool to think that you can earn money after you're dead - or even earn more money than when alive. Much like a deceased humour/sci-fi author who continued to sell Mac hardware and software (the movie still works BTW) well after he was dead.

Of course, this couldn't be a 2002 post about death without the inevitable September 11th reference. Amazing and ghoulish.

Groove Debate

I think this is just fantastic. Ray Ozzie and Dan Gillmor duking it out over Groove and Windows. Personally, I wasn't that impressed that it was seemingly tied to Windows and to Outlook when I saw it ealier this year.

Dan says:
"Groove, is becoming almost part of Windows -- and will be, at best, an afterthought (my interpretation, not Ray's) on other platforms. There's a disconnect here, I believe"

"Many of Groove's customers like the control-freak stuff. Corporations want to lock down their PCs in some ways, and Microsoft will be helpful to them in this effort. It may also be simpler, and more cost effective for Groove as a company, to turn the product into nothing more than an admittedly dynamite feature of Windows. It's not, I believe, in the ultimate interest of Groove's users -- not all of them, at any rate."
Dan's Column

"I can tell you that I will do what it takes to ensure that Groove has a chance to have a very broad, ubiquitous impact, that there are many potential users and customers out there with varying platform and feature needs, that I'm very pragmatic in achieving desired outcomes, and that the only "grand plan" is to create something of substantive value for customers."

http://www.ozzie.net/blog/2002/08/12.html

Of course, Ray has fueled the idea of further Groove and Windows/Office integration and Dan is reacting to Microsoft's Paladium plan. Ozzie giveth and Bill taketh away.

Free (as in Freedom) Storage

Hmm, petabytes.

"The cluster file system helps database administrators more easily manage the file system on Oracle 9i RAC clustering technology. It offers, for instance, a graphical tool for managing a complete disk farm as one file system, said Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle 9i database marketing.

"Oracle is releasing the source code in Linux to help increase the adoption in the high-end enterprise market," Shimp said. "This is part of an ongoing series of efforts by Oracle to help build up Linux in the market place."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,456894,00.asp

ABYSML

"ABYSML is a markup language that puts comprehensibility of the input text above convenience for the language processor. In this respect it is very different from XML, which is both dreadfully difficult to read, and yet a tremendous pain in the ass to parse; XML brings to mind H.L. Mencken's concept of "the libido for the ugly". Well, ABYSML is beautiful and simple and I guarantee you won't give old H.L. a second thought."

Example of the code:
BIF:
NETWORK
{
NAME: Dog-Problem
VARIABLE
{
NAME: light-on
OUTCOME: true
OUTCOME: false
PROPERTY: 'position = (73, 165)'
}
...

(Available from the RISO site).

Death Of EMail

"With Notes essentially cloned and the original Ozzie team resurfaced at Groove Networks, Microsoft shifted its attention to XML Web Services. With Microsoft's investment in Groove, collaboration R&D is now focused on the intersection of Groove's decentralized peer-to-peer model and Microsoft's centralized STS (SharePoint Team Services)."

Inforworld article

Ray Ozzie on collaboration:

"We spent years and years at Lotus trying to convince people of the "higher order" value of collaborative processes, sharing, and KM. And I learned the hard way that fighting what appear to be natural organizational and social dynamics is very tough. Which is why eMail is the most popular collaboration tool on the planet: it works the way that people naturally want to work. And which is why Groove is built upon a client-side, personally empowering "email model" than an "app server" model. Mobile, instant, ad hoc, private. Effective collaboration tools strike a balance between personal need/behavior and collective/organizational need."

http://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2002/08/04/why.html

RISO

"RISO: distributed, heterogeneous belief networks. A belief network is a probability model defined on an acyclic directed graph; distributed means nodes can be on different hosts, and heterogeneous means allowing different conditional distributions."

From the thesis:
"RISO is a system to aid reasoning in spatially and temporally extended problems, which implements a class of graphical probability models called distributed
belief networks."

"As the number of sites is increasing 400% per year, we can expect RISO installations to soon outnumber elementary particles, not to mention available IP
addresses."

"It is natural to represent each geographical unit with a belief network, and to represent the flow of information from one locale to another by edges connecting variables in
separate belief networks; different kinds of messages travel with the arrows and against the arrows."

"The RISO inference algorithm is based on the polytree algorithm for belief network inference, in which “messages” (predictive distributions called 1/-messages and likelihood functions called ¸-messages) are computed."

When we create this distributed belief system we can finally find Elvis (25 years dead this month).

I've been able to get the Java code going with a little juggling. Wrote an Ant script which helps. It still needs some work and the initial instructions are wrong. Cutting and pasting from PDF is fun too: I think "inference" came out with a registered symbol (®), 1/- is pi and ,- is rho (or something).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/riso/

Live Free or Die - California Pulls a Peru

"Named the "Digital Software Security Act," the proposal essentially would make California the "Live Free or Die" state when it comes to software. If enacted as written, state agencies would be able to buy software only from companies that do not place restrictions on use or access to source code. The agencies would also be given the freedom to "make and distribute copies of the software."

"The point of the proposal isn't to punish developers of proprietary software. Instead, advocates point out that "closed" software adds costs and creates security risks, two problems the state needs to reduce."

Looks like California is cruising for a "donation" from Mr Gates.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949241.html?tag=cd_mh

Mozilla Monetizing

"So here you are, a multi-billion dollar corporation with a sagging stock price that has spent hundreds of man-years and millions of dollars on a layout engine and a Web browser. You've thrown all this money into the support of this cool "standards-compliant" layout engine, and you don't even know what that means! You're out all this money, and you have to find some way to make it back.

Well, do I have the plan for you. Enroll in David Hyatt's "Monetize that Browser!" seminar today, and you can learn how to recoup your losses. I'll teach you time-honored methods for making that money back. Yes, in just 30 short days, and for the low price of $599.95, I'll whip your money pit into a cash-generating machine!"

With "New Furniture from IKEA" under "File" and under "View" "Movies @ Netflix.com", "Tools" has "Buy More Tools from Home Depot". It's lucky they went with "Bookmarks" and not "Favourites".

David's post

Two More Semantic Web Articles

This is a fairly interesting about the maturing use of ontologies.

"Large ontologies are essential components in many online applications including search (such as Yahoo and Lycos), e-commerce (such as Amazon and eBay), configuration (such as Dell and PC-Order), etc."

"One of the simplest notions of a possible ontology may be a controlled vocabulary – i.e., a finite list of terms. Catalogs are an example of this category. Catalogs can provide an unambiguous interpretation of terms – for example, every use of a term, say car – will denote exactly the same identifier – say 25. "

"The next point includes frames[4]. Here classes include property information. For example, the “Apparel” class may include properties of “price” and “isMadeFrom”. My specific dress may have a price of $100 and may be made from cotton."

Also lists 7 uses of simple ontologies/taxonomies and 8 uses of structured ontologies. Things like consistency checking, disambiguation, site organisation, comparative searching, etc.

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-mit-press-(with-citation).htm

This is yet another primer for the sematic web and ontologies.

"As with a conventional CMS, we tag the content elements with metadata that describes the element type, like headline, body text, and publication date. We also need to tag the content with metadata that describes what the content is, like product description, white paper, support document, or retailer. In addition, the system must know how these components relate to each other."

"You can see we begin to describe not just content but concepts, ideas about what is in an organization and how those concepts relate to each other. The goal behind this kind of model is to represent our understanding of the organization and to document it in a way that will eventually become readable by the CMS."

"The model described above - the concepts, relationships, plus some additional information - is called an ontology."

http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2002-08.shtml

dmoz RDF

Much in the same vein as RooDolF this is an RDF wrapper around dmoz. It uses the Dublic Core name space which is good.

http://nutria.cs.tu-berlin.de/dmozrdf/index.html

Unfortunately, it's the first 1.5 GB of dmoz so much of it seems to be porn or "adult" content:
http://nutria.cs.tu-berlin.de/dmozrdf/odp2rdf.jsp?query=windows

IBM to Supply Next CPU for Mac

"IBM is to release a version of the dual-core Power4 processor aimed at the desktop, and will disclosed details at Microprocessor Forum in October.

The new chip designed for "desktops and entry level servers", and will be an 8-way superscalar, SMP-ready design capable of 6.4GB/s throughput. Tantalisingly, the processor has it own "vector processing until implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions."

The "over 160" number is quite significant: the AltiVec vector unit for the PowerPC G4 has… 162 instructions.

Now why would IBM want to do create a desktop RISC processor? It needs to remain competitive with entry-level workstations against the likes of Sun and HP's Alpha, where the size and heat dissipation of the mighty POWER4 have kept it out of systems below $12,000. IBM's desktop workstations still run POWER3 (but then you can find UltraSPARC Iis in Sun's bargain basement)."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/26594.html

It's Knowledge Sharing

"Yes, I still hold the view that the term 'knowledge management' is a misnomer...In other words, manage the explicit knowledge - the stuff that is written down - of the organisation and we will have success. We found that this was not sufficient to achieve success because it dealt with just a small percentage of the knowledge in the company."

"We then worked on re-defining the educational opportunities that were available to our associates by changing the pedagogical approach to education. We shifted from sending people to class to one of delivering the class to the student anytime/anywhere. This allowed us to change the cost equation of education sufficiently that we could offer most of the courses from the universities free of charge to our associates provided they obtained a passing grade. We are now moving to just-in-time learning. (This is about 5 per cent of the effort.) We are now spending a lot of time and effort to improve our ability to function as global teams. "

While I don't think Office is seamlessly integrated or that the productivity gains found by using products like Office were not forcast 10 years ago (I would say 40 years ago) he says that future gains in the knowledge management will include:
1. Seamless translation (universal translator),
2. Seamless interface (removing the keyboard),
3. Internet connectivity (further growth).

http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/supplement/story/0,2276,51302,00.html

Interview with Eric Miller

Answers the important questions like what the semantic web is, how it will function, what technologies make it up, etc.

"The Semantic Web is simply an extension of the current Web that allows for more effective sharing and combining of information. To an information professional, this translates into greater access, more accurate and timely information, and reduced costs."

http://newbreedlibrarian.org/archives/02.04.aug2002/interview.html

Entrepreneur.com magazine has an article based on the interview.

RooDolF

This is a simple idea but it converts the Google results into RDF. May he get all the riches and fame he deserves. Does the way you combine Google's results mean that it is producing more metadata than data?

http://nutria.cs.tu-berlin.de/roodolf/index.html

OWL and Lattices

I've started reading the OWL draft specification. Having the sets all and nothing (owl:Thing and owl:Nothing) reminded me a lot of lattices. I wonder if they will do things like using lattice multiplication across ontologies.

Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical Foundations:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540627715

OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 Reference:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-owl-ref-20020729/

HyperCuP paper

A very short one page description of the HyperCuP semantic routing:

"It would be desirable to restrict the broadcast of a query message to peers that can potentially provide information related to the concepts asked for in the query. We address this problem by constructing more than one hypercube in the network: One hypercube is created for each ontology concept, creating a cluster of peers which carry information related to the concept."

http://iswc2002.inrialpes.fr/posters/schlosser.pdf

Skin your Swing

Allows you to skin any Swing based application. Has XP, Aqua, or any themepack (it uses a GTK and Gnome theme and an XML descriptor).

http://www.l2fprod.com/

The Coolest Button

"PowerMate is the coolest volume knob your computer has ever seen – and so much more. Use it to edit home movies or scroll through long documents and web pages. Best of all, PowerMate is an assignable controller. Program it to do anything you want in any application. Customize it to your own needs and get wild."

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/index.html

Decentralized Meta-Data Strategies

" Recent developments in peer to peer networks * have centered around the concept of distributed hashtables (DHT) or content routing [Ratnasamy et al., 2001][Stoica et al., 2001]. These approaches assume possession of a hash or other identifier that precisely specifies the document the user wishes to retrieve. Naturally there are some situations in which a user only has more general information about their needs, e.g. keywords or other meta-data. A number of different strategies for handling this kind of search in peer to peer networks have recently come to light. Several are summarized below along with an attempt to identify some common themes."

Description of Anthill:
" The crucial difference in their scheme (apart from calling messages ants) is that each nest (node) stores a routing table associating keyword hashes with sets of other nests. Different nests become associated with different parts of the hashed keyword space thus avoiding the problem that keyword space itself is highly clustered (presumably around various spellings of "Britney Spears")."

Covers Edutella, FASD, Anthill, Routing Indices, Alpine, Associative P2P Networks, PlanetP, Query Routing, SIONet, JXTASearch, NeuroGrid, Reptile, Semplesh, and HyperCuP.

I'll have to check these out at a later date especially NeuroGrid, SIONet, Platet and HyperCuP.

http://www.neurogrid.net/Decentralized_Meta-Data_Strategies-neat.html

10 Things I Hate About Java

Ditch AWT, ditch legacy code, redesign i/o, get rid of primitives all good stuff.

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/31/java3.html

This scared me. Open source implementations of J2EE makes Bill Gates laugh mockingly at Scott McNealy. I think someone has a complex. Although, he might be right about the advertising. I hate the .Net advertising being everywhere. Sun needs to be at least that annoying.

http://www.oetrends.com/cgi-bin/page_display.cgi?77

Meanwhile, JBoss continues to be one of the more innovative J2EE servers:
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/24/jboss_stack.html

There's also JOnAS which uses JORM (Java Object Repository Mapping):
http://www.objectweb.org/jorm/

So You Want to Write an Operating System

Yeah, so apparently if you're smart you don't write your own operating system. Although, if you do you do simple things like pick your audience, your goals, be God and the architecture you want. I liked the idea of Freedows and it was started by another young hacker (it seemed like it died because of personality clashes rather than technical although that probably helped).

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1482

Yeah, yeah I'll finish it this month:
http://www.rcosjava.org/

Of course, using Java to teach operating systems is dumb, especially after you've done it already:
http://babylon.csua.berkeley.edu/

Anyway, real operating systems are written in assembly:
http://www.menuetos.org/

Spinning the Semantic Web

MIT Press is going to publish in November a book written by some of the people responsible for OntoWeb. Foreword by Tim Berners-Lee.

"Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information--display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content--accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications."

MIT catalogue entry for Spinning the Semantic Web

A few of the authors:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter/
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/
http://www.dfki.de/~wahlster/

Threads, Threads, Threads

A topic I never get sick of threads. Javaworld series:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2002/jw-0802-java101_p.html

OptimizeIt Suite (Thread Debugger):
http://www.optimizeit.com/products/threaddebugger/overview.html

My favourite author on the subject (Doug Lea):
http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/

Apple to go to Intel

"Neff, for instance, predicted Apple, which uses chips from Motorola and IBM that currently top out at 1GHz, will switch to Intel, whose chips run at 2.5GHz, to get a performance boost and gain more customers. There's a better than 80 percent chance Apple will make the jump in two to four years, he said."

I guess that's Neff said about that.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948239.html

Cave or Community

"Of the top 100, 70 were individuals or very small groups (typically pairs). These individuals accounted for 46.1 percent of the code and 50.4 percent of projects. One individual had contributed to 267 projects."

"Similarly, previous authors have identified the strong hand of the leader of an OSS program. Moon and Sproull refer to Linus Torvalds as a "great man". Others have pointed out that Torvalds essentially did not have a life and spent considerable number of hours rewriting code submissions by others."

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_6/krishnamurthy/index.html

My most recent experience with an Open Source project is having my patches ignored by the author. Then only to see it reimplemented by him. With my own, small project, it has basically been me as the contributor. However, I've always offered help to understand and to contribute to the project. I can't imagine ignoring a patch (especially if it was for the Disk Scheduler or something as someone is working on). I've had patches accepted by the Jena group. They weren't earth shattering (total of up to 5 lines of code). But they were functional and met features that I needed. The people at Jena could've rewrote it but it was a waste of time. The ramp up to get someone productive on a project is considerable even if the goal (as in mine project) is to make the code as easy to understand as possible. The more that are familiar with the code the more likely the code will grow and get better.

I'm not the best coder - my patches could've been lame or crap. I can't be objective about my own code but from what I've seen happen to others in other projects is that good patches can go to waste. Most of the time this is just from people not understanding the original code or the patch.

The reasons why people contribute to OS according to the article is:
1. To take part in an intellectually stimulating project.
2. To improve their skill.
3. To take the opportunity to work with open-source code.
4. Non-work functionality.
5. Work-related functionality.

On taking up OS projects (especially for work) there's considerable risk involved when it's just one contributor. There maybe a very good reason why there is only one.

HITS

"The HITS algorithm is a two-step process, applying a sampling step that identifies a focused collection of several thousand Web pages likely to contain numerous pages considered authoritative on the topic, and a weight-propagation step that uses an iterative procedure to assign scores to pages regarding the quality of their hubness and authoritativeness."

http://dsonline.computer.org/0206/features/new_1.htm

Improving HITS:
http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/643/

Metadata Registry for the Semantic Web:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/wagner/05wagner.html

KVM for ARM Processors

"The company has released CLDC HotSpot, an implementation of its J2ME Virtual Machine for the Connected Limited Device Configuration that is optimized for processors using ARM’s 32-bit cores. Sun claims that it outperforms its predecessor by a factor of 10, and should fill developers’ needs for the next half-decade."

"Lorain said that due to time constraints, the CLDC HotSpot implementation does not take advantage of Jazelle, ARM’s on-chip JVM that Sun helped develop. “It uses more footprint than Jazelle and won’t do as good a job at preserving battery life, but it will still do a better job than the current CLDC implementation,” he said, adding that it requires about 225KB of device memory, while the previous version used 90KB. Both require an additional 70KB for J2ME libraries. Sun and ARM still are working on “a joint solution that will leverage CLDC HotSpot and Jazelle,” Lorain said, but he did not give a timeline."

http://www.sdtimes.com/news/059/story2.htm

Episode 3 in Lego Form

Winner of the Audience Choice Award at the Brickfest 2002 Animation Competition. The aim was to create a trailer for a Star Wars movie, either existing or made up.

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/zirkusaffe/Movies/riseoftheempire.mov

AAAI-2002 Workshop on Ontologies and the Semantic Web

There are ten papers available from the web site. The ones I found interesting were: "Haystack: A Platform for Personalized Information Management Built on RDF", "Learning Environments Using Reusable Knowledge Units" and "LCW-Based Agent Planning for the Semantic Web". But there's a few others that I wouldn't mind reading if I get the chance.
http://reliant.teknowledge.com/AAAI-2002/

Haystack

"The Ozone user interface is the sole client at this time. The Haystack server hosts a number of information stores, including an RDF store. Other stores are simply wrappers around other sources of information such as LDAP servers, IMAP servers, and Microsoft Outlook stores. All stores are federated by a single Federation Service, which is responsible for dispatching queries to and combining query results from several stores."

I'd like to download or at least somehow look at the Adenine language which sounds interesting:
"Adenine takes the p-code concept one step further by making the ontology explicit and extensible and by replacing byte codes with RDF. Instead of dealing with the syntactic issue of introducing byte codes for new instructions and semantics, Adenine takes advantage of RDF’s ability to extend the directed “object code” graph with new predicate types...Values in Adenine are represented as Java objects in the underlying system."

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/haystack

This was presented at the 2002 W3C conference:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/dquan/haystack_intro.htm

All Things Semantic

They have my company and a bunch of others. They also include people and technologies.

http://mondeca-publishing.com/s/anonymous/title49.html

If you don't want this semantic web things to take off these are the ones you must silence (including Ms Chair, expert, team member, speaker, etc):
http://mondeca-publishing.com/s/anonymous/title10053.html

Who's Wielding the Stick?

Wired is saying that it is Microsoft who is muscling in on the government of Peru and Open Source software. But wouldn't it be nice if all customers were given "donations" from Microsoft.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54141,00.html

This is similar to what I said before, the more knowledgeable you are the more bargaining power you can have:
http://morenews.blogspot.com/2002_06_30_morenews_archive.html#85209378

Picking Through the .COM Trash

Being able to publish source code that you wrote while working for a now dead company seems like a good one. I thought this had resonance with the last post I made about buying stuff from Spike. Whether the source code has more value than a virtual fish tank will take more time to find out than I want to spend. The current source code published at a Not Invisible Worlds site called Mappa Mundi (itself an old magazine web site) is Alkindi Collaborative Filtering and Space Mapper.

You can add using makefiles to compile Java code to the list of signs that a company will go under:
http://mappa.mundi.net/signals/

How to Tell if a Company will go Bankrupt

You can tell if a company will go under if there's a flag, personalised number plates and fish tanks.

Well how about this item from a semi-famous Australian .com company Spike IT. One virtual fish tank made by NEC called "Fish Club". Yours for $1725 (that's Australian Pesos). The original apparently cost US$17,000. It's a Japanese HDTV with a Laser Disc player showing pictures of fish swimming around (30 minutes at a time).

I don't think it was widely successful though because I haven't been able to find many links to it.
http://www.todaystechnologies.com/sales/fish/info.htm
http://creative.zdnet.com/adverts/micro/push3/products/8.html

As technologically cool pets go Eco-spheres come pretty close, and it's a metaphor of the world which we all depend:
http://www.eco-sphere.com/sagan_review.html

If anyone wants to put money in my account (or just give me your credit card details) I'll buy it for you I promise:
http://www.graysonline.com.au/lot.asp?LOT_ID=39595

AJile Java In Hardware - Not

AJile System are stupid. You go to all that trouble of creating a dynamically linked, platform independent language and then someone goes the opposite direction.

"How are applications developed for aJile microprocessors?

Standard Java class files from applications developed with commercial Java IDEs are statically resolved and compacted (e.g., unused methods and fields are removed) to build executables using optimizing linking tools. In addition to bytecode optimizations, the static linker technology performs several embedded application build functions including generating object initialization sequences, memory and JVM configurations, and interrupt and trap handler assignments."

"How do aJile microprocessors perform garbage collection (GC)?

aJile plans to provide several GC algorithms which will be configurable during application builds (linking process). It is also possible to build applications without GC (i.e. never deallocate memory). Utilizing the multiple JVM feature, each application can select the GC algorithm that best suits its execution profile without interfering with other applications."

Jazelle on the other hand:
"Is there any run-time compilation?
No. Jazelle is not a JIT compilation technique. At runtime, over 95% of Java bytecodes are executed directly on the Jazelle-enabled core; the remaining bytecodes are interpreted as short sequences of highly optimized ARM instructions."

And it can execute at over 1000 Caffeinemarks (or 6 per MHz).

http://www.arm.com/armtech/FAQ?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=3#_Section3

And the user interface looks dirt ugly:
http://www.infosync.no/news/2002/n/2111.html

Google and the Semantic Web

I've been rereading a number of articles about Google and the Semantic Web. Having just put a stat button on I've noticed that just about all my hits come from Google and I imagined how annoying it would be if you typed in "vivisimo" and got my page instead of the search engine (a cunning Google plot). Of course, what's the best way to find these pages about Google, people linking to me, people linking to the page about Google and the Semantic Web, the Semantic Web in general and privacy concerns with Google...Google.

The old articles:
http://www.netcrucible.com/semantic.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/815

I can understand people trying to escape from Google's grip:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/25/technology/circuits/25GOOG.html

Resistance is useless - Google is the future. The below article talks about the future where Google has taken over as the repository of all ideas, commerce and business in general. One of the ideas is a "Google Marketplace Manager". It's simple enough to use Google's vast collection of data, RDF and user details. The idea of a decentralised system beating a centralised Google approach, is a seductive one though. And we all dream of a time when we can sell a guitar or a human organ annonymously and efficiently.
http://ftrain.com/google_takes_all.html

None of this has appeared on the Google weblog:
http://google.blogspace.com/

However, it did link to a few Google visualizers. These are really cool. I've spent hours mucking around with these.
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
http://www.langreiter.com/space/google-set-vista

Living the Dream

What to do...we always joke about having web cams and SNMP (or JMX) enabled coffee machine. Well I guess there's always this way:

http://www.pimprig.com/sections.php?op=
viewarticle&artid=72

4 cups though...I guess that's enough for one person...for a morning.

Tinderbox

This is a rather nifty tool. Similar to some of the other RDF visualization tools I've looked at over the last few months. It's only 1.4 MB or so. Runs really well under OS X (and only for Mac). I immediately worked out how to use it. Very nice.

The agents are only simple ones at the moment. Keyword searching. With a bit of manipulating it could make a nice front-end to Meerkat.

It even has the ability to get information from other RSS feeds. If it just had some decent screen scaping or everyone started using RSS I'd be happy.

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

RSS to RSS

Just incase I forget this one:

0.9 and 0.91 to 1.0:
http://4xt.org/downloads/rss/

Not common knowledge yet:
http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/1027551382.shtml>

GXA

Has O'Reilly gone MS mad? Have I gone O'Reilly mad? Well I don't know but this is also another startlingly obvious thing from our friends at Microsoft. It looks from a quick look like a version of JXTA:

"To allow this decentralized approach to work without chaos ensuing, GXA builds upon the hierarchical nature of the URI mechanism to act as a "federator" of disparate, autonomous organizations."

"The focused nature of GXA protocols allows them to be used as protocol building blocks. This composability allows one to combine orthogonal GXA protocols (e.g., WS-Security, WS-Routing) into a single message. Unlike large, monolithic protocols, GXA can be adopted piecemeal or en masse. If your application doesn't need a particular GXA protocol, it is reasonable to not use it while still using other parts of the architecture."

It is also transport neutral too. It's not clear to me which one is actually better, except that you can download JXTA today and get it to work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dngxa/html/understandgxa.asp

It's Good to be Wrong

This is great and from MS:

"The software industry remains extremely competitive, and open source software offerings vie with commercial software. Microsoft competes with rival offerings regardless of whether or not they are commercial or open source in nature. Competition with open source software should not be seen as an attack on open source or on those who choose to develop under that model. In a sense, we are agnostic on this topic; we believe we can provide customers with the best software solutions to meet their needs, period. Even in discussing the GPL, which is widely seen as controversial, I assert that we need to move from the pejorative to the substantive.

Commercial vendors do more than sell products; they also deliver value. If any company's product ceases to deliver value, no matter what development model was used, the market will exercise its ultimate power: not to buy."

What's more they mentioned that MS has GPLed stuff - modifications to GCC. Sometimes I wonder if MS suffers from whiplash the way it's messages changes from cancerous Linux to a vital part of the software development community.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/07/23/msos.html

In-Q-Tel

Traction Software's server looks basically like a very full featured blogging framework. The
interesting part though was this:

"Traction Software investors include In-Q-Tel (U.S. Government funded venture catalyst
charged with identifying and delivering next-generation information technologies to
support the CIA's critical intelligence missions), Slater Interactive and private investors.

In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel is a private, independent, enterprise funded by the CIA. Launched in 1999,
In-Q-Tel's mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge
information technologies that serve United States national security interests. Working
from an evolving strategic blueprint that defines the CIA's critical information
technology needs, In-Q-Tel engages with entrepreneurs, established companies, researchers
and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that pay out in superior intelligence
capabilities for the CIA and the larger Intelligence Community. Learn more at
www.in-q-tel.org."

http://www.tractionsoftware.com/companyinvestors.htm

Review of Traction's software:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ap/xml/02/07/15/020715aptraction.xml

Actually, Intelliseek looks like a more interesting set of tools:
http://www.intelliseek.com/

Should I use a portal/search engine which is based on a product funded by the CIA that purports to have "Competitve Intelligence"?
http://www.profusion.com/

The UK's move to OS

Home Office minister Douglas Alexander said: "I am pleased to announce new policy on the use of Open Source Software within UK Government. It explains how we will consider Open Source Software solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements and award contracts on a value for money basis, seeking to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services."

"But anyway, what does it say? Open Source software "has leapt to prominence by starting to take a significant market share in some specific parts of the software infrastructure market," it cautiously begins, then revs up. "OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, but it is not a hype bubble that will burst and UK Government must take cognisance of that fact."

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25709.html

JXTA again

" The JXTA platform is defined by the following six protocols. A peer does not need to implement all protocols, just the protocols that it needs.

* Peer Discovery Protocol (PDP). PDP allows a peer to discover other peer advertisements (peer, group, service & pipe).
* Peer Resolver Protocol (PRP). PRP allows a peer to send a search query to another peer.
* Peer Information Protocol (PIP). PIP allows a peer to learn about the status of another peer.
* Peer Membership Protocol (PMP). PMP allows a peer to join or leave a peer group.
* Pipe Binding Protocol (PBP). PBP allows a peer to bind a pipe endpoint to a physical peer.
* Peer Endpoint Protocol (PEP). PEP allows a peer to ask for routing information to route messages to another peer.

http://jxta-c.jxta.org/servlets/ProjectHome

The Miracle of Compound Interest

I could put $10 in for everyone that I wanted to meet after I was dead. Elvis, Douglas Adams, etc. Then it would be like some whacky after life type place. At least they are upfront about the 90% in overheads.

http://timetravelfund.com/

What's more likely we bomb ourselves into oblivion or we invent time travel?

http://timetravelfund.com/join.html

There's Open and then there's Open

It's funny. I agree with the initial statement but pretty much everything else seems wrong.

"If you consider open code a benefit to society, you may want to propagate open-code legislation or otherwise try to stimulate new competition in the marketplace."

For example,
"If it was as simple as Raymond puts it, should not all code be open by now, and why did not Microsoft and Oracle open their code?"

So what is Rotor? What is the announcement at OSCON?

As for Oracle there's a whole book about the OS projects that they've used (Apache, Perl, Tcl, etc):
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracleopen/chapter/ch01.html

Of course, Microsoft and Oracle probably won't be GPLing anything soon. So there's open and then there's open. I agree that governments need to legislate changes in - for their own use. But the reasons should be things like transparency, improving effeciency, enhancing economic conditions. There are much better reasons as to why Governments should legislate for Open Source.

The prisoner's dilemmia is also about information and excludes long term cooperation. In the long run it's beneficial to help out, especially if the effort is considerable. Writing useful software requires a lot of effort. Also, in a reasonably functional market competitors should know what the other one is doing. This is not so for the prisoners. The GPL ensures that things get better, not worse, for the software by leveraging long term cooperation.

At the moment companies can still focus on short term benefit. The greedy situation holds. However, in the long run who wins in the Cisco versus embedded Linux, open source databases versus closed, etc won't be greedy.

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/07/19/1957242.shtml?tid=11

Organizational Memory

With overtones of Englebart's groupware idea this is a great paper about developing software for "organizational memory". He talks about how information has a duality like photons. It's also alarming to think that in order to avoid litigation companies are purging their corporate knowledge bases. He also suggests that people listen in meetings - we can all dream.

"An organizational memory that consists only of formal knowledge is bare and lifeless. It is like describing the ball game by giving the statistics, or the mystery novel by simply relating the plot outline. It also lacks the history and context behind the formal documents, and as result, the organizational "memory" is essentially an immense heap of disconnected things, a giant organizational attic. Documents that contain formal knowledge that the organization has paid dearly to create live somewhere on the corporate network with enlightening names like "H:\org\finan\arc\drg\693plan.doc." (Note 6)"

http://www.gdss.com/wp/DOM.htm

Sharepoint Skyrocketing

Even though I've heard problems with Sharepoint scaling above a thousand users, which is related to Exchange's limitations. It certainly seems to be filling the low-end niche. Which is always Microsoft's target market on these things initially anyway. With Yukon and the like it's obviously going to get a boost into the larger scale enterprises.

"Microsoft Corp. said it sold more than 2 million end-user licenses for its SharePoint Portal Server last month, a dramatic rise in the number of seats purchased for the Web-based collaboration software. In the previous 12 months, according to Microsoft, it sold 5 million SharePoint licenses."

"Liberty deployed SharePoint PortalServer software two months ago as a knowledge management tool for its 125-person IT staff. "We actually needed it as a strategic base to our knowledge management system," Haroche said. "It's very easy to install. It's very easy to maintain.""

http://www.computerworld.com.au/idg2.nsf/a/00073F5A?OpenDocument&n=e&c=eB

In my house we obey the laws of thermodynamics

"They found that the change in entropy was negative over time intervals of a few tenths of a second, revealing nature running in reverse. In this case, the bead was gaining energy from the random motion of the water molecule - the small-scale equivalent of the cup of tea getting hotter. But over time intervals of more than two seconds, on overall positive entropy change was measured and normality restored."

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992572

S is for Schema

"The RDF Schema Specific Data Base (RSSDB) RSSDB (v1.5.1) is a persistent RDF Store for loading resource descriptions in an object-relational DBMS (ORDBMS) by exploiting the available RDF schema knowledge. It preserves the flexibility of RDF in refining schemas and enriching descriptions at any time, whilst it can store resource descriptions created according to one or more associated RDF schemas."

It supports string, integer, float, boolean and dateTime XML Datatypes. Just for a change it's using a Postgres backend. However, it doesn't support reified statements.

http://139.91.183.30:9090/RDF/RSSDB/index.html

A more impressive list of RDF Resources:
http://139.91.183.30:9090/RDF/references.html

Semaview

This is a company in Cananda that's planning on creating Semantic Web tools.

They have a fairly good white paper on the advantages and applications that the Semantic Web has to offer. These include content management, image searching, knowledge management and legal applications. The obvious advantages are easier integration and enhanced productivity through improved search technology.

http://www.semaview.com/sb/c2r.sv

What's what?
http://www.semaview.com/sb/faq.sv

While their links to other technologies is fairly light, the didn't even have Jena listed, they did have a good number of inferencing tools:
http://www.semaview.com/dc/soft3.sv

The Two Paths Converge

The key issue that seems to make or break both .Net and J2EE is not their technical merits but how they listen and support their developer community. Will MS single vendor solution be faster and more responsive to change? Or will the JSR process with its large number of vendors and their conflicting but thought out requirements win over. I suspect that the largest effect on adoption will be the use of the Apache licensing on the JSR reference implementations. It seems to me that having access to the source code for JDO or EJB rather than reverse engineering ASP.Net or ADO.Net will be advantage, at least over Mono and other non-MS versions of .Net. Of course, it also depends on developer interest. Is Mono cooler than Java?

" .NET is not just comprised of C# and CLI. It consists of much more: ASP .NET, ADO .NET, and enterprise services-related framework classes, like the types present in System.EnterpriseServices namespace, which are responsible for providing enterprise services such as transaction and security, to name a few. These were not submitted to ECMA or any other standards body. Thus, since no one has complete knowledge of .NET, it's not easy to implement .NET on other platforms."

http://java.sun.com/features/2002/07/rimapatel.html

"If Microsoft decided to make our life really hard in terms of compatibility, it would also hurt its own customers. If it changes the APIs, that affects its customers as well. So I think the APIs will remain fairly stable, and I hope that Microsoft won't go into proprietary protocols or protocols that would make it really hard for us to implement Mono. There's is always the possibility it will do so."

http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2002_07/online/netalternatives/page4.asp

I also hate the .Net advertising. One degree of separation, indeed. As mentioned in the Sun article, the biggest problem with the .Net Pet Shop demo was it's lack of separation. Separation is what keeps applications maintainable. I really shouldn't be surprised that the marketing is not targetted at technical people but they're the poor suckers that have to implement it.

Strange Economics

Well apparently this has been widely known for at least a day now but anyway, Apple are charging everyone US$129 to upgrade to OS X 10.2. The only exception is if you bought a Mac, no not last year, last month, but yesterday. Something about a slow take up of OS X? Time to get the ACCC onto this one.

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-944587.html?tag=fd_top

I guess they have bigger fish to fry (or seeds to sow):
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/nt/stories/s596003.htm

OS Governments

"From Asia to Europe to Latin America, politicians and bureaucrats are gravitating toward open source software for a variety of reasons. In China, the Ministry of Information Industry has been pumping money into the country's largest free software startup, Red Flag Linux, as a way to stimulate that nation's domestic software industry.

In the European Union government technocrats are examining open source software as a way to smooth the integration of conflicting, parochial software and communications standards. And in Latin America, where concerns over skyrocketing software fees and Microsoft market hegemony have triggered a spate of reactionary legislative bills, the debate surrounding open source software carries both nationalist and populist overtones."

As long as you don't count Australia as part of Asia those statements are pretty correct.

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/07/16/linux_in_govt.html

Java OS X FAQ

This was sorely needed. Apple's lack of communication on JDK 1.4 and matters Java has been fairly good on the mailing list just not publicly (their search engine on the list sucks and who looks at that anyway).

Good news is that JDK 1.4 will be 1.4.1, 1.3 and 1.4 will be available on Jaguar, and Java 3D looks like it might happen.

http://developer.apple.com/java/faq/

Spot the Difference

I was initially confused at the Web Services UI I thought it was XUP all over again. It appears to be just a templating and macro type idea (like Velocity).

Are they trying to look like some other organisation?
http://www.wsui.org/doc/20020619/doc/20020619/WD-wsui-20020619.html

Anakia (based on Velocity)
http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/anakia.html

Like this one? (Not the same idea, though):
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xup-20020528/

Oracle Moves into Unstructured Data Management (email discovery)

""Studies have maintained that a lot of information to support decisions lies also in the unstructured data, even in files produced in applications such as Powerpoint."

Apart from being able to bring together every figure quoted or e-mail written about a particular business transaction, features such as those in Oracle 9i could also simplify court cases."

http://www.cw360.com/article&rd=&i=&ard=113918&fv=1

Autonomy in Trouble

One of the biggest (if not the biggest) company in unstructured metadata has suffered recently from "the weakness was seen in Autonomy's European markets and that's what caught the management off guard. Revenue growth in the US has continued and the company remains "encouraged" by the recovery over there."

"The average deal size is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars and some deals are up towards the $2m mark. You don't need many of these to slip to put a big dent in quarterly revenues."

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/020711/35/d36sm.html

They do continue to make sales like the recent one to the UK government to produce a portal:
http://uk.us.biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020704/sfth001_1.html

Fun with J2EE

The EJB 2.1 specification looks pretty good although it looks like it doesn't have all of the features of something like JBoss .Net.

http://www.theserverside.com/resources/article.jsp?l=MonsonHaefel-Column1

OnJava has done an overview of the JBoss clustering:
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/10/jboss.html

Finally, a UML to EJB tool using XDoclet (import using XMI files):
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=192976

PayPal to Drop Online Gaming

"On Monday, PayPal announced that it was being acquired by eBay for about $1.5 billion in stock. eBay said that after the acquisition, PayPal will exit the online gaming business.

"We are making preparations in order to be able to fulfill the announcement that we will cease those transactions in connection with closure (of the deal)," PayPal spokesman Vince Sollitto said.

Last month, under pressure from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Citibank, the biggest issuer of credit cards, agreed to block the use of those cards on online gaming sites."

It seems that if you can't gamble online in NY no one will.

http://news.com.com/2100-1017-943533.html?legacy=cnet&tag=pt.rss..feed.ne_20139578

JEFF - ISO standard Java?

While Sun couldn't seem to get Java standardised it looks like others have had more success in the the real-time and embedded area.

JEFF is interesting because it's:
* Designed to run directly from memory rather than translated,
* Designed to support a Java like VM,
* Royalty free,
* 50% smaller.

http://www.j-consortium.org/jeffwg/index.shtml

Curse our high bandwidth, fast, cheap mobile devices. It's funny that the consortium member "are comprised of companies and individuals dedicated to accelerating the use of Java":
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1383441

They didn't go through the JSR process:
http://www.j-consortium.org/faq.shtml#three

I wonder why:
http://www.j-consortium.org/rtjwg/comparison.shtml

Would it be because of the consortium members. Microsoft still doing work using that language?
http://www.j-consortium.org/members/charter.shtml

Starquake

Yes, I remember this one on the old Commodore. Little did I realise that I wasn't the only one to think that this game was compelling.

Remake (become a member of the forum to download):
http://www.chlorophil.com/starquake/

Hover Bover remake (10 MB vs 171 KB for the c64 disk image):
http://kooldog.netplan.co.uk/hoverbovver.htm

Bruce Lee for the PC:
http://www.planetflibble.com/blitz/

Pike - The Language of the Semantic Web?

"As a language, Pike is much better suited for the Semantic Web
than Java or C#, since it provides multiple inheritance, sets, relations, and
dynamic arrays." Dynamic Arrays, Sets, Relations, yes these things would
be new to a Java programmer! And I've being pining for a language that supports
MySQL and SANE out of the box.

http://pike.ida.liu.se

The RISE project:
http://www.ida.liu.se/rise

Well I still have my WebL stuff around somewhere that was cool man:
http://research.compaq.com/SRC/WebL/

AGLS - Australian Government Locator Service

A simple and reasonably useful first go at using RDF. Most of the Australian government sites have done the minimum. Most of the tools listed look horribly manual and simple. What would be good is automated metadata extraction tools (like Klarity or the TMex stuff) deployed widely with dedicated metadata repositories. The problem with putting the metadata inline with the document is that it makes the actual content larger with no gain to the user (once they've done the searching). The other problem of course is that current commercial search engines don't support the Dublin Core stuff (according to their page and I couldn't find it listed on SearchEngineWatch). Again, a dedicated RDF store would do the trick.

Overview
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html

6 Dublin Core items required to be Produced:
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/faq.html#applying

Tutorial on Producing it with Metabrowser:
http://metabrowser.spirit.net.au/tutorial/AGLS.html

Not supported, what's the point then?
http://webreference.com/xml/column24/index.html

SPRUT Your Russian Stuff

This is more directed graph stuff but this time designed for compiler construction. SPRUT generates C/C++ code. I found this while trying to work out what SPI stood for.

SPI (Standard Procedural Interface) is also used by a program called SPRUT. An IRD (internal representation description)
describes nodes on the graph and the SPI provides graph manipulation (printing out, deleting, adding, etc). Which is in C/C++ code. Neat idea (one we're using in TKS and is also in OntoJava). This has been around since 1998 nothing new under the sun I guess.

SPRUT part of the CoCom package:
http://cocom.sourceforge.net/

OntoJava (generate Java code from RDF):
http://www.i-u.de/schools/eberhart/ontojava/

No internet connection

BTW, in case there's anyone here that needs me I haven't had a Internet connection for the last week (at home). No connection, no updates. It's Telstra's fault, it's always Telstra's fault.

Newsflash - Internet Unsafe

"It is a trivial matter, according to Harding, to use any one of several well-known techniques to trick a user into installing a malicious program posing as an update from Apple. Such techniques include DNS spoofing and DNS Cache Poisoning."

Now maybe Apple are to blame for not using SSL and signed installers but this "hack" is lame big time. I hear that your hosts file is dangerous too, delete it now!

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2118730,00.html

Of course, he added the backdoor to SSH. Which you could exploit anyway if you hadn't recently updated:
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/491/

The Price of Silence

This made me laugh for a long time. I remember studying John Cage's work in High School and my music teaching telling us that they sold 4 minutes 33 seconds cheaply as blank tapes. Isn't there prior art? Does Billy Joel's "River of Dreams" credit him too (does he have to pay everytime)?

"They say they are claiming copyright on a piece of mine called 'One Minute's Silence' on the Planets' album, which I credit Batt/Cage just for a laugh. But my silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence.""

http://boingboing.net/2002_06_01_archive.html#85209505

The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors

This article is interesting because:
* He uses brackets the way I do (which admitedly is a lot like coding).
* Picks up on the use and cost of software as two distinct values.
* Open source means not only you but many more can fix the code. Cheaper, faster fixes.
* The key to open source lies in the government sector.
* That the GPL is more consumer friendly than proprietary software. That customer lock-in is the enemy of business and the biggest pusher is Microsoft.

The point that he does seem to miss is that a knowledgeable user can reduce the cost of acquiring a product. The usual example is that a car manufacturer both acquires and makes products to produce a car. By keeping the knowledge about producing parts they can at least set a base line or even undercut external production.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/06/28/vendor.html

Wonderful World of RDF (this is not new)

Google is a Semantic Web Application because it reasons using links. Links are untyped and basically could be thought of as statements. An improved Google may simply be achieved by improving the granularity of it from pages to sentences or paragraphs (sounds a little like natural language parsing to me).
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/815

Cyc Argument is also interesting. "In an alternative view of machine-intelligence development, personal computers are already so powerful that they are not the bottleneck problem at all. This is my view.

This view is best likened to priming a pump. Visualize your brain as a knowledge pump. Knowledge goes in, gets stored, combined, copied, or whatever; from time to time, you say or write or do things that are, in effect, ways for your brain to emit knowledge. On a good day, the knowledge you give out may be as good or better than the knowledge you put in."

http://www.cyc.com/halslegacy.html

Why RDF?

This article seems to miss the point of RDF. I'm not sure why it's so hard to understand that "RDF provides a very natural base for the expression and interchange of such data". Making statements, pointing at name spaces all these things are not magic or even AI. But in one paragraph we go from "we want to tag pages with, say, the last name of the people who created them, is the attribute labeled "lastname", "last_name", "name_last", "surname" or "nom_dernier"" to going back to "the AI game of attempting to classify all knowledge. See Cyc. See Cyc not run."". Then he says that RDF is centralized.

http://www.darwinmag.com/read/swiftkick/column.html?ArticleID=421

This is similar to the discussion going on in the RDF interest list. If you follow this it gives some nice reasoning behind why RDF and not XML/XML Schema:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2002Jun/0235.html

XWT Makes It...

...onto Slashdot. Hurrah!

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/02/06/25/2154255.shtml?tid=156

Content Wants to be Both

"I see no danger of Corporate America succeeding in solely dominating cyber culture ever. They may continue to encroach on it, but the free alternative will always be there, and much content will continue to remain free. "

"..so there doesn't seem to be widespread rejection of the concept that we pay for basic Internet access like we pay for other utilities."

"I have myself paid fees for content frequently in the last few years for archive look-ups (e.g,. NYTimes.com), special reports (e.g,. eMarketer), select subscriptions (e.g., WSJ), tip jars (e.g,. OddTodd), premium communities (e.g., Ryze), games (e.g., EverQuest), lots of "shareware" software, and more. I also continue to buy lots of CDs despite free MP3s on KaZaA."

http://www.executivesummary.com/blarchive/2002_06_09_blog-archive.shtml#77619850

Programming Through Pictures Part II

The RDF Interest group recently had a couple of links with this which fit in with my previous post.

Before there was XDE, UML and ACE there was intentional programming. I guess it was '95 MS was happy and carefree having just shipped a new version of Windows. Everything was right in the world, they could do anything. Including representation that never dies:

"Software encoded intentionally can be said to be immortal, in that its meaning can be sustained independently of the long term progress in programming notation and implementation techniques."

http://www.research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-95-52

The analogies being used reminded me a lot of musical notation:
http://www.research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?PubID=229

Eidola is a similar type of project which seeks to get around textual representation of code because:
* It presents many features of program structure poorly, particularly large-scale structure.
* It unnecessarily ties the fundamental design of the language to its human presentation.
* It privileges one form of a program over all others, and that form happens to make it particularly inconvenient for software to work with the semantic structure of a program.
* It creates translation messes for alternate visual presentations and storage formats.
* It creates a very high barrier to entry for creative new developer tools of any real sophistication.

At least it would get rid of the eternal curly brace debate:
http://eidola.org/notation/gallery/eidola/fibranibrace.shtml

They even have a 0.0.0 release:
http://eidola.org/

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