Impact Analysis

Checktheapps.com is a phishing scam.

2010-10-31T17:18:00.004+01:00

I got this email from someone I know:

Dear Impact Analysis,

You have been invited by your friend Gorgeous X. George to participate in a research program. Currently there are companies that are looking for individuals who are interested in reviewing and testing the new Apple iPad applications and games. After the review the participants may keep the iPad.

For more details or to register to our program, follow the link below:

http://www.checktheapps.com

Best Regards,
Gorgeous X. George and BTest Team.
___
This message was intended for impact-analysis@some_mail.com, and was sent on behalf of Gorgeous X. George (gorgeous.x.george@some_org.org)

Obviously I've changed some of the names. I checked with Mr. George and he never sent this to me, so we can conclude from the situation and from the content that it is a scam email. I didn't even bother to go to the website. You'll probably catch some sort of browser infection if you do.

Android phones, part 1.

2009-11-22T20:26:00.005+01:00

I'm checking out various options for Android handsets and plans. First up is the T-Mobile G1. As of today, it looks something like this:

$399.99 - G1 handset with Android 1.5
$59.99 - Monthly plan, no contract, 500 mins, unlimited text and data
$35 - one-time activation fee

So, a little over $500, out-the-door, and $60 a month.

Some articles are claiming that over 100 Android handsets are set to enter the market this year. If that is true, I would expect steep cuts in the phone prices.

Back in San Diego

2009-10-28T18:19:00.003+01:00

Our European adventure is over. I'm back at work in San Diego. Photos of our time in Italy and France are on Flickr and Picasa.

Early Trento, Italy photos: Flickr: Trento Set

Trentino, Venice, and SW France photos: Picasa Sets

l'Aveyron.

2009-08-19T17:51:00.004+02:00

Spending the month of August in southwestern France. We are housesitting for some friends.

Feel like testing your legs?

2009-07-07T14:07:00.004+02:00

Vineyard road in Faedo, Italy.

Gothic High-Tech and Favela Chic

2009-07-04T12:34:00.005+02:00

A video worth watching. Bruce Sterling's closing talk at the Reboot Conference in Copenhagen: http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11

I think he has the structure of the next 10 years pretty close to right. We're not going to get shiny new environmentally constructed buildings. We're going to be repurposing the abandoned hulks of the 20th century.

As for his views on stuff (basically, get rid of it), Kathy and I are already a long way down that path. Everything we own fits in a few suitcases. We left nothing in the US when we moved here to Italy. It is also easily argued the the most important real estate in my life is virtual.

Cyber-stalking Bruce Sterling, continued.

2009-06-23T11:43:00.004+02:00

Searching for reviews of his latest book, Caryatids, I came across another fascinating interview on Futurismic. A couple quotes:

It feels like you’ve wrapped up the Viridian Newsletters with a tentative sense of “Mission Accomplished” on climate change awareness. Would that be a fair comment?

No. I wrapped it up more in the position of a guy who was doing some spy work on the ground and who split before the heavy bombers arrived.

...

On the flipside, what about underrated good stuff: what makes you feel positive about the potential of the next few decades?

I don’t even do “positive” and “negative” potential. I sincerely think that attitude makes people actively stupid about the future.

Always interesting, Bruce Sterling.

Futurist art in Rovereto.

2009-06-20T11:18:00.003+02:00

Yesterday we took a trip to Rovereto, a town about 25km south of Trento, to go to the MART (Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento). Well worth the trip. Their permanent collection was unavailable due to a large exhibit on Cold War Art and Design, which turned out to be pretty interesting. We plan to go back in a couple weeks and see the permanent collection after it is reopened.

We also took the time to go to the Museum of the Futurist painter and designer Fortunato Depero. Also, well worth the trip.

Best MySpace suggestion ever.

2009-06-18T12:17:00.002+02:00

From Bruce Sterling:

Let Sweden buy MySpace and hire PirateBay to run it as a public utility.

Makes total sense.

Nearest Neighbors

2009-06-13T19:35:00.003+02:00

Here is an abstract painting my wife did several days ago. I appropriated it and named it Nearest Neighbors. Should be cover art for a scifi book. I like it a lot.

Not abandoned.

2009-06-13T12:07:00.003+02:00

If you use your blog to link to a story about abandoned blogs, that means your blog is not abandoned. Right?

Since the postdoc ended I've just been laying around Trento riding my bike, watching bike racing online, and watching my wife paint. In August we will stay in France for a month and then back to San Diego. It's a good life.

Touring in Trentino.

2009-04-06T19:11:00.003+02:00

Took a short bike ride south of Trento today, through Villazano, Valsorda, almost to Vigolo. From the south of Trento to Vigolo is all up hill -- about a 5 mile long grade. Not really bad, but not too easy. Perfect training. Here are some photos.

Mt. Bondone, across the Adige valley. This if from a little ways up the climb, just past Castello.

We stopped to eat a little and look around. Then we started the real climb.

This is looking back down the hill on SS349. Next photo is from the same spot.

Looking uphill. It's steep.

At the top of this grade you reach a kind of a high valley. There are two passes out of this valley, but we had our training in and turned around for the downhill home.

Yet another change of plans.

2009-04-02T14:55:00.005+02:00

Trentino is a wonderful place. It's historic, beautiful, and filled with amazing people, great wine, and grappa. But, the work has not gone well. The best fix for the time-being is for me to leave LiquidPub and move back to the US. So, I'll be winding down this week, and then wife and I will be taking awhile to explore the Dolomites before we return. Disappointing, would be an understatement.

I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me.

2009-03-06T11:26:00.003+01:00

With apologies to Groucho. But, here's a cult I need to join. The Cult of Done.

A little clarification from Bruce Sterling

2009-03-01T16:46:00.003+01:00

Bruce Sterling must surely be one of the most clear-sighted individuals in our world at the moment.

I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.

Cory Doctorow is worried.

2009-02-18T11:22:00.003+01:00

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing asks How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?

My response is:

The future is obviously bicycles and squatting.

Regardless of what actually ends up happening, the most important thing (as it always has been) is having a wide circle of good friends. This will get you through anything.

Photos and discussion notes on the LiquidPub wiki.

2009-02-08T16:26:00.003+01:00

Photos contributed by participants and a link to the raw notes from the panel discussions have been posted on the Snow Workshop wiki page.

Enjoy.

Trento bank story n.2

2009-02-06T12:49:00.004+01:00

Earlier I posted a story about my first try at opening a bank account. I needed a mobile phone to complete the process so I had to get one and come back the next day. The line in the mobile phone store was another learning experience in Italian culture.

So, I returned to the bank branch, mobile phone in hand. Through the man-trap, and up to a teller. The teller was a very nice young lady who spoke zero English. I pointed to the guy from the day before and he told her what I needed. As she was doing the paperwork an older lady came in and engaged in the same wandering-around behavior as they old guy the day before. There were several people in line, but she came up beside me and started talking to the teller. The young teller listened for about a second and then said something in a very sharp tone of voice to the older woman. I think the gist of it was "go stand in line." The old woman raised her voice a little in response and then the teller just went off on her. Many sentences of loud, sharp sounding Italian. I couldn't believe it. Then the lady went and stood in line, and the teller rolled her eyes and went back to my paperwork like nothing had happened. That was two days in a row. I was beginning to think this is normal.

Last week I was in that branch again and they have dispensed with the ropes and line. They installed one of those take-a-number things and each teller has a little LED display beside their window.

LiquidPub Workshop and Grappa

2009-02-02T22:01:00.002+01:00

I just got back from the LiquidPub Snow Workshop in the Dolomites. It was a great time with many interesting and very nice people. The last night of the workshop several of us pored over some questions posed by Gloria Origgi. After dinner we retired to the bar to drink grappa and red wine. You can see the results on Stefano's blog.

He also took this picture of me that I like.

The reason I look confused is because they were discussing quantum theory. Or perhaps it was the Welsh language. I find them both very confusing.

Why are SOA's and SoS's hard?

2009-01-20T17:48:00.005+01:00

Why is it hard to build, maintain, and understand Service-Oriented Architectures and Systems-of-Systems?

The usual catch-all is: complexity. But, what is it that makes them complex? Size and the number of interacting components is an obvious answer, but it's deeper than that. The deeper reasons are that these systems are dynamic, open, late-bound, and non-deterministic. Even a small system that possesses these four characteristics would be considered complex.

So next time you are wondering why you have to deal with directories-of-directories and meta-meta-data, think about these four deeper reasons.

Dynamic: the components in the system are always changing. New components join and old components leave at arbitrary times.

Open: components we've never seen before can show up and ask to interact. Components we've been using can disappear forever, without warning.

Late-bound: we don't know the name or location of any component until we try to use it.

Non-deterministic: the information returned may be different each time, even when we ask the same question.

Social networks and the world.

2009-01-20T16:17:00.004+01:00

In an earlier post I commented that the world is a network, not a tree. I'm more convinced of this than ever. And further, I think that any application that aims to help people work in the real world needs to respect that underlying structure. People naturally form social networks in their work and relationships, so any application that doesn't respect that structure will be constantly creating its own friction.

So. What are the best frameworks for building social-networks?

Peer-review, again.

2009-01-10T08:40:00.003+01:00

The Scholarly Kitchen has some good posts (via the Lib-License list).

Updates on M. S. El Naschie:
Elsevier Math Editor Controversy
Self-Publishing Editor to Retire

Another problem:
Peer-Review Scandal Shakes French Geologists

Peer-review is like most human systems, neither sacred or worthless, and subject to manipulation if left unattended.

Problems of prestige and honor.

2008-12-26T20:01:00.005+01:00

I'm involved with trying to change the peer-review process for scientific literature. The current system is fraught with problems, but it's entrenched so it's very hard to change. Given my interest a couple of recent postings, The Case of M. S. El Naschie from Reddit and Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics on Slashdot are very interesting.

There are various well-known ways of gaming the system but, if true, this guy seems to have seized the commanding heights of his field for himself. There really can't be any unsurprising explanation for all this, true or not.

Long Tail = Wishful Thinking

2008-12-24T08:09:00.003+01:00

Sorry Chris. It's going to be a little more complicated than that.

But then, wishful thinking was pretty much Chris Anderson's business all along.

Snow in Trento

2008-12-11T12:32:00.004+01:00

In Piazza Fiera, Trento.

Click on the photo for a larger version. We've had about a foot of snow here. This photo was taken about 6pm last night. Now it's raining and everything is a mess.

Here is Via Belenzani from the Duomo in Trento

Cyber-stalking Bruce Sterling.

2008-11-30T17:40:00.004+01:00

“How can you rob a bank in a world without money?” wonders science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, one of the collaborators of the new foresight project KashKlash.

Seriously. I just read the guy's Wired blog. Add it to your feed.

He's an endlessly fascinating guy.

Change of plans.

2008-11-26T18:27:00.005+01:00

So, keeping this blog for non-work related interests has sort of back-fired since I no longer really have any non-work related interests. The postdoc has effectively absorbed all time available. Which is fine. It's the most interesting project I've ever been a part of.

It really is fascinating. You can read all about it at Liquid Publications Project website.

The result is I will probably start blogging about Liquid Publications and related topics a lot.

Although, I did just get a new bicycle...

This was taken beside the bike path in south Trento. That's the Adige River behind it.

The last Viridian Newsletter.

2008-11-19T09:38:00.002+01:00

The last Papal-Imperial sermon.

He's right. I've been following this since since his first missive in 1999 when I was in grad school. In the meantime most of the stuff he talks about has happened to me also.

Bruce Sterling: The User's Guide to Steampunk

2008-11-19T08:59:00.003+01:00

Steampunk'd? Hmmm... Maybe I was wrong.

Trento bank story n.1

2008-10-11T09:24:00.003+02:00

One of the first things I had to do when I got here was open a bank account. I picked a branch of a local credit union and went in and stood in line. First of all, I don't know what it's like in other European countries, but bank entrances in Italy are these elaborate man-traps that make you enter one door with one or two people at a time and then wait while the door locks. After the door locks behind you, the door to the bank opens, but they always strand you in the middle long enough to make you wonder if you'll ever get out.

So, I go up to the counter and talk to this nice young guy who speaks reasonable English. Turns out I need to have a cell phone number, but I can get that and come back tomorrow. Then the fun starts. I've mentioned before that it seems Italians don't like to stand in line. The line waiting to talk to a teller had about 3 people in it when this older guy comes in. He wanders around the lobby for awhile and then goes and stands at the front of the line, ignoring all the signs that say something like "Please wait for your proper turn." He just stands right in front of this 40-something guy who was next to go up to the counter. So, the younger guy says something in a normal tone of voice to the older guy. Older guy starts yelling and waving his arms around. After three or four exchanges and much yelling and arm-waving by the older guy, the younger guy shrugs his shoulders and ignores him.

The teller who was helping me didn't seem particularly surprised by this. When the yelling started he looked up and watched these two for about three seconds and then just went back to his paperwork. Sort of like, is this going to be a problem? No, just another line-cutting, yelling old guy. Back to work.

Trento bus story n.1.

2008-09-28T10:59:00.004+02:00

The second day I was here in Trento Italy I tried to ride the bus. In the US you can usually pay the fare in cash after boarding. I tried that here in Trento. Didn't work. I got on the bus and there was no place to deposit cash. I went back to the front of the bus and held up the coins to the driver, since I speak virtually zero Italian. He started yelling at me about "billy"-something, meanwhile waving his left arm around, and driving way too fast down this narrow street. Enough, I thought. I pushed the obvious stop request button and got off at the next stop. Wow.

I found out later you are supposed to buy your ticket at the bus station, or any of the local tobacco shops, before getting on the bus. And, a ticket in Italian is "biglietto", pronounced something like beely-ett-toe.

Welcome to Italy!

Biking and hiking in Trento

2008-08-30T18:31:00.006+02:00

Here's a shot taken on the Adige River bike path just north of Trento, Italy. It's very beautiful here. Adige River behind the trees on the left. Apple orchards to the right.

This one is looking North from a hike about a week ago. The bike path in the previous picture runs along the right (east) bank of the river.

Art and Fear.

2008-08-30T17:45:00.002+02:00

Anyone involved in any work that has any creative component whatsoever should read the book Art and Fear. You can get one for less than ten bucks on Amazon. While this book is aimed directly at working artists, as a scientist I identify with most of the discussion about work, process, results, criticism, production, ideas, expression, and longevity in my field.

Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland, Capra Press, 1993.

Dell laptop sound fixed.

2008-08-24T08:18:00.002+02:00

In a followup to my earlier complaining about sound on my Dell laptop, Dell figured out how to fix it and put the steps on their Dell/Ubuntu wiki. Very nice of them. Unfortunately it took me months to find it.

Steampunk'd

2008-08-24T08:13:00.001+02:00

Randy Nakamura nails it:

We are being taken for rubes. At worst, the Steampunkers seem to be mediocre hobbyists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of DIY hobbyists want to create an imaginary Victorian present, no matter how insular or simpleminded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded sci-fi movie prop. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Steampunk as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Steampunk must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Steampunkers have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theater, hoax and hype, would be proud.

In Italy.

2008-07-13T14:47:00.001+02:00

I've been in Trento, Italy almost two weeks now. Managed to open a bank account, get a mobile phone, and not starve to death. So far I've observed that Italians don't like to stand in lines and they yell at each other a lot.

It's really beautiful here in Trento.

W3C: A Prototype Knowledge Base for the Life Sciences

2008-06-19T17:23:00.000+02:00

Save me some effort here, folks. Read XML Cafe.

A Prototype Knowledge Base for the Life Sciences

The prototype we describe is a biomedical knowledge base, constructed for a demonstration at Banff WWW2007 , that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies such as the W3C standard Web Ontology Language [OWL] and Resource Description Framework [RDF]. This report outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using the W3C Recommended RDF query language SPARQL [SPARQL], and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains.

Slow, continual movement. It's hard to keep a focus on it.

Those bright boys at Ubuntu broke my sound.

2008-06-08T01:49:00.000+02:00

Back in Feb. I bought a Dell Inspiron 1420N. That model has Ubuntu pre-loaded on it. It worked great right out of the box. I was totally happy with it. About a month ago the next release of Ubuntu (8.04 hardy) became available. I ignored it because things were working great and after using Debian Testing for a couple years I'm always suspicious that doing a dist-upgrade will break things. I finally went ahead and did the upgrade since I needed the new version of Unison for sync-ing files with my two Testing machines. I thought these Ubuntu guys had a real good rep, it'll be alright. The upgrade killed sound (for lots of people!), killed my WiFi indicator light, and didn't upgrade Unison!

Those bright boys are on my shit list for awhile.

More on moving to Italy.

2008-06-06T03:41:00.000+02:00

A month of blog silence and you'd think I'd have more to report. We (the wife and I) have almost completely ditched a one bedroom apartment of "stuff" and packed the remaining "things" in about 15 boxes. That's the easy part - it's physical. The hard part is psychological -- dealing with visas for Italy. But, that may be on track now, so I can leave in a few weeks. The wife will come over a couple weeks later after a family visa is arranged -- we hope. Talk about lack of transparency.

Anyway, I've already started working remotely, so time is not all lost. I hope to start posting about work in the project soon. In the meantime here are a couple links to interesting resources I'm reading.

Open Access News

petermr’s blog: A Scientist and the Web

Open Archives Initiative : Object Reuse and Exchange

Depth-First : Walking the Web of Chemical Informatics

Moving to Italy

2008-05-10T04:04:00.000+02:00

I guess I'll break blog-silence on the new plans. I've accepted a postdoc at the University of Trento, in Trento, Italy, working on the LiquidPub project. This should be fascinating research. And, we've wanted to live in Europe for many, many years.

Converting Relational DB to RDF/OWL.

2008-04-10T17:43:00.000+02:00

Case studies are useful (via XML Cafe):

Experiences with the conversion of SenseLab databases to RDF/OWL (Draft)

Abstract

One of the challenges facing Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences is that of converting relational databases into Semantic Web format. The issues and the steps involved in such a conversion have not been well documented. To this end, we have created this document to describe the process of converting SenseLab databases into OWL. SenseLab is a collection of relational (Oracle) databases for neuroscientific research. The conversion of these databases into RDF/OWL format is an important step towards realizing the benefits of Semantic Web in integrative neuroscience research. This document describes how we represented some of the SenseLab databases in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL), and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these representations. Our OWL representation is based on the reuse of existing standard OWL ontologies developed in the biomedical ontology communities. The purpose of this document is to share our implementation experience with the community.

Controled experiments are better, but not always practical.

Google AppEngine - truely zero cost startups.

2008-04-08T16:56:00.000+02:00

Google AppEngine. This will be getting coverage everywhere. And, I mean everywhere. Justly so. Amazon hasn't really targetted web apps with AWS. This is squarely aimed at little startup, web apps. It really opens the floodgates, I think. Grab that 2-3 generation old laptop and try ideas out - for free. This could put cheap hosting out of business.

I managed to get an account and I've downloaded the SDK. More later.

The world is a network, not a tree.

2008-04-06T02:09:00.001+02:00

Via XML Cafe:

"XML is a hierarchic data model but the world is a network. There are lots of possible ways to fill in the missing links [sic], but none of them feels very satisfactory (for example, many of them only work for intra-document relationships).

I'm not even comfortable that the hierarchic relationships should be special. Why can't we have multiple hierarchic views of the same network? Why do all my queries have to change depending on whether my footnotes are inline, out-of-line referenced by IDREFs, or in external documents referenced by URI? What happened to the old doctrine of data independence?"
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 22 Oct 2004

I'm not too concerned with the document references he uses, but I pretty much think the same thing about most of our collective efforts to understand and process information. We gravitate to trees and DAG's (directed acyclic graphs) because they are easier to understand and process. The problem is that the only way we can get the real world to resemble a tree or a DAG is either by making assumptions about relationships or by ignoring relationships, and sometimes both. I'm convinced we do this primarily for tractability and secondly to cover up our collective ignorance. We are clever and egotistical little chimpanzees, but our tools are limited. I think Michael Kay is right -- the world is a network. And, our tools, our algorithms, don't work well on networks. Any time we encounter a cycle everything comes to a grinding halt, but we find cycles in nature all the time.

Three doors down.

2008-03-29T21:55:00.000+01:00

Computer science needs more of this, please.

A Brief History of Cutting Code in a Universe Three Doors Down

Simply Logical (online Prolog book).

2008-03-29T16:29:00.000+01:00

Via Reddit (ht ig1):

Simply Logical
Intelligent Reasoning by Example
by Peter Flach, then at Tilburg University, the Netherlands
John Wiley 1994, xvi + 240 pages, ISBN 0471 94152 2
Reprinted: December 1994, July 1998.

Looks interesting.

In the Reddit comments Korollary points to another good book:
Logic, Programming, and Prolog (2ed).

Gotta love Reddit!

You can find my and others' Prolog links on Del.icio.us at jimlaw/Prolog and tag/Prolog.

IGEM 2008 Synthetic Biology competition starting.

2008-03-29T15:45:00.000+01:00

Two words for the future, "Synthetic Biology".

The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition is the premiere Synthetic Biology competition and currently the largest Synthetic Biology conference in the world. Working at their own schools over the summer, participants use standard biological parts to design, build, and operate biological systems in living cells. During the first weekend of November, they share their work at the iGEM Competition Jamboree at MIT and in competition for a variety of awards for excellence. They add their new parts to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts for the students in the next year's competition.
(Link.)

Also check:

MIT Registry of Std Biological Parts

Edge 237 - A Talk with Drew Endy

BioBricks Foundation

Link dump.

2008-03-16T19:58:00.000+01:00

Been really busy, but always manage to collect an interesting link or two during the day. Here they are in no particular order.

- An Introduction to Prolog and RDF.
- Ragnarök, from Wikipedia.
- Seaside development with GNU Smalltalk. Command-line Smalltalk seems like a contradiction in terms, but the language and the interface really are two separate things. I think this could go places.
- Cobalt, open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit in Croquet.
- 20 Days of Clojure. Clojure is a Lisp on the JVM project, which I talked about back here. Interesting.
- Leonardo Computing Environment. Nice, but why?
- OCaml-Java project. Very nice. Useful.
- MetBlogs. Man, where does the time go? There's a couple days in here, easy.

Enjoy.

Ars Technica Green PC Guide.

2008-03-02T18:46:00.000+01:00

Ars System Guide special: it's easy being green.

I've been focusing on other things for awhile, but this roundup of easy ways to build lower-power PCs is great. It's getting easier and easier, which is good.

SWI-Prolog 5.6.51

2008-03-02T18:28:00.000+01:00

Via PL News, SWI-Prolog 5.6.51 was released last week. Contains some critical bug fixes.

I'm no expert on comparative Prolog implementation, either. But, LGPL license, graphics toolkit, and fast sounds pretty good. Good backend for Logtalk.

Polarized LEDs at RPI.

2008-03-02T18:22:00.000+01:00

Via Treehugger, polarized LEDs at RPI.

Efficiency just keeps going up. Wonderful to see.

SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer.

2008-03-02T17:42:00.000+01:00

Via XML News, the W3C working draft of the Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer is out. From the abstract:

...
In basic SKOS, conceptual resources (concepts) can be identified using URIs, labelled with strings in one or more natural languages, documented with various types of notes, semantically related to each other in informal hierarchies and association networks, and aggregated into distinct concept schemes.
...

I'm not an expert on knowledge representation systems, but I've worked a lot at understanding them and always come to the opinion that we're not very good at it. The usual reason I come to this conclusion is the end result of the representation is almost always hierarchical. Representation systems (warning: sweeping generalisation ahead) try to represent human knowledge as a tree so that it is decidable, tractable, and unambiguous. Observation seems to say knowledge relationships are more like an undirected multigraph -- often undecidable, usually intractable, frequently ambiguous.

Not to knock SKOS. The way to make progress is always to grab something and start working.

NSFW rant about American "broadband".

2008-02-24T02:11:00.000+01:00

This new Japanese Kizuna broadband Internet satellite is fantastic. 155Mb/s down, 6Mb/s up. Just amazing.

Now, let me tell you how much it chaps my ass that I live in supposedly the most advanced technological nation on earth and I have to put up with crappy DSL at 1.5 Mb/s down and a STUPID STUPID STUPID 700 Kb/s up. "Abysmal" does not begin to capture the state of American broadband. "Competition" and "free market", my ass. I used to have a cable modem connection that go about twice this speed (which is still crap), but I had to put up with them screwing around with my downloads. (No, I'm not talking about Comcast. I'm talking about Cox, who are doing the same shit as Comcast, but getting away with it.)

In-f*ck*ng-credible.

Logtalk 2.31.4 released.

2008-02-23T18:21:00.000+01:00

Logtalk 2.31.4 has been released. Looks like lots of cool bug fixes for threading and a few other enhancements.

Logtalk seems very cool. I'm surprised it's not more active. Paulo Moura, one of the Logtalk developers, has a blog, but it hasn't seen a post since June 2007. The Logtalk forums are ready for the masses, but traffic appears very light. Maybe experienced Prolog users don't have any use for object-orientation? If you read the Logtalk feature list as a series of use-cases it would seem like an intelligent direction to go. Paulo's November 06, 2006 blog post, "Porting Prolog programs to Logtalk" (bottom of the page, no perma-link), is an interesting view on Prolog standardization.

Following another link, it's apparent that Logtalk was Paulo Moura's 2003 PhD thesis at University of Beira Interior, Portugal. It's great that he is continuing to develop it.

More W3C activity: Best Practices for RDF Vocabularies.

2008-02-03T16:55:00.000+01:00

Via Cafe con Leche, there is a new W3C working draft out:

Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies.

Guidance is good. Where I work we have literally thousands of groups cobbling up RDF vocabularies in their own little vacuum. Each one points to the fact that they have a vocabulary, but no one is interested in coordinating anything with anyone.

I am a scientist.

2008-02-01T03:01:00.000+01:00

I am a scientist. I've wanted to be a scientist since I was about 10 years old. However, you definitely don't need a PhD to be a scientist. People get all these strange ideas about what it is to be a scientist. The work of a scientist is pretty well defined, and if you do that work, you're a scientist. A lot of people who have made huge contributions to computer science didn't have PhD's and I don't think it matters. It's the work that matters. Science is a job that can be learned, like any other job.

One of the reasons I ended up in software engineering is because I'm a generalist. Science does not generally reward generalists. But software engineering seems to tolerate us. I think tolerance of generalists is decreasing, but I also think this is good for software engineering. Software engineering could use a good dose of science. Yes, I'm working on it.

New knowledge organization system draft from W3C.

2008-01-31T16:01:00.000+01:00

From DERI, I hear of the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) draft.

This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web.

...

Using SKOS, conceptual resources can be identified using URIs, labeled with lexical strings in one or more natural languages, documented with various types of note, linked to each other and organized into informal hierarchies and association networks, aggregated into concept schemes, and mapped to conceptual resources in other schemes. In addition, labels can be related to each other, and conceptual resources can be grouped into labeled and/or ordered collections.

It's an early draft. We'll see where it goes. I hope it really is simple. Things certainly don't seem that way now.

I love C.

2008-01-29T16:30:00.000+01:00

I admit it, I love C. I just don't want to write really big, complex programs in it anymore. But, I still have really fond memories of writing programs in C. C was the first language that gave me the feeling the machine was understandable. I was a professional programmer for several years before I learned C. In fact, I learned C++ before I learned C. I learned C for a data structures class when I started grad school. I remember implementing sparse matrices with double linked lists. Gives you a feeling competence, lets you feel you could do anything. I eventually worked up to X Window System programs using XLib and Xt Intrinsics. You better know your C to write those.

Yeah, it makes you feel great. It takes awhile to realize the effort that is required for large systems in C. When I look towards the future it makes me shudder to think of having to implement everything in C. But, we don't have to. Different tools for different jobs.

But, I love C.

Postdocs in Europe.

2008-01-13T02:00:00.000+01:00

I've been silent for the last couple weeks because I've made a decision to apply for several postdoc positions in Europe. Like I pointed out earlier, there is a lot of activity in Europe at the moment and none in the US. I've also decided to apply for a faculty position. I think I will have stiff competition, but the fit is really good.

If you have any advice for me about the European academic environment, please leave a comment.

Why?

2007-12-31T22:05:00.000+01:00

Why are there more than 10 software engineering slash semantic web post docs in Europe and none in the US?

Rewriting rules and languages.

2007-12-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

I was running around the web today trying to corral some more of my interests and I happened across the Stratego Language.

Stratego is a language for program transformation based on the paradigm of programmable rewriting strategies.

Since my phd area was involved with program analysis and program evolution, this is pretty fascinating. It also reminds me of another short book review I did. This one was also in SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. I reviewed Term Rewriting Systems, by TeReSe. Here's the review.

Software Engineering Notes 29:2,32 March 2004

Term Rewriting Systems is edited by Mark Bezem, Jan Willem Klop, and Roel de Vrijer, and published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003, (hardback), 0-521-39115-6, 857 pp., $130.00

TeReSe was originally an abbreviation for a Term Rewriting Seminar held by the chapter authors at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam from 1988 to 2000. These twelve authors (including the three editors) have now collectively taken that name as the authors of this text. Details about the book can be found at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~terese/.

According to the authors, Term Rewriting Systems (TRS) have their basis in mathematics and mathematical logic, and TRS began with the development of lambda-calculus and combinatory logic in the 1930s. Rewriting is the theory of step-wise, or discrete, transformations. The field has expanded into conferences (Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA), an IFIP Working Group, European ESPRIT projects, textbooks, and a list of open problems (http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/rtaloop/).

This book entirely devoted to theory, and an appropriate preparation is assumed. The introduction to TRSs is less than six pages. I would suggest graduate classes in computing theory and algorithms, at the least. Good grades and a lively interest would be required, too. There is a 35 page appendix with mathematical background, but it seems useful only for review. The rest of the book consists of 15 chapters on different topics in TRS. See the book's webpage for abstracts of the chapters.

This book would be useful for PhD students actively involved in research areas such as functional programming, theorem proving, or other areas of theory. The book's website should eventually contain answers to problems in the book.

...End of the review.

Stratego is under development by the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. Looks like an interesting group. Also a blog and a wiki.

Hmmm... They have a couple post-docs available....

Book review: The Description Logic Handbook, 1st Ed.

2007-12-29T17:47:00.000+01:00

I've been working on expanding my understanding of description logics. Since one of the books I've been using is The Description Logic Handbook, I thought I'd post a review of the first edition that I did for ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes in March 2004.

Software Engineering Notes. 29:2,32 March 2004

The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, implementation, and applications is edited by Franz Bader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah L. McGuinness, Daniele Nardi, and Peter Patel-Schneider, and published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003, (hardback), 0-521-78176-0, 545 pp., $120.00

Description logics are an approach to knowledge representation in the field of artificial intelligence. Description logic (DL) is a continuation of research areas previously known by names such as terminological knowledge representation languages, concept languages, term subsumption languages, and KL-One-based languages.

The intent of this volume is to provide a comprehensive introduction to theory, implementation, and applications of description logics. After an introductory chapter on description logics, the first section has five chapters on theory, the second section has three chapters on implementation, and the last section has seven chapters on applications. The applications discussed are conceptual modeling, software engineering, configuration, medical informatics, digital libraries and web-based information systems, natural language processing, and databases. More information on description logics can be found on the description logic homepage on the web at
. Abstracts for each chapter in the book can be found at .

The introductory chapter is a good non-mathematical introduction to the subject. However, the authors intend this book to be a reference rather than a textbook. Consequently, some preliminary preparation in theory is needed to make use of the rest of the book. On the other hand, if you are interested in implementing DL systems or building applications that use DL, this book could be invaluable.

Section one, on DL theory, is well written. The chapters are closely related and the writing is consistent. Chapters reference each other and progress logically. In addition, the theory chapters also point out areas of theory that cause problems in implementation, and refer forward to coverage in section two of the book. Although necessarily quite mathematical, it is more easy reading than theory usually is.

The section on implementation is targetted towards those who need to build knowledge representation systems, rather than specific uses of these systems, which is covered in the last section of the book. Implementation in this context has to do with building DL provers and maintaining the knowledge-bases that they contain. The
first chapter is primarily concerned with maintenance of knowledge representation systems. The second is a discussion of several historical, current, and development systems. The development systems are the current systems the authors consider to be the most optimized, expressive, sound, and complete. If you are considering using one of these (DLP, FACT, or RACER), this may provide valuable perspective.

In the application section, the chapter on software engineering is an interesting read. DL-based systems have been developed for software maintenance since at least late-80s, but have not entered wide use (that I know of). This would seem to be an interesting area for software research, and this book would certainly be practical enough for researchers to use.

In summary, a good (but, expensive) reference for researchers in DL. And, an good (but, expensive) read for software engineers interested in applying DL to software.

Logic programming wake up call.

2007-12-27T15:46:00.000+01:00

Logic programming has a great future as applications start using more semantic web technologies. Nonetheless, this wake up call from Tom Schrijvers at K.U.Leuven, Belgium, is a good thing. The comparisons with the functional programming community and Haskell are expecially interesting. There is a massive body of experience in logic programming, Prolog in particular, that we can't afford to lose.

I've been facinated by Prolog for many years, since playing around with Borland Turbo Prolog in the late '80s. But, as with many things, haven't had the time to dive in. There are a number of interesting cross-paradigm language integration efforts going on that look very interesting. In the Smalltalk ecosystem there's SOUL (logic-based declarative languages, not exactly Prolog, but similar) and Logtalk. For Java there's TyRuBa and YProlog. Poplog is an integration of Lisp, Prolog, and ML. The Reasoned Schemer is an exercise in implementing logic programming in Scheme. And there are several more Scheme/Logic projects that I can't lay my cursor on links for. Then there are multi-paradigm efforts like Mozart and Mercury. There is a distinctly European flavor to the projects. There must be some intersection between software maintenance and logic programming. Perhaps I can find a post-doc over there. :)

The list of logic projects just goes on. If you have a favorite please add it comments.

Great writing: This Hack Was Not Properly Planned.

2007-12-26T16:19:00.000+01:00

The Serious Skeleton Has Emerged From His Crypt Of Contemplation And He Has No Funny Bones For You!

Wonderful, funny turns of phrase and great thinking (I think).

Kim Stanley Robinson interview.

2007-12-22T00:52:00.000+01:00

I'll read anything Robinson says, and I haven't even read his novels yet. I have copies of them, but where's the time. This interview on BLDBLOG is a good intro to his thinking and a refreshing take on a possible future for humanity. We have some work to do if we want to have a future and people like Robinson are laying some groundwork. I have a lot of problems with utopian, star trek, space travel bullshit. Most people just don't stop and think, or are not equipped to think about the practicality of any of it. Even if we can overcome the physical limitations, what about the human psychological limitations? Like, if we go into space we'll magically shed our human small-mindedness.

Technorati claim.

2007-12-21T22:17:00.000+01:00

Technorati Profile

Just experimenting. How's Technorati working for you?

Great commentary on current economic events.

2007-12-21T21:52:00.000+01:00

Paul Krugman is surely the best economic commentator in America. This video is a great impromptu discussion of current events. I'm not sure of the date, but it would seem quite recent, this month probably. It is totally worth listening to.

Yeah, I got it off Reddit.

Another great source of economic commentary is Dean Baker at Beat the Press. Both these guys are masters of understandable fact and explanation.

Dijkstra and "Pseudo scientific Software Engineering."

2007-12-16T02:16:00.000+01:00

Starting with a post on Reddit pointing to the Dijkstra archive, then moving to a reply at kirit.com that says: "Edsger Dijkstra didn't like software engineers."

It's apparent that Dijkstra didn't like gurus, but I'm not so sure he didn't like software engineers. The post at kirit.com is right to point out that the "pseudo science" claim come from the reddit headline, not from Dijkstra. I think Dijkstra was quite a good software engineer and added a lot to the study of software engineering. It would be interesting to know if he was actually at the 1968 NATO conference where we got the term "software crisis". It's entirely possible. But, this whole way of thinking is based on a bad assumption. The assumption is that there is inherent tension between computer science and software engineering, that you can't be both a software engineer and a computer scientist. That's news to me. Software engineering is a huge area in computer science. I got my PhD in it.

Software engineering as an academic area has also been getting a lot more rigorous over the last decade. It seems to be heading the way of the divide in physics between theorists and experimentalists. Until recently (like 6-8 years ago) a good theory was enough to get a SE paper published. Now it usually takes experimental evidence. Here's a great run-down by Joe Ruthruff, a guy I went to school with.

I think I am both a computer scientist and a software engineer, and I know many people who are both. I think this view that software engineering is unscientific is based on the behavior in practice. Software engineering is young, even younger than computers. And, at the moment, there's not much pressure to practice it as a science. As the science matures I expect it to get increasingly harder to act unscientific. It will simply come to be considered unprofessional. You can be pretty bad before you're considered unprofessional now. Software engineering doesn't move as fast as some fields in computer science because it so closely linked to people. Making software engineering better in practice involves getting people to change, which is hard.

Think about the parallels with medical research. What does it take to "prove" that one drug is better than another? Then think about what it would take to convincingly demonstrate that one software engineering practice is better than another.

The obvious can tell you something about yourself.

2007-12-09T03:38:00.000+01:00

“You mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of one sentence written by Susan Sontag?” My friend Ron Rosenbaum seemed incredulous. I told him, “No, it was actually two sentences.”

This story of documentary film maker Errol Morris' efforts to find out the truth behind two Crimean War photographs is strangely compelling. Interesting tech angle at the end too.

Mobile computing and Google Android.

2007-12-07T21:59:00.000+01:00

I've been looking more at mobile computing as part of this focus on low-power systems, and cause there's a lot of cool buzz about them lately. Google Android is certainly big in terms of hype. But I would expect it to get some mindshare due to this association with the Open Handset Alliance. I think the public is totally fed up with the inflexible and corrupt handsets generally available now.

My problem is I don't see how mobile computing on cellphone-sized gadgets is going to work. Input and output are limited and frustrating in my experience. My work with voice-recognition systems tells me they suck. For output, why are we looking at these tiny little screens? How 'bout an EyeTap?

Steve Mann is Top-Ten for cool, BTW.

Clojure - Lisp on the JVM.

2007-12-07T21:49:00.000+01:00

This is kinda weird, but I think I'm going to have to try it:

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime.

The last sentence seems to say that run-time compilation is supported. I don't know how that would work in the JVM. Dynamic class loading? And I'm curious how well it really support concurrency.

Eight watt computer.

2007-12-07T21:24:00.000+01:00

Better. At Treehugger:

Eight watts. That's with processor and SDRAM running full tilt. Add the 8" LCD monitor at 12 Watts and a folding solar panel and you have a complete off-grid Linux puppy for £499.

Previous posts: Power efficient PC's -- Why?, Power efficient PC's.

Our systems, our social networks.

2007-11-17T22:59:00.000+01:00

Been doing some more reading since the last post (see I don't talk to *those* people), and there is an earlier reference for the idea that our systems reflect our human communication networks. Mel Conway wrote about it in 1968 in How Do Committees Invent? for Datamation Magazine. Here's the money:

Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Truly new ideas move from person to person and across fields so fast. They are so freakin' rare.

I don't talk to those people.

2007-11-11T21:49:00.000+01:00

Last couple weeks have not been pleasant, professionally. I work for a "large enterprise". Big. Actually, huge. And, this enterprise is sold on SOA. I'm fine with SOA and Web Services as technologies. My job is to watch that various parts of the enterprise SOA plan don't work at cross purposes, and to make sure that the group I'm in doesn't get caught in some kind of a bind. This is not easy since communication between parts of the enterprise is minimal, at best, and deliberately obfuscated as a general practice. There is simply no incentive to communicate well or make information available. Folks are trying to change that, but a quick glance at the trajectory shows I'll be long dead before it happens.

So, what does this have to do with SOA? There seems to be this pervasive idea in the enterprise that SOA will solve the communication problems we have. I don't think so. I think that poor communication will almost guarantee services that won't work together. Call it Service-Oriented Failure.

I had pretty much reached the conclusion that it was going to be impossible to get a reasonable enterprise SOA going because there was too little coordination, communication, and information. Turns out there's a book about that. Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror. The author's basic point is "if the people aren't talking to each other, the systems won't either." The mirror reference comes from his contention that we build systems that reflect the business relationships we have. It's an unusual book in that it's arranged in the form of linked short stories. Hardly any of the book is about technology, it's all about people. The title says "Grid", but the content is about SOA. Used copies are cheap probably because it's not a message that managers want to hear. Most managers would read the book to better understand SOA and will not be very happy to have the book tell them the problem is that they need to be a better people manager.

Gödel, Nagel, minds and machines

2007-11-02T03:05:00.000+01:00

Via a Lambda the Ultimate post:

Just fifty years ago, Ernest Nagel and Kurt Goedel became involved in a serious imbroglio about the possible inclusion of Goedel’s original work on incompleteness in the book, Goedel’s Proof, then being written by Nagel with James R. Newman. What led to the conflict were some unprecedented demands that Goedel made over the use of his material and his involvement in the contents of the book - demands that resulted in an explosive reaction on Nagel’s part. In the end the proposal came to naught. But the story is of interest because of what was basically at issue, namely their provocative related but contrasting views on the possible significance of Goedel’s theorems for minds vs. machines in the development of mathematics.

PDF here. Man, I'm a sucker for this stuff.

I don't think it is impossible to build a brain, but I don't think we are anywhere near understanding any intelligence well enough to recreate it. If we do, there is going to be a difficult moral test for society to face. I don't have any problem with it. Arguments for naturalness be damned.

If only...

2007-10-30T02:40:00.000+01:00

I've always liked this bit of techno-optimism from Dave Clark:

We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Brings a tear to my eye.

That's Doctor Clark, to you.

Identify the problem(s).

2007-10-21T15:07:00.000+02:00

I really believe that either you are constantly learning to do your job better, or you are wasting your time. If you are a software engineer, aspire to be a software engineer, or want to be a great programmer you need to be working hard to understand why this business is difficult. It's not obvious. It takes effort. We seek simple answers because they satisfy the ego. Simple answers let us believe we understand, when actually we delude ourselves.

One good exercise I stumbled on is Scott Rosenburg's Code Reads. Start at the bottom and work upwards. Print them out and take them to work. If your boss gets pissed off...well, you need a new place to work, because that place is holding you back.

It's up to you.

About the title of this blog.

2007-10-20T17:39:00.000+02:00

I was a self-taught programmer in the SF Bay area for about 10 years. My undergrad degree was in engineering. During those years I worked with odd little one-off languages and dead systems. Eventually it got very boring. Finally, my wife got me to sign on for grad school in computer science at SFSU. One thing led to another and I got a PhD at Oregon State in software engineering.

As every programmer knows, making any change to a large-ish program can be dangerous. You make one little, innocuous-seeming code change, recompile, and most of your regression tests blow up. Then, you either spend the next week getting everything to work again, or you back out the change and think about it some more. The essential problem is that changes can have non-local effects, and programmers are horrible at estimating these effects (although studies show they think they're very good at it). Estimating the effects of changes is called software change impact analysis, or impact analysis for short. Impact analysis was my dissertation topic. Here is an lightly edited abstract:

Successful software systems evolve over their lifetimes through the cumulative changes made by software maintainers. As software evolves, the problems resulting from software change worsen, exacerbated by increased system size and complexity, lack of program understanding, amount of effort required to make changes, and number of personnel involved. Experience shows that software changes made without visibility into their effects can lead to poor effort estimates, delays in release schedules, degraded software design, unreliable software products, increased costs, and premature retirement of the software system.

Software change impact analysis, impact analysis, is a software maintenance technique meant to address these problems, by assessing the effects of changes made to a software system. While impact analysis is frequently cited as a motivation or a potential application for program analysis and software maintenance research, research specific to the task of impact analysis has languished for more than 10 years. In addition, few researchers have examined the empirical factors underlying common impact analysis techniques or the tradeoffs inherent in known techniques, and none have performed empirical studies comparing impact analysis techniques.

In this dissertation we introduce a new impact analysis approach that addresses a set of tradeoffs not addressed by any current impact analysis approach. Ours is the first fully-dynamic impact analysis approach. We use light-weight instrumentation to record program execution at the level of procedure calls and returns, then efficiently build a compressed representation that can be directly used to estimate change impact.

We next extend our technique to accomodate system evolution. Our extended technique updates the impact representation after a system change, whereas the previous technique requires a complete recompution. In addition, we show how our approaches can be extended to a large class of emerging software architectures, including Java component-based systems and large-scale systems.

Finally, we discuss the implementation of our approaches, present the first cost models for impact analysis techniques, and report the results of the first empirical studies that compare impact analysis techniques. We also empirically examine the performance of our approaches and the factors affecting the use of our techniques in practice. We found that our approach has linear time and space complexity (in the size of the dynamic information collected) and achieved a mean compression value of 0.955 on the subjects we used in our experiments. Our investigation of program evolution across multiple versions of three of our subject programs showed that, depending on the level of change activity, we can update the impact representation more efficiently than recomputing it in a majority of cases.

If you want to read the whole thing, it's here. But, lookout. It's over 200 pages. The full PDF is 30 megabytes.

Perhaps you wonder why I say estimate the effects. Can't I calculate them? Nope. That problem is undecidable.

On being Bad and Nationwide.

2007-10-18T03:11:00.000+02:00

He's bad. He's Nationwide.

He's right.

Erlang has arrived.

2007-10-16T04:41:00.000+02:00

Via PL News, you know Erlang has serious mindshare when it has its own continuing obfuscated code contest. Wallah: the 2007 Obfuscated Erlang Competition

Have you looked at any of the Obfuscated C entries the last few years? OMG. It's beyond obfuscated. It should be the Encrypted C Code Contest.

Some (not me) have said Perl is obfuscated by design. However, that would account for the the Obfuscated Perl Contest being discontinued in 2000.

Learning Squeak, aiming for Croquet.

2007-10-14T23:09:00.000+02:00

Who isn't a fan of Alan Kay? But, sometimes the stuff he says in interviews is scary-right on too many levels. Via Julian Lombardi's blog:

People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

He is specifically referring to Doug Engelbart and his work on augmenting human decision making. Kay points to Engelbart's papers and his 1968 demo. (Extra points if you can spot Stewart Brand in the demo.)

I started playing with Smalltalk/V on my little Toshiba T-1100 laptop in about 1989, before I got into grad school. It was fascinating, but a huge pain. Ran out of memory all the time and the image and changes overflowed the 1.44MB floppy when I tried to save it. Besides, Smalltalk was totally foreign at the time. I didn't get it. Then, I sort of forgot about it for 15 years. Now I'm back working with Squeak, which is surely the most accessible and useful Smalltalk available at the moment. Lots of bright folks are building amazing things with Squeak. Web apps with Seaside; rich-media, networked documents with Sophie; self-described application meta-models with Magritte; and wikis with Pier. But, the most interesting has to be Croquet.

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications on multiple operating systems and devices.

Buncha geniuses. P2P architecture. They look to have solved some of the essential scalability problems with virtual worlds.

Power efficient PC's -- Why?

2007-10-14T18:24:00.000+02:00

Google peak oil.

Watch Crude Awakening.

That said, we have far more oil than we can afford to burn.

Be the change.

Cradle To Cradle Going Mainstream.

2007-10-13T18:07:00.000+02:00

In my list of interests, did you think I made up that term "cradle to cradle"?

Nope. Via TreeHugger, see MSNBC.

Shipping container architecture.

2007-10-13T16:49:00.000+02:00

Via Boing Boing, a great roundup at Making Light. Use what's available. Why wait for a disaster?

Power efficient PC's.

2007-10-13T16:05:00.001+02:00

Via a Slashdot post, Extremetech has an article on the Fit-PC. This little, $285 AMD Geode-powered PC running Linux draws 5 watts of power. The one thing they don't tell you is the actual size. From the photos I'd guess 12x12x4 centimeters. Five watts sounds pretty good, but the capabilities are limited. The Slashdot discussion is pretty good (short version: buy a laptop), but doesn't really supply any information on power consumption. But, by my lights, it's movement in the right direction.

Update: a comment at Extremetech points out a 2006 article on LinuxDevices.com on a $99 mini-PC. Nice price, but power consumption appears higher (3 amps x 5 volts is 15 watts).

Open-source as a business model.

2007-10-13T02:16:00.000+02:00

Here's an instruction manual.

I found this a long time ago, but ran into it again after reading a blog entry on OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal, then following a link to RPG's site, and looking at his books. I highly recommend Patterns Of Software.

I heard a quote once that went something like: "No matter who you are, all the really smart people work for somebody else. So, unless your business model includes innovation from outside, you're going to fail."

It that quote from Patterns Of Software, or is it from somewhere else? Sounds like a good excuse to read the book again.

For some reason this post reminds me of Bill Joy, who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Anybody seen him lately?

Venting about SOA.

2007-10-11T05:10:00.000+02:00

SOA is fine. But, I don't think it solves any new problems, I don't think it simplifies things, and I don't think it will lower costs or shorten schedules. Plus, it's impossible to test. A real bonus!

Smalltalk balloon sighting.

2007-10-08T19:28:00.000+02:00

Being a fan of Smalltalk, and a user of Squeak, I've always liked the smalltalk balloon logo. Sometimes I've wondered if there's a real balloon and what he does with his time. You know. Does he hang out at Squeak headquarters during the week telling war-stories about Alan and Adele and PARC? And, what does he do on the weekends? Well, I think we know what he does on the weekends now. For the last several months he has been spending every weekend hanging out at the apartment building next to mine in San Diego.

Why I identify with Bruce Sterling.

2007-10-07T22:23:00.000+02:00

From an interview in Nova Express, 1997 issue 13:

"I'm not a real energetic person, but I'm kind of restless in a very peculiarly intellectual way, and I'm not somebody who has very much discipline. I could not make it in the sciences, because I don't have it together enough. I've got way too much imagination and not enough coherence."

I certainly don't have the imagination or coherence he does, but I'm working on it.

Maybe not.

2007-10-06T23:17:00.000+02:00

I changed my mind. Software maintenance is boring. Unfortunately, it's an important problem. But, it's boring. On the other hand, I have a huge investment in it. But, it's boring. I sound like an undergrad. So, I'm going to follow a bunch of other topics that are not boring and hope that at some point they will be applicable to software maintenance. That's right. I intend to attack the problem by ignoring it and working on things that seem more interesting.

Convenient, isn't it?

It's a start.

2007-10-01T05:21:00.000+02:00

Just a start. I will be discussing software maintenance issues and distributed software here.

Or, am I the only one who has problems with this stuff?