Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
mnot: Boo!.  This article, spotted by Bill dehÓra, provides an interesting analysis of XML as a carrier for certain kinds of already-structured (or not) content.  This article also provides useful links and an XML Protocol (aka SOAP) Working Group perspective.  Author Mark Nottingham thinks that "the real question here — and boy, is this the elephant in the virtual room — is whether XML Infoset is the best base for users to model data upon." Tim Bray comments that it is enough that XML is the current best way to interchange data, and does not himself claim that XML is the best way to model data.


posted by Dennis at 5/7/2004 10:48:48 AM

 
Bill de hÓra: Is that an envelope I see before me?.  There is coming to be some discomfort around the use of XML this week, and here's part of the discussion where XML is considered to be the elephant in the middle of the room.  I think there are misunderstandings at a couple of levels.  It may be that misunderstandings already around (in?) RDF/XML may be lifting into Atom.
posted by Dennis at 5/7/2004 09:59:51 AM

 
Scobleizer: The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.  Here's another generic recommendation about weblogs from companies out into the industry space of the blogosphere.  Although Scoble is at Microsoft, this seems to be a general plea and guidance for how to be effective in communicating via weblogs.  It is terrific advice, and it takes a considerable commitment to transparency and building trustworthy relationships.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 07:16:57 PM

 
ongoing • Sun Policy on Public Discourse.  One of the interesting features of the Blogosphere is entry of people providing gatekeeper/community functions from inside technology firms.  Here is Tim Bray's advice to fellow Sun Microsystems employees about how to play nice in creating public community while also acting responsibly as an employee.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 07:08:00 PM

 
apophenia: Blog Me Context.  danah expands on something that has been nagging at me.  My blogs are wildly out of context and I do want to organize and consolidate many of the ill-woven threads that I have accumulated.  I am frustrated about that, as my reliance on throwbacks and blowbacks (and flashbacks) should demonstrate.  I need threadbacks and laybacks and waybacks and some way to pull together, dismember, organize, and republish without making myself nuts.  (A search engine over my archive would help, too.)  And I don't want to damage the blog as it is (throwbacking being too icky already).

My idea is to back out and look at the expectations that are being frustrated, arrive at some sensible requirements, define constraints on what technology must afford, and take another run at it.  All without stumbling into the world-hunger solution, mind you.  Ouch.

Or, put simply, how do I get from blog as privately-contexted sticky notes to writings and the level of conversation that involves organized thought?  Can I keep the blog around and lead from it to the refined materials?  I have questions.

[later 2004-05-10-22:33 -0700] The revamping of Blogger, as much as it irritates me (I am busy having to refresh about 100 posts to deal with the new posting model breaking my archives and my feeds), promises to provide better support for repurposing and the 3-by-5-card model of blog entries by having each post to a separate file, along with any comments on that entry.  This approach has more promise for scaling, although the idea of having all these little files around gave me the shudders at first.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 11:56:20 AM

 
SourceForge.net: Project Info - kanren: A declarative logic programming system.  This is a project spotted at Lambda the Ultimate.  My curiosity is not only because of the participants on the project but also the prospect of having a sound computational logic and declarative system that runs on tiny processors.  Because it speaks of purely-functional subsets of scheme, it would be interesting to see what has to be defined in oMiser as primitive (if anything) to have the model work there too.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 11:16:24 AM

 
on social software (28 April 2004, Interconnected). [originally posted 2004-05-06-1105 -0700]  This is a comprehensive discussion of design principles and how to address the nature of communities and social interaction, spotted by clay today.  (I notice that I am using first names a lot, for people that I don't know and certainly don't know me.  orcmid the name-dropper.  Great.)
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 11:07:40 AM

 
Many-to-Many: Matt Webb and a practical guide to social software.  This page links to some useful resources (that I will throwback), and I already resonate with the quotation on identity that Clay Shirky provides here.  It turns out that "orcmid" has proven to be a far-more durable identity for me in cyberspace than my own name.  There are many Dennis Hamiltons, but pretty much only one orcmid.  I would definitely not want to mess that up.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 10:59:00 AM

 

FOAF: What Open Standards?

Get Tooled Up:'FOAF : Using open standards to support community building', Ariadne Issue 39/  Spotted by danny, this article wanders through a screen-shot-oriented overview of what one might do with a FOAF.  I can't tell exactly what open standards are being refered to.  (There are links and I will follow some.)  Mostly I have this "ick" reaction to the screen shots and maybe even the idea.  There is also a too-common "gee, look at these cool tools" along with "and it is extensible so it doesn't have to do everything (right)" sense I am getting from this.

I need to stand back farther and see ways of looking at community, and then what use one makes of a plumbing tool to maintain a particular communities existence for itself.  My first thought is that a community ought to grab a namespace and qualify the bejeezus out of familiar words, like "friend" or "associate." 

Then I would look at the idea that individuals assert their communities or their place in communities (with FOAF-like entries on their web sites) and see if that is a good way to do the job.  It is about as nicely decentralized as you can get, I'll grant that.

Finally, there are the dynamics of the game, including trolling around and reconciling the asserted community participation by analysis of these web-situated certificates attributable to the various actors.

Sounds like a half-dozen or so thesis projects, some of which are doubtless being breathlessly developed as we speak.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 10:50:56 AM

 

Throwback: FOAF Vocabulary Specification

FOAF Vocabulary Specification.  [originally posted 2004-05-06-1042 -0700] This is apparently the specification for Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF).  I found the Foaf-a-matic and created a little FOAF file for myself.  I'm not sure what that proves.  I edited it a little bit but it doesn't give me much to go by.  This specification is immersed in RDF and OWL and Semantic Web technology, and all I want to know is just what is this.  I also have trouble decoding the copyright claim.  I think I will steer clear until I'm satisfied there's no volcano in all the magma.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 10:48:22 AM

 
CommunityWiki: TrustedLinkLanguage.  Why did so much of this page seem familiar.  Because this link is to the middle of a page that I just ready.  Hmph.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 05:17:18 PM

 
CommunityWiki: LinkLanguage.  Another interesting page, about the value of WikiWords as links so that you get to have a HyperText way of digging out context, nuance, and so on.  Murray Altheim adds zest to the soup by pointing out that conceptual integrity is not so easy and that the ontology forced by one target per WikiLink has its own problems.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 05:13:14 PM

 
CommunityWiki: RdfInWikis.  This is an interesting discussion on how to handle Wiki metadata and some other matters that are facilitated by RDF.  There is also a strong peppering with aspersions about RDF/XML.  This may or not season to your taste.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 05:00:16 PM

 
No Business in Social Networking.  Here's more on the good, bad, and ugly of Artificial Social Networks (ASNs).
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 04:42:10 PM

 

The grand old rag

Yankee Doodle Dandy.  [added 2004-05-06-14:38]  Last night, I saw a performance of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," the musical.  It was difficult to be with the literal flag waving that occured on the stage.  In the build-up to the flagstraveganza at the end of Act One, I though I heard the actor speak of "the grand old rag" that had flown at the battle of Gettysburg.  We lofted from there into "You're a Grand Old Flag," and I suppose its true.

More difficult was the Act Two opener, "Over There."  What a contrast between the optimism of yesteryear and the reality of today.  Now, how proudly does it wave?  I feel ashamed.

Amnesty International - Library - Usa.  There is a "No Torture" icon that David Weinberger posted and that links to Amnesty International.  I want a more specific statement for myself, and the red-white-and-blue to go with it.  This is something I captured while looking for a way to express that.  The point for me is that the Rule of Law should prevail above all else where the Star Spangled Banner stands.  We have nothing as a democracy if we don't have trusting each other to govern ourselves and to abide by the rule of law, freely accepted.  That we think there is any place off the battlefield where that does not hold strikes me as ethically unsupportable and morally repugnant.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 03:30:15 PM

 
Joho the Blog: The murky ground for torture.  [originally posted 2004-05-06-11:36 -0700]  Where is our stand for who we are in the world and for ourselves?  Especially ourselves.  I don't want that to be something that considers any right circumstance for torture. I don't see how it could be written into the military code in a way that makes it clear what the conditions (immediately-urgent and short-lived) and consequences must be.  And I don't think one can frame an ethical justification.  Even if we could, I think it is socially more powerful to simply have torture be unacceptable under all circumstances.

Either way, I am completely willing to take the affirmative response to David's questions: "Can we as a nation say that we abhor torture, except in the rarest of cases? That we do not believe in the institutionalizing of torture? That we will fight it around the world? That we believe in the rule of law and that no one is above the law? That we believe in treating even our enemies with dignity? That we support the established international conventions for treating prisoners? That we are sorry about what went on at Abu Ghraib?"

I suppose one way to make our stand perfectly clear on that would be to accept the jurisdiction of the World Court, at last, and end the craziness about no law but our law, when we feel like it.  The hypocrisy of our fears and distrust is rotting the American soul.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 03:20:36 PM

 
The Ethics and Etiquette of Social Networks - Darwin Magazine.  This is an interesting account from Stowe Boyd about some problems with ASNs concerning reputation and people gaming the system.  Also, the agenda of ASN operators is not clear, as in how the law of unintended consequences showed up here.  This is something I want to be very careful about for any software I drop into this space.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 02:20:01 PM

 
Too Many Fake Friends.  This Jim Louderback article for PCMag gives a careful look to social-network schemes like Orkut and where it starts to get icky.  It is interesting how we get that icky feeling when up against an undisclosed agenda that just doesn't have an arrangement feel clean.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 01:03:48 PM

 
CommunityWiki: FearOfEditing.  Here's an interesting Wiki page about the inhibitions people have about editing.  This is not unrelated to other situations where people don't speak up, and there may be much to learn here.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 12:51:08 PM

 
isolani - Web Accessibility: Accessibility in the News: April 2004.  This is a nice compilation.  I doubt my sites have much accessibility at all, and I should actually read the guidelines.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 12:43:31 PM

 
Matthew Thomas » When semantic markup goes bad.  The first sentence of this useful entry is "In HTML, there are semantic elements and presentational elements. Semantic elements (like a href, cite, code, em, p, samp, and strong) have specific meanings. Presentational elements (like br, font, tt, b, and i) do not – they only alter visual presentation."  Although I think there is an unfortunate confusion in the use of "semantics," it is interesting that one can tag this way, and have a better chance, with some agreement, of customizing presentation in an appropriate way.  Go here for tips on that and not to worry about my objection to "semantic."
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 12:39:53 PM

 
Lawrence Lessig - The Anarchist in the Library.  Lessig's guest blogger, Siva Vaidhyanathan, has an intriguing Q&A on his recent book.  Two things to take away here: An upgrade to your technofundamentalism detector, and respect for Siva's gentle appraisals of critical matters.  There is also great material in a compagnion blog entry about rudeness and avoiding ad hominem attacks.  This civility shows up in Siva's discussion of a recent air travel to a music-industry confab.  Vaidhyanathan does honor to the Lessig Blog.  I can completely understand Larry's choice.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 12:06:04 PM

 
Silly DJ, Hacking is for kids. | Lineman.Net.  This is painful.  Just painful.  Somebody screwed around, then fessed up (while in the process of being tracked-down through some simple computer forensics), and this rather real IM conversation happened between the perpetrator and the semi-victim.  I originally thought this was Lineman, a teacher, as semi-victim, and I see it is more complicated than that.  The semi-victim's ethical counseling consists of "Silly Dj learn to cover yourself next time, names have been changed to keep
UMBC from expelling Silly DJ for computer hacking and what not." And "When it comes down to it, I knew who it was before he imed me. It was just a matter of whos getting into trouble and how much. Cause I dont want people out of school cause of this, but people need to know. Don't mess with my network."  For Lineman, the hanging judge, the question is "Why don't you want him to get fired? It sure looks like he needs to be."

I get it (slaps forehead).  I have this idea that teachers, especially mathematicians, have some higher moral and ethical outlook, and would acknowledge the perp (as we say in the police procedural novels that I read) for coming forward and fessing up.  The good cop then looks for an appropriate minimal way the perp can make ammends:  say 8 hours of community service at a hacker recovery group and food line.  I'm not teasing.  There is a lesson and the perp is already learning it.  As a good coach, I would let the perp create the sentence.  It looks like this perp is ready for that.  Justice is complicated, isn't it?  Or maybe we make it that way.  (I wonder how this would work with some US MPs that have had their handiwork in the news lately.  Being Solomonic in how they make ammends.  I want to see that CD-ROM.)

posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 11:40:02 AM

 
WMBC Radio - In Response to recent events.  [thrownback from 2004-05-05-12:32 -0700]  Well, the dilemma of the errant DJ and stupid playlist hacking is resolved for now.  This is a college radio station, and I must confess I don't get out much, based on what some of these web pages are like.  The college web site seems unavailable at the moment, but here's an interesting blurb.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 11:30:26 AM

 
mamamusings: tablet pc envy.  [upendedback on 2004-05-06-16:14 -0700]  I already have tablet envy, after riding Amtrak from Portland to Seattle seated next to a Microsoft intern.  I don't know that Dell has one yet.  But Acer looks good.  I want the usability to be improved by the time I acquire one in June-July 2005 (as my M.Sc in IT graduation present).  Or I could maybe convince Todd Needham that I qualify, though I have enough trouble figuring out how to upgrade the other two machines on my SOHO LAN to Windows XP Pro without messing everything up.  I'm not sure that I can stand yet-another-flavor of Windows, and adding wireless in the house.  But Vicki the potter might like it.  She might like it a lot.  Maybe Todd would like to see how an artisan makes use of the tablet?
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 11:09:34 AM

 
intertwingly: Sam Ruby.  This is a nice site.  The Wiki is devoted to Atom work, it seems.  One nice feature is the description of Atom as related to "episodic" web sites.  That's a nice catchall phrase.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 10:48:52 AM

 
intertwingly: Reality is Corrosive.  I love that the subtitle for intertwingly is "It's just data."  This is a great article about badly-layered abstractions and overlooked coherence considerations.  It takes off on Joel Spolsky's description of leaky abstractions.  I like to call some of these coherence failures, though others are simply bad design.  The note provides a nice account of how some of our ideas break down in reality.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 10:41:44 AM

 
dda's weblog: Le Brainf*ck.  I know we all know the word, I just can't make myself type it in public.  This is probably the kind of religious raving lunacy that the folks on FOM never want to happen on their list, having gotten to their limit on namecalling and such in the past.  I can dig that. [tweaked on 2004-05-06-16:19 -0700]
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 09:29:54 AM

 

Computing Milieux

Logic, Language, Computation, Mathematics and Software

When Worlds Collide

When Is Programming Mathematics, and Vice Versa?  [last updated 2004-05-05-17:54 -0700]  I thing about the connection of software, computing, and mathematical logic a great deal.  I think about language less often, other than to recognize the traps we make for ourselves in being careless with language.

Lately, I have been wondering about the apparent disconnects between the worlds of mathematics, computer science, and software-development practice (including software engineering).  I have come to think that the inhabitants of these communities are speaking different languages in which the words are all spelled the same.

Along with that, each community accepts serious and different over-generalizations about the connections among their disciplines.  Another factor may be people in one discipline interpreting what they hear from others as being in terms they already know.  The difference is not recognized.  Maybe not even the possibility of a discrepancy is recognized.  (I over-generalize.)

For example, there are computerists that assume that computation accounts for all of mathematics (and maybe physics too), and that non-computational mathematical theories are simply mistaken (something that should make mathematicians wary about borrowing concepts from such exotic shores).  Others conclude that algorithms and programs are the same.  Continuing in this vein, I see the Church-Turing thesis over-extended and then argued with (or taken as settled).

I think there are important and valuable connections among these disciplines.  I think we have not mastered them, maybe not even recognized them.

Some of the current articles of belief don't sit still under close scrutiny.  I am intrigued by that.  Unfortunately for me, it is one of those things that I think is right in front of our noses and should be obvious.  And it isn't.

Sunday I began to doubt myself and wonder whether I will ever have anything to offer in this area that is of any value whatsoever.  This arose in conjunction with a claim, citing Sir Tony Hoare, to the effect that successful programming requires meticulous application of mathematical principles.  We got to this point because I expressed my concern that object-oriented programming techniques were being misunderstood as a metaphor for mathematical structures.

I say it is a serious matter to confuse objects in object-oriented computer technology and mathematical objects of almost any kind. I am alarmed when I then see "class" as used in programming languages identified with "class" as in mathematical logic, model theory, and other mathematical conceptions.  I know computerists who espouse that conceit (and also claim that their objects model the real world), but I was startled to see it lobbed in from the mathematical sidelines.  I think these missteps are at least category mistakes, and I don't find them harmless.  This collapsing of distinct concepts together corrupts language, trivializes mathematics, and obscures the power of computation yet to be realized.  That's my thesis.

Listening to the masters. It is difficult to speak into a discipline from the outside in wanting to make a distinction that is not speakable (or easily heard) in the parochial language of choice.  Here are three statements that I think capture what I want to point at.  I invite people to avoid disagreeing with them and simply consider how they might be providing a valuable perspective (and not any absolute truth):

"I don't even know how to formulate the concept that a METAFONT program draws a beautiful letter A, so I couldn't possibly prove the correctness of such a program. But still, somehow, the theory that I've learned while doing computer science gives me more confidence in the programs that I have written." Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, pp.17-18.

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Donald E. Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience (1922).

What Is There to Notice? Maybe it helps to look at programming as actually done.  There is more than enough to go around.  Start with Linux source code and see how much mathematics is found.  If there is disappointment about the absence of Object Oriented Programming, look at the Java source code for the Eclipse project.  The specifications for Java and for its standard class libraries are available on-line.  There is some mathematics there.  Go look at the lists of open and closed bugs and see how much of it is mathematical activity.  Look at the information on what is called reflection in object-oriented systems.  Try that as a foundational mathematical structure.

All right, I'm being strident.  I think software development is far more like engineering than like mathematics, even though many programmers (not knowing much about engineering) fight that idea.  I won't dispute that makes software engineering a discipline in which mathematics is applied.  In my experience, software development is more like deriving a cooking recipe than mathematical activity (unless some respected mathematician asserts that mathematics is more like that too).  Also, I am not picking on Victor.  We've swapped notes and I share his interest in computational mathematics.  I would like him and others to be more critical in what it is they say they are doing, that is all.  That is a lesson for me too.

Another way of looking at programming is that it is like enacting procedures that involve only arithmetic (although the arithmetic may be one over interesting kinds of data, such as coded text), copying (rewriting), and comparison.  I don't know about you, but when I did arithmetic "by hand" to reconcile a bank statement and my check book, I didn't think much about the mathematics of it. I have sat down and confirmed the mathematics by which the reconciliation procedures actually work, but I doubt many bank customers have done that.  I did it because I could and I wanted that understanding of what I was doing.  When I used a calculator, and then software, I thought even less about it. Mathematics hasn't helped me one bit in resolving a failed reconciliation, except in one way: I believed in the mathematics enough to know that there was a mistake somewhere, and I believed in my experience enough to look for my mistake first. I did find a bank error once: In the statement, not in the balance. (Through some misadventure, the starting balance for the current month was different than the ending balance on the previous month's statement, and the difference was the amount of a valid transaction that never did show up on a statement. That was over 30 years ago.)

I suppose one could claim that I am tacitly doing mathematics even though I don't have my attention on it.  For me that is like arguing that a chef is tacitly doing kitchen chemistry.  It might be true, but it doesn't seem very apt as a characterization of good cooking.

If one is willing to consider that there really is very little mathematical practice in writing programs, and that is increasingly the case, would it be a good thing to force more mathematics onto programming?  I think maybe we just want to drive the car, not know why it works.  So fussing over the mathematical aspects of software may be largely beside the point and, where valuable, may require the attention of specialists, just as assembly language programming now does.

Well, what is there to gain from this perspective?  You tell me.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 01:27:57 PM

 
Throwback: When Is Programming Mathematics, and Vice Versa? [posted 2004-05-05-23:49 -0700] I am making a space her for more elaboration on the topic introduced by the preceding note and continuing to the end of these additions. It is an experiment involving making inserts between existing blog entries by interpolating between the time time stamps. (Blogger lets me fudge the time on an entry.)

[later: 2004-05-10-22:07] I now have a means to accept comments on these blog entries, so comments are now welcome.  I have set my blog to invite registration, and I prefer that visitors do so although anonymous comments are also allowed.  I reserve the right to delete any comment that offends my sense of civility.  In such cases, I am willing to post links to material that I don't find appropriate for inclusion here, with appropriate disclaimers about linked content not being the responsibility of the present management.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 01:25:03 PM

 
[FOM] Object-Oriented Formal Mathematical Languages.  [thrownback from 2004-05-06-16:00 -0700] After I collected myself a bit and took the coaching of the moderator, I posted a brief version of my "When Is Programming Mathematics, and Vice Versa" concerns to the Foundations of Mathematics Discussion List. My note is restrained and fairly self-contained, the essential point being that

I see enormous quantities of successful practice that show little evidence of what I would call mathematical activity.  And I do not doubt the value of a mathematical perspective in creation of software.

I am keenly interested in the connection between software and mathematics (and logic and language).  I accept that it is off-purpose for FOM and welcome off-list suggestions of more-appropriate forums/communities where the connections might be explored.

I make that an open invitation.  I have received some comments, and I suspect this might grow best in a social network, even if carried out in public.  I do not have in mind the creation of yet-another discussion list.


posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 01:20:05 PM

 
[FOM] Reply on Tony Hoare and Software Mathematics Economics.  [thrownback from 2004-05-06-0851 -0700] After my little note, Steven posted a response in support of the work of Tony Hoare.  Let me be clear:  I have nothing but admiration for Hoare's work, the formalization of Concurrent Sequential Processes, and all of the work that flows therefrom, including Z.

I reiterate that this is valuable work, it is not the same as saying successful software development requires it (as a generality), and it will not always be applicable (i.e., in confirming non-formalized qualities and the validity of formalized ones).  I don't expect to find a silver bullet.  And the work should be continued, so that its standing as an useful bullet can be understood and delimited.  In practice, computer science is an empirical science, I say, and we definitely do need to understand that better and also comprehend where solid theories apply.

Steven also asserts that "it is only a matter of economics that lets software companies get away with the liberal informality of modern programming languages." He speaks of bugs as an externality the cost of which is passed on to customers, concluding that "computer programmers are not mathematicians is matter only of economic tolerance and engineering pragmatics." I do not know how to eliminate engineering pragmatics and (mere?) economic considerations. I have nothing to contribute along those axes.

I do cling to a middle-ground view that is perhaps allied with the "middle road" perspective of David Parnas. I think verification tools are important, I don't think they can ever be all of it, and there is far more to software engineering than verification to specifications, however and to whatever degree it is carried out.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 01:15:48 PM

 
Joel on Software - Mike Gunderloy's Coder to Developer.  [originally captured at 2004-05-05-09:16 -0700] I was IMing on my trans-middle-aged angst with anderbill and he pointed me to Joel Spolsky's Foreword to Mike Gunderloy's book.  I need to go back to Mike's site and see about the book again.  This text is harsher about computer science than I would be.  And it makes great personal testimony about what it takes to develop as a professional developer.  I am not going to say mathematics doesn't matter.  I want to emphasize how much else there is that matters.  I see this as affirming the affinity of software development to engineering.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 12:30:17 PM

 
Math and the Computer Science Major | Lineman.Net.  [originally captured 2005-05-10:16 -0700]  This is a nice article from a mathematics teacher.  I can't dispute anything said here about the value of mathematics in computer science.  My own experience is similar, even though it was gained extracurricularly.  (For calibration, my high-school mathematics touched on calculus but there was no calculus or pre-calculus class in those pre-Sputnik days.  I went right into calculus as a college freshman, also studying free-hand drafting and other topics in late-50's science.  There were no collegiate computer courses available where I was.)
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 12:25:23 PM

 
Slashdot | Math And The Computer Science Major.  [originally captured 2004-05-05-09:48 -0700] This article conducts an examination of the previous entry's observations with comments by Slashdot readers.  The discussion is at slashdot's level of civility. It demonstrates the range of considerations that a particular self-selected sample of programmers provide to the question of math, computer science, programming, and their interconnections.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 12:20:26 PM

 
Throwback: When Is Programming Mathematics, and Vice Versa?  This entry is part of an experiment.  I don't have a comments mechanism, and I don't have a TrackBack for this site, so I am going to fake it (which is why it is a Throwback).  I have turned off my site feed for starters because I must perform an important test.  I am going to post this along with everything else in my backlog, and then I am going to move it and some other items.  The moved items will get new permalinks.  What I want to confirm is that nothing that has not moved gets a new permalink.  So endeth the first reading.

[later: 2004-05-05-23:03 -0700 I am moving this back from 2004-05-17:53:47 to as far earlier than the entries on this subject that I can get without changing the sequence of any others.  So endeth the second reading.]

[still later: 2004-05-05-23:36 -0700 It worked.  This entry is inserted in the middle and none of the permalinks of other entries have been impacted.  It is clear that it works better for me to have blogs be more like wikis or sites that let me name the pages and choose how to spot things inside my blog folders.  That has a serious ripple effect on archives and indexes and the current blog front page, but having to worry about non-interference with permalinks is not cutting it for me.  There's more to handle in designing some components for smoother episodic web publishing.  This is all half- (no tenth-)baked and I will stop now.  The big challenge of the moment is to restore my feed, since Blogger blanked out all the fields when I turned it off, so I will have to recover the configuration from somewhere.  So endeth the third reading.]

[latest of all: 2004-05-10-21:58] I am giving up on all of this throwback stuff, as well as adding titles and headings to groups of entries.  The suddenly-replaced Blogger implementation has a different posting model with entries kept in individual files along with their comments.  This changes things.  Once I overcome my irritation at being blind-sided and having some of my archiving corrupted as part of this change, I will be able to see the advantages of this approach for scaling into article form, repurposing blog content and so on.  But for now, the throwback, flashback, and related experimentation is at an end.]
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 09:05:46 AM

 
css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design.  I was telling myself that it is time to look into CSS and XHTML.  This site suggests some amazing possibilities of that approach.  I particularly like the home page and Wiggles the Wonderworm.

[later: It strikes me that this example of brilliant software has much to offer in looking for the mathematical rigor in programming.  How is it to be found here?  What theory accounts for these results and ones not created yet?]

[later: 2004-05-10] I am also thinking that this is a demonstration of how much of what we experience in software is emergent in situated usage and is not apparent in the design of the software, and certainly not in the implementation.  It is valuable to notice that formal understanding is at a reductionary level neare the implementation and the emergent behavior arrives through empirical trial-and-error and heuristic adjustment that is not evident as such in the formalization.  This is an important feature of engineered artifacts and it is not clear to me how this is accounted for in any rigorous way in treatment of the relationship among logic, language, computation, and mathematics.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 09:03:16 AM

 
Many-to-Many: The insistent messiness of humans.  Ah, yes.  Yes indeed.  Nods knowingly.  Uh hum.  k00l!

[later: 2004-05-10-21:46] All right, I am serious about this.  The important thing is, to borrow a phrase from Wheelright, "artifacts have contexts; people have perspectives."  That we can apply multiple perspectives to the same material is of keen important when we talk about notions of unambiguous, well-defined meanings of data, as is said in the context of the Semantic Web.  This must be snake oil or, at best, unwarranted hype.  And clinging to that silver bullet will distract us from accepting and then working with the way people are with language and how there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  Then maybe we can be direct about where there are prospects for precision and rigor and the difficulty of preserving fidelity to that, once achieved.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 08:14:16 AM

 
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: What is an Online Community?.  I feel comfortably at-home wandering around this site.  Here's a great thought-starter: Online communities are “communities” first and “online” second.  I think there is more to be considered here about how communities (or circles or any of the other mappings) are overlays and they are also dynamic and ad hoc.  The early groupware/teamware thrust seemed to allow for this in terms of teams coming and going and dispersing when the particular purpose for being glued together had been fulfilled.  I admire the bottom up, communities first idea.  In terms of growing social communities, I think the participants cause them and not the software. Though software might encourage engagement that was seen as too difficult before. And we should remember a key lesson for personal computing: people who don't balance their check book are not likely to balance it on-line either. Some communities can only be forged on-line, because of geography or accessibility, and that is a deeper exploration than I have little space for in this margin.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 08:06:29 AM

 
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies.  Being really curious now, I go to the commoncraft (not CommonCraft nor Common Craft, though they are not sure about the second form, which is used most places other than the logo).

It appeals to me that the site is done in a friendly and chatty voice, and that it is (oh, there's one) about CommonCraft, which is a very nice advance over ToolCraft (which tends to be separative and not common).  I also learn from this site that there is a Social Software Alliance.

The most-important part may be the the little blurb about a conversation with Ward Cunningham that gets into the fragility and the remarkable survival of civilizations, a metaphor for how wikis thrive through civility despite the hostile and anti-social elements afforded by the Internet.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 07:57:22 AM

 
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: Thanks for Stopping By.  This is a friendly page that provides simple, useful tips about reading a web log, interacting with a web log, and having your own blog.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 07:50:37 AM

 
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: What Conference Organizers Need to Know About Weblogs.  This Scoble spotting discusses on-line community building and taking a positive approach to the fact that people are now blogging about conferences in real time. This will be a powerful part of the buzz concerning your conference: like it or not, agree with it or not.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 07:48:58 AM

 
PRAXIS101: Listening is good.  AnderBill is giving copies of Choosing Civility to all of his friends.  Here he cites the tremendous power, and grace, of committed listening to others.  A lesson that I can never be reminded of too often.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 10:43:37 PM

 

Computing Milieux

Social Computing and Communication

Empowerment and Blogging

I have some things to do. I have had them to do all day. [updated again 2004-05-04-18:17 -0700]

One of the things there are to do in this category is start TrackBacks.  It is more mystery technology, but I am going to start by pinging.  I don't know how to do it automatically, but there is a web form that will let me do it.

The way it goes: I will publish new blog entries to my site so I can use the pages to find out what my permalinks are.  Then I can pick entries that refer to sites that have trackbacks and trackback those entries -- let those sites record that I have an entry that discusses their entry.

To accomplish this, I must supply the trackback link of the other site's entry (found by a special incantation on that site) along with my site's name, the title of my entry, and the permalink of my entry.  I also provide a short summary that provides a reader at the other site with some idea of what my entry has to say about the subject.

This is just for the pinging part.  Then I need a way to make it more automatic and operated from my own machine, even if using my browser.  But for now, I just want to see a real trackback from me to some article I've spotted and discussed.

[later - 2004-05-04: I have rewritten this entry to make more sense to even me. I have also succeeded in establishing track backs from discussed entries elsewhere to discussing entries here (got that?). After the first two, and confirmation that it worked, I tired quickly.  This is not something that I want to be doing by hand.  I want a computer-mediated approach that doesn't require me to work so hard.  I also don't want to have to monkey with any of the weblog software that I use and that doesn't run on any computer where I can modify it.  And even if it did, I don't think that is the approach I should try first.]
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 06:41:59 PM

 
Mindjack - Linked Out: Blogging, Equality, and the Future.  danah boyd pointed to this (with discomfort about A-list status), and I have learned in the echo here that there is something important to consider around perceived power relationships and people giving themselves the authority to speak.  And beyond that, finding ones authentic voice.  This is relevant to on-line education and discussion settings.  I shall pay attention.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 05:18:55 PM

 

Small Things Loosely Connected

I am stealing David Weinberger's meme because I am tired of writing headings and I want to somehow link up all of the material I have pointed at below.  SOA is about architecture, but it is also about components, and it is here because this is when I noticed it.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - The SOA Hype Keeps Chugging Along.  Dare provides some examples of the extremes of SOA hype, and also provides some nice insider chat on who he listens to and where he sees useful content on SOA.  I didn't even know that MSDN had an Architecture Journal, and I have picked up a couple of other blogs from this.  I will ignore that I don't live that far from Redmond and MS is hiring.  There is something important in all of these particular gleanings about RSS Bandit and having feeds work properly, but I haven't figured it out yet.  What I do notice is that some blog pages require me to drop my mobile-code defenses to read them. While this one is worth it, and so are the MSDN pages, I don't like having to do that.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 04:46:06 PM

 
Future Now: New comment spam attack.  Spammers are figuring out how to act badly on blog comment lists.  A.S.K.Pang wonders if he should turn off comments altogether.  I think this is one of the things that registration is good for.  I know there is a reluctance for some people to register and there is also a desire for anonymity.  Unfortunately, anonymity is the haven of the bad actors too.  I guess I am going to be simplistic about this: You want to talk to me, you have to be williing to stand up and speak for yourself as yourself.  Of course, I don't mind pseudonyms (so orcmid speaketh), but something that involves creating an useful association and that can't be conveniently mechanized to suit the spam business model.

[later 2004-05-10: Well, comments have been enabled on the new version of Blogger, and they are working on this site.  I allow commenting by anyone, but the process of gettting to a comment-creation window is a big clumsy.  People may have more trouble with it than spammers, and that is a concern for me.  For all of the human factors and UI redesign that was presumed to be invested, I don't understand the basis for some decisions that were made around usability.]
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 04:25:41 PM

 
mamamusings: teaching new technologies.  This is an interesting article about what it is like to be a teacher for a technological subject for which the content (and the precursor classes) advance rapidly. At the same time, Liz also says something that gives me a lot to think about. At first blush, I like the idea a lot:

"The future, I think, is to let go of the traditional approach of teaching how to do things in a specific language, and instead offer a more studio-like environment in which students are given access to resources and tools, and then work on developing a project. (We teach most of our classes in 'studio mode,' but in most cases they’re far from real studio approaches—they’re lectures with occasional hands-on exercises.) Surprisingly, it’s the students who are often most resistant to this mode of teaching—we’ve successfully conditioned them to see school as a series of core dumps, and switching gears into a more user-directed model often generates resentment and confusion rather than enthusiasm and creativity."

I think this ties to how we learn by exploring and doing and failing and figuring it out as we go, not in advance.  I also think we learn when the learners generate the learning.  I think the teacher should sit outside the circle, not in the middle.  How do we do that?  How do we make it satisfying for teachers to have empowered students?


posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 04:16:38 PM

 
TheFeature :: "Inverse Surveillance" -- What We Should Do With All Those Phonecams.  Now here's something completely outside the box.  An interesting tit-for-tat strategy, too.  I can see some need to authenticate surveillance images captured this way, but that's already an issue.  I think Howard is on the mark where he says we won't know what this provides until we do it.  I have no doubt that it will happen.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 03:40:36 PM

 

Logic, Language, and Computation

I notice that, now that my Atom feed includes full articles, the formatting comes through in the feed because it isn't mangled by passing through a summarizer.  Good move, Orc.  So, I will put in headings and separators and not worry about them making trash in the feed.  Mathematics, Logic, and Computation are a fascination of mine.  It is also a passion of mine, though not at the rarefied level that serious theoreticians seem to deal with it.  So it is easy for me to feel out of place and incompetent.  That my fascination has me straddle two worlds that speak two different languages using the same words is something that I stumble on regularly.  Meanwhile, here are some of my gleanings in this area.

Studying Mathematics and Logic

I just ran into a little goldmine of material in Italian because I was curious about a conference that I was sure I wasn't interested in.

Language and Method of Mathematics at Pisa

posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 02:41:43 PM

 
Programma LMM (in Italian).  Wow, how did I miss this guy.  I downloaded some papers (I think) on infinity, on axiomatic methods from Euclid to Gödel, and so on.  Here is a syllabus for a course of study on Language and Method of Mathematics.  For me, this is hot stuff.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 01:44:51 PM

 
Mauro Di Nasso Home Page.  Cool, the title of the home page is in English, and the page is in Italian.  There is the occasional English phrase, and that is interesting too.  There is material here that makes it worth practicing my clumsy lingua italiana.

Remind me to tell you some day about when I was moved to learn Italian long before meeting Vicki and later learning that it was her life's dream to be in Italy (which is when I finally took concerted action to learn Italian).
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 01:35:33 PM

 

Computational Arithmetic versus Encounters of the Standard Kind

MARIAN 2004 - Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic and Analysis.  OK, a stranger than usual clipping, but I have automatic radar that notices things about Universities in Italy and particularly Pisa and the nearby CNR organization.  I have this dream of having an institutional affiliation like that so that we could live part-year in Italy and Vicki could realize her lifelong dream of being in Italy.

I immediately ruled-out this congress because I have a class at the time and the subject is way afield of my limited and clumsy expertise at connection of mathematics, logic, language, and computation anyhow.

But it does say arithmetic, and almost all of the arithmetics used by computers are decidedly non-standard in ever way imaginable, so there is probably a topic here, whether or not even remotely close to what these folks talk about as non-standard.  And models, the wonders of models.  So this reminder is for me to at least notate something (not here).

Odd, I notice that conference announcements often inspire something that I make a technical note about, even though it might not be what the conference is actually devoted to.  It's like opening a newspaper and reading someone else's horoscope, then being inspired by what that brings up!
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 01:29:32 PM

 

Personal Computing

Cooperative and Collaborative Computing

The promise of light-weight components and tools

I have the sense that we are on the verge of a major simplification in the personal computing space, especially around communication, coordination, and lots of small things loosely coupled.  It may not be soup yet, but I can smell something simmering.

Slashdot | Core CSS (2nd ed.).  I haven't gone for CSS, the use of Cascading Style Sheets in web pages.  I have been working on content-first and widely-usable HTML pages, though I don't know how well I am doing.  I think I must go for CSS though.  I also think it will assist more in accessibility and I want to make sure I deal with that.  I can also see CSS plus XHTML being the desired avenue for generated pages from Wikis, from bloggers, and so on.  So, it is time.  This book review suggests an useful starting point.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 12:48:18 PM

 

Trust and Trustworthy Computing

Situations of Trust

Overcoming the distrust of trusting

BBC NEWS | Technology | A question of trust online.  This article is self-spotted by Bill Thompson, and I want to use it in a discussion about transparency and open operation in an on-line university setting.  Issues of distrust come up, usually raised by students about the speculative behavior of other students if, for example, study materials are made more widely available earlier.  Here I favor the reminder that there are demonstrable trustworthy situations in what would be predicted to be anarchies on the Internet, and there is something to learn there about our automatic, prejudged distrust of trusting. As Bill says, "When I am overwhelmed with despair by the spammers and the scammers, [communal activities such as Wikis] give me hope."
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 12:36:21 PM

 

Computing Milieux

Cooperative and Coordinated Computing

Mining the Blogosphere

thom's blog.  This is Bill Thompson's commentary, and it is as lively as I expected from the spotting that I traced.  This guy is as weirdly organized as I am.  This blog has a feed (well, three feeds and you choose your poison).  And it is not the only blog for Bill Thompson.  There is the billblog, which is not syndicated -- I think -- and which is referred to from thom's blog, so that kind of works.  Then there is what the BBC on-line pages refer to as Bill's Blog, and these seem to be the collection of Friday articles, somehow related to billblog, but presented another way and published as articles, such as this one.  I am not sure how it all fits together, and I am sure that I haven't broken the code.  I'll keep watching.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 12:13:58 PM

 
BBC NEWS | Technology | A little less conversation: "Fire, agriculture and the wheel are probably the only three transforming technologies that have been around long enough to have observable consequences for basic human physiology and psychology, so we should not expect too much from social software in the next 18 months."

This is the article spotted by andrew.  It is a lot of fun, as you might tell from the quotation.  There is more on how much is shallow and fails to rely on serious work that has already been done and that could inform the social-software enterprise.  This is one of those articles that one can use to stop and think.  I suspect more of Bill's Blog will be like that too, and I am going to hook up to it.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 11:56:30 AM

 
words: Social software: hype alert?.  There is a recuring complaint about how geek culture ends up corrupting and misapplying work that has been developed over substantial time by serious practitioners in other, subject-oriented domains.  I think the contribution of what was called library science, and is now called information science is one example that gets misunderstood by geek science.  In this posting, we are reminded that something similar happens around human interactions, human-computer interactions, and the awful design of so-called social software.  I am going to look further.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 11:50:11 AM

 

The search for appropriate tools

DDJ: Manifesto for Collaborative Tools.  Cool! Eugene Eric Kim's Manifesto is in the May 2004 Dr. Dobb's Journal, and it makes a nice read.  It was circulated for discussion on-line, recently, and I recall some negative comments.  Seeing it presented in text here gives me more appreciation of the content.  (I guess layout matters [;<).

I just got off the phone with my first buddy call with AnderBill in too many weeks, and we have been talking about how there is some confluence showing up, and it is based on simple and lightweight tools and components.  I think there is something to list out against this manifesto and see how well we are doing.
posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 11:42:51 AM

 
Operational Transformation in Real-Time Group Editors: Issues, Algorithms, and Achievements - Sun, Ellis (ResearchIndex).  Here's how Hydra (I can't remember the new name at all) handles concurrent editing over Rendezvous.  Beside the many forms the paper is cached in, there are goodies in the papers that cite this one.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 12:20:11 PM

 
SubEthaEdit FAQ.  Well, um, no, there is not any cross-platform interoperability and apparently the design is trapped in the code or in Cocoa and elsewhere.  It looks, from here, that this could really use Zeroconf a little better.  On the other hand, the protocol used for concurrent editing without locking has been published and maybe that is what we need to get above this nice but narrowly-focused implementation (this solves a problem when getting concurrent edits to wikis and comments on blogs, too).
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 12:17:01 PM

 
SubEthaEdit.  I missed the original Shirky spotting about this, and the discussion of CuWiN and Zeroconf led me back to it.  I have a slight interest in editors, especially for friendly ones that can be configured or used or incorporated in Wikis and Blogs.  The editor formerly known as Hydra is for MacOS X 10.2.8 or beyond, but since it runs over Apple Rendezvous, it should be portable enough for running on Zeroconf and some alternative like .NET or Java or something or all of the above.

There is a comparison with version control systems that intrigues me, because one still wants that in collaborative editing too.  I want to figure out how/whether that works, and what the integration is.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 12:09:19 PM

 
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network  This is yet-another Shirky find.  I don't know who coined CuWiN for this, but it will probably stick.  This is a wireless solution.  What tantalizes me is whether it fits with Zeroconf too.  Clay put down spots on these in consecutive postings, so I would think he wonders (or knows) too.  OK, I am on overload and need to back off.  This is looking yummy, though.  I especially like the idea of creating networks where there currently are none, also a feature of Zeroconf.  If we can get it all into/over IP too, this becomes juicy yummy.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 12:01:07 PM

 
Porchdog Software: Howl.  This is the open-source implementation of Zeroconf that Shirky spotted.  It would be very interesting to see if this protocol is expressed in such a way that it can be a WAN overlay across NATs as well as working with direct wireless, IR, and port/modem connections among machines.  (I keep forgetting that my Nokia 9000's have IR connectors and run as modems, though it saved my butt in an Atlanta hotel whose phone system had gone out.)

I'm overloaded by the possibilities here, and I don't know that it means the Zeroconf protocol holds up.  I really want a trivial P2P bootstrap, and this looks like it may be the avenue.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:54:15 AM

 
Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf).  OK, well I may have been confusing Zero Configuration Networking and what I thought was happening with CuWiN and the Champagne-Urbana Mesh project.  And maybe not.  They could go together.

Zeroconf is about simple peer-to-peer discovery using IP as the only common protocol different platforms are likely to have.  It is designed to work even when carried out on links that are part of a larger, more-managed (-configured) network.  I think (just think) that this might work really well across NAT too, and that would be marvelous.  I haven't done the detail work, but the basic charter and scope of the Zeroconf work is appealing.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:46:01 AM

 
Wi-Fi Networking News: Open-Source Mesh Group Releases Software, Discusses Social Goals.  This is the article by Glenn Fleishman that Clay Shirky spotted.  It is going to depend a little on how CUWiN actually bootstraps, and I can't tell from here.  Also, this is another group that distributes open-source software by posting ISO CD-ROM images (urk) without source code.  [Off topic: If the BSD license doesn't require you to say where to find the source, how did it qualify as an OSI-conforming license? Or did I miss a stitch in the OSI requirements.]
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:33:08 AM

 
Many-to-Many: Social hardware: Champaign-Urbana mesh project.  This is the Clay Shirky posting that has me think that P2P bootstrapping may have just gotten easier, especially for modest, self-selecting group overlays (whatever I mean by that).  I need to now dig into the referenced articles, so I will do that now.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:29:36 AM

 
Understanding Without Proof.  Posted by rattlesnake, this article looks at the George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez book, Where Mathematics Comes From.  It also plays on Proof Without Understanding and uses a lengthy example inspired by a quotation from Benjamin Pierce.  So there is something about chasing threads and noticing harmonies in all this too.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:17:25 AM

 
Bill de hÓra: RDF, meet SmartFrog.  This article spots some Hewlett Packard initiatives related to activating and managing distributed objects.  Some of them are open-sourced (and in Java).  One of the HP teams has support for the latest RDF and Owl specifications.  Hmm ...
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:02:14 AM

 
Bill de hÓra: Steve Vinoski on WS inside the enterprise.  Well, well.  This is a nice statement about use of Web Services to do some repurposing of legacy systems without every committing to creating "real" Web Services.  This is eminently sensible and some further practical observations are provided here.  This is a little far from the P2P "taking back the net" discussion.  Or is it?
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 10:56:34 AM

 
Sean McGrath: More Relax NG.  You are trapped in a maze of twisty little threads all the same ...

Well, there are some interesting convergences this morning.  I am just weeding through the web with my little newspaper clipping clipper (called Blog This! in this incarnation), so I will point out for now that there is a lot of interesting material here on schemas and also on distillation/translation and caching schemes.  This is something that I have in mind, sort of, for nfoWiki retention of already distilled web pages, inspired by a different markup system that does something similar.

Other than that, I am not sure how this connects things up for me.  I am inspired to dig deeper and find out.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 10:50:08 AM

 
ideas asylum - Push, Pull, Click, Click.  That was actually a comment (attributed to David Ferguson) in the meta-assembler developed for the Univac III around 1963  It goes back to a commercial that few will remember.  It has been a nostalgic morning ...

This article, spotted by Bill dehÓra, looks at the current RSS syndication model and considers whether a P2P model for aggregation and feeds would work better.  This leads to a critical look at whatever the interaction model is to be, and Bill adds that maybe we should look at interactions even more broadly.  I concur.  There are some interesting links here.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 10:43:10 AM

 
Bill de hÓra: RSS over P2P: one of those aha moments.  I am not taken with the pushing-tin theory and other observations here.  I do think that the need to look at the interaction model of feeds.  There is a recent observation about P2P bootstrapping that is done completely without reliance on a central service, and that strikes me as important for P2P, social software, and also coordination among blogs, wikis, and even service-oriented-architecture components.  Let's go looking for more.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 10:32:04 AM

 
Cover Pages: Encoded Archival Description (EAD).  Ah, of course.  An EAD is MARC records brought into the XML age.  Well, the amount of tacit knowledge required to create a "correct" MARC record seemed mind-boggling to me when I checked way too long ago.  I would not be surprised that EAD doesn't get much closer with regard to coherent/consistent interchange and combined use of EADs from/among different sources.

When we worked on DEN and DMA in our parochial little world ten years ago (seems like lifetimes), we knew there was this problem around metadata and that we would not solve it.  Some of the bread crumbs we planted for metadata reconciliation were intended to let people know they had the problem, but I figured the bigger problems of content slackness (e.g., allowing anything a human reader would understand without thinking and that a computer will never figure out on its own) couldn't be addressed until the problem arose enough in practice for people to get it.  Or not.

XML with namespaces does provide an improved way to signal that maybe the content structure is not understood, even though the tag is spelled the same as a familiar word.  But since XML DTDs don't do anything about syntax and interpretation of content, we are still left to deal with the problem of malformed entries for recognizable tags.  Dorothea suggests that RELAX NG may provide the answer.  I don't know whether RELAX NG is promoted because XSD is too hard and inadequate or what.  This last problem of schema assessment is getting to be worrisome.

I am going to have to deal with this in the Situating XML nfoWare theme, so these markers are important to me.  I will fret over it later.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 09:47:55 AM

 
Caveat Lector: Valid != Right.  I think Dorothea may be feeling better.  Here's a lovely rant on the difference between having a valid XML and having the document be "right."  A number of useful distinctions are introduced (and some examples of non-useful practices).

There is a discussion of EAD but the link doesn't work at the moment.  This reports on an unsuccessful effort to use a common process across some heterogeneous implementations of the same DTD.  I suspect that Dorothea's suspicions are correct since, as far as I can tell, if you simply used Dublin Core attributes, the assurance of interoperability is only slightly better than the existence of the proverbial snowball.


posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 09:30:07 AM

 
CommunityWiki: InterWiki.  This is a nice summary of the InterWiki idea, with links to where different aspects are covered/demonstrated. (It is taking me a little to adjust to the new CommunityWiki color scheme and logo, but it is working.)
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 09:13:51 AM

 
CommunityWiki: InterMap.  I use InterWiki mapping so rarely that I keep forgetting where to find the map and what it looks like.  Here is an archetypical occurence.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 09:09:26 AM

 
CommunityWiki: WikiNameSpace.  This is a nice run-down on the various use of NameSpace-like qualifications in communicating within and across Wikis.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 09:07:14 AM

 
Tahoe Daily Tribune - Student Cheating.  Spotted by Blog Spot, this article is about student cheating, the expanded opportunities to cheat that technology provides (SMS, cell-phone video, and the internet), and the approach being taken in one California High School to remove temptation and also address the subject as an ethical concern.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 08:39:59 AM