Duplication City

Sgt Peppers Paradise

I'm being lazy (from a popular link) but its kinda good...

Intelligent Design comes to Australia

Intelligent Design "Scientists across the country are outraged.

So what's all the fuss about Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design or ID, is being put forward as a serious scientific theory. It's even found it's way into some high schools."

They made mention of The Wedge Document which outlines a way to conquer the world. Apparently you need more than a death ray these days.

Maybe some Gerin Oil "dry-out" clinics need to be created. Adam Bosworth recently decloaked an article related to it too.

Rocking with Ruby

"Beyond Java" This book is a light read, even I read it in a couple of hours, about the circumstances around Java's success and its possible successor. There's a lot of first hand interviews about what's wrong with Java, what's right with Ruby and other languages and why Rails maybe Ruby's killer application (and why that's important). C# and .NET was not seen as a replacement to Java mainly because it doesn't add enough over Java and the reasons why Java became successful in the first place hasn't changed.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed with this book especially with its lack of depth. The thing that the book struggles with the most, is that it's been almost impossible to guess where the next disruptive technology will come from - most of the comments in the book are feelings or from a subjective point of view.

Some points raised in the book that reinforced my existing prejudices:
* That future languages and platforms will probably be deployed on .NET and Java VMs. The competition between the two seems to have a positive impact on both - locking out any competitors. That means, there's something to look forward to in Java 7 and .NET 3.
* That VB developers were totally hosed by .NET. Rails and environments like it will bring back that kind of development. The first to harness the disaffected VB developer wins.
* Continuations are going to be a key piece of infrastructure.
* Sun is moving too slowly especially with the JSR process. For example, the solution to JAR hell won't be available until 2008.

Update: The ServerSide's post article has some good comments and responses from Bruce Tate.

A few more things read over the last week or so on Ruby:
* Updates from the recent RubyConf 2005 JRuby Progress "...With the stackless interpreter, stack-depth was limited only by available memory. He showed a fibonacci calculation of 3000 (64MB), then 150000 (1G) with amazingly good performance..." and mocking in Ruby with Lafcadio and MockFS.
* Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby "This is just a small Ruby book. It won’t crush you."
* What Is Ruby on Rails "Rails helps you achieve this new level of productivity by combining the right ingredients in the right amounts."
* You Can't Educate Pork Links to slides on "Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform".

Serenity

There was a scene in the movie, with a mumified corpse in a vehicle, that reminded me of something I'd seen before in a book called "Spacewreck".

Spacewreck is part of a series of children's books Terran Trade Federation. Seems to ilicit a strong response in people including modelling them in PovRay and Homeworld mods.

A directory filled with the original artwork from the first book is here. Two paintings by Angus McKie look a bit like the design of Serenity without the engines (here and here). This is mentioned in a Firefly site thread.

More gallery links: Fred Gambino, Peter Elson, Chris Foss and Angus McKie.

SPARQLing

toward SPARQL CR, PR, REC, press releases... schedule review "...the valueTesting and sort issues continue to act like difficult-to-drain swamps...The objection from Network Inference saying that SPARQL should have used XQuery remains...I wanted to have a much smaller spec (without SOURCE/GRAPH etc.) and finish earlier... since we didn't meet the April CR milestone, I'm pretty much convinced that what I want and what this WG wants are pretty different..."

RDF DAWG Issues List: sort, "...re-opened 2005-08-03 following comment ORDER with IRIs." (also, extending < operator and lexical vs value space), valueTesting, disjunction, countAggregate , "these are complicated in RDF due to open world notions of equality and inequality.", and bnodeRef, "Users seem to find it useful to refer to bnodes given by the server, though the scope of a bnode is usually one lexical graph."

A look at implementing SPARQL using Lisp: "...parts of the grammar weren't designed to be easily parsed; it has a number of features that are clearly user-focused, such as optional dots. (If it were designed to be easily parsed, it would be s-expressions from the start...)...I have seen objections made to UNION, on the grounds that implementation is difficult. I'd like to nip that one in the bud; I wrote twinql in a few weeks, not full-time, inventing algorithms as I went, and UNION wasn't difficult." Alternatively, I guess it could've been XML.

A response to "evaluating SPARQL w.r.t an RDF query language survey" which lists how you can (or cannot) perform queries that: "Return the labels of all topics that are not titles of publications", "Count the number of authors of a publication" and "Return all publications where the page number is the integer value 8."

Just for Fun

-Ofun "One of the key realizations of modern Internet projects (the oft-quoted Web 2.0) is that on the whole, your users can be trusted. The key is that the users also need to have the tools needed to repair any damage the tiny minority may cause. For a development project, modern version control systems can give you "anarchy with an audit trail". If something does go wrong (intentionally or more likely accidentally), it's easy for any other developer to identify and fix or revert the problem. Having this safety net allows the project to run full-bore without time-wasting process getting in the way, and without undue worry that code quality will suffer...before atomic changesets and quality merge tools, it was extremely difficult to roll back a single change made at some point in the past; now it is much easier to do so. And without a proper test suite, it's hard to tell if a change broke the code in the first place...skill ladders are part of the very definition of fun. True passion and community-building rarely develop around a project that doesn't have such a ladder."

Via Slashdot.

JRDF 0.3.4.1 Out

Now available for download.

Some thoughts related to this:
* To ensure valid refactorings and bug fixes it seems sensible to go back and do some things properly. It means that the next highest priority will have to be writing an NTriples parser to validate the RDF Test cases. The SableCC grammar for NTriples is already done.
* While this is a good start, it's not nearly fine grained enough to actually write the code and have fast running unit tests. Tom has done some of this test driving a parser with his SPARQL work although I suspect I may do it a little differently (using EasyMock).
* Graph equality and isomorphism on graphs is a pain - which is to say that it's complicated with blank nodes (see the test cases). In "Matching RDF Graphs it lists possible ways to do mappings, including a blank node may map to a labelled node. I know that in Kowari loading the sample FOAF files twice into the same graph adds the blank nodes twice. While this seems like a mistake it is the fastest way to load a graph. Maybe implementing different loading modes (no duplicate checking, blank node to blank node and blank node to labelled node) and signing grahs are two ways to help this.

JRDF 0.3.4.1 Soon

So the JRDF 0.3.4 was replaced last night due to a problem in the Ant build script creating it with source instead of classes - so much for QA.

Following that little discovery a few other problems related to RDF/XML parsing have been fixed: Does not resolve relative URIs correctly and Stacked xml:base directives with relative URIs not processed. The first is due to the difference between the way Java's URI classs resolves and the way its defined in RDF/XML. In section 5.2 of RFC2396 says: "...any characters after the last (right-most) slash character, if any, are excluded." and the RDF/XML specification says: "These specifications do not specify an algorithm for resolving a fragment identifier alone...The empty string is transformed into an RDF URI reference by substituting the in-scope base URI."

The second is a fix from Sesame's RIO.

Hypertime

Writeboard "Every time you save an edit a new version is created and linked in the sidebar. This allows you to write without fear of deleting something, overwriting something, or losing a better version of the document from last week."

Seems very similar to "Reasoning behind the OSMIC proposal: MODELS OF TIME, BACKTRACK AND GROUPWARE"

Out meta-ering the competition

Ning - a meta social app platform ""So after being offered a large number of social media applications, we are now into the meta-framework to build social media applications. The notion is interesting: as we have come to expect that any consumer application will include some element of social networking, collaborative filtering, tagging, etc., Ning has the first shot at claiming platform status in the social phenomena by offering building consistent building blocks (though wikis could probably claim anteriority)."...What it does do is make APIs an even more important feature for social apps to have, because Ning users will potentially have less need to visit the websites of Flickr, del.icio.us, 43Things and others. Ning will drive customers to those other services, but via the APIs. "

I always seem to quote people who quote other people, seems apt in this case.

Gun

Google and Sun together "Google and Sun Microsystems will hold a press conference on Tuesday at which they're expected to announce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users..."Imagine StarOffice running on the desktop, and Google perfecting the [file synchronization]," said Edwards. "Then you have your collaboration space carved out immediately for you, and Google is hosting it.""

Does it even make sense for a company that is selling open standard, network centric, highly scalable applications on Unix combines with a company that invented Java?

Imagine a host of GApps (GMail, GCal, GIM, GWorld, etc.) working on your desktop.

Via Update: Sun Marries Google? and a smidge more Sun turns up volume against Windows Vista and Office 12 (links to The Value in Volume).

The Future is Google Ads Everywhere (powered by SPARQL)

Scoble ? RDF "SPARQL is an answer to the question “What if I want to do SQL-like querying when I know perfectly well that everybody will be using their own incompatible database schema?” I’ve been a SemWeb skeptic, but I look at SPARQL and I think: Suppose you could assemble a ton of property-value pairs about web sites, and suppose on the front end you could build a nice responsive query page that allowed you to compose queries like Scoble’s hotel search; well then, SPARQL would be more or less exactly what you need to bridge the gap. Hey, isn’t Guha’s Alpiri project more or less that back-end? And isn’t Guha working at Google now?"

And what would we do with this perfect engine and ubiquitous bandwidth - ads. Author: Google's Patents Reveal Strategy To Beat Microsof "In Arnold’s analysis, he said some filings in the patent portfolio point to an accelerated use of high-speed fiber and wireless that could be used to deliver Google technology...An ultimate goal of the firm is to deliver completely individualized ads to users."

Evolution not creation

Another speech by Adam Bosworth He talked mostly on a TDD/Agile theme where applications are developed in 2 week iterations based directly on customer usage. This offers a better alternative to software architects spending years in seclusion developing the be-all and end-all API and developers hoping that they will get what they need. He cited Windows as an example of this approach. Unsurpisingly, this leads to more tightly coupled code as reported in the recent article about Microsoft rewriting Windows by the Wall Street Journal.

Bosworth calls this approach intelligent reaction rather than intelligent design. Google, eBay and Salesforce were given as examples of this application driven rather than API driven development.

Relating this back to RDF and agile databases, the experience at Salesforce is that the most significant amount of effort is spent customising the data not in other areas such as the user-interface or processing logic. While he doesn't give a reason for data over processing he does say that customised user interfaces are too expensive because they require more user training.

A transcript of some of the talk is available at: Bosworth: The new model is, 'run like mad'.

JVM Dynamic Language Support

invokedynamic: New Java Bytecode for the Dynamics "The new byte code, invokedynamic , is coming to a JSR near you very soon....the verifier won’t insist that the type of the target of the method invocation (the receiver, in Smalltalk speak) be known to support the method being invoked, or that the types of the arguments be known to match the signature of that method. Instead, these checks will be done dynamically."

From a previous article, Pluggable Types "...Ruby (that's basically Smalltalk with a Perl style syntax)..."

Supping from the Information Firehose

* Oracle 10g Support for RDF "There are procedures provided to search the RDF models with a language that looks like a bit like SPARQL...The search is pretty nice because you can join your search on standard SQL tables, thus combining both your triple model and relational models together.

Oracle also has Rule support, in the form of Rule Indexes. A builtin set of rules for RDF Schema (RDFS) semantics is provided, which is a very nice touch. You are also free to create your own rules, both with the query pattern matching and filters."
* An Atom Store With links to people wanting to create a non-SQL store for Atom, including the very good Bosworth's Web of Data (original here) which is largely about why new databases should not be like Oracle but should distribute the processing (no views, triggers, etc).
* RDFAuthor does SPARQL "Damian is working on a new version of RDFAuthor that generates SPARQL queries (instead of the older Squish notation). It can also (not sure which protocol(s)) get results from a query service." I liked the original RDFAuthor - good to see an update is underway.
* Wrapping rdflib's Graph around a 4RDF Model "I wrote a 4Suite RDF model backend for rdflib, that allows the wrapping of Graph around a live 4Suite RDF model. Finally, I used this backend to execute a sparql-p query..."
* Secrets of lightweight development success, Part 7: Java alternatives Closures, Continuations, Metaprogramming and Reflection: "In short, the Java language just isn't a very productive applications language. The founders made some wise compromises to wrestle control away from C++, but we're starting to pay for those compromises."
* ONJava 2005 Reader Survey Results, Part 1 "Eclipse (76 percent), NetBeans (21 percent), None (17 percent), IntelliJ (13 percent)...JBoss (38 percent), None (28 percent), WebSphere (21 percent), WebLogic (20 percent)"
* Language Innovation: C# 3.0 explained "...most of the features of C# 3.0 are, arguably, nothing but syntactic sugar designed to make programming more productive..." One of the things that was (originally) good about Java was the lack of syntax (I thought anyway!).
* KVM over IP

What do you do all day?

Code Is Not An Asset "Since software code is not an asset, but rather a liability, the more we can reduce the deadwood, the better off we are...It is definitely possible to deliver high level of functionality, interactivity and sophistication by utilizing only a portion of code that would normally be used if we stick to the old school (morecode, or more LOC). And that’s a desirable thing."

What's a Unit Test?

A Set of Unit Testing Rules "A test is not a unit test if:
* It talks to the database
* It communicates across the network
* It touches the file system
* It can't run at the same time as any of your other unit tests
* You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it."

"If you write code in a way which separates your logic from OS and vendor services, you not only get faster unit tests, you get a ‘binary chop’ that allows you to discover whether the problem is in your logic or in the things are you interfacing with."

Linkaholic

* Questioning RDF "'Now I hear the argument that one does not need to know hedge automata to use RELAX NG, and all that, but I don't think it applies in the case of RDF. In RDF, the model semantics are the primary reason for coming to the party. I don't see it as an optional formalization. Maybe I'm wrong about that and it's the need to write a query language for RDF (hardly typical for the Web punter) that is causing me to gurgle in the muck.'...I definitely think there is some merit to disconnecting RDF from the Semantic Web and seeing if it can hang on its own from that perspective...I've wondered if there is similar usefulness lurking within RDF once it loses its Semantic Web baggage."
* An early look at JUnit 4 If you don't like TestNG or JUnit 4 what do you do? I like the "failXXX() throws FooBarException" better. The annotations just don't do it for me.
* XML Virtual Machines "You can target XUL for deployment to the Mozilla platform, today. XULRunner now means you can develop and test away in double quick time . Yes, Mozilla is a platform (a XUL visual forms builder could be a game changer on the client, as well saving some folks I know a lot of typing ;). And if you need a thicker-than-that client, then consider the OpenOffice platform."
* The Future of Mobility is Linux "The latest news I’ve seen about the Nokia 770 is that it’s going to have a host of applications ready for it at launch, including VoIP software, streaming media, chat applications, Doom, etc. The thing that’s so amazing about this is that the 770 is essentially the *same exact hardware* that’s on my Nokia 6680, yet the development pace for the 770 is way more rapid. In addition, there’s at least a half a dozen blogs and bloggers dedicated to the device, and it hasn’t even launched yet. This shows the power of an open environment and the draw of Linux and its fans."

Adding more Layers

Crisis "What if we jilted the ugly sisters of rdf:Bag, rdf:Alt and rdf:Alt and took reification out back and shot it? How many tears would be shed?

What if we junked classes, domains and ranges? Would anyone notice? The key concept in RDF is the relationship, the property.

The result would be a subset of RDF, RDF-lite perhaps. All instances of RDF-lite would be valid RDF-full but the converse couldn’t be true. Sparql would still work and so, I suspect, would the OWL machinery despite the omission of classes. RDF diffs would be trivial without blank nodes allowing efficient synchronisation of triple stores. Signing of triples would also be possible without requiring the hoops of canonicalisation to be jumped through."

Sunday afternoon blather "So (ramble nearly over) basically I don’t think there’s any need to define a subset or simplification of RDF because it’s already layered. You don’t need reification, ontological inferences don’t use them. If all you want to do is publish HTML with a bit of explicit data embedded, or write an aggregator that understands “rel” then fine. If you’re doing good Web stuff, you’re still helping the Semantic Web. What SPARQL brings is a low barrier to entry into the ideas, and a low barrier to development of true Web applications. I do believe SPARQL has the potential to be explosive because it makes the Semantic Web that much more agile."

This got me thinking about a conversation with Tom about the Graph interface in JRDF. It allows you to get TripleFactory (for Collections, reification, etc.) and GraphElementFactory for creating graph elements (nodes and err triples - which is now moved to TripleFactory in 0.4). It makes sense to make these decoupled to provide a tighter interface (for understandability) and less to mock out or stub out when testing.

Lack of Symmetry

Catching up on Journal of Web Semantics: Preprint Server:
* Completeness, decidability and complexity of entailment for RDF Schema and a semantic extension involving the OWL vocabulary "RDFS entailment is decidable, NP-complete, and in P if the target graph does not contain blank nodes...In this paper we extend the notion of RDF graph to allow blank nodes in predicate position and show that the standard entailment rules for RDFS become complete if rule rdfs7 is replaced by a suitably extended rule rdfs7x. In view of the fact that the semantics of RDFS allows blank nodes to refer to properties, ‘generalized RDF graphs’, which allow blank nodes in predicate position, seem to form a more direct abstract syntax for RDFS than RDF graphs."
* OWL-Eu: Adding Customised Datatypes into OWL "1. OWL does not support customised datatypes (except enumerated datatypes)...
2. OWL does not support negated datatypes. For example, ‘all integers but 0’...
3. An OWL DL datatype domain seriously restricts the interpretations of typed literals with unsupported datatype URIrefs..."

"OWL-Eu supports customised datatypes through unary datatype expressions based on unary datatype groups. Intuitively, an unary datatype group extends the OWL datatyping with a hierarchy of supported datatypes."