ShelterIt - My digital think-tank

Something inspired me between coffee and office today ...

2012-02-16T16:34:00.000+11:00

Blargh, so I haven't updated here in a while. It's not because there's nothing to say, but simply too much to say, gagging me in the process. I usually dump a few good tidbits to my Google+ stream, but my good ol' rants and raves have taken a hiatus. And I'm not quite ressurecting them yet, I'm not ready to have a strong opinion on a lot of things of late. Well, correction; I have very strong opinions on a number of things, I'm just not sure I'm right. I'm trying to unlearn a life-time of being full of bluster.

Life is full of surprises, which, in itself, is not surprising at all. For some of us, it's even a welcome change. I've ... changed lately. Not in a sudden way, but I suspect my move to a quiet town with a kinda country feel, surrounded by serene and spectacular scenery (and, no doubt, gorgeous beaches) has put my mind into a strange place. One would think it would have calmed down, relaxed a little more, taking in the scenery and let itself be soothed by the looks and sounds of this thin slice of serenity between heaven and earth, but no, it's racing harder than ever! There's so many other things I can squeeze into the time I now have available, so much more to ponder!

For those who have known me for a while knows the certainty with which I stated my bold stance on pretty much any opinion I cared about. No more. The older I get, the more steeped in the ultimate scientific quest for origins I become. I gulp down many buckets of science and scepticism every day, and try to make sense of it all as it slushes - erodes away beliefs and builds up embankments of facts - over my framework of thought. Where in the past I had knowledge and opinions, I now have facts and uncertainty, proud uncertainty! I'm starting to love all the things I don't know, licking up the sweet, sweet tears of frustration that people show me. It seems, on average, that most humans can't deal with not knowing.

I'm starting to suspect that all of humanities problems lie hidden behind the fear of not knowing, and not just not knowing what's for dinner tonight, but not knowing the meaning of life, universe and everything! Behind not knowing something is that awful, horrible, disgusting habit we have of making stuff up in the place of knowledge. We try to fill those gaps in our understanding this universe with something - anything! - quick, before someone sees us! We can't stand the gap, it is empty and repulsive in our mind. It's a pothole in our perfectly flat road to knowledge, fill it, fill it! Quickly, put religion in the spot for origin and purpose! Hurry, slap down some homoeopathy and acupuncture on that disease we don't understand! Look, you missed a spot of telekinesis in your quantum entangled deepism!

The distrust of anything you don't understand should stand in stark contrast to what you believe to be true, however it seems epistemology isn't a very prioritized field amongst normal people. Heck, even specialists and experts can't tell their ontology from their oncology on any good day, even if they depend on the former to really explain - and often cure the source of - the latter.

If that last sentence didn't make much sense to you, then you're part of the problem, too, just like me, but hopefully - if I dare suggest - getting to know the science of philosophy (as opposed to the profession of being a philosopher) and why epistemology matter, you can tatter along with me to the sound of people making bad decisions for us all on faulty grounds.

So, that's where I am right now. Soon, I shall seep through the groundwater of this blog, and become that weed in the garden of knowledge I aspire to be.

Update-ish

2011-12-09T16:35:00.001+11:00

Hi Folks. Sorry for the quiet, I have too much to say, deterring me from being able to make a coherent sentence, little less a whole blog post. There's plenty of stuff in the woodwork, and it will come out fairly soon, I promise, including a book I'm writing. However, I've been doing lots of smaller stints at my Google+ channel with drips of ideas and good stuff found elsewhere. I think that that will be my platform from now on, where here on the blog I'll do the bigger and more serious stuff, while the Google+ channel a more constant drip. I've given up on Twitter as the noise was unbearable, and Facebook is ... well, I can't really use that kind of language in front of you good people.

Here's a quick update; family doing good (and my girls exceptionally so, with grades through the roof, talents earning them rewards), we're more settled these days, plodding along with our various more or less interesting projects. I'm taking a bit more pictures which I'll showcase later, a few videos, art, music, etc. The girls are really getting good on violin, and we've started up a string ensemble (if you're in the Kiama area and play either strings or classical, come and have some fun with us! There might be a oboe-player nearby). Works fine. Life's normal.

in more technical news, xSiteable - my latest project that mixes Topic Maps with all sorts of event-based plugin fun using PHP - is that I've spent a lot of (possibly too much) time on the database side of things, creating a common xPath-based simple query language that is SQL, NoSQL and XPath compatible, and a host of ready-made plugins for it (PDO, SQL Topic Maps, LDAP / AD, session, array). The way to describe various parts of your data then becomes a cached layer of reusable nuggets of data, like " $data->get ('some-identifier' ) ", no matter where in the application it gets called, will always refer to the same data, cached or create based on definitions elsewhere (so, using a rather declarative approach in which, I feel, you can define what your application does better than any other approach I've used before.

For example, each plugin can define data sources, queries (with or without parameters) using the global query language, or ask if it's allowed to use the native language (and mostly it is, but some times you may wish to not do that, for example in core modules and such). I use events for application flow, so for example handling of users are done through the events XS_ON_USER_BLANK, ..._CONFIG, and ..._CHECK which other plugins can hook into to provide user credentials or services back to the framework.

I'm also revamping the content management and document management / store aspects of it, making sure that I don't fall into pitfalls of persistent identification, nor that I cause trouble later. Every part of the application hooks into events, and each part of the screen are rendered through them, so you can inject snippets of GUI into various parts based on them using a layout module (for example, if the GUI renders a document, a button can be injected that does something, like add the ability to share a document, or whatever, you decide). Events, events, events. I've hence also made the event handler a bit more robust.

Finally, I've made everything even more RESTful, even internal services are done through REST. Want to add a menu item to the main menu? POST your item to the resource for the menu module. And so on. Every module and plugin has a resource assigned, and the "API" (I use that term loosely) is through that or a sub-set. I've even designed the data management back-end this way, so any data source you define will have an automatic RESTful API to it, if you allow it.

Security. Yeah, working on it, and I'll explain it better later, but it's almost done as well, where any object have a CRUD self / CRUD sub-elements RESTful model. More on that later.

Ok. It's the weekend. Have fun, and I'll see you on the other side.

2011-09-23T15:18:00.005+10:00

Hi everyone. Things - meaning life, blogging, new projects, fun experiments - have slowed substantially over the last couple of years to the current standstill. But it's not a bad thing, as such, it's actually a nice break from the hectic life I used to have, and has been a good opportunity for me to re-group and re-think my life and what I should do with it. There's also been a tremendous amount of focus on the kids (helping them grow, school, etc.) and our family life, and in many ways you can say that my family is now my biggest and most important project.

It didn't used to be like that. I think I was just like every one else, balancing work with family life, compromising some things for other things in an effort to make life as easy as possible. Now I don't care about life not being easy. Well, what I mean is, I don't treat life as if it needs to be either easy or hard, but more as project that I mold and shape into how it best suits me and the family.

There's a few things going on, though;

- I'm still writing a book, but I've changed it slightly. The manuscript I had was a little bit all over the place, and I've focused it back a bit to relating to that shimmer between humanity and technology, and how we as social people could better use a great deal of human cognition and social science to solve our (software development) problems. The current title; "The well-tempered keyboard." (Classic music geeks rejoice!)

- My never-ending framework and enterprise application delivery system is getting momentum, but as with any other mention of xSiteable expect some delay before I release it. However, I'm doing interesting work in the back-end these days on modular data source integration between a disparity of systems (same API into SQL, filesystems, XML, JSON, key-value, NoSQL, caches, etc. controlled through a generic caching module) creating some funky business analysis and statistics opportunities. (If you can create a dynamic SQL statement, for example, we can now have time-based as well as real-time analysis and statistics, with drill-down, semantic linking to other statements [including non-SQL] and deliver them in widgets all over the shop) It's admittedly terribly fun, but I know a few of you are looking forward, so I'll try to speed up a bit.

Stand by for another installment, soonish.

What I did on the weekend : EJ12

2011-08-10T10:56:00.002+10:00

Here's what I did on the weekend with Grace and some of her friends from school ;

Grace and a few of her school friends created this book trailer for "Hot and Cold: EJ12 Girl Hero" for some book trailer competition at school, and we're all proud of how well it turned out. EJ12 is a teen-age girl turned secret spy, and have all sorts of adventures. This one - "Hot and cold" - brings her to face the Ice Queen in Antarctica, among other things, and we mucked around with blue-screen for a long time trying to get proper icy special effects, but it proved too cumbersome, at least until we can get a proper blue-screen and some seriously good editing software.

I used to work in the movie world (many eons ago, before children) and taught Grace to script, story-board, convert, shoot, production, editing, the lot. It was a lot of fun, and I'm impressed with the girls; you did a fantastic job. I used a Panasonic Lumix G2 camera for all shots, a simple pancake lens, and only used the free and open-source OpenShot video editor (running under Linux/Ubuntu 11.04) for editing and post-production (which I probably should write a review of, now that I am intimately familiar with it ... I've got a few suggestions :) ).

Oh, and if you thought the school uniforms in the beginning looked a bit strange, it's because the girls used their bunads, Norwegian folk costumes. Don't ask me why they chose that and those high-heels, but I suspect the glamour of movie-making seeped in. Enjoy.

Update: I sent a link to the author of the book and she loved it, and she has just posted it to her EJ12 blog. How cool is that?

Australian Chamber Orchestra review

2011-07-18T22:41:00.000+10:00

For my birthday my wife thought up a brilliant gift for me; two tickets to each of two concerts the Australian Chamber Orchestra was holding in Wollongong, so for each concert I would bring one of my two daughters so they could experience both the brilliance of ACO and that of going to a concert with a bit of pizzazz!

The first concert was called 'Baroque Virtuoso' and is, I think, one of the first times the ACO's newly aquired Stradivarius violin (price: just short of 2 million dollars) would be on display and played by the beautiful Satu Vänskä. The program for the concert promised a few Greensleeves baroque pieces but interspersed by a few contemporary pieces I knew nothing about.

First, here's Satu introducing the concert;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3PIv2w9OXA&list=UUYj5cJizFqEY

I brought Grace (11 turning 12) who's been playing violin for two years now, and she was excited, but did remark that the ratio of people to age was something bizarrely far above even my own age. Together we spotted about less than 10 people that looked anything less than 30 years old (or so, not counting me), and the concert was sold out (which means 515 seats, according to the Merringong website) with lots of older folks about. Not a bad thing in itself, but does perhaps say something about the state of classical music in this region.

I won't say too much about all the pieces in the concert, but I'd like to make a few general remarks and point out the highlights.

First the bad, and let me make it clear straight away that I'm a huge baroque fanatic; I study it, love it, live it, I have so many baroque recordings and have been to so many baroque concerts that it makes people worry about my sanity, but I love it from the sheep gut strings to the various baroque tunings, and unless you try to be as HIP as you possibly can be, I won't be pleased. And as such, I wasn't pleased. The baroque pieces in question - Handel's 'Concerto Grosso in B minor', Vivaldi's 'Concerto in B minor' RV580, Teleman's 'Viola Concerto in G major' (!!), Tartini's 'Devils Trill' G minor violin concerto and Corelli's 'Concerto Grosso in F major, op.6 No. 2' - all had the same tokens of baroque pieces played for modern chamber orchestra in modern tuning on modern instruments.

However, within that framework there was lots to love, so don't get me wrong, the playing was at times quite sublime, with the highlight for me perhaps Corelli's because I love it so (but they could have put a bit more gusto into it). Satu's solo work on Tartini's concerto was of course brilliant; she's very, very good, and has a lovely playing style and touch, not to mention that remarkable timbre in the Stradivarius (first time I've heard one live, I believe). But for me, the music lose their soul in the sharpness of the modern instruments, and cry a little in modern tuning. But that's just me.

The best part of this baroque concert was the music that wasn't baroque, starting with probably the highlight of the evening for both me and Grace;

Stuart Greenbaum's "Moments of falling" is a gorgeous Aeolian fantasy that falls off a cliff, dragging other motif's with it on the way down, rumbling lyrically until its timely death. Lots of people around us, too, were stunned at this one, and the applause, I think, captured our surprise and delight quite well, an applause that wouldn't be repeated again until the big solo pieces and the bug finish. It was a wonderful piece, and one that the ACO just nailed; this is their true domain! This is what they do best, there's no doubt about it.

Colin Brumby's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" was up next, of which I found the first movement just as wonderful as the Greenbaum piece, coming and going in and out of similar motifs, circular developments and sharp constraints that really don't constrain much. Absolutely lovely stuff, and really well played. Second movement was somewhat different from the first, and didn't quite capture me, but still good.

James Ledger's "Johann has left the building" was Grace's favourite, a delightful romp through Bachesque brilliant motions without the genius. I wasn't quite into it as I was the others, but perhaps the promise of Bach had me looking for something it wasn't trying to be. Probably. My bad.

Peter Sculthorpe was the only contemporary composer I had actually heard of (from my years at the National Library of Australia and the Music Australia project, I think), and they played his "Port Essington", a remarkable piece and perhaps the most abstract at times as well as being the most complex composition, going from ensemble, to trio, to abstract, to trio, and back to ensemble, all interspersed with various degrees of overtones (six movements in all). The bush and the life around Port Essington came alive on stage, and it was quite remarkable. I could tell some of the audience didn't quite know what to do with this music, but I loved it! The playing was simply astounding, from the syncopated abstracts to the trio cadences (on which Mr. Cello, Timo Valve, did some fine fiddlin' indeed) to some people-giving-eachother-looks discords. I sucked it all up and was enthralled in it all, and was definitely the second highlight of the evening for me.

I can't say enough how wonderful it was to hear these Australian contemporary pieces, an area I'm completely ignorant of. However, this crash introduction have me wanting more (lots more!), and that is a testament to the brilliant playing of the ACO and the pieces they chose for this concert. Every player bounced off the next, and the timing was impeccable. I'd however advice them to stay clear of the baroque period (especially when you mix it like this, because you're forced into modern tuning and playing which doesn't suit baroque music, in my snobbish and faulty opinion), and do what they otherwise do so brilliantly.

I can't wait for my next concert next month with their take on Schubert.

Upcoming book

2011-06-21T21:21:00.000+10:00

Well, a little time ago I asked your opinions on how to publish a book, what to do, what to expect and directions to take. I didn't get too much feedback, but some, and I've at least had some interaction with my good old friend Slobodanka which I worked with at the National Library of Australia.

I've come to a realization; my book is pretty much unpublishable by any sane publisher, so I'll publish it here, free in PDF form, when it is reaching publishable shape. I know there's outlets like Lulu or Balboa Press where I can do it through them (and I might still consider that), but I kinda like the freedom of tinkering with my own book at my own leisure as well. I know that these things take time, and that a good editor is a must, however I'm thinking three things ;

My wife is a school teacher with strong academic background, and shall be editor
Some of my friends are literate and damn smart, and they could be editors, too
I used to work in publishing (technical side), so I can set my own book reasonably well

One of the most difficult parts of this whole thing is that I couldn't explain to anyone what the book was about. It's somewhat eclectic, binding together my years of experience in software development, working with information architecture and usability, my life as a film-maker and professional musician, my fervent scientific outlook on the world coupled with a penchant for epistemology and other nasty philosophical terms, my love of ideas, language and people, and all the little things I've crashed into while stumbling through life.

What's it about, again? How about I quote from the introduction instead, and you tell me ;

The wrong book

Oh, I'm sorry, you probably thought this book was about software development or some-such, maybe a framework, or at best how to deal with hard computer problems. Maybe you thought this book was about how to be a better programmer, showing you slick tricks and fancy algorithms. Maybe you wanted me to help you design better applications, or take you gently through various middle-ware stacks on offer. Or maybe you thought – silly you, looking at the title like that! - it had something to do with being a nicer developer. It's not.

Well, what I mean is, not really, not specifically, but perhaps rather that I won't talk about such things; they are, after all, what I do for a living. But talking about all of that stuff up there sounds really boring. Why would I write a boring book? That's right, that would be a bit silly of me. However, I can't guarantee that this won't be boring for you, especially if you expected any of those things listed at the top. All of that stuff are general problems that really are manifestations of other, deeper and more troubling problems. Like people.

I like people. I'm a people-person, and I thrive on being with people. Humans. Human beings. Folk. Crowds, big and small. Opinions. Feelings. People. You see where I'm going with this? Therein lies the solution to anything we can ever think of; interacting with other people, sharing our ideas, let thoughts simmer and talk about them, written down, talked about, discussed, shouted, ranted. Words. People.

At this point you're probably wondering if you wandered into the library and got the wrong book or something. And perhaps you did, but wouldn't it be grand if you wandered into the library to take out a book, and ended up taking out the librarian instead?"

Linkbait

2011-06-15T15:11:00.001+10:00

Another round of links to bits and bobs stuck in my browser's tabs ;

Technology

The architecture of Open Source projects : Pick some of the top open source projects around, and let the lead developers write about their design and architectural concepts and models. Amazingly good stuff.

Fuel PHP Framework : Fuel is a simple, flexible, community driven PHP 5.3 web framework based on the best ideas of other frameworks with a fresh start.

ID Policy : The OBO foundry documentation on identification management, and interesting tack even though I don't agree completely.

Understanding JQuery UI widgets : a tutorial.

Best Linux multimedia applications : "Today's category is multimedia applications. This is a pretty broad one - photo organisers, audio and video editors, drum machines, podcatchers, synthesisers and most anything else related - so if you think it counts, it probably does!"

Schema.org : The rest of the universe has waffled on the news of this site launching. I found their data model page the most interesting.

Gephi.org : "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free." Looks fantastic!

PHP-classes : Just an interesting collection of useful PHP classes (or, more specifically, functions, but who's counting?)

Science and mixed bag

Latest earthquakes around the world : Brilliant resource for those of us who follow the crusts till the end of the world!

Evolution : Perhaps the best resource I've seen yet about evolution; massive, extensive, thorough, clear, and recommended.

Photo.stockexchange.com : "I was thinking at the differences between SLR and DLSR (in Manual mode). In both cases you can change aperture and shutter speed as it suits you. But with SLR you are stuck with the ISO of the film which you happen to have in the camera at the moment, while with DSLR you can vary ISO as you wish, too. Now maybe the question is naive, but how is this handled in practice?" Perhaps more than you ever wanted to know.

Roger Ebert's two-thumbs up : The latest line of movies deemed good by perhaps the worlds best movie reviewer (and by best, I mean smart, thorough, sharp, well-rounded and honest and spot on after all these years I've read his stuff. This guy thinks about movies the exact way I do).

Philosophy and religion

Something rather than nothing : The Unpublishable Philosopher keeps bringing the goods! I want to follow this one up in the future, it's really good stuff.

A taxonomy of fallacy : As brilliant as the title sounds.

Thomas Hobbes : "Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory"

Gettier problem : One of the more interesting problems of epistemology.

Atheism Is the True Embrace of Reality : The brilliant Paula Kirby writes; "Until 2003 I was a devout Christian. And I mean devout. I believed absolutely, and my faith was central to my life at that time. Various clergy thought I had a calling to “the ministry”; one even suggested I might have a vocation to be a nun. Now I am an atheist: the kind of atheist who is predictably referred to by religious apologists as “outspoken” or “militant.” So what happened? What happened was four little words: 'How do I know?' "

Philosophical Ignorance : What happens when a theology-based Calvinist proclaims that a statement of reason needs splitting hairs in order to complement his world view. I have my own follow-up at Sheltered Objections.

Historical Jesus : Jutified true beliefs? Epistemologically interesting take on the historicity of Jesus that must be taken seriously by believers for the rest of us to accept your claims as anything more than mere opinion.

xSiteable 3.0 and Jankles 1.0, first views

2011-05-10T19:46:00.001+10:00

Ok, time for a more serious update and a show and tell on what I'm currently working on. In my last blurb on this I talked about xSiteable which is the underlying framework used to create the application (which basically is an Intranet application) which we currently call 'Jenkles' (but might change if we find an even cuter name ...). And this time, let's jump straight to the application and get to the framework through it ;

Jenkles 1.0

Jenkles is basically an application for doing a few common things you might want for a portal, intranet or similar. It currently supports searching and browsing of documents, news and comments, various social media widgets (like Twitter). But the specifics of this isn't too important as they are to be extended and changed all the time.

Shown to the left is basically the front page which basically is a widget dashboard. You can add, delete and move widgets around (drag'n'drop) as administrator, or create pages where users can edit them yourself, like a personal dashboard. Everything is configurable, including the tabs at the top, all widgets, and the system is built on JQuery UI which means you can go to their website and roll your own complete look and feel.

In short, the main purpose of Jenkles is ;

1) Find, synchronize and harvest PDF (and a host of other formats to follow) files from a network drive.

2) Make documents accessible, searchable (in a few interesting ways, including faceted), browsable, previewable, printable, taggable, listable, etcable. And chuck in configurable meta data on top to create a document control system.

3) User access through (currently, more to come) Active Directory / LDAP. We've got NTLM support as well.

4) Widgets! Widgets for information access! Widgets for news! For fun! For profit! (And the next 3 months will be spent creating a bucketload of widgets, so join the fun!)

And of course the scope of the application will continue to grow as we and the community grows and extend it. The way it can grow is almost unlimited, thanks to the flexible plugin architecture of xSiteable.

Showing left is the browse functionality, but you can equally well browse documents through the faceted keywords searching, or other means as we develop them.

All documents have one page to represent them, with a preview pane, metadata sections (including document control if you're an admin), where the persistent identity scheme from Topic Maps come in handy. This is where we deal with all things identity control, including links from the document to various instances of control, be it internal or external (which might include a Wiki page that talks about the page in question, or even is the original editor place for it ... the options are endless)

xSiteable 3.0

xSiiteable is a framework I've been working on for many years. The first version was an XSLT framework that took Topic Maps input and spat out a complete website (there's a few dozen websites around the world running it still, poor things). The second version a heavy extension of that that was never released (due to laziness), and runs for example the National Treasures of Australia website. This is the third version which is some 3 years in the making, but things have dramatically changed.

The XSLT framework has been re-shaped into a kick-ass templating engine (still using some Topic Maps concepts, but is more about making good templating for professionals as easy and flexible as possible), but it is now a PHP framework created from scratch with some more modern ideas and concepts. I'll let the Wiki do the talking ;

xSiteable is a (yet another) PHP framework that tries it hardest to be simple, understandable, extensible, modern and flexible. It encompasses certain paradigms and technologies ;
event-driven; all class instances and their methods are driven by a structured event-stack, guaranteeing that every part of the framework is extensible, overridable, and fixable.
Everything is pluggable; all classes hooks into the event-stack as plugins, modules, widgets and actions. If it doesn't plug in, you're doing it wrong.
fully object-oriented and relying on PHP 5.3+ to make sure we don't spend a lot of time and code on past mistakes
topic-maps; a semantic technology for easily working with complex structures and meta data, and persistent identification management, and also makes parts of the framework ontology aware
a variation over the Model-View-Controller paradigm with more intuitive action classes
REST; embracing HTTP and resource-orientation as a way to leverage flexibility and scalability
HTML5 using the HTML5 Boilerplate templates as a base
JQuery and JQuery UI as a base for JavaScripting
XSLT for the best functional kick-ass templating out there

Basically, everything you do is write plugins and action classes that deal with the app and data, and XML templates to deal with the output (usually XHTML, but there's default support for XML, JSON, JSONP and text output as well)

Plugins, modules and widgets all share the underlying event-stack, and things happen in and out of it. There's a profiler in the logger. REST runs the underlying concepts of HTTP. There's a Topic Maps-driven data model for data interaction. And heaps of other goodies.

Sure, there's tons of PHP frameworks out there, some probably better than this one. But I do seriously think it embraces some very interesting concepts that makes it an interesting environment for rather quick development of complex application, without killing the fun, it's still easy to do, and is infinitely extensible including jumping on, overtaking and extending existing code and plugins.

Hopefully this sounds tasty. In some future installments I'll go through with some code examples and such, but do have a peak at the Wiki to see some good examples there, and otherwise let me know what you think.

Ubuntu 11.04 - disaster, fear, loathing, all wrapped up in one!

2011-05-02T22:13:00.000+10:00

I'm a huge fan of Linux (the kernel) and the many incarnations of operating systems that use from, from humble devices and cool smart-phones (using Android), to servers and desktop systems. It is today probably the most used operating system for computers today, and it all started in humble beginnings and embrace complete freedom and collaboration. It is nothing short of an amazing feat of humanity, thanks to an open and sharing geeky Finn.

I am myself an Ubuntu user of about two years or so. I've had various incarnations in the past (Red Hat and Slackware, specifically), but more or less found that Ubuntu was the distribution for me; easy to use, easy to maintain, stable, effective, well supported and well packaged.

And now, all of that might change. Well, all of the things about Ubuntu, that is. I started with Ubuntu 9.04, then I had version 9.10 for a while, and then upgraded to 10.04 (not without a hitch or two), and then a couple of months ago I upgraded to version 10.10 (which was a roaring success). If you look at the calendar you'd notice that my 10.10 upgrade is fashionably late, and that's because I have one principle in regards to upgrading my OS;

Wait at least 3 months until the forums are filled up with actual solutions to all the problems you might bump into.

And then on Saturday I broke my principle, partly because I felt brave and confident that Canonical (the people behind the Ubuntu distribution) had it all under control, and partly because of the success of the last upgrade. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the first problem was that I hadn't been paying attention to the gossip of the Ubuntusphere, and didn't know that they had replaced the Gnome2 window manager with Unity, a window manager spawned from a more successful netbook line of software. I'm sure it might have been a good choice for netbooks and lighter machines, or even lighter users, but for us heavy-weight developers it turned out to be a disaster, bordering on unusable.

Just like the disastrous change in Ubuntu 10.04 of moving the window control icons from the right-hand side (where we all know them, from Windows and Mac to most Linux) to the left (back to some distant past x-windows time-travelling exercise gone wrong) against all cries, and simply ignoring all usability issues that came from it, Unity brings with it a whole bucketload of additional confusing and counter-intuitive concepts. And, against the nature of Linux itself of complete freedom and a multitude of choices, Unity is pretty much non-tweakable. A lot of the time as I was trying to get to grips with the new user-interface I thought to myself, "surely there's a config option where I can tweak this to be usable?" but no such thing exists. Want the taskbar at the bottom instead of the left-hand side of the screen? Tough. The menus were confusing enough, but the plain stupidity of Unity as a screen real-estate saver then filled up with advertisement for programs I might want to download and install? Unbelievable. And moving the menus from the top-left panel where you could rely on a consistent and static place for all your programs and settings you now get a mish-mash of scattered options by right-clicking and clicking on "more" options! I'm sure a lot of it sounded cool on paper, but in practice this is just terrible.

Anyway, the biggest gripe I have (apart from shifting the window bar icons and titles into the top-panel when maximized!) is the new taskbar concept, which is a taskbar and quick-start menu, wrapped into one. It's similar to the Max OSX bar where you fly over your programs, and if it's running you get some little indicator that it is indeed already running, meaning instead of starting it when you click on it, you switch to it. Fine enough unless you're like me and have many windows of the same program open at the same time. At all times I have at least 7-9 Chrome windows open, each sporting an assortment of tabs. Want to switch between these windows? Why, simply flick your mouse to the left-side of the screen to open the taskbar (with the added delay until it comes up), scroll till you get to the Chrome icon, click it. It has a tiny indicator on it saying there's more than one window open, so you click it again where minimized versions of those windows zoom out and gets placed on the screen with a cool animation, and now you click the window you wish to switch to (and note the small windows have no titles just graphics, and if you squint really well you might pick out what the window might contain, but most of the time it's a random click'n'try process). So when I'm in multiple windows that rely on eachother (one window is the program I'm developing, another a test window, then there's the debug window, a JS debug window, documentation, and on and on) I have to go through this whole ordeal to switch between them if I was arrogant enough to want them maximized (and when you develop complex programs that is a guarantee). The only solution is to have them not maximized and placed around in some fashion where I can click on them, if I can read the window bar text. Horrible.

I'm almost lost for words as to why Ubuntu has chosen to now use Unity as the default window manager, given that a majority of users would still be geeks and more or less tech-savvy people. As a supplement, fine, but the default thing for all Linux geeks and users? Shocking.

Needless to say I was less than impressed, and pondered what to do. And then a stupid thought came to me; I just read about the sexiness of Gnome3, so why not try that? Yeah, a bit premature at this point, but I was seriously that disappointed with the whole Unity ordeal, willing to try desperate measures to get away from it (also, not realizing that Gnome3 and Unity are actually terribly similar, and if the story had a successful ending at this point, I'd actually probably been very, very unhappy at this point, so it's kind good that it didn't happen as planned).

Ok, so I found a page or two that showed how to add a ppa to do the trick, and a apt-get dist-upgrade later I rebooted. However I rebooted into a black screen where nothing except a solitary mouse happened. Oops.

Fast forward a number of reboots and apt-get install/upgrade gnome* later, I just thought, hmm, this isn't going to work. Could be graphics drivers, but I had a mouse so I had no idea. And reverting back to Unity was not really an option (as the big warnings had told me), however someone had made a ppa for purging the Gnome3 from the system. I ran that, and it make things even worse (but in a good way I learned later) where I couldn't even open a session of any kind. Ok, back to the terminal and Lynx trying to work things out, and then I stumbled upon a tool which I can't for the life of me remember (menustat, statmenu, something like that?), but is a console tool for tagging what your distribution should contain. So I tagged out ubuntu and in kubuntu (because I thought might as well give that a try), let the program churn away, and rebooted ...

... into a Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome 2.* classic user-interface. And yes, in hindsight I should have known that the way to do it is to log out of Unity, click my username again for login, but before putting in the password select 'ubuntu-classic' from a drop-down menu at the bottom, and then log in, and I would have gotten something almost like what I've got now, but doing it correctly is for wimps.

However, what I've got right now is somewhat better; it's a mutated mix of Ubuntu gnome 2.* and KDE (and I'll see what I want to remove, little by little), but in the purging effort it cleaned up a few snags I had been struggling with, like the graphics card (graphics now much smoother and faster), now unstuck options, some sound problems in some packages, and a cleaner theme throughout.

All in all, over the weekend I thought I'd screwed up my system seriously (although I did use the great Ubuntu One service to back up my essentials). But after a purge or two, everything snapped back to normal, all programs working, all personal settings intact. Now that stands as a testament to the greatness of Linux if nothing else, and I'm back to being a somewhat happy camper.

But I'm not happy in that I think Ubuntu is not going to be for me anymore. Both Unity and Gnome3 seems like a step in the wrong direction, so perhaps KDE is my next try, we'll see as the next version of the Ubuntu saga unveils. Or, failing that, this might be a good time to go shopping for another great distribution. The options are, unlike Unity, endless.

xSiteable coming along

2011-04-14T17:19:00.000+10:00

Just a quick note that the xSiteable framework is coming along nicely, and I've started to document it and clean it up ready for a release in a couple of weeks time. Yeah, I know, release small, release often, but there are some basics I'm going through right now that will impact it enough to make a 0.9 release bunk in a week or so, so I'm just holding out a little bit more.

Anyway, take a look at the introductory page I put up at GitHub, which should give you enough info ;

https://github.com/shelterit/xSiteable/wiki

And let me know what you think. This is the framework itself, and we're releasing the CMS / CRM / Intranet / DataWarehouse / ERP / DMS / whatever system as open-source probably at the same time, we just gotta come up with a name for it first. :)

Dumpty-dumpty!

2011-04-08T14:47:00.000+10:00

It's time again to dump a whole slew of links ;

Tech

ElasticSearch : Another newcomer of searchy goodness, open-source and on GitHub. Yummy.

MQL : FreeBase's MQL query language tutorial. Good food for thought.

HTSQL : A really interesting take on that juction between SQL and NoSQL.

A plugin pattern : A JQuery development pattern and tutorial.

HTML5 logo : When you want to express how cool you are.

JSON-LD : JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.

BackBone : This is one cool light-weight JavaScript framework. Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing modelswith key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Aloha Editor : A damn sexy WYSIWYG next-generation editor.

Lithium : Another sexy light-weight PHP framework.

Linux Sound Scopes : A nifty albeit somewhat outdated list of Linux sound gizmos and widgets.

Less Framework : Yet another less-is-more frameworks, this one for HTML5 and CSS templating.

Biology, science, philosophy

The Trouble With Testosterone : "In these essays, which range widely but mostly focus on the relationships between biology and human behavior, hard and intricate science is handled with a deft touch that makes it accessible to the general reader. In one memorable piece, Sapolsky compares the fascination with tabloid TV to behavior he's observed among wild African baboons. "Rubber necks," notes the professor, "seem to be a common feature of the primate order." In the title essay of The Trouble with Testosterone, Sapolsky ruminates on the links, real or perceived, between that hormone and aggression."

The Information, a natural history of information theory : "Gleick is one of the great science writers of all time, and that is, in part, because he is a science biographer. Not a biographer of scientists (although there is much biographical insight to scientists, mathematicians, lexicographers, writers and thinkers inThe Information), but a biographer of the idea itself, and the way that it ricochets off disciplines, institutions and people, knocking them into new, higher orbits, setting them on collision courses."

In memoriam: the x-phi debate : "The controversial new movement called experimental philosophy – 'X-phi' as it has come to be known – has generated both excitement and hostility in the philosophical community. Questions abound: Is experimental philosophy the wave of the future or just a passing fad? Can probing for the intuitions of the 'folk' tell us anything about philosophical truth? Are philosophers qualified to conduct empirical studies, or should this be left to the psychologists?"

Starting over - choosing my religion : "What form would the ideal religion take?" Interesting question, even though I strongly disagree with the conclusions.

A natural education? : A Christian take on the secular world of education. Again, good piece, but there's many flaws to be explored here, and I'll tackle that in my philosophy blog at some time later.

Miscellaneous

Tiburtina Ensemble : Here's a Czech vocal (mostly) ensemble that I stumbled upon by random, and boy am I glad I did. Pay especially attention to Hana Blažíková (which stars in a few of these productions, especially the "Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo", an oratorio by Antonio Caldara, one of my most favorite pieces of music) whom I posted a video of a few days ago; she's amazing, in no uncertain terms.

What movies do people regret watching? Some of these answers are good, but I expected more like my own story. Quite a number of years ago now, I was doing a project that needed some old footage of people snuffing (with the old snuffbox) and smoking and cavorting, so a few good black/white fast-moving silent movies, that sort of thing. I popped in a search, opened a few random movies to see what I've found (this was many years before Google, YouTube and previewing anything), and one of the movies that came up (auto-play, no less) was this little snuff movie (of the non-profit kind) of a woman who got shot in the head. I seriously, absolutely regret seeing that movie. It was a very dark and horrifying moment in my life, also due to the shock and horror of it all.

What are the most underrated movies? This is a seriously good list of films that are far, far better than their reputation and fame. Explore.

Ok, that's it. Enjoy, and I'll see you over the weekend.

Ubuntu 10.10

2011-04-07T12:06:00.000+10:00

I had held off upgrading my computer to the latest version of Ubuntu, because every time I do, something screws up. Maybe the sound disappears, or the mouse accelerates, or Java goes missing, or the graphics gets botched. Always something.

But I shouldn't have worried. I went to update manager, hit that 'distribution upgrade', waited an hour or so (lots of downloads on a slow line), one reboot, and everything worked perfectly on the first go. Not a single hitch. Not even a small one. In fact, something's even improved, such as my internal microphone started working. It looks better, feels better, responds better, and the fonts are vastly improved. Everything is just, well, perfect. Color me impressed, and thanks to the Linux community, Canonical and the Ubuntu team for making this awesome operating system that frankly, for me, couldn't be improved upon.

Antonio Caldara: Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo (6)

2011-04-05T21:10:00.000+10:00

I was very happy to find this gem today (and hopefully it stays up a while). I've been a huge fan of Antonio Caldara ever since that epic recording of his "Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo" with favourite soprano in the whole world Maria Cristina Kiehr, super-star counter-tenor Andreas Scholl and Gerd Turk from Cantus Koln (one of my favorite ensembles).

Hana Blazikova is a new find for me, but boy am I glad I stumbled upon her. Her singing is nothing short of fantastic, and as a bonus she's Czech which speaks to my half-Czech heart. :) But I truly love her version of Madelena, a more timbre version of Kiehr, more edgy, softer vibrato, and a rather clean ornamentation which I prefer. I wish I could find out more about who's playing and what event it is, though, but until I figure it out, let's make no mistake;

This video is amazing. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Options for an open-source project

2011-03-28T20:51:00.000+11:00

I'm nearing completion of the next generation of xSiteable, which used to be a "website generator in XSLT using Topic Maps" but has evolved over the last 10 years into "RESTful SOA, event-driven developer-focused, less-is-more PHP framework and super-cool XSLT templating layer, with a Topic Maps engine, full-stack plugin architecture, life-cycle-based event model, shaped around HTML5, CSS and JQuery" kinda framework, a little something I've tinkered with to fit all my many needs over the years.

Now, in my current job I'm creating a document-control, intranet, social web app thingy for a health-care organisation, and we've agreed to open-source the lot. So, I could use some advice, but here's the current plan ;

xSiteable is BSD licensed, and consists of the framework itself
a yet unnamed application written using xSiteable is released with BSD license as well

How should I distribute the two? Are the licenses ok? What source repository to use? Google Code, GitHub, what? (We've got both in subversion on a local server right now) xSiteable is really a collection of reusable classes where some are dependent on others, but not completely. Where to document the API's? Where to document examples and guides? How to attract users? Should I create a blog for it? And on and on.

Thoughts or ideas?

Updates, clarifications, revelations, forgiveness

2011-03-14T15:49:00.001+11:00

So, a little more time has passed, and what have I done to make sure that you, dear reader, still come back for more? Not a lot. So, here's a list of interesting tidbits one can ponder after the immensity of the Japan situation has eroded all sense of scale and importance of mere secular indulgences, without less of a technology angle this time to prove that I am, after all, human ;

Subnormality : Last week I ordered as a poster this fantaboulus comic which I fell in love with some time back, and it arrived in the mail a few days ago to much glee and satisfaction. My kids like it a lot, and it has been hung up in the best spot in the house where we mostly ponder the important things in life; the back of the toilet door.

Pigs Fly : A few months ago I was hunting beer at my local liquor store (Kiama Downs IGA on the corner), not expecting to find much more than rubbish Aussie beer (with a few exceptions, like Coopers), when the lady behind the counter surprised me with this treat from a local brewery (Bowral, home to Australia's perhaps most famous and loved cricketer, is in the Southern Highlands, about 1 hour north of here) called "Pigs Fly." I highly and absolutely recommend giving this a try; it is now officially my favorite beer in the world. It's that good.

Pictures : For Christmas I bought the "family" a new camera, since I wrecked our last one in an attempt to take pictures of water with a non-water camera (sorry, Julie!); A Panasonic Lumix G2, a four thirds system based camera that I'm starting to love to bits, allows me to really explore a more professional realm of photography. Apart from fabulous picture quality (pressing the right buttons, of course) there's a hack available to give you the option of doing 1080p resolution video in 60fps, which looks Awesome! I've dumped a few initial shots to my Flickr stream, but more to come as I refine skills and motives.

Sheltered objections : I've kinda decided to be a bit more pro-active on my old blog of philosophy, secularism and epistemology. It's been lying dormant as a rather busy life has rushed past, but things are settling down, and I want to start a series of analysis of various definitions epistemic notions people hold while talking about things in their normal lives. Oh, and I've been given a ton of various "religion X for skeptics" over the last little while, and I wanted to document not only what it means to be a skeptic, but also be a bit more explicit about why these pamphlets are failing.

Coffee : We've just got ourselves a nice little coffee machine, and I'm already quite good at making cappuccinos, mochas, and that Aussie favorite, long black (short black being a bit of an oxymoron). We got it at some garage sale for cheap because it didn't work properly, but I cleaned and fixed it up, and it works really good, and is quite fast and looks great. Come on over for a cuppa.

Pool : Did I mention that our house has a swimming pool in the back? Yeah? Well, you know what I love almost most of all when it comes to house maintenance? Grab my snorkeling gear, jump in, and clean that sucker out. The bubbles and quiet thundering serenity gives me great pleasure as I suck all sorts of grit into the cleaning tube, mix chemicals, and scrub walls. If you need a good way to dis-connect and revitalize after a busy week of work, this hits the spot for me.

Update!

Stewart Lee : A few months ago I stumbled over a link to Stewart Lee's documentary "Don't get me started", a smallish documentary on blasphemy, the religious conundrum of embracing and banning certain freedoms of expression at the same time, and his story about his musical "Jerry Springer: The musical" meeting with censorship and persecution of the religious. I've since gotten quite smitten with this comedian / writer / artist to the point of writing him a thank-you note to which I got a great reply as well (which now sits in my glory box, obviously).

I just wanted to show you this amazingly funny and fantastic clip where he's talking about "Top Gear" and their hosts. Tell me what you think.

Back to my roots

2011-02-16T16:31:00.000+11:00

Lately I've dived back into document control, content management and intranets and data ware-housing in general, a swarm of concepts and technologies I haven't played with in a while. Taking these breaks from certain areas is a good thing; it allows me to return to it at a later stage and witness how they've changed, often for the better.

But my return to this field hasn't been the happy smooth ride I was hoping for. Put briefly, the technologies and intellectual concepts within seems to me to still, uh, suck. I'm constantly living on the edge between people and policies in various organisations, and there's nothing more frustrating(1) than seeing the divide between good intentions and good actions, ever growing despite that people should know better.

The first thing I notice is that the concept of persistent identification management is no further than when I left it. Documents are still named silly things, and identifiers in systems that tries to deal with it still apply internal identifier schemes, and have no external facility for managing them, either sharing nor changing them. It seems to me that most of the technologies in the DC / CMS / KM space still has no good solutions to perhaps the problem that sit at the core of each of them.

Some user interfaces have improved, but not in the way I was hoping. Sure, things look smoother and prettier, and surely the misnomer "web 2.0" have injected it healing juices into old battered ideas, but they're still bad ideas at the core no matter what. It doesn't matter that the buttons look good or are big and shiny if the functionality behind them are fundamentally flawed. A document without external identity is still an internal abomination, even when the buttons are easy to hit.

Workflows are still sequential stop-points along a list of basic logic that only triggers on what we might think of, never of what should happen. The ontological concepts are often completely missed, if present at all. Roles and permissions are all ACL where, perhaps, human organisations don't function that way. Maybe that ACL model fits your network, but does it fit how we humans deal with information and knowledge? We humans might have permissions and access through it, but they do not cover our roles and positions in compound situations. I would have thought this was done better these days.

Wiki's have come a long way. I'm excited about using Semantic MediaWiki with Semantic Forms and a few other plugins, for doing essential super-rapid application development, but the Wiki user-interface have not improved much. The concept of every page simply being a point to which to hang knowledge is still mostly if not entirely missed, even by Wiki makers. People still think a Wiki page is just a page, when it should be a point of data to hang our other bits on to, including, ahem, identity management.

And don't get me started on the various and numerous CMS out there. There's now simply too many of them, and they all do pretty much the same with minor differences. It's almost a bit embarrassing that the field haven't progressed beyond the basic model they pretty much all offer. Even Drupal which claim to be different still, to me, feels and works, well, to a poor model.

So let's talk about the models. They're still the same. They haven't moved. It's all still based around the concepts of content, structure, users and plugins, plopped into a relational model that have to have a specialized table for any ontologically interesting concept you want to introduce. I don't understand, are most of these systems being developed with bribed from the DBA association or something?

Where are the semantic options? Where's the ontology editors? Where's the conceptual modeling tools for content and knowledge management? Where's the persistent identification schemes implemented so we can actually do, you know, integration of systems? Where's the simple data mergers that allow distributed and / or federated reporting?

None of these things are tricky in and of themselves, not even when merged into larger systems, unless, of course, they're rooted in old and stale ideas. Where's the new ideas? The bright and new ways of solving some of these old problems? What have I missed?

Mr Mister : Pull

2011-01-14T17:14:00.000+11:00

For those in the know, the 1980's and early 1990's was a period of music that was forever going to be synonymous with something, err, different, often so different that people that were into it now disown that thing; Ball sweaters, washed jeans, all of the hair-styles, leg-warmers, Milli Vanilli, Pat Sharp, Samantha Fox ... the list goes on. There was a certain plasticy fabric spun into our societies, often making things worse, but once in a while making it all heaps better.

I was a child of the 1980's, of course, and in my musical journey I was heavily into Al Jarreau, early fusion like Seawind, George Benson and some GRP productions, funkier Rufus and Chaka Khan, some rock and pop (bits of David Bowie, more of Toto, glimpses of David Foster and all his various incarnations, and so on), but slowly entering the underbelly of jazz and classical.

However. There was one band I was more into more than any other, and it all started with that well-known tune you still hear from time to time, "Broken Wings" by Mr Mister. Apart from being a good tune, there was something about the group that made them stick a bit better into my brain, something about the sound, the musicianship, the amazing lyrics (thanks, John Lang; you were loved!). I got the album it was off, of course, and the previous, and discovered that the groups frontman Richard Page was a already present in a lot of music I already listened to (especially David Foster and Toto stuff, Steely Dan, and so on). If anyone serious needed a backing vocal to create that special feeling, Richard was brought in. So I had a connection, and I followed the band quite closely, being nothing short of a fan. I loved the dynamic punch, the textures, of course Richard's brilliant voice (through the times has been offered to be vocalist to both Toto and Chicago, no less), the fabulous textures of Steve George, and, as a drummer myself, loved all the crazy in-your-face punctuations that Pat Mastelotto came up with.

They released their third album "Go on" which changed both sound and direction of the band. Less poppy, more progressive, a bit darker, but still distinctly Mr Mister, I loved it to bits (and Pat Mastelotto came out as a awesome drummer, now with real drums[TM]!). However, the record company was not too happy with the sales nor direction it had taken, and lead guitarist Steve Farris left (due to musical differences we have been told). The three Misters went into the studio, borrowed a couple of amazing guitarists, and made a fourth album anyway. And there it stopped. The record company didn't release it. The misters had gone from a poppy chart-topping act to being too serious for record company executives, and with little options at the time (it was the beginning of the curse of grunge) the band disbanded, and their album entered that mystical place of rumors, hearsay and myth, the record company vault.

They all moved on. (Ah, puns!) Richard page did bits and bobs, but mostly as a songwriter and the odd studio work (including a solo album that I love to pieces, but never got much traction outside of those in the know. Not sure if it was another record company slip?), including a couple of songs for Joe Zawinul (of Weather Report fame).

Meanwhile Pat Mastelotto joined none other than King Crimson (1994? - and is still there) and a few other cool gigs. A cool connection to another part of my music world is fellow King Crimson bandmember Trey Gunn (who use Pat a lot) also had another favorite of mine, the completely unknown Bob Muller as drummer for a while (and maybe still?), and Bob again is married to the amazing yet unknown Happy Rhodes (which I've written about before). The circle is complete.

21 years passed.

A couple of months ago that album was released. The mythical fourth album was to be heard, for some for the first time ever (there were a couple of dreadful bootlegs around, but I had resisted all those years) by Little Dume records (Richards' record company). I downloaded my copy a couple of days ago, and it's been sitting in my headphones ever since.

The anticipation and mythical status of something like this is sure to lead to disappointment, with a 20 year build-up to every expectation that "Welcome to the Real world" to the "Go on" progression mustered, so what's it like?

Well, I wouldn't write this long had it been anything short of great. But it's more than that. It superseded any expectation I had. It is simply that good, a true masterpiece. It's basically a step back from "Go on" towards a brighter, more progressive sound, with some of the tunes bringing back some of the best of the early 80's with the coolest sounds the 90's could offer. There's less guitar focus, and certainly tighter, more drums, and definitely more and better singing. Hmm, hard to explain, I know, but the album sounds as if it had been released now it would still sound fantastic. Now, I normally wouldn't do a song-by-song review, but I feel compelled to do so, not only because they all deserve the attention, but to bring some closure for me personally through the music as well; this is the fourth album that needs the context of the earlier three. Here goes.

1. 'Learning to Crawl' starts exactly like a song that builds on "Go on" should start, the piano work and darker tone, and progresses exactly like a song that's from "Welcome to the Real World" does, with various added twists like the layered singing, fresher drums, that catchy chorus, haunting backing vocals that drones away something that ends up in a cacaphony of a grungy "I wear the face." The perfect start.

2. 'Waiting in my dreams' start like other good tunes from the mid-80's acoustic era, quite Toto-ish of the time. But then something happens, the chorus turns terribly Mr Misterish, and turns that all upside down. Another round, and after that a progressive section that blows me away every time, starting with some cool harmonic vocal that leaps into a progressive section of drums, emphasized piano chords and, uh, pan flutes. Yeah, that sounds wrong, but it works. This also have some of the coolest triplet-based syncopated breaks from Pat yet.

3. 'Crazy boy' has some minor / major key swings that a really cool, a snazzy drum-track, and some very interesting guitar layering. This is a somewhat typical Mr Mister tune, I think, with a slightly edgy Richard singing in there as well.

4. 'Close your eyes' is a direct descendant of "Go on" with a twist, with a mid-section around 2:50 which simply screams for a Chicago or Seawind horn treatment! (I betcha if a horn section was available, this would be the bestest tune they ever did!) It has a great drive, and a fantastic refrain that takes me back to "I wear the face", with a few interesting synth twists worthy of Gary Numan.

5. 'Lifetime' is fast becoming one of my favorites, with some excellent guitar work flowing through what is essentially a grungier "Welcome to the Real World" tune.

6. 'I don't know why' is a curious one, taking a few steps back to "I wear the face" with blobs of "Welcome to the Real World" push, only this time with real drums, less guitar, and cooler singing (even to the point that they here sing about falling, too. 32, anyone?)

7. 'We belong to no one' is a real stand-out, a teenage child of "Broken Wings", with a great refrain and sexier drums, until I get my senses blow around 2:10. Beautifully done, with bridge dipping straight for a progressive refrain, building up to a great climax where Pat gets off really well.

8. 'Burning bridge' is another slower tune that starts as you expect a Mr Mister tune to start, and then something amazing happens! This is my favorite tune of the whole album, with singing that reminds me of Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Chicago and Steely Dan, a laid back track with just takes me away days gone by. Listen out for 2:10, a great cut. There's layered singing here that I simply love to pieces! Oh, and some really cool bass playing as well that you'll miss if you blink.

9. 'No words to say' is "Go on" legacy, with dreamier keys and perhaps the strongest lyrics on the album. Progressive, layered guitars, beautiful verse. Great tune.

10. 'Surrender' starts expectedly Mr Misterish, but then turns into a early Toto-esque ballad of sorts, before leaping into "Welcome to the Real World" drive with a "Go on" setup. And then excellent chorus singing through a progressive finish.

11. 'Awaya' Here Mr Mister is doing a Toto, by at the end putting in a mostly instrumental piece, with great drive, all musicians coming together for some fun time. A perfect ending to an amazing album.

What an odd thing; well worth the 20 year wait, still sounding as if just released (well, you know what I mean), and perhaps Mr Mister's absolute best. And most people will never know. But you should. It's that good.

Simply put; this is an awesome album, better than I thought it could have been. I'm in love again.

Happy guacamole!

2011-01-11T16:39:00.000+11:00

So, a new year is here. Again. I'm getting a bit sick of this straining repetition, but apparently the rest of society thinks it is quite alright. So.

A lot of stuff have happened. We've sold one house, bought and moved into another (and I'm sure I'll write more on this later), and various events have come and gone. I've gotten a new camera for Christmas which I'm excited about (a Panasonic Lumix G2), and I'm reading Bill Bryson's latest "At Home" which is brilliant as usual. Oh, and Mr Mister have released their album "Pull" after 20 years (!!), and it is AWESOME!

I'm writing a book. And I'm enjoying it, when I get the time to do it. I'm some 70 pages in, and it's about ... uh, part technology, part human and cosmological evolution, some laser shooting which defies the laws of physics, project management, opinions on the strong need for secularity, on music, and some more parts technology, programming and development, syntax and language, lots about language, and about libraries and culture, and then some. Yeah, so not your average book, but some people are interested, and I'm taking advice on publishing, format and schedule from anyone.

I'm opening ThinkPlot again, an organisation for people who care about the well-being of the human race and the world we live in in an intelligent fashion, to promote education, science and rationality amongst the people that live near you. Our patron "saint" is the late great Carl Sagan. I'm definitely talk more about this later.

Work is good. It's intranets all the way, interspersed with UCD, IA, UX, hacking, supervision, PMing, and all other goodies, and it's in the health-care system doing important work. So, yeah. Good stuff, and enjoyable. In fact, one of the things I've noticed is that in the few years since my last stints in the Intranet world not much have improved in terms of content and document management. The old systems that sucked have been overtaken by systems that also sucks, just in different ways. Enterprise systems of various kinds follow suit. There's so much bad software out there, even from people who should know better. So, yes, I've decided to make something funky from scratch in the Intranet space, using REST, Topic Maps and simpler development tools readily available. We'll see where it takes us.

Kids and wife doing fine. Kids winning awards, playing violin brilliantly, and growing up fine. (Crossing fingers!) Things are chugging along. Oh, and we've just been introduced to and getting hooked on Carcassonne, so now you know what we often do in the evenings. The beach is down the road next to the shop and cafe, and the pool in the backyard is a favorite past-time, so do come over. Things are good.

PS. Send more salty liquorice.

Tabulat Minor

2010-12-03T13:59:00.000+11:00

Not the best title in the world, but the time has come to yet again make a dump of interesting stuff that's come my way, and that I feel interesting enough not to kill the darn tab, taking up valuable memory and browser-loading-every-time-I-have-to-restart-it resources. So ;

Language, communication and Knowledge management

How all human communication fails, except by accident : "Wiio's laws are humoristically formulated serious observations about how human communication usually fails except by accident. This document comments on the applicability and consequences of the laws, especially as regards to communication on the Internet."

Integrationism - An integrational approach to communication : "an integrational approach to signs and semiological systems, and hence to all human communication"

Rendering knowledge : "I updated my original three rules of knowledge management to seven principles which I share below"

There is no “one true” top-level intranet navigation : Just a friendly reminder from James Robertson.

Programming and geekery

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages : The sort of funny geeky article that makes me chortle coffee out my nose.

XSLTForms : "allows browsers to manipulate XForms. This is an open source client-side implementation, not a plug-in or install, that works with all major browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and more)" - well worth some love and understanding.

The OpenRespect Declaration : Bringing a bit more respect and unity to open-source free-as-in-freedom development, started by Jono Bacon of Ubuntu fame. Not even sure I completely agree with this. Well, agree with sentiment, but I don't think I'm prepared to simply respect everything under the umbrella; there's too many arseholes in the world that do not deserve it.

Apache Zeta Components : "A high quality, general purpose library of loosly coupled components for development of applications based on PHP 5" - Yet another PHP collection of classes that will save the world from actual programming. I liked a few of these, though.

Semantic Web

Schemapedia - RDF schema compendium : Search engine for RDF vocabularies.

SIOC Core Ontology Specification : "The SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) Core Ontology provides the main concepts and properties required to describe information from online communities (e.g., message boards, wikis, weblogs, etc.) on the Semantic Web." - Something I should stick my nose in.

LODE - An ontology for Linking Open Descriptions of Events : "an ontology for publishing descriptions of historical events as Linked Data, and for mapping between other event-related vocabularies and ontologies"

Linked Data Tutorial - : Publishing and consuming linked data with RDFa : "The idea of linked data is at time of writing roughly three years around and the community has established a number of good practices and technologies. From publishing linked data [HOWTO-LODP] and URI management [COOL-SWURIS] over describing linked datasets [VOID-GUIDE] to linked data applications. A range of tutorials and guides is available and the number of triples in the linked data cloud keeps growing at a remarkable pace."

A(nother) Guide to Publishing Linked Data Without Redirects : "If we are going to fix fundamental problems with serving Linked Data, I'd prefer to explicitly address the fundamental questions related to URI naming of physical, conceptual and information resources (the overloading of the HTTP name space), so I proposed an alternative solution on the public-lod@w3.org mailing list last week. This post expands on those thoughts with some more detail."

There would be more things here, but I've lost a cobble of them over the last couple of weeks. I better get better at publishing these nuggets before I kill them.

Hello, world ; what are you?

2010-11-10T13:53:00.000+11:00

Hi there. Long time, no hear. Yeah, been busy again, doing stuff, acting up, playing around. You know, life.

But not only has life been busy, but my brain has gone into overdrive over the most absurd notions the last few months. It all kind begun when I was working for Free Systems Technology Labs in India last year when I was working, quite heavily, on a failed ontology that would be a compromising and pragmatic approach to the intersection between us social human beings and the concept of doing business. Yeah, so the scope was crazy right off the bat, but when did that ever stop me?

I'm now several months later still fiddling with it, because it's such an interesting concept; make a model, or a language if you like, of human doings. We all kinda do this every day, but unawares; when you talk to your neighbors and friends you use words that make up phrases that denotes some context you're trying to pin down; you're making a verbal version of a model in order for you to communicate a concept to another human being. All communication in the end fall down to this basic concept.

As they say, some models are useful, all models are wrong, and I've talked a lot about this in the past as well. But what I'm pondering these days is more the fuzzy intersection between things and our thoughts on them, or, to be a bit more specific, between the identity of things, and the things themselves. Here's an example ;

"Alex."

Now, that's just my name, and in the context of reading it on or through my blog, it's fairly easy to assume that my first name somehow refers to me, the person. And you'd be right, too. Except, not really ; It's just a word. Here's another one ;

"Respect."

For some reason we all think that words actually mean something, but they don't! Not a single word you see will have one - and only one! - meaning. Any one word can have millions of meanings, depending on where you see it, what mood you're in, what other words surround it, what language it's in ... so, it depends on context. Heavily. Seriously. Unconditionally.

Even a word such as "respect" can mean so many things, and yet, in our everyday lives, we use words like this as if they make perfect unambiguous sense. Even written down in big serious books we tend to think our words as proper guides for meaning and context, but we're pretty much wrong. All communication fails, it's more a question of the severity and complexity of that failing. Even me writing this blog post is an example of a fail. Hopefully it's up to you to tell me how badly I failed. Be gentle.*

* See what I did there?

Canberra House for sale

2010-10-15T09:16:00.000+11:00

Ever wanted to live in the best cutest little house in Cook in Canberra? Why, here's your chance!

Me and the family has taken a decision to live down the coast (in amazing Kiama) near the beach, basking in the sun, frolicking in the sub-tropical rain forest, sipping good coffee in the many cafes around here, and generally live in paradise for a while, if you know what I mean. So. In order to buy that house near the beach with a swimming-pool (no kidding), we need to sell our beloved house back in Canberra. It is with great sadness I hereby introduce ;

Viewed: Fond memories and hours of work

Have a look, it's a gorgeous little house in a fantastic area. When I worked for the National Library of Australia, which is beautifully situated down by the lake, I had a 7 minute commute in the car, or, 35 minutes of a couple of buses. Jamison shopping center, a mostly charming and smaller group of shops, is just around the corner. There's good stuff all around, with magical Mt. Painter just over the hill, great for walks, and especially if you've got a pet or three. Our backyard is quite large, and perfect if you've got a dog or two, with beautiful trees both front and back. And the cubby-house is a gorgeous little thing I built in Norwegian style with my father-in-law. Wish I could take it with us.

I love this house, and I'm sad to see it go. But the beach beckons me!

Canberra House for sale

2010-10-15T09:14:00.000+11:00

Viewed: Fond memories and hours of work

Jokes

2010-10-13T12:52:00.000+11:00

So, I presented at the OzIA 2010 conference on Friday and Saturday, and since I was the last one out, I thought I'd try to lighten the mood a bit. As part of my presentation I thought I should try to come up with a couple of jokes, you know, to lighten things up, break things up, bring out the happy. But what jokes? I didn't know any Information Architecture jokes.

So I made some up.

Most sane people would stop right there, evaluate what they were doing, and admit that perhaps inventing comedy when there's a distinct lack of talent in the pertinent area perhaps is a bit stupid. Needless to say, that didn't deter me one bit. Here's the first ;

An inquisitive person walks into a bar, however he's grumpy, looking for a fight. He bumps into an information architect, who proceeded to teach him a lesson.

Now, after I told the first joke there was a deafening silence, despite the fact that I had even planted the idea amongst some of my friends there to at least try to laugh at them. Nothing. This surely would have thrown off the best of sane presenters anywhere, but not to ever be deflected or impacted by complete failure I went on to tell the next one ;

A usability researcher walks into a bar. The bartender asked what he wanted, and the usability researcher wrote that down.

Ok, a few giggles for that one, I suspect out of sympathy for the presenter who was bleeding all over the stage. Having ran out of blood, I delivered my piece-de-resistance ;

An interaction designer walks straight into a bar. Not a very good one, is he?

At this point a few more giggles were heard (perhaps my friends remembered that I'd ask them to at least try to laugh, and withstanding the gagging reflex managed to croak something that could be mistaken for laughs?) while I was given a mop by someone off-stage.

Personally I think it went rather well, but I think I've learned my lesson, and the next time I'll do interpretive dance instead. You have been warned.

Bottlebums and snigglecrocks

2010-09-20T15:04:00.000+10:00

Alright, time for another dump of all those tabs and open browser windows I've got lying around, wasting precious computer memory, but yet in need of recognition and a place to feel safe and warm ;

Longform : Hand-picked, longer articles and essays, on all sorts of topics. A must-read.

PhD school in pictures : When you need a quick way to determine what education is all about, why we venture down academic crazy paths. Make sure you continue reading and scroll to the very last image, and read about the reason why this person does what he's doing. Poignant, powerful and heart-breaking, all at the same time.

Free downloading and the creative process : Trey Gunn, mostly famous for being part of King Crimson for a number of years, has two very good and even more interesting posts on DRM, free and / or pirated downloads and being a professional musician. (Part two here) Of further note here is also that Trey's drummer is the fantastic Bob Muller (here's a video of Trey and Bob playing awsome stuff), husband of the other fantastic Happy Rhodes, both of who for some baffling reasons aren't super-famous.

What is design? : A PDF link to an interview with famous architect and designer Charles Eames. Brilliant, and worth memorizing.

UX podcasts : A nice series of interviews and snippets related to the user experience world. My old buddy Donna Spencer is on there, as well as James Robertson.

Traits : Could anyone explain how they are terribly different from multiple inheritance, apart from apparently being run-time? Here's the PHP proposal by Stefan Marr who looks to be into some really cool stuff (subscribed, of course).

I also wanted to do a philosophy-related dump of links, but I need to clear some space in my head for a more substantial blog post for that, and I'll probably dump that on my other fuzzy blog instead, but I'll tell you all about it in due time. I'm going through some pretty heady times in terms of deterministic dissing of the compatibilist stance of free-will, mixed with a comparative specific notion of time (not model A or B) that dips into evolutionary psychology, outright reducing folk psychology to an evolutionary artifact on which our cultures are built which is wrong, wrong, wrong. But, eh, I'll get back to you on that one.

Tabs dumping

2010-09-03T13:27:00.000+10:00

I'm in dire need to dump all the interesting stuff lounging around in my various tabs in various browsers (don't we all use more than one browser at a time?), so I can make more space for whatever weird stuff that comes my way. I'm sure this particular collection will say something about where I'm mentally up to these days, but I have no fear! So here goes ;

Hawking hasn't changed his mind about God : This one is an obvious story from this week, about one of the smartest people in the world making obvious declarations about the nature of, well, nature, but it's interesting all the same, coupled with some other news about being able to test the merits of String Theory.

What happened to behaviorism? : Is Skinner dead? Well, yes, but is he truly dead? As in, Schrödinger's cat dead?

Amateur astronomer reporting a UFO : It is said that there's a good reason astronomers don't report UFOs, because they most likely know what they're looking at. But what happens when they don't?

What is morality? : Another brilliant endeavor by Luke Muehlhauser, a nice little introductory eBook on moral philosophies.

Infrasound : Yes, interesting in its own right, but have a look at the Ghost on the Machine, when you instead of thinking you're seeing ghosts you investigate properly and think scientifically; a whole new world can open up and be explained a lot better.

Did freedom evolve? : Evolutionary epistemology and free-will, what can be more fun?

Journal of Evolution and Technology : Good guy Australian philosopher and author Russell Blackford not only pointed me to this eminent online journal, he's also writing for it in various capacities. It looks really good, a must read. (And both him and me are present in the blog comments on the previous item)

Porter Stemmer : Don't stammer, stemmer, with Porter. Mince words, not meaning. Cut words down to their stems, and use that for semantic analysis.

Protovis : A brilliant data visualizer toolkit which I'm using quite a lot these days. And simple to integrate into stuff. Um. Like, Topic Maps. Yeah, I'll blog more on this later.

Salut Baroque! concert, and true love

2010-08-26T14:25:00.000+10:00

Ok, so last night I went to see the disgustingly good Salut Baroque ensemble at the Conservatory of Music in Sydney, and I got mostly what I expected (Hans Diether Michatz [who's student Shaun Stewart is my two girl's violin teacher!] in his normal good form, Valmai Coggins getting more and better sound out, Tim Blomfield doing his usual funky bass violin, the beautiful Monika Kornel making me wish I was a harpsichord, Sally Melhuish keeping it all together) with a few new faces worth noting ;

Matthew Greco was a new name (and face) to me, playing remarkably well (although the Folia could use some extra booyah!) and with an extraordinary body language. He seems to be involved in a lot of good stuff, so I'll keep me ears open for more. Brilliant left-hand technique.

Simon Martyn-Ellis was a pleasant addition to the line-up; mellow playing smooth as silk which I'm sure he's "inherited" from one of his teacher, the best lute / theorbo player in the world (uh, yeah, I'm biased), fellow Norwegian Rolf Lislevand (of Jordi Savall fame, and who was musical director of the last concert I went to in Norway, the 1610 Vespers by Monteverdi, and you see him briefly in this video I recorded from the event and which I wrote about here). Or maybe he's got talent, who knows? :) Really nice playing.

Then there was soprano Anna Fraser which had a most delightful timbre to her voice! No unnecessary vibrato, no fake phrasing, just full goodness the whole way. Loved her voice.

And then there was my new love, soprano Jane Sheldon, who blinded me with her expressive and passionate rendering of anything she did, clear, passionate and full of life, no silly-billies or cheap courtesying, beautiful as a summers evening. Even sitting still she moved in the most enthralling way. Of course I can't here write a love letter without lamenting much about the meaningless of life away from mountains and the severe lack of spring in my walk to and fro work, so I'll spare you the details, except to say that she did a most thrilling Zefiro Torna I've ever heard a non-Italian ever do (yeah, I'm a Monteverdi geek).

Oh, Salut Baroqe, you tease me and pain me and drive me crazy with all that I long for. Until next time, thanks a lot.

Updates and recommendations

2010-08-18T16:59:00.000+10:00

Right, so here's where I'm up to these days ;

I'm working for a local (but fairly large) health care provider as their intranet guy (building an empire from scratch, and may well include Topic Maps) both in design, implementation, usability, and process management, a role that is being expanded crazily with every day as we discover new territories to conquer and submit to our new reign of knowledge management. So yes, I'm actually enjoying it, even though the challenges are sky-high and densely packed.

I'm writing a book tentatively (and probably) called "The well-tempered monkey" (with some fancy sub-title, I'm sure), and it's about evolution, baroque music, the IT industry, software development, human psychology and cognition, category theories, philosophy, geeks, procreation and laser-guns! I'm roughly 1/4 finished with the first draft, and it contains heavily edited blog posts, lots of new writing and thinking, and my own pictures and designs. (Can an eBook embed music? If yes, I'll put some of my music in as well for good measure) Looking for tips, but think I'll make it a eBook-friendly PDF with a donate button at this point, unless you have a better way.

A good friend and librarian / cataloger Saskia has started a new blog called "All things cataloged", and she is well-versed in the black art of Topic Maps and identity management. You should check it out, it's good stuff.

Today I stumbled upon a Dutch version of a Norwegian classic by Sigrid Undset on a lonely bookshelf in the corridors of a health care facility in Albion Park, Illawarra. Man, that was a seriously crazy moment!

I'm closing in on xSiteable RESTful event-driven resource-oriented PHP framework for enterprise application development with embedded Topic Maps / identity management. I've started documenting the thing, and I'll release it soon-ish, I think. It also feature a funky Topic Maps-based XSLT dynamic GUI templating framework that I think should be a project all by itself, but hey, I'll throw it in for good value.

I've created a number of upper and core ontologies that I might release at some point, some of them obviously designed for more fuzzy Intranet stuff, but I'm increasingly getting all representialist on my arse, outing basic category theory and generally thrashing the good name of entites everywhere. I feel a long blog coming on.

Did I mention that all enterprise knowledge management software friggin' sucks? Like, sucks balls? All of them. I've tried them all, extensively, and they all just fail the one simple rule I've got; make KM easy for people. Confluence, Atrium, Documentum, SharePoint, SocialText, LifeRay, all the portal apps and associated server technologies, Vignette, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun (hehe), I could go on and on, they all SUCKS BALLS! They are technologists solutions to human problems, and failing basic compassion and respect for the generic user! Usability is not about pretty friggin' colors and cute graphics! I'm disgusted with the state of affairs as the usability of these things have not improved much or at all in the last 20 years I've worked in this field. (And yes, I'll friggin' make my own, I'm sick of this ...)

Anyway, on that happy note, life isn't so bad, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next crazy chapter in my life. We'll talk soon.

I would think that, too

2010-08-03T20:59:00.000+10:00

If I were you, I'd think that this blog didn't exist anymore, that it was abandoned and left behind in some digital heap of leftovers and unwanted peripherals. But no, it's still here, still serving your humble host as a way to express himself. But wait, if that is true, where is it? Where's this expressions you speak of?

Fair question. And the answer is a bit complex, but since my Indian adventure ended I've had a really shitty time finding proper income, especially given that I live in a region that is chemically free of IT jobs. It's pretty here, and life is nice and slow, but my family can't live off pretty and nice and slow (or so my wife and kids tell me). I've done a smidgen of contract work, but laughable as it stands, and it has in general been quite difficult for me to focus on much else. Of course I could vent here every day about my struggles, especially the vile and evil ways of the recruiter (and a lot of blame has to fall on those morons who hire them; shame on you) but I've been sparing you, good reader, from a repetitious stream of vile and frustrations.

Sure, some interesting things have happened, and a lot of it will be revealed in due time. But right now things are slowly falling into place (although not all is as good as it could be), normality returns, and I'm having a cup of tea before bed, and wanted to pop this message out there that things are looking up, if only for a brief moment.

One thing that has happened which I'm somewhat excited about is that I've decided to write a book, and I'm already 50 pages of edited and (re-)written materials. the title and contents will come a bit later, but I'm thinking of a self-publishing model in eBook form, but I'll take any advice at the moment. (It's a book for technology developers, managers and entrepreneurs - very broad in scope! - on the more philosophical side of things)

Anyway, I'll let you in on the details of work later. I'm in Australia for now, but there's a Norwegian adventure possibly a bit later on, but as with all things in my life, the details are light and fluffy.

Can you just stop this obsession with books?

2010-06-28T11:04:00.000+10:00

Hey, Library. How are you? It's been a while since we last had a serious talk, but I've been busy. Anyway, I've got a few minutes to kill before I have to fly off again, so care for a cup of coffee or something? Great!

So, how have you been? Busy, eh? Yeah, I know the feeling, always striving towards the future, making things better, solving more complex problems, finding within yourself which path you should travel, all those things. Yeah, I've been busy, too. Life is always in motion, always changing, and we cling to those things that don't while learning and re-learning to let go of that which does.

Oh, that's not what you've been doing? Right, you've ... tinkered with FRBR? And you're excited about RDA? No, no, I'm not disappointed, I just thought, you know, the last time we talked that we knew that was a bit of a dud, you know? That the future of the library isn't in, well, bibliographic?

Look, Library, I know you love your books, I really do, but didn't you agree with me that the world was more than just books? Yeah, so why are you still obsessing with them? Why is your world still revolving around small rectangular physical paper-based objects with words in them when there is simply so much out there? Heck, there's even all of that stuff in the books available in other formats and mediums, too, but you seem to just have a fetish for paper? What's up with that?

Can you just stop this obsession with books? It's not healthy for you. You go on and on about the measurements of the paper, what it weighs, you talk only about what it looks like, who wrote it, when it was written, who printed it, and so on. In fact, you go on and on about how to simply read and describe the title of the darn thing, and not once do you dig into the content of the thing to tell me what this thing is really about. Sure, you pop out some keywords about it, but seriously, you got all that from reading the sleeve cover, I mean, come on, have you even read the darn thing?

Look, I know why you do this; so that, through your brilliant description, others might find it when they search for whatever you described it as. The problem is that the ratio of getting it right for all people is about the word-count of the book itself. It's not good to have a few butchered select words about a tome of knowledge or inspiration. You're not helping people on their path with this sort of stuff. People are not interested in books. They are interested in its content.

You need to stop talking about books, and seriously - as in, right now! - start talking about content. Otherwise, all that will be left of you will be an epithet of what you once was. And I hate to see you down, my friend, I really do. But the power to change is from within. You will have to want to change. I'll help if you like, heck, we all will! We all love you and think you're the greatest, but seriously, you have got to change, you have got to shape up and lose that bibliopheliac addiction.

Ok, sorry to sound so glum and direct, I don't have the time for a long boring committee meeting. Thanks for the coffee, by the way, it was great. And great seeing you again, I've missed our little chats! Take care, ok? And call me if you need anything, alright? Love you. See you later.

Updates : Hate and rage

2010-06-24T16:26:00.000+10:00

Hi, folks. It's been quiet from me for the last little while. This whole "chasing up a new job" thing has kept me busy, and, to be frank, rather uninspired. But I should keep you updated (so I shall do that at the very end of this post), but I also need to vent before I explode!

Recruiters.

That word I've just written up there? It's a synonym with "arsehole." (But wait, there's more! I could add 'incompetent' and 'nasty' without blinking!) Not because they will come right out and be arseholes; no, that would be terribly unprofessional of them and possibly lose them money. No, they are arseholes in a subtle but deviously efficient way.

I had a stint a few years ago dealing with recruiters when I wanted to quit working for the National Library of Australia. I sent out my CV, wrote letters, wrote emails, called and talked with them, on and on. Those experiences are mirrored by my experiences of late. But before I leap into a lament, let me ask you something, where "you" are people in companies and organisations across the globe who might be looking for good people to join their team :

Why the bloody hell do you use recruiters? What is it that you hope to gain from using them? Is it simply that you think that quality people are queuing outside their shop, waiting for those skilled recruiters to match the perfect candidate up with your perfect job description? Seriously? Is that what you think? Because if that's so, I feel the need to tell you that that is not what's happening.

Recruiters are evil. No, no, it's true ; they do not care about the people involved in the recruiting process, they care about their commission in doing so. They are evil, money-sucking bastards that don't give a rats ass about who they match with whom, and so in being arseholes they treat people like crap. Unless they feel there's a slight chance of a match they simple will not contact you, they will not answer your emails or calls. And what do they base their matchability on?

Shit skills. Every time and every single recruiter I've had the pleasure of "talking" with during this last month of riding the Boogeyman their complete lack of understand of what the hell I was talking about was shockingly clear. The client wants a senior developer with MySQL skills, and I say "No problem, I know mySql, in fact I've been doing Sizzle for the last year." You can hear the humming buzz on the line as the other side tries to process this. I say "It's a MySQL fork". More silence. "So, you haven't done any actual MySQL work, then? Ok, that's too bad ...", so I interrupt "What? No, I've done MySQL for years [I mean, for fuck sake, I've been a web developer since 1997!], I was just pointing out that I'm really into the matter of things and hack on forks and play around with unofficial features through MariaDB and ...". Recruiter breaks in with, "so, er, mariaDB, right, so no recent MySQL work, then?"

Or when asked about PHP I said I've done Zend Framework for years, which the job description mentioned as a bonus. "Right, but have you done any PHP work?" Or when asked if I know SCRUM, and I said sure, and that I've done a bit of MODENA of late as well. "So, no real SCRUM experience, then?" Or when asked about if I know XML well, and I say that, sure, I've even created a full Topic Maps engine in XSLT, written a canonical XML dataset serializer (for some obscure project), and get a "well, I meant if you have any core XML skills?" Obviously not. Or how about being asked

Look, people, you're putting these people in charge of finding you the best people? Please don't. Every company I get direct contact with I have a good open dialog with. Recruiters are fucking areholes who treat people like disposable napkins (fit for wiping their saliva from thinking about their commissions, I suppose), and you should not use their services. It's not good for your organisation, nor is it good for the progress of humanity.

Right.

Now, the update. It's very short; I had 6 good leads. I blew one (I aimed too high with that one), 2 were with recruiters (and obviously they don't get back to you unless someone has thrown money at them, so I'm counting them out as I cannot find out what the actual companies are), 2 are in Norway (and they're pretty good, in as much as if nothing else happens within days, we will decide to move back to Norway), and 1 up-in-the-air with a really funky company locally that has great potential (but might fail due to time).

So, all in all, we're in a pretty downy, unstable, crazy place. We're considering taking off for a couple of weeks in a camper-van and see the south coast, but we'll see. Frustrations are running high, and I think the family needs to chill for a little while.

Take care!

Topic Maps visualisation

2010-06-03T14:24:00.000+10:00

I've had a screenshot of a demo I made some time ago just lying around on my desktop, sulking for being forgotten and ignored for so long. I guess I wanted to polish the demo up and make it live at some point, but I've been distracted by a pandemonium of butterflies that has taken up room in my house of late, so I'm just going to dump it here ;

What you're seeing is parts of the Opera Topic Map by Steve Pepper represented as a Treemap (similar to the Protovis thing that Patrick linked to today), and the concept work well as a way to browse around the Topic Map itself, even through smooth zooming in and out of large and small groups of things.

The next fun thing is another tool I've made that takes some YAML structure or XTM as input, and create pretty decent graph representations of the map using GraphViz ;

This one is an ontology that is especially made for a portal I'm doing for Claudio Monteverdi, the baroque composer (and a hero of mine). Here's what a partial input looks to get the idea ;

   Music:
   (c) Work:
   (i) L'incoronazione di Poppea:
   (i) Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria:
   (c) Form:
   (i) Madrigal:
   (i) Motet:
   (i) Canzonet:
   (i) Mass:
   (i) Trio sonata:
   (i) Opera:
   (c) Style:
   (i) Primo prattica:
   (i) Secondo prattica:
   Person:
   (i) Monteverdi, Claudio:
   (i) Monteverdi, Baldasarre:

This method is perfect for sitting down with customers and clients, and just jot out models, ontologies and concepts; all you need is a text editor. (You'll notice that assocs are made through (c) (i) and a few others, which basically are assoc templates you can define more of, so a meta ontology for ontology construction. Yay! :) It's a couple of PHP classes (one of them being the PHP Topic Maps engine I've talked about before that I'll wrap up if I get some spare time) that generate DOT from the input, and serves up a generated image on refresh, so basically you edit the text file, save and hit refresh. Very fast. I might even consider an inbuilt editor in the browser, but pah!

Anyway, just a quick dump there. I'm also working on a far more complicated TM visualisation thingy using RaphaelJS to play directly on the HTML5 Canvas using native and SVG graphics, and it's looking very good so far. I'll show you more when things gets closer to something I won't hide in shame over ...

Need my brain?

2010-05-28T10:07:00.000+10:00

Recall how I have been neglecting my blogging due to just too much work these days? Well, the day when the crazy busy stops is today. After working non-stop with some pretty lofty crazy funky Topic Maps stuff, getting some traction on the potential and seeing some light at the end of a very busy tunnel, it's a bit odd for me to announce ;

My project has been canned for strategic reasons, and I'm out of a job.

Well, now, things move quick around here; the one moment I'm crazy busy doing crazy stuff, next I'm crazily trying to figure out what to do next. If anybody need a brain for hire, this is your chance!

The stupid thing is that I live in the Illawarra / Wollongong area, an area renowned for lack of jobs and being chemically free of IT and innovation (the local government tried to fix that by calling Wollongong 'the city of innovation' and build a huge innovation center that's too expensive for any upstarts to get into). I guess this is a good time to link to my LinkedIn profile, no?

However, I'm not bound by that we must be living here. I'll go anywhere, especially interesting places, interesting countries. I've got three little kids to worry about so I can't jump too quick, but I certainly can hop around New South Wales and possibly Canberra, and sort out where to live after that. Or I can telecommute, or fully work from home. I'm not fussy at this point.

I guess this is where I tell you what I can do; through my 20+ years career I've chewed over and gained specialist expertize in just slightly too abstract things, like Topic Maps (a fantastic technology that doesn't exist in Australia, but obviously should and you should hire me to teach you how to kick arse!), XSLT (a fantastic technology far too few use and truly understand, but you should and you should hire me to teach you how to solve complexity with simplicity!), AI (a crazy notion only researchers use, and I'm not a qualified researcher, but you should hire me just because you value solutions over credentials!), library technology and science (a dying cluster of concepts, but you should hire me to get you up to speed and make you thrive and survive!), epistemology (don't even know where to begin with this one, but you should hire me because I'm telling you!), and training / speaking / coaching on a mixture of the above (been on the conference speaking circle a bit, and held tons of training sessions and seminars). I guess more conventional stuff I can do out of the box is complex PHP (lots of that the last few years) and front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, JS/JQuery, the usual suspects) and middle-tier stuff (JSP, JSF, XSLT, a bit of Ruby, a pinch of Python, Perl if I'm crazy, ASP / .Net to some degree) ... heck, I used to be a proficient C developer in my early days, and there's really no language I can't meddle in. Oh, I know; I'm big on architecture with SOA concepts and REST technologies, although I'm not one of those who think the UDDI is great and promote ESB or any somesuch bundle of WS-* wherever I go, even though I can do that, sure (but I'd recomend a RESTful approach for a simpler and richer infra-structure). I've created CMSes of various kinds, frameworks (event-driven, load-balancing, etc.) and APIs, query engines, Topic Maps engines and KM platforms all from scratch, so it feels a bit silly to explain what I can and can't do. There's probably nothing I can't do as such.

My strong side is being creative, though, to see possibilities, opportunities and plan for that in mind. I'm one of those who embrace somewhat agile methods without being an agile-head (coaching is, in fact, a satisfying way of getting things done), and have a special interest and knack for project management. If you need a project manager with a coaching style in areas of knowledge management and using Topic Maps, well, you know who to call. :)

Anyway, in the off-chance that you think I'm the guy to help you out, you can reach me all the time at alexander.johannesen@gmail.com. And if you've got pointers, point me there, or point your pointers here. It's a tricky situation when it happens this abruptly, but I took a risk going into this project, so I knew this was an option. Let's just hope it pans out alright. And thanks for any help you can provide in this crazy time. :)

What I did last weekend ...

2010-05-21T17:18:00.000+10:00

I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but work and, uh, work got in the way. However, as a band-aid for low blogging I bring you a special edition of "What I did last weekend!"

The week before (Tuesday? Wednesday?) I was out on my lunch-time walk to get much needed coffee (a poor substitute for Masala and / or proper Chai tea), when I was coming back up the hill I noticed something interesting in front of me ;

On a trailer of a big four-wheel off-road monster of a car, a big white boat similar to the modern fishing vessels around down by the harbor was attached, except it was all white with a big blue logo on its side which read "Australian Museum."

I was intrigued, and I wondered to myself if they were lost or something, accidentally taking a wrong turn to somewhere exciting and had to turn down our street to get directions or something. I had stopped, and while pondering these things, a lady came out of the rental house it was parked in front of, and we started some idle chatter about why this boat (with all its magical capabilities) were here of all places.

Well, it turned out that the Australian Museum once a year goes out on a collecting excursion to collect samples for both the collection and for scientists as well. I showed some vague interest in the matter (I think I fell to my knees, pleading for insight, frothing at the mouth), and was invited in to have a look at their setup. I got up, and skipped into the house like a little girl, giggling and grinning all the way.

I looked at their photo setup, talked some technical stuff, and then moved downstairs to their lab setup. They were a bunch of people (6 in total, I think) of about my age and up, and I had a quick glance and a lovely but quick chat with them as I mentioned that I'd love to show my kids, and we were all invited back on the weekend.

That's what I did last weekend; I took Lilje and Grace down to their lab, and we got stuck talking to the most wonderful bunch of scientists for about 2 hours. They showed us their findings, specimens, the worms and other invertebrates, plants, shrimps, urchins, you name it, all sorts of little critters who mostly got put in formalhydrane for an all expenses paid trip to provide us with knowledge.

The kids loved it, and I loved it, and I wish to thank the team and the museum for brightening our day and for shining light into dark corners.

Of models, frameworks and the paradigm shifts we don't see

2010-05-06T14:42:00.000+10:00

I need desperately to talk about models. I hunger for them, I need them, I love them! They are pretty, of course, arousing us and making us do silly things like buy stuff we don't need, or fooling us into buying something we think we need but we later find out that we're a bit stupid, we were mislead by the models winks and beautiful attire. However, they are often more than just skin deep, more than just the abstract notion of our perversion to objectify everything we see. Confused yet? These models are not found on the cover of glossy magazines.

These models are everywhere. They are how the brain takes a group of concepts - be it physical objects or knowledge nuggets in our head - and plonk them all into a grouping of sorts, and draw lines of meaning between the new group and the old it knows about. Together they form anything from thoughts to language to the reasoning used when voting. Between person A and political issue B we draw a relation type "opinion" with opinion C. A few fuzzy million of these, and we can pin you down pretty well.

Where do models live in our various systems? Well, they live in language, for the most part. And this is not some cryptic ballyhoo I'm inventing here, so I'll demonstrate with the humble book. Let's look at a description of a book in the foreign and mysterious language called Eksemelle ;

The book

<book>
   <title>Some title</title>
   <author>Clemens, Samuel</author>
   <pompador>In a nutshell</pompador>
</book>

"book", "title", "author" and "pompador" mean something to someone. To most people who understand the English word "book", it means those rectangular objects made of dead-trees that's got some kind of letters and / or pictures in them. They are, as we say, semantic in that they have meaning to those who knows what those words mean. Here's the word "book", and it has a definition of sorts; that is explicit semantics. But then there's the implicit semantics of what those words mean in terms of this being an XML snippet, maybe from a specific bibliographic format, maybe with an even more specific XML schema (unless the XML schema is made explicit through something like a DOCTYPE). And finally there's the tacit semantics in the space between the model, the framework, and the people who work with it. Let's explore these shark-infested semantic parts.

How are they semantic? In what way are they meaningful, and to whom? Well, let's start with who. No model is really valuable unto itself; there's always some external framework that understands (and appreciates?) the model, some "thing" that looks at and interacts with that model in order to make it useful. Indeed, a models usefulness is often measured by how the semantics of various models match up. For example, the usefulness of the MARC model can be measured in terms by how well it matches the model librarians work with and need. Needless to say, the usefulness of the MARC model can also be measured how useful it is for a bricklayer, but more on this later.

So in what way are they meaningful? Every time we talk about models, we are really talking about a translation that's going on between models. The model of the words in this blog post is translated first from my brain and into the model used by my blogging software that uses some models of the Internet and computers and complex electronic networks and systems, and then translated to the model of your brain. We take a piece of semantics, and we try to make the transition from my brain to yours - through a multitude of other models - as smooth as possible. Have I succeeded so far? Does our models match up a little, much or not at all?

Things are meaningful when the models match up, when there is little or no difference between them to make understanding the thing in one model hard to understand in another. An example of a semantic mismatch in models are indeed the semantics of the 245$a field for a bricklayer looking for his bricks.

Constraints on entities

In the past I've talked about how models are constraints on entities, and this still holds true, but it needs a bit of clarification to make sense. First, what are entities?

Well, entities is one of those words that we can make to mean pretty much anything we like, but let's take a simple view of entities being "things you can talk about", similar (or exactly the same) as subjects in Topic Maps, "concept" in philosophy, or, to the layman, "things." Anything you can think of. Any subject, fictional or real, physical or surreal; a boat, a thought about the Moon, the idea of North, the concept of the number 1, the Eiffel Tower, MARC, a MARC record, an XML representation of that record, the book the MARC record represents, a physical book, the relationship between the book and the abstract notion of a book that the MARC record represents ... oh, the possibilities are - truer than anything! - endless.

Between the entities, in the cracks of our language and our understanding, flow their relationships. They are part of our model, those notions that give our entities a meaning of sorts, what makes the semantic;

   "This book" was written by "this author"

Look at what we found in the cracks; "was written by." Isn't it grand? This trifecta is known in the Semantic Web world as a triplet, basically a tuple with a subject - predicate - object structure. Make enough triplet statements about a thing, and it grows in semantics. Let's look at our book ;

   "This book" is our subject
   "was written by" is our predicate
   "this author" is the object

Let's make another triplet statement ;

"This book" is still our subject

"was published by" is a new predicate

"this publisher" is another object

We now have a model a bit like this ;

"This book"

- "was written by" : "this author"

- "was published by" : "this publisher"

We got a subject (or an entity) that we're attaching predicates and objects to, in many ways similar to how we might add named key/value pairs of properties to an object, or create a lookup-table with column indexes between two tables in a relational database, or set named properties on a Java Bean, or even scribble two statements about a book in its margin. We're attaching some semantics to something.

When we attach meaning to something, we are constraining its possibilities that those properties might be something else. We are saying that the title of the book is X, and by saying it is X we can infer that it isn't millions and millions of other titles that it could have been. Before we put that title to the book it really had only two options;

Either the book had no title, or it could be any title we could imagine. But by labeling the book with a specific title, we're constraining both of these options, changing them dramatically from the endless possibilities we had to one specific option. We constrained the book by giving it meaning. And the more meaning we give it, the less abstract it becomes, the more constrained it becomes.

Reflections in the mirror

The models we have in our heads rarely perfectly match the model we're interacting with. The model in my wife's head is not matched well with my own model in many ways, like shopping, views on the value of shoes, the model of interacting with people (she's the one with a model closer matched to the generic likable model shared by most social and nice people) and the concept of geekery (of which she has none). And she is a person that's quite well matched in general. It only gets worse from here.

Now imagine the semantic distance between me and a computer system I've designed. I can work with it. I understand it. I can get my job done. However, I show my perfect model to a customer, and they immediately start picking it apart, pointing out how my model doesn't match their (or their individual) model. How could I have been so blind?

Here's a little secret to why usability and user-centered design works; you test your model against most other people's model in order to get to some model that you all can reasonably match with. When you don't test your model against the users models, they are bound to suck.

Models are reflections of how we humans see our world. The MARC standard most certainly reflect how the librarians saw the world, how it matched their needs and wants. My programs are often a reflection of how I see things. Your browser is a reflection of its developers model of how your browsing should be. This blog post is a reflection of me. Your computer a reflection of some manufacturer. The operating system a reflection of yet more developers views.

Sure, we try to create standards that either try to reflect some common model of things, or at least a common language in which to describe this view. However, it is terribly difficult to come to models that match well across so many thousands and millions of possible models. I'm tempted to almost say we need some constraints of commonalities on our models in order to create semantics to better understand our various models, to better agree and share them.

Where models sleep at night

Where do we find the actual models when we peer into the computer systems we use? Somewhere, surely, is that model in which we try to model to our own model rests, somewhere in there amongst the code and the interface we can point to it and say, "There!"

Mostly we can't, however there is one place where you'll find a lot, one place so holy in computer science that people dedicate whole careers to dealing with its innards; the relational database.

I need to speak about the relational database a bit because, well, so much of most computer systems out there a) have one, and b) store much of their model in there. Yes, there's alternatives, and more and more technology pop up that tries to do different, but let's be realistic about what 99% of most computer systems use, those RDBM systems. Let's have a look at a small corner of one ;

What we see is tables; columns of fields, rows of entries. These form the entities of these models. The example given even uses a tricky third table to function as a lookup-table between two tables of entity data (I won't go into too much technical details here). To get data in and out of these tables, we use a query language like SQL to say things like this simple example, "get all fields (with their rows of data) from tables A and B, where table A has a field 'book_id' that matches its value with a field 'id' in table B, sort it by the field 'title' of table A in descending order, and give me the first 40 results."

One SQL statement that matches for that is a semi-cryptic "SELECT * FROM TableA,TableB WHERE TableA.book_id = TableB.id ORDER BY TableA.title DESC LIMIT 40", or some other variety (there's tons of different ways of saying the same, with or without JOINs, sets and filters).

Let's look for our model. First of all, it's the titles of the tables, the titles of each column in them, and lastly the contents of the rows. Notice here that this is three levels of semantics nested within each query, and you need to know all of them to make reasonable statements. But what else is in our model? Well, it's those pesky relationships between things, the constraints on our entities to make the meaningful, and they exist in the query itself, in your application. Think about that for a second, think about where these things go ;

The table, columns and rows go in the database system. The querying goes in your application. The user interface (which we haven't even dug far into but is a wormhole of complexity in its own right) that interacts with you also sits in the middle, in the application. So there's a model in your database, and you reconstruct that model in your application (otherwise, how could you query the database if you don't know what it looks like?) and yet do further things that are not embedded in the database (and so, you've got a super model ... fun with pun!), translate further between your users and the user interface, translate back into the application which translates back into the database ... ah, what fun spaghetti games that makes.

Surely RDBMS and SQL is better than other alternatives? Well, it was for many years, and it was a way to solve the problem of doing things in far worse way, for sure. But we were also under the constraints of computing power in which we couldn't just do the right thing and still get a computer that gave you answers in time for Christmas. It was a compromise between the need for any answer to all your data, and that of a practical lots of answers to most of your data.

But this analogy can be taken further, especially into the world of MARC and the libraries. MARC itself was also designed with lots of peculiar constraints, funny rules and structuring, and then with the added AACR2 (and earlier friends) rules for manual data integrity, it surely reflected the best of breed at the time, reflected what they wanted and it was something that matched their onset. So we got the model of MARC (I've called it the culture of MARC in the past, but a model suits just as well) in MARC itself, in the rules we add to it, to our ILS, to our OPAC, our catalog, our acquisition, our collection management, everything. And then the model of MARC is everywhere, it even starts to dictate our human processes.

Time flies

But then time flies, and the world changes, sometimes unexpectedly and the harsher if it is. Just like there's a lot of push for alternatives to RDBMS these days because today and tomorrow is somewhat different from yesterday, the same with a push in the library world to go from MARC / AACR2 to something more like FRBR / RDA.

However.

When you create a model of the future you need to make sure it is future proof. You have to make sure that not only does the model match what you need right now, that it reflects the funky stuff you wanna do today, but it must be able to deal with the future. If it doesn't, well then you are going to have to go through the pains of changing the model sooner rather than later.

Here's a few thoughts on that process in the library perspective. FRBR was designed 15 years ago, when the world was sloooowly waking up the the new fresh brew of the Internet and technology. Take a good look at what the world was like back then, especially paying attention to the fact that books were still the main container for knowledge and information, mobile phones did nothing more than make calls, Internet devices were practically unheard of, no eBooks, no iPads, no eEducation, no eGovernment ... for Fraggs sake, the evil monster of Netscape was still alive and doing harm! I remember still writing Netscape specific code to deal with its quirks. This was a time before we all stopped hating the dying Netscape and focused on the evils of Internet Explorer instead. can you even remember back to that time and think that the world might be in your back pocket or pack in the shape of an eReader or iPhone, or that Amazon (in its infancy) would have a full-blown infrastructure including their own eReader with tons of titles a click away? Or perhaps even more profoundly, that WikiPedia would lead the way to the disjointed revolution of knowledge and information? That we would be twittering? That all higher educational institutions would move towards ePresses? That paper journals would turn to online journals? That the pricing models of online content would change? That the price of admission would change? That even the model of content negotiation would be different? That blogs would dominate the future of discourse, even the serious academic ones? That newspapers would ever fail?

Time flies. And models change. Some models are better at dealing with change, some are better at being future proof, but change they will. And when the models change, you must either change your own models, update your models, or use outdated models. FRBR and RDA are outdated models before they're even implemented. Please reconsider.

Model models

The last ten years or so there's been a stronger push towards meta models. That basically means "simple models in which you can create other models." One might wonder what such a crazy thing would do to help, but let me first exemplify through what I've seen again and again over the years I've worked as a consultant ;

The smallest changes to any complex system, where databases, tables, columns and rows must change, you've also got thousands of lines of query / SQL that also needs to change, every model along the way, from the hardwired entities of the database to the user interface controls must all be updated to this new way of looking at the world. It could even be the smallest of things, say, changing the name of a field in a table from "id" to "book_id" (some times even stupid things like this is needed because the people who create the original model [called schema] didn't worry about multi-join SQL statements that would have a hard time dealing with the ambiguity of the many varieties of "id" fields, or didn't have the foresight to think that more than one thing in your table could be rightly called 'id' ...) could cost in the millions. I know it sounds terribly stupid, probably even terribly untrue, but I swear on the grave of all those programmers who laid down their lives in pursuit of SQL ambiguity and integration and middle-tier testing, that it is a very sad truth.

The library is facing similar insurmountable trouble by switching to anything but MARC, and I suspect the cost analysis is in the multi-millions wherever you look. People are starting to ask if the change will be worth it (and with the criticism laid out about FRBR you might want to have a closer look before you leap), is there another way?

Well, sure, kinda. There's meta models, models that are somewhat ready but needs your lovely input and tweaking to get perfect. They are generally easier to deal with because, unlike models, they are designed to be a bit vague and, well, meta about it all. And yes, indeed; Topic Maps is such a technology. The model in topic Maps is simple ;

a subject is anything you can ever think of, anything you want to talk about, anything in the "real" world, like books and people and cars and thoughts and ideas and ... well, anything.
A subject is represented in a computer system by a Topic
Topics have multiple Names, can be of multiple Types, have multiple Identites and multiple Occurrences
Associations of different types tie them all together with roles

If you can wrap your head around such a concept, it's easy to build whatever you need with it, and here's the advantage ;

A standardized data model and a standardized reference model
A standardized XML format for exchange, import and export
A standardized query language and a standardized constraint language

It doesn't matter one bit what data you put into it; all of the above still applies. You can make model-agnostic queries into your data. You can mix whatever data you feel like; nothing can't be put into it. You determine yourself what level of indirection you want on your data. And you can have serious identity management to boot! Did I mention author records done right? Chuck a thesaurii or faceted navigation systems right in the model! Make software modules understand certain languages rather than the combination of languages and data, and share these! Want to see what your data merged with any other data might look like? It's right there in the standard, it comes out of the box. Play with your data, and invent new ways of interacting with it without dicking around for weeks with databases, filtering and merging. And on and on it goes.

But why do this? Well, since the model exist in a domain which is specially designed to handle the disjointed nature of your models and data, they are free to shape whatever solution you might think of (meaning, you can change the interface without changing the model nor the application logic) where you in the past were stuck with the original model design. You can copy and paste your little models and languages around. Try out new things. Merge stuff with ease. And, not the least, focus on application specifics without worrying about model integrity. Nor do you have to worry about user interface integrity, either. How to put it in a way that you could understand? It's like taking a bucket of apples and a bucket of bananas, which in the past would when mixed together make a sticky slushy fruity goo that no one really likes, would now be genetically merged to make the banapple that can still be split apart into its raw apple and banana parts if you felt like it.

Yes, I've whinged and raved about this in the library world (and other places) for years and years, but getting people up to speed on understanding models, their implications and how meta models might be a better bet, then demonstrate and convince everyone (including people with no technical background), all while standing in an elevator with some people who's off to tinker with some RDA or MARC or something. It's hard to get their attention when they don't actually see the problem.

But I'm not pushing Topic Maps, really. Well, a little, but more specifically I'm pushing meta models, and I'm pushing for better ways of dealing with your computer infra structure, to take a few good steps out of the litter sandbox that permutes the current library systems infra structural designs, and get jiggy with the future before it gets overrun by the cool kids with iPhones and iPads and whatsnot's that also, you know, have a model or two. Models that may or may not be compatible with whatever model you come up with next. If you do. Seriously, I thought librarians loved meta?

Linux Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade, ATI MobileRadeon 3650 woes

2010-05-04T14:29:00.001+10:00

(Note: If you're after my ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga, scroll further down)

As mentioned in my more eclectic piece of yesterday, I stuffed up my computer over the weekend, and now I'm here to tell you all about it as well as tell you about the latest Ubuntu release.

I upgraded through the update manager as I've always done. I know a lot of people prefer to take backup, clean the machine, install a fresh Ubuntu version, and then copy back the personal stuff, install the stuff that went missing, as a means of a more secure and painless way. I sneer at such disdain for life and adventure!

I've never had trouble with just clicking the update button that extends beyond what minor snafus you might expect, like drivers to old stuff not working perfect with new stuff, but that's in the nature of going from old to new systems, and doesn't say anything bad on the upgrade process as such. For me, it worked pretty good.

But let's go through snags, one serious annoyance, an irritated state of affairs, and a few tips in dealing with your ATI Radeon issues ;

Snags

I had mostly no trouble at all, really, except after the install the following snags are noted ;

The brightness control no longer controls the brightness (and I now must use my special function keys to adjust it). No biggie, just annoying.
My Vodafone 3G mobile network adapter software got uninstalled. Why? It was an independent third-party program. Puzzle.
The applets (minimize and desktop switcher) on my bottom panel (Gnome) has crashed a couple of times. Odd.
The system seems slower, but I need to investigate a bit further before pointing fingers.

Serious annoyance

Before we get to the good parts, I need to point out this one thing that just stands out as the dumbest thing with this release, and it is just so stupid that no amount of trying to back-pedal out of it with the lamest excuses ever is good enough;

They switched the minimize, maximize and close window icons from the right side (like the rest of the world does it) to the left (like what retarded systems used to do in the 80's and 90's)! Luckily there's a couple of easy fixes, but none which are embedded in the system to make it easy. Friggin' idiots, what were they thinking? I could write a whole book on just how stupid this was, but suffice to say, my over 10 years of UX and GUI design experience - and my personal experience in using these here new (but terribly old) ideas - screams how much it sucks big time! Icons of window control now sit on top of menus that you use all the time, and the cognitive distance between doing what you want and what will piss you off has now been reduced to a swearword's distance on a regular basis. I seriously hope this is not a hint of things to come, or I'll jump ship. I can deal with the odd snafu, but I don't want to deal with continued stupidity.

Irritating state of affairs

I have a Toshiba Satellite P300 (05Y01Y, which now is discontinued ... a true mark of comfort for me) that came with pre-installed Windows Vista which I killed by accident, and I popped Ubuntu 8.10 on there and have been reasonably happy with all this time. However, all this time there's a few things that still is terribly annoying, although I know this is the fault of vendors and not Linux (so I live with these blemishes rather than whinge about them). Over the updates things have improved (like Skype and Choqok), but there's still more hardware related issues that should have easy fixes ;

BlueTooth does not work, and probably never will. Toshiba sucks when it comes to supporting Linux, and their BlueTooth stack obviously is not supported here, nor are the default Linux stacks compatible with whatever my machine's got. However, I'm not in need of BlueTooth so I haven't spent the appropriate crazy time needed for proper investigation.
There's an insanely annoying delay (between 0.5 to 2 seconds long!) whenever a window is minimized or maximized (which also means when the application starts up, hides, reappears or closes down, you know, the sort of stuff you do all freakin' time) when I've got graphics acceleration switched on. This is apparently a bug, and it's been around and come back in various forms. There's a few suggested fixes, but mostly it just doesn't seem to want to go away. This one is seriously bad, and it amazes me that something like this could still be hanging around in an otherwise polished distribution like Ubuntu. There might be a link to the ATI drivers below as well, but the sad part is that to temporary no go insane over this, I sadly have to switch graphics acceleration off.
Update! It seems that after trying the suggested fixes for enabling 2D that didn't at first do anything, now all of a sudden the problem disappeared! Oh, joy! Come to think of it, I did do a reboot not that long ago, and re-installed the desktop switcher applet. Maybe there were some correlation between the switcher and the graphics driver? Who knows. I'm happily running Compiz and Emerald (although the latter is only an experiment I suspect will be uninstalled).
The two internal microphones on the machine has never worked, probably never will again due to Toshibas poor Linux support. Crikey, can't they just hire one or two Linux guys to at least tweak existing software with configuration options that might be compatible with some of their more popular models? I could spend a weekend to do this myself, but I've got an USB DSP that does these things which works just fantastic, so again I won't spend the time chasing it.
My external Logitech Optical Radio mouse does not work properly. It works in the sense that the accelerator insist that my whole world is either top-left or bottom-right, and there's no easy ways in Ubuntu to modify crazy acceleration, so I've just given up on it and use it on my Windows machine.
The internal ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga; this one gets its own section below.

Generics

To me, this upgrade was a bit meh. Nothing stands out as impressive, just small fixes here and there. There's the new menu's at the top so many people rave about, but I don't like nor use them, so meh. The new colors are, well, meh. I didn't mind brown. Not sure I mind purple. Meh. I like that more icons are getting the same style and form, but no biggie. The Software Center has been prettied up a bit, but still lacks what's really important, like testimonials, ratings, awards, versioning, people's comments, recomendations, field groupings, and so on. Meh. I'm sure there's more stuff around, and I'll find them eventually. The only real thing that stands out is that some old problems still aren't fixed, and my system is less responsive. Oh, and they switched from Sun to the OpenJDK Java which threw me off for a few minutes as well. Meh.

My Mobile Radeon 3650 woes

The ATI / AMD chipset has a shaky support history under Linux, but the good news is that there is some degree of support. And indeed, my screen right now is utilizing both OpenGL and higher screens and lots of colors, so all should be well. But it is not, at least not "all" well.

It's not that my latest upgrade killed my graphics setup. No, in fact after upgrade things worked quite well, except I had four ATI Control Center Catalyst icons under System -> Preferences, so I was trying to fix that, and see if there was a fix for the annoying "minimize,maximize delay" bug mentioned further up. But all of a sudden I must have fiddled with the wrong setting (actually, I was uninstalling some unrelated package that wasn't so unrelated after all).

Here's my receipt for fixing a seriously broken and mangled FGLRX install ;

Purge your filthy system of sin ;

sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* 
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati 
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-radeon

If you get an error like so ;
   dpkg-divert: mismatch on package
   when removing `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by fglrx'
   found `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by xorg-driver-fglrx'
Go to this page over here for general instructions on fixing diversions.
Go to System -> Admin -> Hardware drivers, and wait for it to collect its thoughts.
Click on "Install" or "Activate" near the bottom, and wait for it to do its magic.
Reboot.

That worked for me; your mileage will vary. Downloading the (massive; 96Mb!!) driver from ATI's homepage, purging and running the downloaded installer did nothing for me. The whole ATI graphics driver brahooha is amazingly bad and should get some cleaning up. Even the Control Center that ATI delivers looks amateurish, and it seems their software lacks any good cleaning up strategies. Or even nice GUI ways of setting up important settings (!!).

The next time I'm buying a computer for my Linux Ubuntu adventures, I'll do some pretty hefty research first to make sure I avoid at least some of the biggest pitfalls. Bloody stupid vendors. Meh.

I turned 30 and my warranty expired

2010-05-03T17:16:00.000+10:00

Todays post is different. It is not about any of the usual subjects I relay here, but about growing old, growing up, growing wary and fearing not only the future of me and my family, but growing wary of humans out of touch with reality, the political rot of the societies we create, and what power and resources together can do to harm our statistics and the people within them. And I want to give Love a brief mention, too.

(I also post this somewhat different topic because my work computer is a bit temperamental after I performed a Ubuntu upgrade, so I'm on our other computer today)

"I turned 30 and my warranty expired"

I'm actually quite a bit older than that, but not quite yet 40, but the sentiment still stands out as a sore thumb. My brain, as it matured and gained a platform of consistency, so did other parts of my body mature to their natural consequences. Slowly I'm feeling age creep up on me, a dodgy knee, faltering memory, eyes and neck trouble, difficulties sleeping.

We all know the physical constraints of growing older. But I notice more and more the inner-space effects. And no, I'm not getting old and bitter as the old stereotype will have it. No, I'm turning sad and lonely.

Such a statement, for me, have so many levels it is a bit hard to know where to begin, but let's begin with the simple and obvious ones. I am Norwegian, my wife is Australian. Where do we live? If either of us came from some country that is statistically worse off than the other, the choice would be easier. If I came from the slums somewhere in Nigeria and she from, say, England or Germany, that's not a choice; it would be a better life for us in Europe, for our children, no question. Even if we have to abandon family in Nigeria, everybody would understand to some extent. Opportunities and security for a raising family beats out war and poverty every time. But Norway and Australia?

Both countries are rated as some of the absolute best countries in the world to live in. And by that alone there are proponents for each family on both sides that can't understand the struggle to actually choose one side. We've so far lived twice in each country as a family with small children, and there's pro's and con's to each side in all aspects of our lives. It's painful to have to make a choice.

Less obvious

Since we are a family, we are a tightly knit group of people who love each other. We stand by each other, support each other, and generally try to make the best of our situations, however they come at us. And we are the best of friends.

But I used to have other friends as well, include a few best friends to whom I was very close. We currently live in (and I suspect for the immediate to intermediate time) Australia. When I moved here all my friends and family were left behind. We moved to a new area. Australians are hard to befriend in any meaningful way. So I quite often feel alone, outside of the family space. All my interests and passions, especially those I do not share with my wife, are hard to deal with ; my strong passion for baroque music. My deep love of science. Love of food. Bibliophelia and meta data. Geekery. Internet life. Knowledge management. Philosophy (ethics and otherwise). Inventions! Engineering!

Of course we make up for that in the things we do share, and this is still quite a lot to keep me sane and reasonably happy, and it helps to share these passions with her and the kids (to the level they understand). But I could use a smidgen of intellectual interest in these ignorant marshes we live.

Even less obvious

World events affect me. Some affect me because they are world events, but the ones affecting the most are the world events that other people around me don't know or care about. Living in an intellectual desert makes you conservative about the academic nurture you seek out. I feel somewhat ashamed in normal talks with people to reveal any hint of knowing stuff, even stuff that's not really all that controversy or hard or uncommon.

What to do when you're aching to tell the world the wonders of the universe, and no one around your really cares to listen? You start making silly plans ;

Making a documentary about beach ecology and geology. I've got fact checking and research done, but I'm waiting to buy a HD camera (that can also do underwater shots) for my birthday. I'm going to channel my inner deGrasse Tyson.
Plan to teach your children about the speed of light; an applicable model of air and space travel, and gee, what's the point of all of that? And see the whole "Cosmos" series by St. Sagan.
Plan to travel to the middle of the desert, looking for minerals, metals and / or interesting biology

But they are somewhat silly plans. They might happen, but the odds are against me, mostly due to work and family attire. It's not that I don't want to do these things, heavens know I do, but time is limited, and well, I need to make better priorities.

Where should we live? Where is the best place for our family to live? Should we choose easy life, rich life, busy life, interesting life? Should we sacrifice our complacent sheltered lives for richer experiences in doing good in other countries? Should we apply our collective strengths to make somewhere else who do care about bigger issues a better place for all who live there? Should we risk the personal safety of the now for a idealistic future of others?

Not obvious at all

I feel a disconnection between myself and the society we live in. I am not satisfied in having a safe life in a protected environment with the latency of science penetration lower than what's livable. There are so many topics to discuss, so many issues to sort out.

Politics suck. And I used to be a politician, so I know quite well how rotten the discourse of democracy can get when agendas are played at different levels of the game. Don't get me wrong; I love democracy - the process. I just hate the people who usually enter into it. And I hate the way the cult of personalities distorts, disrupts and corrupts the ideals laid out. And most of all, I hate how people in general have no friggin' clue about the implications of epistemology in politics, how their own ignorance of science and facts is having an adverse affect on societal progression.

Yes, I like progressive thoughts and actions, not for the sake of just progression, but for the ideal of not falling into staleness and for always question the status quo; what can we do better? Even the best of things can be improved. I'm no fan of "if it works, don't fix it!"

Adequate.

That's a word I hate to the fullness of my person. I don't have a problem with being cautious, but there's a thin line between cautious and conservative, one which I see society fail all too often. Most often it's done in a way to appease popular opinion. But popular opinion is, by its very definition, only popular and only an opinion. Why are we chasing this rather than necessary facts?

Back to less obvious

Politics in general is an attempt by the populous to reach an agreeable direction of channeled progression, but I've always held that for this to work you need to populous to also care about, study, and be able to argue with logic about the issues at hand, without falling into the pit of bias and the fear of change.

Change is the key to the universe and all that is within it; all things change, over various kinds of time scales. Rock and metal change over longer time of millions of years than one-celled animals and viruses that have time scales of hours or even minutes, and then there's everything in between. The scale in which you view the universe is a fascinating exercise in trying to understand the world around you, and by carefully understanding the context of those scales you can get a pretty amazing overview of the scope and direction of huge topics like life, evolution, geology and cosmology, and perhaps get a better understanding of your place in the cosmos.

Back to obvious

My place in the cosmos is that of insignificance. Well, I know the physical outlook, but as a human sentient being who would like the world to be my oyster, I can not only understand my insignificance but appreciate it, love it, live it. There's great power in knowing you are invisible; it allows you to see clearer that which you love.

My family comes first; they are my pillar, the platform on which I base my life, so much is clear. And as a unit it doesn't matter what the cosmos throw our way as our strength and love is in that unit. It's a self-sufficient ecosystem of family ebb and flow. Politics flow over, through and around us. People do the same. Society is the sand on our beach, tumbling around, always shifting and changing.

There's nothing so important as to embrace change. And in this light I view the progressive nature of the human endeavor; humans fighting change every chance they get. Poverty and despair is as much a result of this as is the unbalanced resource management, the political systems and the populous scientific interest and literacy.

And that is they key to my disjointedness from society, as well as the thing that keeps me going; my family. No matter where we are, no matter what friends we accumulate, we are together.

And even if it is obvious, it's not really that obvious.

Moved the blog

2010-04-30T19:39:00.000+10:00

Well, Blogger has just discontinued publishing blogs as FTP upload, so I was looking at moving my blog to my own server with a WordPress install, but laziness and problematic import filters has made me just move it to blogspot. There shouldn't be any differences, and my shelter.nu domain should forward all traffic here. Hopefully my feeds will follow through as well. Maybe I'll do the full convert in the future.

Oh, and P.S; sorry for low blogging. Gotta finish something for work first before I leap into song about all my usual silly topics.

Another bob

2010-04-27T20:46:00.000+10:00

Busy, busy, so another miscellaneous post, but have a post planned for Thursday about abstract vs. concrete models, library science and Topic Maps which should be interesting. Until then ;

Science

Oil Slick satellite image : A satellite image of the oil slick that has been spreading after the oil-rig disaster last week.

The improbability pump : A great review of two books at the same time by Jerry Coyne (professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and author of the book and favorite blog "Why evolution is true") pointing out the absurdities of two opposing poles of science ; Richard Dawkins "Greatest Show on Earth" which I've reviewed before, and Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's "What Darwin got wrong" (this last book has taken a severe beating amongst people in the field, and this review is no exception).

Against nature : A damn good takedown on women's issues, of what it means to be for or against nature, for what it means to be for or against female choices in an absurdly male focused world.

Technology

Maiana : Public Topic Maps voyeurism. Sexy and tasty.

Australia pushes net censorship in Washington : I live in a strange country that thinks that censorship in any way or form is something that can be democratically defended. Needless to say, most Australians who care about this issue are not amused.

My next toy : I swear, once time and money and life and the will to go on returns, I'll get this little puppy and stream all my digital media goodness through it. Although. Hmm. No video support. If this thing only had video support! Can you hear me, Western Digital?!

Philosophy and art

A.C. Grayling responds : Grayling is a British philosopher that I truly admire, both for his knowledge and engagement with society, but I also love his humour and low-key observations. Here he responds to Gray, his arch-nemesis of sorts, who did a review of Graylings latest book. If all rebuttals were this grand.

A Designer Universe? : Veering off onto the curb with this scientific view of the cosmological argument, by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin. "Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about?" Brilliant.

Godessey : Artist Lynne Naylor new exhibition looks stunning.

Another tidbits

2010-04-22T18:05:00.001+10:00

Dang, I'm so busy with work I don't have time to post much here these days, even though I feel another library lament coming on. Perhaps it's best for all I don't. Maybe I should do something that's at least related to work; that way I can vaguely justify it. :)

Anyhow, here we go ;

Semantic technologies

Linked Data : "recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF." : We'll start here for what the RDF crowd is toting as their best options these days. I'm not impressed, but then I'm not very keen on open-world assumptions as they don't address specific needs. Yeah, me being silly, I know.

"CTM 1.0 : A tutorial" : What it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what an isa and ako relationship is, this might give you a clue.

Pedantic Web : "Welcome to the Pedantic Web Group" A cute attempt to basically ask people to clean up their sloppy messes. It's not going to fly, but I support the sentiment.

Sam Ruby points to "Open Graph Protocol" which looks interesting, and probably something I should get involved in with my Topic Maps stuff. Possibly a combination of my embeddable PHP Topic Maps engine and this would make for a fine plugin to various packages. Hmm.

Topincs : Speaking of Topic Maps, this video looks very, very good. Robert Cerny is churning out the cherry chutney for sure.

Other technology related bobs

Aaaaaargh! Panasonic has released two items of pure lust too close together, and I don't know what to do! Lumix DMC-G10 and it's HD video toting compact friend, DMC-ZS7.

OzIA 2010 conference CFP : I attended, presented at and did the website and design for the very first OzIA back in 2006, and it was a blast. I'm suspecting it's still a blast.

DIY Steady Cam : A contraption I want to make for a project I've got planned.

Generic science

Keep freeloaders happy with rotting corpses : Another tale of some of the poisonous critters in my garden, and this time we're dealing with a Hannibal Lecter. Goody.

OCW search : "Find free university courses online" Brilliant! Ever wanted to find online course materials, either because you're doing those classes, or, like me, you're a freeloader of all the sciency goodness?

SurfScience : Brilliant blog I found mixing the life of the beach with the life of the geek.

Canberra, eh?

2010-04-14T17:00:00.000+10:00

So, due to cosmic circumstances, I find myself in Canberra until mid-day Friday. The quick yet big question jumps out;

Do I still have friends here? Friends who'd like to meetup for a cup of coffee, or a chat by the lake? Email me at alexander.johannesen@gmail.com or mob me at 044 9525 011.

Philosophical and religious matters

2010-04-10T20:47:00.001+10:00

Some might have noticed that I often diverge into very diverse topics on this blog, but lately I've made a decision; I'm falling apart and splitting it in two!

This blog, my main blog for over 10 years now (a crazy notion all by itself!) will stay pretty much as is in terms of technology (Topic Maps, REST, SOA, clustered and distributed systems, databases, software development, and so on) and its various adventures (mine or otherwise), but also keep the personal elements and especially all things library, and perhaps the odd science post as well.

The new blog - the Sheltered Objections - will focus on philosophy and religion, and will be mainly for talking about and critiquing related such topics. I felt the time was ripe to make that distinction a bit more clear, both as I have something to say in that arena (I've been a closet philosopher all my life, much to my friends chagrin) but also because I want to let people have a choice between two mostly separated worlds.

So, if you wanna follow me on adventures of the mind and of human definition, go there and subscribe. It'll be fun, I promise.

Do libraries understand the future? Or how to get there?

2010-04-09T16:56:00.000+10:00

I can be quite harsh when stating my opinions, and I often feel I get on people's toes a lot through doing so. But it's not my fault; I blame my Norwegian upbringing where we tend to state things as they are, and then we discuss things until the cows come home, but we do it with complete respect of the other side. You might say polite bickering and being tempered yet pigheaded about things is a national favorite past-time, and then some of us went on to the pigheaded Olympics and cleaned the tables and set the whole thing on fire. And then we debated with the smoldering rubble some more.

My past is littered with opinion pieces on all things library, from the culture, its place in society, its technology and direction, and I've written both here on this blog and on various mailing-lists, as well as hold presentation live in various forums and conferences. I'm a prolific library-bitcher, you might say, as most of what I say ain't necessarily wonderful praise and kissing the boots of those who make library decisions.

However.

Today I won't bitch, though. It still may not be safe for work, but I won't say how stupid the library world has been in missing opportunities, how they've misplayed the technology ball, how they've been blind to keeping up societal appearances, how they've lost their political clout, the lack of philosophical standing or progress, how current management streams are drying up the drive and kill the courage they once had, et cetera. No, that's all been said before, and I won't even mention it, not a single word, not me, not today, uh-uh, nosirree.

The reason I won't bitch about these things might be interesting to some; I don't really care anymore. I know that some of you out there who know me think I'm engaging in hyperbolic crud, because normally such a statement would grate against my ideals of love, peace and bibliophilia, but it is true; I don't care what happens to the library anymore, and this is a good thing; a thing not worth breaking is easier to shape and change. My passion for all things library have shifted.

My real passions

I have a bunch of passions, from music and movies, to science and education, from software development and technology, all the way to epistemology and philosophy. And the ideals of my library world certainly bump into or totally encompasses some of my passions, but the library ideal is one that needs to be explained not from a contextual or cultural point (also known as the status quo), but from that of the future and values that crosses over from the past and into it (also known as, err, "the future").

These days the most marked of my passions is the one of science and education. I will extend myself well beyond my borders for people who genuinely wish to know more, that wants to study, to find things out. I've been an inquisitive pain in the arse my whole life, an entrepreneur and inventor, someone who just can't leave something that works alone until I understand how it works (even if that means I'll break the darn thing in the process, a little bit like my library career). Sharing my passion for knowing is what I, as a human being, love the most.

In the past, my passion would have had a good corollary to books, because as we know the past is riddled with books and parchments as the epitome of knowledge and information. If you were to become someone important, you had books. If you were someone important, you've written one or at least starred in one. Libraries formed wherever power dwelled. But then stupid humans and their silly ideals of freedom and unity and all that crazy stuff invented something new; books and information to the people for free. Well, that's at least the ideals going from late 17th century of the western world, slowly creeping into the world and changing it more ways than the history books gives them credit.

That is a piece of history I simply adore and love, feeding my ideals and passion for protecting it, furthering it, pushing that same agenda.

But then we have the now, where most important discourse and information is still somewhat found in books. But only just; a new crazy idea came along not that long ago, the idea of making things digital and hook them together in networks across the globe. The reason we've still got those darn libraries is because the long tail still points into them, into books and journals. But what when they don't anymore?

Library : A definition

Books. And then "modern libraries are increasingly being redefined as places to get unrestricted access to information in many formats and from many sources. They are understood as extending beyond the physical walls of a building, by including material accessible by electronic means, and by providing the assistance of librarians in navigating and analyzing tremendous amounts of knowledge with a variety of digital tools."

Is your library like this? Does it do these things? How does it do it? I want to talk a bit about these things, because, frankly, they are together my list of the most important things in regards to all things library;

The potential of what the library can do and offer
The promises made
The actual offer
Plans for the future

I've written tons and tons on the potential I see in the library before, whined about the promises made and how they stack up (and how in the end made me resign from it all together), and about what drives the machinery and direction. I've written about this so much I've forgotten links and most of what I've said there. But I won't go hunting for it anymore. I mean, what's the point? And I wrote at the beginning that I wouldn't whine about it here, so let's talk about the future instead. The future is now!

This post will be more or less on the future of the library world, or, more prosaically, how the library world enters into it. They've got three choices; enter into it physically by going there, enter into it by planning for it, and enter into it by shaping it.

Boldly going there

This is the easy one, and the default one. You just go there, or, because all of time is encapsulated in the one dimension of non-spatial reality, you just sit there and let the future huddle around you. No, this isn't as zen as it sounds, it's really what most people do, go about their business, where "going about your business" usually means doing things without thinking too much, letting everybody else shape your future.

Now, as a preamble I don't actually have that ability, so it's hard for me to sympathize much with it. I can see how it works, but for me I find it hard to let that become some excuse for not improving and doing better. I'm one of those where even buying lunch is a stream of philosophical implications (how far removed from my ancestors is it ok for me to eat them?), and walk on the beach becomes an internal monologue about how it got there and the eco-system of it (narrated in a faux Sir Attenborough voice), or where my daily work is a constant bombardement of ideas and thoughts of how to do things better, how to improve that which is not quite right (I don't believe in the silly 'if it works, don't fix it' mentality which has spread across this planet like a virus), pondering language and linguistics and neuroscience even when making variable names or looping through a hashmap. Whatever I do at any given time is not a compartment, a category of activities, a single unit of a constrained domain; it's all connected, from the micro to the macro. I'm just an insignificant extension of the cosmos, trying to make things better. I'm evolution.

So, standing still doesn't work for me, but I hear lots of other things on this planet does it, and does it well. But I think that's a bit deceitful; nothing stands still, not even rocks. Nothing stays the same, give it enough time. In a few thousand years, my favorite rock around where I live will become just a grain of sand on the beach. So by this analogy, I don't think even the library world stands still. Heck, we know it doesn't. We all know that little by little, even the most conservative bastion of all things that are meant to stand still in the universe, slowly creeps and crawls their way towards some distant and different place.

So this is all about the scale of time and our place in it. Let's talk about the human scale of time, the time it takes for a generation to react to the former generation. Rocks on this scale are terribly, terribly, utterly mind-bogglingly slow. A rock from generation to generation is so slow they are practically eternal, and indeed, for much of human history this has been the default position. It wasn't until mid 19th century that we figured out that rocks were so slow that we needed to invent a brand new scale to make any sense of it, the geological time, spanning 4 billion years. Compared to a mere generation of humans, that's practically forever.

But the library world on our human generational scale is comparatively damn slow still. The building they built last generation is still there, doing pretty much the same things. The librarians in there are doing practically the same things as the last generation. The only two ways it from time to time have gathered speed is by 1) planning ahead, and 2) having a paradigm thrust upon it from the outside.

Boldly planning for it

The library world have never really had a great need for planning for the future, at least not the more organized types of libraries we've had the last 200 years or so. The world of knowledge and the written word didn't really moved much since movable type, so even if some things changed here and there they had plenty of time to get their heads around it. What is 10-15 years of thinking and tinkering with a problem that has a 100 year span?

Nothing. It's perfectly alright to spend time getting it right when the problem is, on our normal human scale, slow. But what happens when the problem isn't just fast, but changes the human culture in which our scale is rooted?

Enter the digital age. It all started with computers becoming common, not only in places that had the resources to buy expensive and complex computers, but more so when they become cheap enough to go into any home. The age of ZX80/81 / Spectrum 16/48k / Commodore 64 / Amiga / Macintosh II / BBC Micro (all cheaper home computers) changed the world as we know it, probably far more than we give it credit. I was a Spectrum 48K owner myself, living in a country dominated by Commodore 64's. So what does a 10 year old kid who wants to play games on his computer do when there are no games around to buy? He has to make them himself, and sealed his destiny and became a geek, but perhaps a bit more importantly to this conversation, I became a librarian through the process of reading, borrowing, sharing and researching the written materials (remember, no internet in those days) otherwise my programs wouldn't work and my insatiable lust for making the darn thing work would die. Luckily for me, the addiction was like cocaine, but instead of ruining my life I became a computer literate.

When you become computer literate, the world looks very different to you. Problems everywhere become programming tasks, creating a small sliver of interfacing between the digital and the real world in the process. This sliver has since grown rather large, encompassing most of society, not a trivial feat in so few years. Even in the library world it has crept in and helped out. But we need to look at what it helped out with;

Cataloging. Searching said catalog. Bookkeeping. Writing reports. Did I forget anything?

I'm not really trying to be snarky here, and of course I know computers do more than that at the library, however, when we're trying to look at the present of what they actually do, I don't think I'm all that far fetched. There's the odd interesting project, some application running on a (secondary) server somewhere, maybe a new GUI into the catalog, or maybe some exhibition website, or maybe some self-serving library-card database thingy. But seriously, it's not like the computer systems in the average (or hip and cool) library are doing anything amazing (but please point me to them if they exist! Nothing would be cooler!). It's all pretty ... well, average. Standard stuff. Even if you blog and do Wiki's as part of your communication, you're not above average. You are average.

To get out of being average when you need to be great (more on this later) you need to plan to become great. You need to come up with some activities and goals in order to move faster than not moving at all. But how does the library stack up to this?

Of course they are planning. Every day is another plan. But we need to discern between planning for tomorrow and planning for the future. Tomorrow is just around the corner, and that, truly, is just planning to stay up to date, keeping up appearances, to plan for being relevant to what's going on right now. Putting up a Wiki or starting to blog or even putting together a prototype of a search engine that presents records in an FRBR manner, or creating a process and system that streamlines ILL with digital copies and distributes them in a copyright-enabled fashion, or even a backend system that convert MARC records into RDF and spread them across a clustered system of servers in Linked Data fashion complete with cool URI's and ontologies to work with the data, that ain't planning for the future! Maybe you're about to start a project that acts as a portal for information, a collection-point, or a federated search point, or a dynamic system for understanding user requests and dispatch semantic contextual networks to semantic engines that convert them into knowledge nuggets and present them to researchers, you're still not planning for the future. These things are the least you should do, but these things are not the future, it's only today and tomorrow.

Planning now to do something funky within the next year or so is not planning for the future. So then, what is the future? And by "future" I mean to actually have one.

Boldly shaping it

You need to shape it. You need to look into your crystal balls, and determine what the future should hold. No, don't look into the ball to look for what the future holds, that path leads to stupidity, and, well, it doesn't work. No, you must insert yourself into the fabric of modern development far more than you normally have, you must reach out and not only point to the future, but invent it!

I was extremely happy to see Jessamyn join BoingBoing as a guest writer. That's a perfect example what needs to happen, a high-class librarian writing for a high-class blog, about all things weird and wonderful, reaching out with a subtle librarian view of of the world. (My favorite post!) However, even after you've immersed yourself in what's going on in society or even try to shape bits of it by your very existence, there's some bigger issues we haven't even dared go to yet. Well, let's ;

The need for conserving the libraries isn't the need for conserving the houses, or the books, or even the library cultural spot in its society (which are all good reasons, mind you). It's not to keep certain people in jobs, nor is it to keep the services alive. No, it's to preserve the librarian ideal. The librarian profession is not worth keeping if its ideals aren't in tune with reality, and I can point to the thousands of professions through the ages who have died when those parts of society it was attached to, died off. There's a certain notion of librarian philosophy that I'd like to talk about ;

"When the gulf between theory and practice in librarianship is discussed generally two themes emerge, which are that theorizing about librarianship is mostly non-existent and, when such theorizing exists at all, it is largely irrelevant to library practice."

I'm sometimes inclined to say that the reason the library world is in trouble is in the above quoted paragraph. Ok, so it's easy to see the gap between the mostly non-existent library philosophy, but we must remember and let it sink in that philosophy is defined as the action of doing philosophy, not as an archive or to think of it as history, or even use old thinking as if it applies to the now, or, heavens forbid, the future.

Library philosophy needs to happen, at least a hell of a lot more, and it needs to be a bigger part of what libraries do, it should include all librarians, it should be part of the fabric of librarianship. You need to ponder epistemological implications of digital identity, to think through the notion of copyright for the greater good, or your academic standing in an academic world that's moving to semantic networks, the loss of the bibliocentric view and the impact on collection management, or the systemic notion of semantic knowledge networks. Or you need to find out what fragmented semantic contexts offer knowledge management, or how the iPad will influence citing and sharing of notes, how to address those notes themselves as they are often more valuable than the original text (and lots of bloggers know this quite well already). Or, perhaps even more importantly, you need to establish an ethical guidebook to global knowledge management, models for information distribution and wealth, or ontological analysis of human and non-human identity. You need to re-think what those ideals are in order to preserve them. Only then can you shape any future worth having.

All those meetings and planning of cool projects you do? It's all fluff and nonsense unless there's some serious philosophies to back them up, new ideas, visions of what the future might be, and certainly visions that's based on the library ideals worth keeping. In the absence of philosophy there will be the status quo. And that's worse than standing still, even if you look ever so handsome and your moldy paper smells oh so good.

Here's a relevant quote from my distant past ; 'I'm still in love with the library ideals and concepts. I still love books. And maps. And old pictures. And just surfing the catalog. Or snooping in the newspaper reels. Or finding a microfilm, wondering what's on it, what it means, and who did it. Even subject headings and its contextual meaning. I love catalogers. And I love librarians. I just don't love what we're collectively doing with the concept of "library."' And I should add; I don't love the lack of philosophy, or the lack of shaping the future.

Let's think a bit more seriously about this. Let us philosophy!

But the question in todays post was if the library world understand the future? My assertion is, no, they don't. They understand it's coming, they understand it will involve technology, and that books will be less and less important, they understand that they need to have cool projects (and by 'cool' I'm happy to settle for just 'relevant') and to keep that up, and that they need to accommodate the onslaught of the digital impact. They understand all these things, because they are close to them. These things are on their scale, they understand these things because they deal with it every day.

But deep thinking? Good luck.

Before I write what I write before the next time I write

2010-04-06T16:50:00.000+10:00

It seems my last poll revealed that there are still people in the library world who hasn't rejected me, or, perhaps a stronger theory, likes to watch road accidents. So my next piece is being written about why the library world fails so badly at technology and seeing the future (or even their own relevance to it), but I'm somewhat busy these days with real work, so a few more days, ok?

However, all is not lost. I've got a few things to say about, well, the stuff I work with, that bucket I stick my head in every day to see if the crap I put in it yesterday has turned to gold yet. No luck so far.

There's a peculiar discussion going on in the Semantic Web mailing-list at the W3C, of which Bernard Vatant will fill you in. It's funny to watch; where are the success stories, where is the commercial viability, does it even work in academia, has it got traction, what do we do now? Why aren't more people doing it? Why haven't the world adopted this specific and undoubtedly brilliant world-view yet? Are we all mad!?

I'm sure you can fill in with our own Topic Maps echo here, but the more you dig, the more you discover that most of the sillies put up as a reason or a scapegoat for the lack of world dominance are things that, frankly, the Topic Maps community have figured out long ago, and some of those missing features in their world is a dominant feature in ours. And we haven't taken over the world, either. Bummer.

It's frustrating, I know, but what can we do? There's no amount of technology suave that can beat any status quo that feeds upon itself. No new ideas can beat old ones that seem to work, because, well, the definition of "works" is so multi-faceted and complex and, eh, making lots of money for lots of people. Semantic Web and Topic Maps doesn't make lots of many. Heck, they don't make money, period. They're convenient little technologies that will stay small and insignificant.

I have a plan, though, and it will piss off some of the Topic Maps purist (or, let's face it, even pragmatists) and hopefully some Semantic Web people as well. First, I'll rename it something cool - maybe something like NoSQL or something - and then rename the integral concepts, strip away the jargon, and make it web-friendly by injecting it straight into HTML5 based technology, and relate all queries through SQL. Mwuahaha, I might even throw some REST API's in there, just to stir it up some more. And I shall call it ; the web.

Man, I hate these technical wars over standards and ways of doing things. The thing I love about Topic Maps isn't the standard or the specs. No, it's the thinking I'm forced to do in rejecting some parts, while loving others. It's what I take from it. It's the epiphanies it yields.

NoSQL? Semantic Web? Topic Maps? SQL? They're all just abstract interfaces into a set of memory positions shaped by various registers, stacks and pops. Standardizing our ways is just a step on the ladder of the future, not a platform upon which we have to stand firm.

Anyway, the whole NoSQL thing is something I'll have to write about more later. Right now dinner and kids and cleaning the house beckons.

What to write about next?

2010-03-30T16:55:00.000+11:00

Life is terribly busy, and there's simply too many things to write and ponder about. Since my time is limited, I need to spend my lunch hours and some after time on it, and hence I'd like it this time to be about something you'd like to hear about. So, naturally, the best thing to do is to make a poll ;

Let me know what you think, and if your blog post isn't on this (admittedly quickly put together) list, pop in a comment and let me know. Let's give it until ... um, Wednesday or so.

Bibs and bobs : Extended edition

2010-03-25T17:09:00.000+11:00

Hoo boy, just when you thought your tabs were cleared, you discover that yeah, sure, the tabs in your main browser window is gone, but you forgot about a) 4 other windows full of tabs themselves, and b) circumstances of the time bringing a flurry of interesting stuff you should put out there. So, I'm here to put out some more. I'll try to classify them as I go along ;

Technology

A faster and more compact Set : For Java geeks and Topic Mappers alike, but mostly for those with both fetishes. And older post I stumbled upon once again and was meaning to look into. One day. Really soon now. Ish.

New Horizons : I'm a bit of an astronomy nerd, so what's better than the combination of rockets, science and star trekking with the fastest ever made human object!

Open Mind Common Sense : A delightfully fuzzy Semantic Web project that Danny Ayers pointed me to. It's ontologies with Social engineering. Great stuff!

Pegatron Tegra : Sexy little computer to chuck in the corner to do your digital bidding. Pure lust!

Climate change and politics

Think tanks, oil money and black ops : Where do all the climate change skeptics come from? You'd be surprised. Or not.

The Guardian responds : The English newspaper The Guardian had a series of investigational reports over the alleged scandal of the leaked email of the University of East Anglia, a series of reports they have been severely criticized for by the people involved, ranging from poor reporting to outright lying, pretty serious business for an otherwise respected and large newspaper. The Guardian has posted a reply (at the critics blog, no less). Do read the comments, though, as they are perhaps more important and interesting.

LeakGate : Scientists fight back : Tim Lambert, Aussie vegemite and all-round good-guy, follows up on the many distortions made by journalist Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times over time, and he points us to this exclusive 31-page complaints letter by climate researcher Simon Lewis. Heady stuff! Will the Sunday Times respond in the same manner or at all as the Guardian above?

Health and fraud

Quack Miranda Warning : If you read this quite common warning on your medication or supplements, beware. And, a good introduction (reading the comments) on where this expression comes from.

Snake Oil : A beautiful infographic from Information is Beautiful, showing a vertical bubble-chart of peer-reviewed double-blind tests on various compounds and organics that you mostly find in supplements; what is proven to show any workings, and what is, essentially, snake oil. I love this one!

Religion and philosophy

Does God have a future? : You know, I'm really starting a man-crush on Sam Harris after this; what style and impeccable delivery, not to mention that he actually understand both the science and the philosophical implications of both. But Deepak Chopra? The opposite; he's the biggest woo-meister of them all, arrogant and testy, wielding the power of fluffy words and interruption of others. People respect that? I'm shocked.

The God of the old testament : A rather famous quote (and a video of him reading it) by Richard Dawkins, here put in context of biblical quotes to underline what is being said.

Indian skeptic challenges guru to kill him on live TV : Well, kill him with Tantric Magic, as it were. A delightful trip down the staircase of the insanity of what humans think they can do and the brave (in this case Samal Edamaruku, the president of the Indian Rationalists Association) that stays still and proves them terribly, humorously wrong. I giggled through most of this. There's even a second part over here where the Tantric is doing the whole "terrible ritual under a full moon with a scepter with feathers and fearsome chanting, and you know, you should be really, really scared, why aren't you dead already!? Just die, will you! Bugger."

Supersessionism : Word of the day : "Supersessionism and replacement theology or fulfillment theology are Christian interpretations of New Testament claims"

Off kilter

Kirsten Flagstad : Arguably one of the absolute best opera singers there ever was. And, she was Norwegian. Did I mention I'm an opera-buff?

Ancient Literature : A long list of reasonably known ancient literature. Brilliant if you're bored.

Circumference of the Earth and the Holocene geographical epoch : A link to the Wolfram-Alpha answer to the circumference of the Earth, and to a WikiPedia article on the Holocene. I'll tell you all about why I'm reading up on this in another post in the future, but a hint is that you might see me doing some local embarrassing sciency stuff soon. I can't wait.

Pruzy's Pot : Uh, a somewhat gross unexplainable short-story of sorts. You just have to hear it, I guess. I will have nothing more to do with it.

Tidbits, miscellaneous and bits and bobs

2010-03-23T17:22:00.000+11:00

Ok, let's clear out the tabs on my browser ;

A host of mummies, a forest of secrets : "In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air."

The trouble with trusting complex science : Another round of of talking about trusting science, specifically this time about climate change. I'm quite baffled that anyone can read the article and then at the bottom shout about conspiracies, it's all bogus and lies. There's only one side of this silly debate that's got any evidence to back up their claim. Can you guess which one?

Morality, with limits : "The question: What can Darwin teach us about morality?" A heck of a lot, but not Darwin himself but more to the point the 250 years of science that has progressed since. Speaking of misrepresenting Darwin, how about the worst science journalism of the year? Personally I think it's funny the media and the general population has such a crazy-bad knowledge of what Darwin actually wrote. Maybe they should read the darn thing before venture into hyperbole?

Sam Harris at TED : Science can answer moral questions : As a follow-up to the previous link I had to post this talk by Sam Harris that should be considered very, very seriously. Religion does not have monopoly over the notion of moral behavior, and often, you can say it's the opposite (referring, for example, to the current disgusting scandal within the Catholic Church, the worst crimes, the most abhorring behavior done by self-proclaimed holy people, and then the systematic cover-up of the same. Shocking stuff!)

Spin classification : Unless you're a physicist geek, this is both over your head, and terribly boring. You have been warned.

Distributed Publications : Finally, a more techie geeky look at distributed publications, using RDF / triplets (or any graph-ish model). Jeni always talks about great stuff.

Newbie tips for Topic Maps bliss

2010-03-19T17:26:00.000+11:00

Well, hi there, pilgrim! So, you've noticed this fandangled thing called "Topic Maps", and you heard it was an interesting, smart or new way of solving hard problems of some sort? Well, you've come to the right place. Let me, as an elder of the movement, give you a few hints and tips of how to go about this complex notion ;

1. Don't do it

Yeah, I won't lie to you; unless you know more than a smidgen about information science and / or knowledge management, and especially unless you know quite a bit about data models and how to interact with them in complex computer systems, I'd urge you to stay right clear of it. Topic Maps is full of complex models, silly jargon, weird people and technical API's. Nothing in the normal world is easy, and the Topic Maps world only makes it harder. Topic Maps won't solve your problem, unless you already know how to solve it, at which point find some other technology that people actually know, ok? What's the point of building the best system out there with amazing technology that no one knows how to use, extend, appreciate or even keep a straight face while talking about it.

Also, at what technical level do you think you need it? If the answer is, not very technical at all, why care about the underlying technology? An Excel spreadsheet might fix your problem much better. Use that. Unless you know that multi-dimensional graph-based technology will save you, look another way. If you don't know this stuff it will lure you in with magical wistful promises of a better tomorrow that will never see the time of day.

2. Make someone else do it if you must

Ok, so this one isn't all that different from the first tip, but since Topic Maps indeed can solve hard problems in brilliant ways, there are people out there who could use it and help you solve them. The truth is that people who are steeped in this stuff, who knows it inside out, indeed can solve pretty much any complex issue you might have with it, and even help you become smarter in doing it, even teach you how it all works. And there's other benefits to letting them do it for you; you don't have to become one of them in the process.

The truth is that Topic Maps really is cool and brilliant and all that, but it is ridiculously hard to grasp and even harder to master, and it will change you into a weirdo in the process. Have you really got the time, resources and personality traits it takes to get into this stuff? Really?

3. Topic Maps people are few and rare, and, uh, strange

I kid you not; these guys are not your average cup of tea, so tread gently, and expect to be surprised in some way or another. Expect them to say things that makes no sense whatsoever, they have their own language littered with technical jargon even technologists wouldn't understand. I don't think they get out much, at least not outside their own field, so you need to replace your own terminology for theirs if they are to made sense of, as they themselves rarely compromise and adapt to how the rest of the world see things.

Also, expect some slight geeky behavior like mistaking things like pages, tags, websites, business objectives, servers, networks, computers and pasta for topics, topics, topics, topics, topics, topics and topics, in that order. It's quite similar to that of Asberger's syndrome, but if you know how, you can use it to your advantage, but caution and patience must be urged, and just like with the real thing unfortunately there is no cure, only workarounds.

4. Patience is not a virtue, but stubbornness might be

Look, the mystical world of Topic Maps is full of concepts you never dreamed existed, things that makes you ask fundamental questions about identity philosophy, what is knowledge, and paradigms of models and technological culture. Patience is not enough to grasp this stuff, you need sheer stubbornness and bloodymindedness to get anywhere, and - dare I say it? - perhaps some weird personally trait. Maybe a limp or a monocle. Not only do you have to understand the technicality of the stuff, but also the weirdness of the culture itself and - perhaps even more important - the personal implications this knowledge might have upon your own thought processes. You may end up getting a cape.

Once you tread down the path of Topic Maps and actually get anywhere (and that in itself is a hallmark of your stubbornness), your brain will change, you will see things differently. I'm not going to say that that is a good thing, but it can be, especially if you like uprooting your preconceived notions and planting new ones. The world is built on foundations which are far removed from the Topic Maps world, but once you grasp this other world it is hard not to see your old world in a new light, and this can be challenging. You might even start to sound like one of these blubbering idiots yourself, saying topics, topics, topics, topics, topics when you used to speak a coherent language people around you actually understood. There's great danger in getting an epiphany or two.

5. If you like your job, stay clear

Hmm, I see a pattern in my tips, but the thing is that once you have converted your old job might look boring and infantile by comparison. You might get (morally repulsive) urges to work on Topic Maps, but your organisation probably won't understand what the hell you're on about (remember, the whole painful stubborn process you went through has to happen to each and every person in your whole organisation!), and you might be looking around for another job where the Topic Maps goodness is practiced. Don't be fooled!

These jobs don't really exist. No one thinks Topic Maps on your CV is a good thing, because they, too, haven't done that stupid painful stubborn path to enlightenment either, and you'll come across as a bit of a show-off with nothing to show for it. (The exception to this tip is if you live in Norway. If you want to know why, the answer is that, again, the Topic Maps culture is repellingly weird) No one who does real business gives a rats ass about Topic Maps, and no one who does real business in the future will either. Even people who does weird but similar things who also have modest success (like people doing Semantic Web / RDF work) shun Topic Mappers. For your own job security, stay clear.

6. However ...

However, if you are weird, not scared by overly complex or outlandish technologies, if you think that strange new cultures only makes you stronger (and you've got a strong immune system to boot), if you think job security is only the stuff of boring people, and, indeed, if you have a monocle, cape and a glass eye, perhaps this might be the place for you after all.

And if so, contact me; I get off on this stuff. Otherwise, you have been warned.

And another one

2010-03-17T10:21:00.000+11:00

Here follows another tidbit collection as life and things have heated up and is stealing my time. First a couple of techies, then a few sciency ones, and lastly politicals ;

Hanvon multitouch tablet : Pure, unrefined lust!

Introduction to neural nets : Back in the early 90's I was doing neural nets, cumulative histographical analysis and other hard-core funky techniques working on real-time video motion detection for high-security systems. Good old days.

Kilroy was here : Patrick Durusau is showing no end to his delightful writing, and I'm loving it. This post here is about how librarians have been there, done that. I feel I need to follow this one up properly in a couple of days, though, as I don't feel that that is the whole picture. Sure they've done some of it, but the people whodunnit are a few good eggs in a large, large basket of indifferent eggs; the library sectors' general cowardice / conservative notions coupled with a wide-spread lack of technology knowledge means "done it" truly means "haven't done it, only sniffed it."

ZTM Topic Maps : This project has been shrouded in mystery and undocumented hysteria for many, many years. I first heard about it back in my early days of Topic Maps, and I'm happy to see it turning into a real project. Looks good, too.

Memory and the Hippocampus : How are we doing picking our brains? What is neuroscience up to these days, especially with memory and, yes, the hippocampus, my favorite body part.

Global climate change, and flogging : A brilliant short video. "The anti-science crowd isn’t satisfied with merely spreading disinformation about climate scientists."

A bat is not a bug : Tim Lambert expose "The Australian" newspaper for the anti-science pile of rubbish it is.

You can't handle the truth : A more scientific look at the dangers and impact of drugs.

Science vs. religion : A hilarious cartoon poke!

Scientology insider's nightmare childhood : "A former Scientologist who says she was a 'child slave' and alleges she saw a six-year-old boy chained up in a ship's hold is disappointed the Senate has blocked a full inquiry into the religious organisation." What's up with this country? I thought I had arrived at a good place? (But then, I've written about Australian politics before, the ultimate oxymoron)

'We are adding balance' : The sad state of education and science creeping into the corners of the USA.

Tidbits

2010-03-10T17:19:00.000+11:00

My blog entries tries to be slightly more than just links and boring commentary to the stuff linked to, but I also realize I have a life and a job which demands a lot of my time. But every day there's always one other thing I wish to talk about, yet another tab open in my browser as I stumble around the net like a blind mole looking for a grapevine in a volcano, but most of the time those things are perhaps not extensively mind blowing enough to trigger my bloggoreah to go into a full post.

So, I'm starting a new thing. As my tabs fill up and my browsers slugs down, at some point I'll just decide to post the tabs with a slight commentary, dumping them all ontp the blog, and I'm starting as of ... now ;

How to Write Great Copy for the Web : My good friend Donna Spencer (nee Maurer), the Godess of UX, just released her second book about writing for the Inter-tubes (ie. the Internet, the web), which I hear is super-good. And when it's Donna, it's always good. Can't wait to get my dirty hands on it!

Schlepping From One Data Silo to Another : I'm delighted to see Patrick Durusau (one of the smartest people I know, with a beard to match it) finally start a blog. I've been whinging at him for a long time to do so, and this blog post is the reason why; he's preaching the gospel. Just like words are nothing or very little without a context (those things we usually call 'sentences'), data silos are nothing but bunkers until they are opened up, and become fountains.

The communities manifesto : Good stuff, although shouldn't this one have been made, like, years ago?

Minards' Napoleon : This amazing demonstration of the powerful ProtoVis JavaScript visualisation toolkit, is an adaption of another famous visualisation of Napoleon's catastrophic descent on Moskow.

The New Ten Commandments : A decalogue for the modern world : An updated take on what is purported to be the best thing since sliced bread (well, given sliced bread was invented early last century, that's an expression from the oxymoronic bin), the "backbone" of what many thinks have laid the foundations of the modern world (which isn't true, but that's a blog post in its own right for later) Also in this vein, Christopher Hitchens has a funny but good piece of late on the Ten Commandments as well.

Dear James Randi : As a skeptic myself, this is hilarious! Beware of language not fit for people who's got a problem with anatomy and calling things for what they are, like, uh, vagina's. And do check out other writings on the McSweeney website; really good stuff all around, another hidden treasure.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast : Sometimes we need to take a step back and think about the words and contexts we are using. Do you know what 'culture' means when people say it?

A question of perspective, and the deliciousness of cannibalism

2010-02-12T17:39:00.004+11:00

Happy Darwin day!

Let me pose this obtuse question to you; how many generations removed from you do you think it is ok to mate with your relatives? And the follow-up; how many generations removed do you think it's ok to eat them?

Dear friends, and by that, I mean everyone in the world, past, present and future. Again I'm sitting here pondering the big questions in life (it is, after all, lunch time), and I've hit upon a sad but somber note that I wanted to say something about. And I know this is a slight deviation from my normal prose, but some times there are more important things that trickle through my system up to the surface of this blog.

There are some revelations of truth that most people can't bear to think about in daily life, and so we suppress them, hide them away, and make them into someone else's problem; Surgery and blood, butchering of animals for consumption, undertaking, biopsies, most dentistry, philosophy, sewage and drains, rectal operations, and the list goes on and on with jobs you'd rather let someone else deal with. But I want to pick up on one of these for my purposes here, the butchering of animals.

I mentioned in my review of Dawkins latest book the notion of geological time, but we can extend that a bit to include the big bang (which didn't bang) and the formation of stars as well, so we're going some 13.7 billion years back in time. To use Carl Sagans wonderful cosmic calendar metaphor, imagine that all that time from the beginning of our universe (well, from the time just after the singularity until now, as we can't measure nothingness) until now is evenly spaced out across a years calendar. We, the humans and our whole history from when we diverged from some other ape specie, about 5 million years in total, is nothing but a little footnote; the last 10 seconds of the last day of the last month.

Let's go one step further, let's take those 10 seconds, our past history, and slosh that one across another yearly calendar, where January 1 is the first upright (but not humanoid) apes and where every month is about 416 thousand years each (every day is about 14 thousand years). That would mean we meet us, the species Homo Sapiens, at around 21st of December, just in time for solstice. This also means that our recent history, the written one we know about from the first Sumerian tablets 6000 years ago and until today all happens just shy of 12 hours before midnight before New Years.

We humans, as aware Homo Sapiens, are but mere minutes in the great cosmological calendar, and a quick blink in the great scheme of things. You yourself is nothing but a fraction of a millisecond. A macrosecond! And this is the scale from which you observe the universe and try to find answers.

It's worth pointing out that we live in what Richard Dawkins (in another book of his) is a medium sized and macrosecond timed perspective; all that you know about the universe has to be compressed into this tiny perspective. Imagine your tiny perspective as a glass jar in front of you; in you pour cosmological time with all its components of matter and energy. The words you read right now is a structured pattern you recognize as words that your brain translates into meaning, so when we look at huge swaths of time we're looking for patterns, for things that we can find some meaning in. Unfortunately, all of our modern world of patterns you recognize, including our scale social patterns, our technologies, our modern cultures, all those things we have a nominal understanding of (if not at least a record of), all of it is nothing but a mere grain in a large soup of all that's ever been. You can try to find some meaning by looking for that grain, but even the chance of finding it would be hard in the extreme; your perspective of looking for words and sentences no less than 0.7 centimeters high, usually black on white background, is so not fit for the task of looking at microscopic grains all jumbled up, you're simply extremely out of your bounds.

That is cosmological and geological time for you; it's very hard to grasp.

Update: I've added this handy chart in order to try and draw the immense time. On this scale, we - the civilization of the human species, our last 6000 years of trying to understand who we are - are mere three-four pixels, fitted on a small line that you can hardly see to represent our entire human specie! We're so far removed from the scale of the universe to practically render us non-existent;

Now, let's move on to chemistry, how elemental particles are influenced by the various powers of nature such as gravity, viscosity, surface tension, and thermodynamics. If you take all particles around and stir them in a great pot adding heat, how long do you think it will take for certain atoms to form? Well, that's how our billions and billions of suns made matter, and when they exploded in supernovas scattered this material across the universe. So stabilize things a bit, but still you stir the pot. How long does it take for the atoms to form molecules? Remember that in each of these processes there are things that are naturally attracted to each other, and things that naturally repel. So, how long to make molecules. like, say, water? Next step, how long do you stir until you get strings or clumps of molecules? And how long until those clumps gets other clumps attached? We must realize that chemistry on this level is highly complex. Molecule A needs water to form, but water needs the fusion powers to merge two gases into a liquid. But what about molecule B? Well, it may need enough gravitational pull or surface tension of enough molecules A to be able to create a molecule B. And to get molecule C's, we need perhaps 5 other molecules, and it might all be perfectly natural as they all rely on the natural pull and push of attraction with other kinds of molecules. Molecule D might be attracted to molecules A and B, but repel molecule C. And we keep stirring the pop. A molecule F might only form if you have already formed molecules D and you freeze them next to molecules H. How long do we stir this semi-random pot until we get the first multi-molecular things? How long until a cell? How long until a replicating cell? How long until a one-celled replicator? Chemistry basically are interactions between things, so you can add one molecule to a pot of other molecules and use the energy from that chemical reaction to do other things, like moving, replicating, eating, sleeping, repairing damage, having sex, enjoy sunsets and writing long blog entries in the Internet.

It's really a question of perspective and of time more than asking silly questions about whether life can come from nothing or not. Of course it can as long as we define "nothing" as something that's hard for normal people to understand; it's just natural stuff, but because we can't reasonable imagine cosmological time we come to the wrong conclusions about the origin of life, that it can't just come out of "nothing." The answer is that it most certainly didn't come out of nothing; it came out of the amazing nature of the universe, and of chemistry. And a pinch of luck, probably.

Before I venture back to my original question, we need to define evolutionary time as defined through how long we think evolution of life on this planet has taken place; 3.7 billion years. So, from when roughly the time the earth came to be until life emerged, the semi-random chemical pot was stirred for about a billion years (that is a long, long time nothing much at all really happened) and then one day some multi-molecules did something astounding; it became alive. But what does that mean, alive?

In terms of chemistry, not much. Some define life as a cell able to replicate itself through DNA, but even that's a big stretch. These days lots of people are even talking about an RNA world void of DNA, and this went on for a very, very long time. Stirring the pot changed things around, perhaps made it better or different (even though we find traces of the RNA world still), but if you look at the details of chemistry slowly and carefully, there is no life, there is no one point we can say it starts Here! Because everything evolves sloooowly, so slow, in fact, that just like cosmological and geological time, we can't even phantom evolutionary time. If evolutionary time is mapped to our one year calendar, each day represents over 8 million years, bringing our human existence down to the last two minutes of the whole calendar. That's a long time to stir.

One thing few people grasp with all this is of course that most of the stirring and chance encounters and attraction and repelling yielded nothing, and that it was all this lack of results that made the tiny bit of result ever so interesting! It's again a matter of perspective, but did you know that 99.7% of all species that ever lived on this planet are all extinct? This is on par with; did you know that your body's cells have all be renewed, and that all your memories of a time older than about 13 years are transfered to you, that you are not the same being that was here when those memories formed? Well, it continues to blow me away, and it should blow you away, too;

We are complex molecular machines that somehow got this notion that we are important, if not to something external then at least unto ourselves. These are fine evolutionary traits that probably has saved our bacon from time to time, but think in terms of cosmological, geological and evolutionary time and you quickly forget about the importance of now and rather ponder the importance of all that time that has passed.

We are all connected. Through evolutionary time, life has shaped itself into countless forms, both on land, in the sea and in the air, on rocks, under rocks, everywhere, all shapes, sizes, it did it all in the name of just keep going, of replicating itself at all levels (molecular, cellular, as creatures, and now with Homo Sapiens we can add "ideas" to the mix). We came from chemistry between elements, from the same place. And all the atoms on this planet that was back then are still here, only reassembled a million times over through chemistry. Some times they assemble into water, other times into gases, but some times, under amazing circumstances, they come together and assemble you. You're here because of the continuous process of evolution created more and more complex things that use DNA to put a few trillion molecules together to shape the person that you are. And it only took cosmological time for the universe to become self-aware.

You have billions of cousins. We all do. All our ancestors, millions of generations of slowly changing and adapting to its environment, to a slight stirring of a chemical pot, you end up with the millions of species we know about today. And if we know this many living species, how many countless millions of extinct ones could there be? No one knows, of course. But the question still remains;

How many generations removed from you do you think it's ok to eat your relatives?

We're all connected, we're all descendants from the same primordial soup, and no matter if you eat a carrot or a juicy steak, you're eating a distant cousin. Now it's just a matter of deciding how many generations away you're willing to eat.

Bon appetit!

Richard Dawkins "Greatest Show on Earth"

2010-02-08T17:56:00.001+11:00

If I wasn't an indoctrinated corporate drone I would be a scientist, and indeed, back when I was a wee boy I dreamed of becoming a geologist. Boy, did I know my gray rocks from the slightly lighter gray rocks and so on. I took great delight in walks in nature finding moraines and tills and other long-gone remnants of geological implication (glaciers, mostly), and I could tell rombeporfyr from feltspat and point out the probable processes involved in creating the shapes and colors. It was a glorious time, and I've still got it I think (and I've passed it on to my kids who always make me carry tons of rocks back home ... there's poetic justice if I ever heard it), but nowadays mostly through the local geography (which is interesting in its own mind as the Kiama area are remnants of several epochs of volcanic activity on top of sandstone, with a strong iron presence. I'll probable make a post about all this in the future sometime).

Knowing something about geology makes you somewhat aware of what's known as geological time, a time frame that spans billions of years. And, as some might suspect, trying to get a grip on what 'billions of years' for a mere human is is a daunting and often failed task. But a rudimentary understanding of geological time and processes also rendered me immune to a lot of otherwise human misunderstanding and nonsense that our cultures have built up over time to explain all that which we didn't understand. So if you understand unstable (ie. radioactive) isotopes in rocks and their half-life, how they break down (as a figure of speech) from an unstable to a stable form, you have no problem understanding other processes that also runs across billions of years, and indeed, runs parallel to geological time and processes. And to someone who not only knows a few things about rocks but also those things which you find inside rocks, evolution is not hard to grasp, at least not the tenant that it is right there, in front of you, staring back at you after you chipped that piece of rock off from the rock wall. For me, it was the most natural thing, and indeed sparked my deep interest in all things biological as well.

So for me to read Dawkins book "Greatest show on earth" was more like a dumbed-down defense of something that I thought no one was stupid enough to refute. But, there it was, in the first chapter, a fleshing out that there were indeed idiots out there who just could grasp the most basic notions and evidence, people who actually thought everything we see now has been unchanging for all the time the earth and the universe have existed; about 10.000 years. Huh? *blink* Maybe the sub-title should have tipped me off; "The evidence for evolution", as if we needed more evidence than what was taught in school.

Then I realized that not all the kids I went to school with paid too much attention when such big issues came up. They probably passed the tests and all, but I did not see them engage with (or annoy with too many questions) the teacher the way I think I did, they didn't go out into the woods to climb rocks and find fossils themselves, they didn't deduce the layers of a side of a deep canyon with a river at the bottom who was responsible for the canyon, who dug it, how the shape came to be. I guess they ended up not knowing as much, at least not on these subjects.

And that was the greatest surprise for me; the world really needs to be convinced that evolution is real?

It was like someone pinched me; here I was thinking our human species were going places, and then I found out that the truth somehow is in question, that people were actively disagreeing with the fact that the earth was flat, young and static (and yes, that was satire). Looking at their argument against is nothing short of a laughing matter, all attributed to the fact that their faith is in disagreement with the science. Ouch. So who do we think is right? The people of faith and no facts, or thousands of scientists working together for hundreds of years on the greatest Utopian adventure humankind has ever ventured on? Oh, the irony.

A few observations I need to point out, though, is that when you read the book, try to read it in the voice of Richard Dawkins himself; it will make the book so much better, the arguments come alive and the longer hard words stand out with better diction. When I read some of the things it wasn't until I heard him read it himself that the words obtained a greater sense of beauty, and I'm pressed to say that I prefer him talking.

Another nitpick is how Dawkins repeatedly say that "he won't deal with that anymore" or at all, because he or someone else have written about it elsewhere. That is fine if the reader is an avid fanatic, frantically buying and reading everything the man or those others have ever written, but for the rest of us that stands out as a balloon of evidence just being deflated, making that horrible noise in the process. Don't do that; mention at least the main interesting tidbits that fit in your context, and then provide further references.

But still, for me, in short, is that the book is great; it's well-written, perhaps two notches too intelligent in places (c'mon, references to poetry? Who reads poetry anymore? And it uses a lot of big words, excluding huge parts of the intended audience), but a tad bit too apologetic as there is nothing excusable about being ignorant by choice (although I understand that this angle is mostly for the US market) and, I feel, just way too soft on the "opposition." These people are clearly not just history deniers, they are outright dishonest about their thirst for truth and knowledge, probably wouldn't know epistemology if it hit them over the head, cannot fathom that human traits and physiology only makes sense in evolutionary terms (have you checked your vestigial parts lately?), and since the discovery of genetics the huge amount of science that only works if evolution is true over geological time. I agree that thinking evolution is not true is crazy on a scale of, err, biblical proportions, and as much as I this book wasn't for me, I guess there is a strong need for it if there truly are this many nut cases out there who will deny anything if it doesn't sync with their faith or holy book. Weird and sad, but then that's what happens when you deny truth and, you know, that which sits right in front of you just waiting to be seen.

Topic Maps, 10 years down the line

2010-02-04T17:39:00.000+11:00

I'm told, by way of my own imagination based on loose rumors put out by flying pink fairies, that Topic Maps is a waning technology, poorly supported by the IT industry at large, hard to wrap your head around, and generally icky to deal with.

All of this is, unfortunately, true.

But, as in all stories told by only one side, there is an other side just waiting to come out into the light, just one day, real soon now. This day may never come, but here is my own little attempt to shed some light on a few of the issues with the Topic Maps world. It was about 10 years ago I first got a whiff of Topic Maps, so my first post in 2010 seems fitting to take some Topic Maps rumors, loose observations and vague statements, and make some comments along the way. Here we go ;

1. Topic Maps are hard

Why, yes, to a commoner or some person with a somewhat traditional approach to computing, Topic Maps can indeed seem like an alien concept at first. The first time I started reading up on it I was mesmerized and frightened at the same time, wondering where the magic would bring me and just how painful it would be for me when reality would kick in (and me) ; there were new notions and concept, new words, new paradigms everywhere! Reification, role types, associations, occurrences, occurrence type, typified information, subjects and topics, ontologies (upper, lower, specialized ones) the list goes on. It is terrifying indeed, and for many, many people they are so terrifying that SQL and C# and .Net and C and PHP seems like a comforting auntie lulling you back into things we know and know well, no hard thinking required (just lots of hair to pull out).

Until you realize a few things, that is. For example, the vocabulary is anchored in information science, and with a bit of research or learning it shouldn't take that long to get familiar with it. Even the complex issues of reification and ontologies after some time will be as normal and self-explainable as second-cousins and language. (And yes, there is a correlation between the examples given! See if you can find them!) And perhaps more importantly, the problems you can solve with Topic Maps can completely and utterly eradicate the major problems those traditional methods give us, one of the biggest bug-bears that I'd ever had! (Anyone wish to offer me a book deal on how to solve most of the main IT development problems in seriously interesting ways? :)

Can I just mention that having an small epiphany about Topic Maps have the effect of you never returning to the real world and look at it the same way, ever again? I have never met a person who got Topic Maps return to the old ways, at least not without making huge compromises. Getting it will change you in good ways, and is most definitely worth the effort despite the pain.

Tips to newbies: It's not really hard, even if it seems hard. But it requires you to change your mind on some key issues.

2. Topic Maps are poorly supported in the real-world

Oh yes, indeed. If you talk to anyone, any company in your immediate serenity (yes, a tautologically pun) and ask them about their use of Topic Maps, you'd most likely get a blank stare back and a careful "What would we need maps for?"

There's the odd technical-inclined person who might now a toddle about what these fabled Topic Maps are all about, but very, very few people understand what they are, and even less have implemented them into something useful. (The exception to this is, oddly enough, the country of Norway, and some scantily-clad areas of southern Germany) No mainstream software package comes with the stuff wrapped in, no word-processor touts its amazingness, no operating system comes with support for it, and no popular software of any kind use it.

But then, there's the odd system that use it. You'll find it also in the odd Norwegian government portal, which is bizarre in its own right, and perhaps deep down in some academic underfunded project or perhaps some commercial project where parts of the data-model masquerades as it. My old website use it. I have a framework or two. There's the odd other open-source project, a few API's, and a host of other well-meaning but obscure projects that perhaps has got it, albeit well hidden and kept away from children.

For a technology that stands out as something that can fix it all, I find it bizarre that it is found so seldom, but then bizarre is not the same as surprised. And when you look at the "competition", the well-funded, well-marketed, well-established world of the Semantic Web, championed by none other than the W3C and Tim Berners-Lee, well you have to concede that it shouldn't be much of a surprise at all, really. Topic Maps is a tiny group of enthusiasts (a few hundred, being liberal with statistics) who'll saw off their right leg if it meant we could get the specs done in time, while the Semantic World is littered with academia, organisations and companies (we're talking thousands upon thousands of people actively working on it), so no, you should not be surprised.

Tips to newbies: As the saying go, if a million flies eat it ... surely, it has some nutritional value or greater worth over, say, that green grass the cows are dumping it on?

3. Topic Maps is dying and obsolete; use RDF instead

There was a period about 10 years ago which I regard as the Topic Maps time of bloom ; the trees had beautiful flowers on, the pink and purple petals falling over the world of IT like a slow-motion rainfall of beauty. Everywhere you turned there was people talking about it and potential projects popping all the time.

But times went by. Topic Maps was too hard for most (see point 1 and 2), and not just the technical implications themselves and the language and terms used, but also the philosophy of it, the very idea of why we should be using it over, say, any relational database or traditional software stack. I mean, what's the point, really?

The point is easy to miss, admittedly. A technology that can be used for everything is hard to pin down and said to be good for something. And we have focused just too damn much on knowledge management systems, and not only that, but used our own special language in the process which often is quite remote from knowledge management speech in the enterprise arena (but you find it rife in academia). When the world looks to Topic Maps, all they see is a difficult way to do knowledge management. Ugh.

Myself, I'm using Topic Maps in highly non-traditional ways. I use maps for my application (definitions, actions and functionality), for functional topology (generic functionality in hyper-systems based on typification), for business logic (rules, conditions, interactions) and, perhaps just as important, for the actual development itself (modules and plugins, deployment, versioning, services) which makes for a highly (and this "highly" is quite higher than any normally used "highly") customizable and flexible framework for making great semantic applications. But more on the details at some later stage.

Tips for newbies: No, it's not dead nor dying, just not as popular as stuff that's easier or more accessible

4. Topic Maps is nothing new

Well, given its roughly 20 year history (and I'm counting from early days of HyTyme), in Internet years it's an old, old dog, so by that alone we can't say there's anything new, but most people would mean "new" here to mean something like "we've been doing X for years, so why do we need this?", where X usually points to some bit of the Topic Maps paradigm that indeed has been done before. Of course it has. There is nothing new in Topic Maps except, of course, putting it all together and standardize one cohesive and complete way of doing pretty damn most of what you would need for your complex data-model, identity management, semantic or otherwise relational, interoperable information and / or structural need, chucking in knowledge management, too, for good measure.

There are of course nothing new with Topic Maps, except that all that old stuff is bundled into a new thing, if you allow a 20 year old standard to be called "new." But then again, "the standard" is really a family of standards, all evolving and changing with the times. There's always a sub-standard (no pun intended ... well, not a lot of pun intended) in the woodworks, always some half-baked document to explain something or other, always something that is so damn specific and concise that the overall grooviness and funky bits are pushed to the side-lines.

Topic Maps is new and old at the same time, but it really is groovy and funky once you overcome the technical jargon and the concise nature of the standards.

Tips to newbies: The king is dead. Long live the king!

5. The Topic Maps community is, um, a bit tricky

Oh, yes indeed. And this one is the hardest to write about as I'm part of this community and know pretty much everyone, some more than others.

So let's say it this way; I'm a difficult person in certain ways, for example I talk a lot, I overflow with ideas rather than code, I don't care too much about political correctness, and I speak my mind and use language that could alienate people with too strong attachments to their ties or their social buckets.

And the core of the Topic Maps community is loaded with weirdos like me; highly opinionated, rough ideas, hard on woo, and soft on business. But the problem isn't the weirdos, but the low number of them. Any successful community with such a wide-ranging and all-encompassing area of what Topic Maps is all about (which is, uh, almost anything) going from epistemology to identity management to ontology work, well, you need a lot of personalities to match them all to make it seem like a lively place. We, on the other hand, have a handful of people, and the contrast between us all is sometimes just too great. And, I've noticed, we're not very good with newbies, either, so even if we answer their questions, quite often our answers are just too far out there for normal people to comprehend (and I've got a ton of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to back it up).

I'm part of many different communities on the web, but there is only one champion of how fast an online discussion goes private (and it's not of the good kind; it's the kind where we need to express our frustrations in private [because, ultimately, we're nice people who don't want to offend anyone even when they deserve it, those bastards], lest we blow up and our eyes will bleed!), and that's the community which is located on a private server where you must write to the list owner in an email to be added. *sigh*

I tried my "question of the week" thing on the mailing-list for a while, and some of those went well, but too many of those question quickly descended into nothing or private arenas. So, I'm officially giving up on it for now. Maybe I'll come back stronger once my spine grows back, who knows?

Tips for newbies: Be strong, keep at it, ask for clarification! We don't know just how alien we are. And please join in as we need more weirdos.

6. What, exactly, is Topic Maps, anyways? I don't get it!

Yes, indeed, what exactly is this darn Topic Maps thing? The funny thing is that there is no correct answer to that question. First of all, it's a family of standards that we collectively call "Topic Maps", but it could also mean either the TMDM (Topic Maps Data Model) standard or the XTM (Topic Maps XML exchange format) XML standard, depending on your non-sexual preferences. Some might even go out on a limb (obviously not the limb cut off in point no. 2) and claim that it means the TMRM (Topic Maps Reference Model) which is a more abstract framework, or possibly even just the philosophical direction - or, dare I say it, zeitgeist? - of the thing, like a blueprint for how to build a key-value recursive property framework with identity- and knowledge management system. Your mileage may vary.

But then we have a problem as it is not a technology nor a format. It is more akin to a language, a model or a direction of sorts. No, not a language like SQL (even though the TMQL (Topic Maps Query Language) could be said to hold that place) that is to be parsed by a computer, nor a language like Norwegian or English. No, we're talking about a language that sits right in the middle between the computer and the human, a kind of mediator or translator, a model in which both machine and human can do things that each part understands equally well, a model which is defined through information science, math and human language.

So what is it? It's a language that both computers and humans can use without pulling too much in either direction, a language in the middle that, if spoken by many parties (computers and humans both), they can all join hands and sing beautiful knowledge management songs together, share and propagate with ease. But of course, Topic Maps isn't limited to just knowledge management, oh no. You can solve unsurmountable things with it as you can make it represent whatever you want it to, and I really, truly mean anything. If you want a topic to represent your thing, off you go. It's that flexible.

It can work as the basis for pretty much any system that has structures in it of any kind or shape, and that, by and large, is pretty much any system ever built. So it's actually quite hard to explain just what you can use it for, even though traditionally it's content management, portals and knowledge management.

Tips to newbies: It's only a model ...

So there you go, a quick summary of bits and bobs about Topic Maps. In my next installment, I'll summarize my naval fluff collection, next the train-table changes of Minnamurra station of the last 10 years, and finally I thought I'd summarize all the redundant technology that's gathering dust in my garage. Stay tuned for exciting times ahead!

I ain't dead!

2009-12-08T16:31:00.000+11:00

Right, so I'm still here, in the rubble of my mind, trying to work something out. I haven't blogged in the last few weeks, because, again I'm lost to the infinite machine of just too bloody much to blog about. Some of these things are somewhat secret stuff, but a lot of it I should yell out for all to see, and I'm sure with a bit of patience and Macedonian Oil I just might.

But not now. "Now" is just a futuristic recap of things I've blogged about in the near future, using cheesy book titles ;

The end is far, far away : Studies in Cosmology, thoughts on the flat universe model and evolutionary natural selection, and how timing is everything
Ontology schmology bolony : Everything I know about ontologies, linked data and inference, and just what a bloody mess it all is (and the possible ways through it, as far as I can see)
Library end-times : This is what they were, this is what they are, this is what they'll become
Evolution as a driver for moral philosophy : Philosophical greats had good questions that now makes for redundant answers
Have you heard this?! : Science as a language of beauty, art and transcendence
Functionally complete impotence : Programming languages that mean well, but are ugly, smells bad and won't make you light up after having sex with it
Atheism and agnosticism : A transsexual ploy to power (or, a Tale of two Ditties)
Software : Sitting comfortably? How sitting in front of a computer makes you a terrible programmer
Books I've read : The good stuff (and where to go next)
Books I've read : Time I've wasted (and the reasons for it)
Lingua Panga! : How language poisons everything (the big problems of humanity blamed on humans talking too much)

Right, so that should leave some clues as to where I am and where my mind is. My bedsite table is brimming over with books and notes, and I've got a few half-written articles (novels, is more like it) sitting around waiting for me to retire so I can bloody well finish them.

I also have some real articles in the oven, about service-oriented architecture (SOA) perils and solutions in a time of cloud hysteria, parallel processing mania and key-value minimalist thinking as a way to leverage, er, something or other. I'm sure it'll be great once I figure out what I'm writing.

Oh, and it's hot here now. We've been to the beach rather often, but being a dad of three crazy kids I don't get to go in the water much, but I enjoy helping Sam dismantle the beach with a shovel and bucket. It's also end-of-year stuff with school, Lilje playing in some musical number or two, and generally for Grace and Lilje to say goodbye to Minnamurra Primary as we're moving them over to Shellharbour Anglican Collage next year following Julie's new job there. We're also moving houses in about 10 days (closer to the beach, so it must be good, although I'll miss the close proximity to all my coffee-shops), so that's going to be crazy time.

Ok, time to go and treat kids for head-lice which has rampaged through their school of late. And then, dinner. Wish me luck.

On identity

2009-10-27T17:27:00.000+11:00

What are you talking about?

   We're always talking about something, but have you wondered why we humans are so good at it? It's not because we're smart, that our brain has got some amazing capacity for language, or even that we've evolved a great sense of logic and inference so we can break sentences up into compartments, parse it and make some sense of it. No, it's because we've got a tremendous imagination!

   And it seems that our frontal lobe is to blame; it is linked to a number of cognitively important things, like dreaming (preparing the brain for situations and trauma; did you know that no matter the trauma you will be over it [as in, able to move on] within 7 months?), Déjà vu (the frontal lobe is always a few milliseconds ahead of you), intuition (simulating possibilities, feeding you with probables), and in this context, filling in the gaps as best it can.

   And boy is it good at it. Remember that meme that was floating around some time ago, about how researchers have found that if you removed some of the letters from words in a text, the brain is still able to fill in the gaps so that you can make sense of it? The brain will fill in whatever gap there is, and this is also being heavily linked to religion and why people believe in rather bizarre things, from ghosts to conspiracies to "alternative medicine" ("You know what they call alternative medicine which is proven to work? Medicine.'" -- Tim Minchin). But I'm not going to get into what they believe here, only how they believe in the same bizarre things as their peers.

   But first some background. My recent adventures in library-land is trying to get some traction on identity management, which I have tried to explain there for the last two or three years with little to no success. I'm not even sure why the library world - full of people who should know a thing or two about epistemology - don't seem to grasp the basics of epistemology. (Maybe it's another one of those gaps the brain fills in with rubbish?) How do we know that we're talking about the same thing?

   If I have a book A in my collection and Bob has a book B in his collection, how can we determine if these two books share some common properties or, if we're really lucky, is written by the same author, has the same title, and is the same edition, published by the same publisher? We're trying to establish some form of identity. Now, we humans are good at this stuff because we're all fuzzy and got this brain which fills in the gaps for us, but when we make systems of it we need other ways to denote identity.

   The library world has a setup which is based around the title and the author, so for example we get "Dune" by Frank Herbert (1920-1986), or if we are to cite it, something like this (from NLA's catalog) ;

APA Citation: Herbert, Frank, 1972 Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia :
MLA Citation:   Herbert, Frank, Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia : 1972
Australian Citation: Herbert, Frank, 1972, Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia :

Never mind that when you look at the record itself it lists Herbert as "Herbert, Frank, 1920-" confusing a lot of automata by not knowing he died over 20 years ago. So we've got several ways of citing the book, several ways of denoting the author ... what to do?

The library world is doing a lot of match and merge (on human prose, no less!), where since you know that a lot of authors have died since their records were last updated, you can parse the author field and try to match "sub-fields" within it to match on that. However, this quickly becomes problematic ;

Herbert, Frank (1920-)
Herbert, Frank (1921-1986)
Herbert, Francis (-1986)
Herbert, Franklin (1920-)
Herbert, Franklin Patrick Jr (1919-)
Herbert, Francis (1030-)
Herbert, Frank Morris (1920-)

Which of these is the real Frank Herbert who wrote the book "Dune"? Four of them, actually. Now, if you're a human you can do some searching and probably find out which ones they are, but if you're a computer you have buckleys trying to figure these things out, no matter how well you parse and analyse the authors individual "sub-fields". People make mistakes and enter imprecise or outright wrong information into the meta data (for a variety of reasons), so we need some other method that's a bit better than this. However, do note that this is the way it's currently being done. Add internationalization to the mix, and you'll have loads of fun trying to make sense of your authority records, as they are called.

Now, my book A just happened to be "Dune" by Frank Herbert, so I sent a mail to Bob with the following link and asked if that happened to be the same book ;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)

Did you notice what just happened? I used used an URI as an identifier for a subject. If you popped that URI into your browser, it will take you to WikiPedia's article on the book and provide a lot of info there in human prose about this book, and this would make it rather easy for Bob to say that, yes indeed, that's the same book I've got. So now we've got me and Bob agreeing that we have the same book.

How can our computer systems do the same? They cannot read English, certainly not to any capacity to reason or infer the identity of the subject noted on that WikiPedia page. But here's the thing; that URI is two things ;

A HTTP URI which a browser can resolve, will get a web page back for, and which it displays to a human to read.
A series of characters and letters in a string.

   It's the second point which is interesting for us when computers need to find identity. It is a string that represents something. It isn't the web page itself, just an identifier for that page, just a representation of a particular subject. This brings us back to epistemology, and more specifically representialism; we've created a symbol, a string of letters, that doesn't need to be read or understood when the strings are put together, but simply a pattern, a shape, a symbol, an icon, a token, whatever. It's not an URI anymore, but simply a token. And because it's a string of characters, it's easy to compare one token against the other. "http://bingo.com" and "http://bingo.com" have the same equivalence as "abc" and "abc", that is, they are the same. Those symbols, those tokens, are equal.

   So now we can say that the URI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) is simply a token and a URI at the same time. This is deliberate, and bloody brilliant at the same time; it means that we can compare a host of them for equality as well as being resolvable in case we want to have a look at what they are. This becomes a mechanism for both human understanding of what's on the other end of the URI, and for doing computational comparisons.

   So are we to use an URI for each of the variations of Frank Herberts name? No, that would bring us back to square one. No, the idea is for sharing these URIs (but more on URIs for multiple names in a minute) in a reasonable fashion, but this is where it gets slightly complex because when you talk to Semantic Web people it's all about established ontologies and shared data. When you talk to people, it's all about resolvable URIs. But there's a bit that's missing ;

I love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

That's a classic statement, but what am I saying? Do I love the Semantic Web (the subject), or do I love that web page article at WikiPedia explaining the Semantic Web (a resource)?

Incidentally, my classic statement is known as a value statement in the RDF world, and as a triplet (because it's got three parts, the three words / notions). Whenever we're working with RDF, we're working with URIs. Every single entity is translated into its URI form like such ;

I [http://shelter.nu/me.html]

love [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love#Interpersonal_love]

Semantic Web [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web]

I need to talk a bit about namespaces at this point. If you're not familiar with them, they're basically a shorthand for mostly the first part of an URI, like a representation that can be reused, and then glued together by the means of the magical colon : character, so for example I have many things to say about me and my universe, which each will get translated into a URI ;

me [http://shelter.nu/me.html]

topic maps [http://shelter.nu/tm.html]

fields of interest [http://shelter.nu/foi.html]

blog [http://shelter.nu/blog/]

Writing out the URI for each thing is tedious, and also is prone to errors, so what we do is to create a namespace as such ;

alex = http://shelter.nu/

Now we can use that namespace with a colon to write all those URIs in a faster, less error-prone way ;

me [alex:me.html]

topic maps [alex:tm.html]

fields of interest [alex:foi.html]

blog [alex:blog]

Namespaces is also a good way to modularize and extend easier existing stuff, and helps us organize and care for our various bits and bobs. Well, so the theory goes. But when you muck around with lots of data from many places, it quickly becomes a situation that I call name-despaced, where there's just too many namespaces around. When it gets complex like that with hundreds of namespaces around, we're pretty much back to having non-semantic markup again and no one really wants that. This all is of course the result (but not end result) of the organic way information and people organize stuff. Some namespaces will die, while others will be popular and live on, and we're still in early days.

Anyway, back to solving our identity management problems. The issue here is that just sharing the data doesn't give us semantics (meaning), nor does sharing our ontologies. We need both human comprehension and computational logic in order to pull it all off, and the reason we care about this these days is that the amount of data is growing beyond our wildest imaginations and will continue to grow. The computational part is reading in ontologies and sort data thereafter. The human part is creating the ontologies.

So what are these ontologies? Well, they're just models, really, an abstract representation of something in reality, so when FRBR spends its time in prose and blogs and articles and debate, it's really trying to make us all agree on a specific way of modeling said domain. When we formalize this effort, mostly into XML schemas or RDF / OWL statements, we are creating an ontology. It's like a meta language in which we can describe our models further. This is usually modularized from the most abstract into the most concrete way of thinking, so from what's known as an upper ontology (pie-in-the-sky) through various layers (all called many different things, of course, like middle, reason, core, manifest, etc.)

   Karen Coyle (a voice of reason on the future of the library world) recently "debated" with me on these things, and I pointed her to "Curing the web's identity crisis", an article by Steve Pepper (fellow Topic Mapper like me) which more people really should read and make an effort at understanding. Now I think there's some confusion as to what is being explained (well, I never got a reply, so I don't know, to be honest. It's probably me. :), and also to why we (us terrible representialists) keep bringing this up, but I'm kinda back to where I started in this blog post of trying to argue the case for creating identity of things through more layers than currently is being used.

   We (both RDF and Topic Maps) use URIs as tokens for identity. But in the RDF world there is no distinction between subject identity and resource identity, and I suspect this is where Karen's confusion kicks in. In the Topic Maps world we make this distinction quite clear, in addition to the resource-specific identities as well (so URIs for internal Topic Map identity, external subject identity, and external resource identity), and this is vitally important to understand!

Let me examplify with how I would like to see future library cataloging being done ;

I have a resource of sorts at hand, it could be a book or a link or a CD or something. Doesn't matter, but for the example it's written by Frank Herbert, apparently, and is called "Dune Genesis." It's an eBook. I pop "Frank Herbert" into a textbox of sorts, the system automatically does some searching, and finds 5 URIs that match that name. One of those URIs are WikiPedia and another is The Library of Congress. That means LoC has verified that whatever explain the subject of "Frank Herbert" is at the URI at WikiPedia, and that there is a reasonable equality between the two; one WikiPedia page, one authority record at LoC. The other URIs more or less confirm it (and this speaks to trust and government) I choose to accept the LoC URI as a author subject URI. Nothing more needs to be entered, no dates, no names, no nothing. Just one URI.

   Now I pop the name "Dune Genesis" into by tool, and it does its magic, but it return only a WikiPedia URI, and because it's tradition not to "trust" WikiPedia it means I have a "new" record I need to catalog. However, the WikiPedia URI contains RDFa, so my tool asks if I want to try and auto-populate meta data, and I choose yes. Fields gets populated, and I go over them, controlling that they are good, add some, edit some, delete some, and hit save.

   Two things now happen; the system automatically create an URI for me, a subject identity URI that if resolve will point to a page somewhere on our webserver with our meta data. That URI is fed back into whatever loop that tool uses for federated URIs, it could be library custom-made (see EATS below, or look to the brilliant www.subj3ct.com website for federated identity management) or something as simple as Google (for example, I use Ontopedia a lot, so if I do do "Alexander Johannesen Ontopedia", I will get as a first result a page representing an URI I can use for talking about me). This creates a dual system of identity, one for the subject, one for the meta data about the book, both using the same URI.

   Do you dig it? Can you see it? Can you see the library world slowly using such a simple mechanism for totally ruling the meta data and identity management boulevard, or what? I pointed to Conal Tuohy's EATS system. Make him give it to you, collaborate to make this just work, open-source and make make it a tool for librarians to automatically create, use, harvest and share identities and resources using the same URIs, and you've got what you need.

   This is complex stuff, and I think I need a drink now. A nice hot tea will do, and I'll try to clarify more in the coming days. Until then, ponder "what the heck you are talking about."

Old post, as good as new

2009-10-21T19:26:00.000+11:00

I just realized that I wrote this ages ago but never posted it. It has a few gems in it ;

Criticism is mostly about rocking the boat. Sure, there's positive criticism, like "you're not ugly, just beautiful-impaired!", but aren't we over this silly overly political correctness by now? Criticism is to tell it straight, that what someone else has done is not up to scratch, that surely there must be some improvement that could be done. But the library world don't work like that. Criticism in the library world uses a different word; approval.

Ontological Ponderings

2009-10-15T14:21:00.003+11:00

The last few months have been interesting for me in a philosophical sense. My job is on an architectural level in using ontologies in software development, both in the process (development, deployment, documentation), the infra-structure (SOA, servers, clusters) and the end result of it (business applications). So needless to say, I've been going a bit epistemental, so I promised myself yesterday to jot down my thoughts and worries, if for no other reason than for future reference.

One big thing that seems to go through my ponderings like a theme, is the linguistic flow of the definition language itself, in how the mode of definition changes the relative inference of the results of using that ontology over static data (not to mention how it gets even trickier with dynamic data). We usually say that the two main ontological expressions (is_a, has_a) of most triplets (I use the example of triplets / RDF as they are the most common ones, although I use Topic Maps association statements myself) defines a flat world from which we further classify the round world. But how do we do this? We make up statements like this ;

Alex is_a Person

Alex has_a Son

Anyone who works in this field understand what's going on, and that things like "Alex" and "Person" and "Son" are entities, and defined with URIs, so actually they become ;

http://shelter.nu/me.html is_a http://psi.ontopedia.net/Person

http://shelter.nu/me.html has_a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son

Well, in RDF they do. In Topic Maps we have these as subject identifiers, but pretty much the same deal (except some subtleties I won't go into here). But our work is not done. Even those ontological expressions have their URIs as well, giving us ;

http://shelter.nu/me.html http://shelter.nu/psi/is_a http://psi.ontopedia.net/Person

http://shelter.nu/me.html http://shelter.nu/psi/has_a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son

Right, so now we got triplets of URIs we can do inferencing over. But there's a few snags. Firstly, a tuple like this is nothing but a set of properties for a non-virtual property and does not function like a proxy (like for instance the Topic Maps Reference Model do), and in transforming between these two forms gives us a lot of ambiguity that quickly becomes a bit of a problem if you're not careful (it can completely render inferencing useless, which is kinda sucky). Now given that most ontological expressions are defined by people, things can get hairy even quicker. People are funny that way.

So I've been thinking about the implications of more ambiguous statement definitions, so instead of saying is_a, what about was_a, will_be_a, can_be_a, is_a_kindof_a? What are the ontological implications of playing around with the language itself like this? It's just another property, and as such will create a different inferred result, but that's the easy answer. The hard answer lies between a formal definition language and the language in which I'm writing this blog post.

We tend to define that "this is_a that", this being the focal point from which our definition flows. So, instead of listing all Persons of the world, we list this one thing who is a Person, and moves on to the next. And for practical reasons, that's the way it must be, especially considering the scope of the Semantic Web itself. But what if this creates bias we do not want?

Alex is_a Person, for sure, but at some point I shall die, and then I change from is_a to a was_a. What implications will this, if any, have on things? Should is_a and was_a be synonyms, antonyms, allegoric of, or projection through? Do we need special ontologies that deal with discrepancies over time, a clean-up mechanism that alters data and sub-sequentially changes queries and results? Because it's one thing to define and use data as is, another completely to deal with an ever changing world, and I see most - if not all - ontology work break when faced with a changing world.

I think I've decided to go with a kind_of ontology (and ontology where there is no defined truth, only an inferred kind-system), for no other reason that it makes cognitive sense to me and hopefully to other people who will be using the ontologies. This resonates with me especially these days as I'm sick on the distinction people make between language and society, that the two are different. They are not. Our languages are just like music; with the ebb and flow, drama and silence that makes words mean different things. By adding the ambiguity of "kind of" instead of truth statements I'm hoping to add a bit of semiotics to the mix.

But I know it won't fix any real problems, because the problem is that we are human, and as humans we're very good at reading between the lines, at being vague, clever with words, and don't need our information to be true in order to live with it. Computers suck at all these things.

This is where I'm having a semi-crisis of belief, where I'm not sure that epistemological thinking will ever get past the stage of basic tinkering with identity in which we create a false world of digital identities to make up for any real identity of things. I'm not sure how we can properly create proxies of identity in a meaningful way, nor in a practical way. If you're with me so far, the problem is that we need to give special attention to every context, something machines simply aren't capable of doing. Even the most kick-ass inferencing machines breaks down under epistemological pressure, and it's starting to bug me. Well, bug me in a philosophical kind of way. (As for mere software development and such, we can get away with a lot of murder)

I'm currently looking into how we can replicate the warm, fuzzy impreciseness of human thinking through cumulative histograms over ontological expressions. I'm hoping that there is a way to create small blobs of "thinking" programs (small software programs or, probably more correctly, script languages) that can work over ontological expressions without the use of formal logic at all (first-order logic, go to hell!) that can be shared, that can learn what data can and can't be trusted to have some truthiness. Here's to hoping.

The next issue is directional linguistics, in how the vectors of knowledge is defined. There's things of importance to what order you gain your knowledge, just like there's great importance in how you sort it. This is mostly ignored, and the data is treated as it's found and entered. I'm not happy with that state of things at all, and I know that if I was taught about axioms before I got sick of math, my understanding of axiomatic value systems would be quite different. Not because I can't sit down now and figure it out, but because I've built a foundation which is hard to re-learn when wrong, hard to break free from. Any foundation sucks in that way, even our brains work this way, making it very hard to un-learn and re-train your brain. Ontological systems are no different; they build up a belief-system which may prove to be wrong further down the line, and I doubt these systems know how to deal with that, nor do the people who use such systems. I'm not happy.

Change is the key to all this, and I don't see many systems designed to cope with change. Well, small changes, for sure, but big, walloping changes? Changes in the fundamentals? Nope, not so much.

We humans can actually deal with humongous change pretty well, even though it may be a painful process to go through. Death, devastation, sickness and other large changes we adapt to. There's the saying, "when you've lost everything, there's nothing more to lose and everything to gain", and it holds remarkably true for the human adventure on this planet (look it up; the Earth is not really all that glad to have us around). But our computer systems can't deal with a CRC failure, little less a hard-drive crash just before tax-time.

There's something about the foundations of our computer systems that are terribly rigid. Now, of course, them being based on bits and bytes and hard-core logic, there's not too much you can do about the underlying stuff (apart from creating quantum machines; they're pretty awesome, and can alter the way we compute far more than the mere efficeny claims tell us) to make it more human. But we can put human genius on top of it. Heck, the ontological paradigm is one such important step in the right direction, but as long as the ontologies are defined in first-order logic and truth-statements, it is not going to work. It's going to break. It's going to suck.

Ok, enough for now. I'm heading for Canberra over the weekend, so see you on the other side, for my next ponder.

Stupidity of systems and debt collection

2009-10-07T13:09:00.004+11:00

Today's tale is an example of stupidity put into system. Or, a system that has accumulated enough stupidity to grow sentience, and has become a cancer onto society.

A preamble; in my distant, distant past (over 20 years ago now), I accumulated a bit of debt due to unfortunate circumstances, not too big for the world to get scared, but not small enough not to cause trouble. I lost a house over it, basically stemming from taxes on income the government of the country I was living in at the time thought I should pay when I, in fact, didn't have an income at the time (in their wisdom they demanded I had to prove that I didn't have an income, a bit like proving that something doesn't exists which is, in fact, impossible. And when you're arguing with a system, you're not going to be heard). It's a long story, one I'd rather try to forget, but suffice to say I have some experience of debt, debt collection and the various instances and how they work.

Since my distant past I try to help people make sense of these systems, mostly for minor things (like when you forget to pay a bill twice ... you'd be surprised how easy it is :), but sometimes also for larger debts that take time, patience and good negotiating skills to overcome. But I've done it again and again.

So, the other day we got a message on our answering machine from some person who's got the worlds fastest talking voice, saying something like 'Hi, Ribbedy Rabbedy from Bing and Bong here (honestly, it sounded just like that!), calling on an urgent matter, call us back on !*$*!!!*$$%%!*$ (I had to go through the message over 10 times to get these numbers right) with reference number %*@%*@%*$$* (another 10 times to get this number), bye!'

I called back straight away, because we have a pretty good system in our house for bills coming in and getting dealt with and knew of nothing outstanding, where everything gets put into the 'in' folder and dealt with at least three times a week, and if dealt with, moved from one side of the desks folder drawer to the other, big cross across the bill, and typed 'paid' in large numbers, before filed safely. But when I called the number, I was greeted by a receptionist who didn't know who'd called me, couldn't find anything with my reference number, couldn't tell me quite what it was they do ('business services' yeah, that explains it) and in the end we gave up. I thought, if it is that important, they'll get back to me.

Didn't hear another thing for two weeks. Maybe they made a mistake, and were after someone else.

Then last night we get a call from someone with a thick Indian accent, probably some poor outsourced guy in Bangalore just trying to fill his quota, trying to explain to first my 9 year old daughter, then to my wife, and finally to me, about something or other. We just couldn't work it out, except big words such as "serious matter" and "debt", and this all smack down in the middle of dinner-time. What they hell? It sounded more and more like a scam, as he was being very secretive, refusing to tell me anything of value, so I tried to just get out of him what company he was calling from, which was something like B'n'B, D'n'D, E'n'E, or any other combo of letters that go with ee-enn-ee ("what do you do? We do business services" Aaaargh!). My daughter confused and my wife worked up, I ended the conversation with saying that if there is a serious matter and you can't communicate properly, send us a friggin' letter, in a stern but polite manner.

Today came a letter. Well, a bill actually, accompanied with threats of "garnishee your wages, tax refund, bank account or *** or take you to court" with "urgency" and "serious" plastered all over it.

I paid the bill after going through our paperwork and not finding a 'paid' version of it, ticking it up as 'human failure to pop an old bill where it belongs for filing' (so, most likely my fault), and then the phone rings. Yup, another representative for this company bugging us. Having just paid the bill, I asked why he's calling, but because these guys (and no Indian accent this time, albeit there was a foreign element to it, since I'm a foreigner myself I detect these things) can only read from scripts he insisted to talk to my wife. I said, no, you just called me on my phone, I'm her husband, is there anything we need to know that the letter / bill doesn't address. "If I could only talk to your wife, I could answer that question."

This is where it gets complicated, and I must induce the powers of logic, inference and bloody common sense. The next 3 minutes went on with me stating "you called me, you tell me, my wife doesn't want to speak to you because you're rude, incosiderate and mysterious about matters which could be cleared up in no time and you insist on being stupidly pigheaded because 'for legal reasons' that you can't explain further you can't explain it to anyone but her *if* there is or isn't anything of importance you need to tell her that the letter didn't."

"For legal reasons" is more often than not business speak for "we don't want to get into legal trouble ourselves", and is something I've been thinking a bit about lately. I've had phone calls from various companies we have services from, Telstra being one of them, who do courtesy calls to you to make sure everything is fine, or nag about some service they're pushing, or other somesuch, and they all start with asking me about info to confirm that I am who I am. "For legal reason."

So I am to tell a stranger, who is calling me on my own bloody phone, that claims to be from Telstra or otherwise to give out personal info for verification of who I am? What is my option for verifying that they are who they claim to be? At current, there is none; this is a one-way street, because I am me, lucky to their client, and they are whoever hell they want to be. This whole identity conundrum has been bugging me more and more of late, and culuminated today with this idiot (who in his defence was reading from a script) failing miserably to understand that in any conversation there are two parts; you and who you are addressing at the time. It may not be who you want to be talking to, but that doesn't alter the reality of it.

I ended the conversation by saying 'I'm going to say no' to his insistant nagging to talk to my wife. The letter and all this insane phone terror comes from Dun & Bradstreet (signed 'sincerely' Corey Smith, National Collections Manager, who I suspect has his name and scanned signature in many D&B templates), one of the bigger players in the debt collecting and reporting business (who I've had slightly better dealings with their Norweigan branch in the past, but only marginally).

What's all this hubbub about, you may ask? 63$. Yup, that's right, 63 Australian shiny little dollars, and not only that, but CentreLink - an arm of the Australian government for family benefits, like child support, pensions and the like - had overpaid us the 63$, and now apparently wants it back the hard way, at any cost (and you can just imagine the cost of all this rubbish!). Instead of, you know, just deduct it from our next payment.

63 friggin' dollars. They should feel so ashamed of themselves. This is what you get when stupid systems grows sentinence instead of a brain.

Library Pontifications

2009-09-29T20:39:00.004+10:00

Once in a while I get some email from people who ask me some questions or ask me to clarify something I've said in some setting. The other day I ranted on the NGC4LIB (Next-generation catalog 4 libraries) mailing-list about, uh, something or other. And I got email, which I answered, but since I got no reply I'm posting it here in a blog-edited form so that it doesn't go to waste ;

I think I am starting to understand your rants against the culture of MARC, and I'd probably feel offended if I knew what all of the above meant.

Hmm. Well, it wasn't meant to offend anyone. I guess if people thought they were hardcore into persistent identity management, then maybe they would feel I've either overlooked their hard work or don't think what they're doing is the right kind, or something.

I usually have two goals with my "rants"; 1. flush out those who already are on the right track, and make them more vocal and visible, and 2. if no one is on the right track, inspire people in the library world to at least have a look at it. I can do this because I have no vested interest in the library world as such; I cannot lose my library job as I'm not working for a library. :)

Naturally, to feel outside of the mainstream creates a crisis of confidence in one's abilities. What does it mean these days to say that one is a cataloger or that one works in tech services, and is it perceived as a joke for those on the outside? Oh yeah...they still produce cards. What do they know about databases?

Librarians are from the outside an incredible gifted bunch of people who knows what they're doing, they have granted powers outside the realm of normal people (including professionals like software developers, believe it or not), and they know stuff we normal folks don't.

However, having been on the inside you get to glimpse the reality of an underfunded, underprioritized sub-culture of society who knows as little about the "real-world" as normal folks know of the library world. There is a great divide between them, and very little has been done to open up. The blame for this I put squarely on the library world (as the real-world is, well, real and out there) who for many years have demanded a library degree even for software development positions, and when we finally get there we are treated as second-class citizens because we don't have that mark of librarianship that comes from library school. It's a bizarre thing, really, and perhaps the most damaging one you've got, this notion of librarians must have a library degree, as if normal people will never understand the beauty of why a 245 c is needed, or the secret of why shelves must be called stacks, and so on.

One thing that has got me very disillusioned about the library way is philosophy. I deliberately sought out the library as a place to work because I have a few passions mixed with my skills which I thought was a good match, and one of the strongest passions were epistemology. One would think that if there was one institutional string of places that could appreciate the finer details of epistemology, it would be the libraries and the people within. That's what they concern themselves with, no?

Err, no. No, they don't. There's the odd person that ponders how a OCLC number can verify some book's identity, but these are very plain boring questions of database management. Then along came FRBR which does not only dip its toes into epistemology, but outright talks about it! The authors of it clearly had knowledge and wisdom about such things. So, one would think there was hope. Like, when it came out in 1993. That's more than 15 years ago. And people still haven't got it. How much time do you reckon it's going to take, and more importantly, how many years until it's way too late?

But no, RDA comes out of the woodwork and proves once and for all that there is no hope of libraries ever taking the issues at a philosophical nor practical level. Let me explain this one, as it sits at the core of much of my "ranting."

FRBR defines work, expression, manifestation, item, and these are semi-philosophical definitions that we're supposed to attach semantics and knowledge to. There's primarily two ways to do that; define entities of knowledge, or create relationships between entities. (Note these two basic ways of doing knowledge management; entities and relationships, as they spring up in all areas of knowledge representation)

Now, can you without looking stuff up tell me the difference between a work and an expression? Or between manifestation and an item? Sure, we can discuss if this or that thing is an item or something else, back and forth, but is that a good foundation upon to lay all future library philosophy? Because that's just what it is; a philosophical model we use to make sense of the real world. FRBR is confusing, even if it is a great leap forward in epistemological thinking, for example when it comes down to identity management (persistent identifiers for one thing can be expressed through a multitude, like a proxy, which FRBR fails at miserably, for example) it is right there in the centre of it, but a lot of it focuses on the wrong part of it, the part that involves human cognition to make decisions about identity.

Anyway, I guess at this point all I'm trying to say is that there are glimpses of what I'm talking about in the library world, and I was attracted to it, I wanted to dedicate parts of my life to fixing a lot what was broken in the real-world. I came to the library because they are the shining beacon of light in our society.

So, what happened?

Which is why I am interested smarting up about some of these things. Where should one go for a decent but not mind-blowing introduction to the types of things you have described lately?

It's hard to say what will blow your mind, and what will not. But since you're a library type person I'm going to go out on a limb here,and assume you're a smart person. :) So, I'm going to assume that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology won't blow your mind. So let's assume we're using the definition for "subject" as such ;

An area of knowledge, a topic, an area of interest or study

In terms of philosophy we usually expand that definition a bit wider (so it will also include most discourse and literature) but I'll try to keep it simple. First, a question?

"What does it mean that something is something?"

This is the basic question for identity, that something exists and that we can talk and refer to it. Refering to things is a huge portion of what the library does, not only as an archive, but as a living institution where knowledge is harboured. We're talking about subjects put into systems, about being subject-centric in the way we deal with things. Just like our brains do.

Now, for me there's a few things that have happened the last 20-30 years. The world has become more and more knowledge centric (they've gone from "all knowledge are in books" to "knowledge can be found in many places", and the advent of computers and the internet plays no small part in that), while libraries have become more book specific, more focused on the collection part rather than what the collection actually harbours in terms of knowledge (and I suspect this is because there are no traditional tracks within the library world for technology), probably because it's easier and fits better into budget driven government run institutions.

However, this isn't beneficial to the knowledge management part. Libraries are moving steady towards being archives, but the world wants them to become knowledge specialists. Ouch. And so the libraries will be closed down when they don't deliver knowledge. Archives is what Google does best, and they're not that bad at harbouring basic knowledge. What hope in hell have you got then?

I'm running out of time right now, but feel free to ask any question and point to any of my wrongs, and laugh at it as well; I need the discourse as much as (I hope) you do. Let me just quickly run through that list with comments and pointers ; [editors note : this is a list of things I felt the library world 'have no clue about' from my mail to the mailing-list]

No idea about digital persistent identification.

What happens to identifiers when people stop maintaining them? They lose their semantic and intrinsic value, and become moot. How many libraries maintain their age old software? No, a more human, less technological means of resolving is needed, and when when the world went digital the choice of multiple identities became not only possible but inevitable. Yet, when the library world manages identities as OCLC / LOC record numbers at the item level, things go horribly wrong and you cannot take what you've defined and learned into the philosophical space. Even if the OCLC / LOC numbers are maintained till the end of the world, they do not solve basic epistemological problems.

No subject-centricity.

FRBR does actually provide some, but it is not focused on the epistemological problems, only one of identifying the problem of identification without providing a mechanism (real or philosophical) for doing so.

No understanding of semantics in data modeling.

The AARC2 / RDA world is, in some definition of the terms, a data model. And between entities in data models there are semantics, meaning the relationships themselves, their names, roles and thought purpose. But you have to understand, as a human, all of AARC2 / RDA to be able to model anything with it; there's no platform on which to stand, there's no atomic parts you can use to build molecules and then cells and then beings. The whole model is, in fact, a hobbled-together set of fields without structure (and no, numbering them is not a structure :), and without structure there's only rules. And rules without structure is only human-enforceable.

No clue about ontologies, inferencing, guides by analogy

This is a stab at what the Semantic Web people are doing. They have a long background from AI and knowledge management, and if you guys were at least on par with that group, there could be some better understanding of the issues. The SemWeb crowd understand a lot of first-order logic, inferencing, analogy, case-based reasoning, and so forth, all stuff you need to have computers understand a tad bit better how your data is hobbled together, how they all interact, how entities and relationships (remember those? :) are mapped.

I should of course make a note here that I think that the SemWeb efforts are mostly wrong, and that they could learn an awful lot from librarians in the way to deal with collections and access, but that's a different discourse for some other time. :)

no real knowledge about collection management ( ... wait for it ...) with multiple hooks and identities

I was actually hoping people would jump on this one, getting offended that I said they had no real knowledge of collection management (which is their forte, it is what they do!), but I guess either they saw the hook and line of *identities*, and jumped over it. Dang.

It's all about the identity of what you are collecting. Crikey, publishers haven't even got ISBN to work (how many times to I put in one ISBN to get a completely different book ...), and one would think that would provide hints to why this is hard, and perhaps what to do otherwise. Hmm.

-- end of mail except some more personal ramblings not fit for generic consumption --

What event model ontology?

2009-08-24T16:08:00.004+10:00

Hmm, it seems that no one has blogged, tweeted or mentioned my blog post in my last plea, which I'm quite disappointed with. However, I'll chalk this one down to the complexity of what I'm trying to accomplish, and my failed attempt at explaining what it is.

In the mean time I've been working at it, converging various models from all sorts of weird places (anything from WebServices and SOAP stacks, to operating systems like Linux, to event models in Java and .Net, to more conceptual stuff in the Semantic Web world), but boy, you can tell that we live in a world shaped by iterative imperative paradigms of approaching the software world.

One thing I learned quite early was declarative and functional programming, introduced to me, of all places, with using XSLT many years ago. It may not be the most obvious place to find it, and this is one of those hidden gems of the language which still doesn't enjoy too much of a following. And no wonder; people come into it from the imperative stuff that dominates the world, polluting us all with filthy thoughts of changing variables (at least in Scala you can choose between var and val), functions that aren't truly functional, and the classical idea in object-oriented programming of a taxonomical structure that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Let me clarify that last point. Wht are we doing this stuff? Why are we creating computer programs?

To solve problems. And who are we solving problems for? For humans. It's the classical example (albeit extrapolated) of garbage in, garbage out. I've talked about this in the past a lot, about the constant translation that happens between huna and machine, and how we are creating translation models in both worlds in order to "move forward" and solve problems better. But this excercise becomes increasingly harder as our legacy grows, so trying to teach functional programming to people who don't understand certain basic principles of Lambda Calculus is going to be hard, just like it's hard to teach Topic Maps to people who live in a SQL world. Or like it's hard to teach auto-generating user-interfaces to a user-interface developer.

These are usually called paradigm shifts, where some important part of your existing world is totally changed as you learn some other even more important knowledge. You must shift your thinking from one way to a rather different other. And this is hard. Patterns of knowledge in your brain is maintained by traversing certain paths often, and as such strengthening that path (following the pattern that an often travelled path must be the right path). But if the path is wrong, there's some pretty strong paths you need to unlearn. Damn, that is hard! Which is why I urge you to try it out.

I'm currently using Topic Maps, human behaviour driven ontologies for auto-generating applications and user-interfaces over functional complete models of both virtual and concrete human domains, all with temporality and continous change as the central paradigms. Yeah, pretty hefty stuff, and I've spent years trying to unlearn stuff I learnt in the years before that. And those years were unlearning some other stuff before that. My whole life has been one huge unlearning experience, and I don't think any other way conceptually grasps the beauty of life better; nature and life both are in perpetual change. Needless to say, I'm enjoying every single crazy second of it!

But back to my event model ontology. I've learned one important thing in all this; Sowa has suggested a shift from logical inference to analogy, and this coupled with the OODA loop can create an intriguing platform for knowledge management and eco-system forsoftware applications. I'll let you know more as things progress from here. I'm excited!

And as always, I'd love to hear your comments on all of this. I beg you. Again. :)

Emotional thunderstorm from the Ukraine

2009-08-14T13:20:00.000+10:00

I have to share this one with you. My grandfather, Hans Adolph Johannesen, fought during WWII as part of the Norwegian underground resistance to the German invasion, was captured and put in prison for many years (1 year at Grini, Norway, and 2.5 years in Germany, till the end of the war, with and befriended former prime minister of Norway Trygve Brattli). All of this many years before I was even born. But he shared the stories and the pain and the heroism. I recorded it, I interviewed him, I lived with him. And then he died, almost 10 years ago.

And right now all those emotions came washing over me, a thunderstorm, pouring rain, because I was silly enough to watch this amazing - in the true sense of the word! - artist retelling of such pain and memories, and in the least likely of all places ;

Ukrainian sand artist proves that reality TV's got talent: "James Donaghy: Kseniya Simonova, the winner of Ukraine's got talent, has become a YouTube phenomenon by telling stories through sand animation. Who needs Susan Boyle?"

Can I ask you a favour? (Does social media actually work?)

2009-08-05T10:34:00.004+10:00

Hi everybody. Could I ask you a favour? I'm not getting much response to my quest for a unified software architecture ontology, so could I humbly ask you to blog, tag, link or otherwise gossip about my previous post on the matter? I would really appreciate it, and I promise I'll share my findings with you all.

(My subtitle "Does social media actually work?" is a blatant attempt to get circulation going by mocking the whole debacle which I try to, ahem, you know, promote. Thanks.)

Boundless?

2009-07-31T15:40:00.003+10:00

Hehe, had to giggle a bit when reading this (in my never-ending quest for semantic mapping of software systems architecture) ;

"The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, whose vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ will enable access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability." (My emphasis)

To embrace "open" you would think that getting to the info would be, you know, just open, but no. There are free chapters available for you to see, just to make sure, you know, there's an engine under the hood, all you need to do is to jump through a few hoops, register, and ... ugh. So I bit this bullet, registered and I got the introductory guide to the TOGAF framework, but it reads as any other fluffy "use our framework, and all shall be well in the world" vendor selling you miracle cures out there. Disappointing, really. I could get the full thing if I apply for a 90-day personal license, but I don't think I'll bother as I react badly to fluff, and I definitly get an allergic reaction to having to register, revealing personal info and such, just to get to read their fluffy bits. What gives?

I think these people have completely misunderstood what "open" means, which is a shame considering that the content might be useful. But I say only might, as I would have no idea. Phft, open, my ass.

Missing ontological serinity in the world of software systems architecture

2009-07-29T11:19:00.008+10:00

Updates: See bottom, but also this question on StackOverflow.

Ok, so let me say from the get go that I'm a little bit upset. Well, maybe angry and bewildered more than upset, but nevertheless not happy. And it all has to do with the dingbat way we architecture our various computer systems. So, yeah, quite generic and not really something we can do much about.

Let's rehash. I'm a SOA junkie, an EDA pimp, and I hate by default the bullshit in any Enterpise camp that promotes their way of doing must be right. And by SOA, I don't mean no ESB bullshit, I mean a hard-core focus on services for architectural means. I build ontologically driven systems, and care deeply about semantics where most others don't give a monkey's bottom.

Lately I've had to rehash my knowledge on plugin architectures (both implementation specific and theoretical), how to modularise complex pieces of software, and implement an event-driven platform on which to run my systems. So I've been snooping around, and there's a ton of models and architectures to be found. But being found is not the same as finding what you're after, especially as I have a few criteria to my search; I want to find something that's generic, simple (but not simplistic), elegant (as in, does not suck) and extendable, an architecture that's event-driven, modular and open. Nothing. I've found nothing. Of course they all claim to be amazingly fantastic and super and great, but looking under the hood, if allowed, reveals yet another staticly created shared library stack with some hooks for your software to use, using some misnomer like SOA or EDA or any of the hundreds of other Enterprise bullshit terms out there.

So, I set my goals lower in the hopes of finding anything of value, even went and asked real programmers what I thought was a simple question, making it specific enough to hopefully muster some replies. Nothing. It seems everybody's got their own way to handle their own little piece of the universe, that people cling to their silos of comfort or something, afraid of what might happen if we all agreed on something. Even when you dig into large architectures, like my own Linux Kernel which I'm using to write this post, there's tons of layers and shared libraries that's hubbled together in a way that does the job, ok, but doesn't make it, in my eyes, an easy job to do, elegant to extend or easy to change.

I guess I should clarify. I'm knee-deep in ontology work for software systems architecture, a field that's almost chemically free of any active community, has a few scattered experiements that went no where (and I'm tempted to put ADL in that category, too), a few papers here and there that talks about it in very generic terms (either as abstracts to academic stroke sessions, or a white paper claiming to be the second coming of Jeebus!), but as to hard-core practitioners like me who want to inject a Topic Map with events of given types that matches certain ontological expressions and Topic Map fragments of certain types of architectual patterns, tough! You're on your own, kid.

So, what am I after?

Well, many things, but I'll try to be a bit clear here. I've cut down on my wants, to, in order to try to find others out there doing similar things. So. I'd like to see a simple event-driven software stack that scales ontologically, and isn't bound to any technology, company or otherwise religious platform. This means that the stack with its names and values work just as well for a small plugin as it does for a larger system like an extra-OS or a cloud, works for potato-peelers as well as online booking agents, database connection pools and kernel space memory managers, but also can grow and shrink with need, in such a way that all other parts of it when they need to can find out what those changes are. This digs into creating an upper ontology for information science, of course, but more importantly it means I'd like to plug software into various parts of a stack, so that everything - and I mean everything! - is an event listener. I know some micro-kernels work in similar ways but highly statically bound, but regardless these ideas are way past the cradle stage by now and need to have a greater exploration in the real-world.

So when I download an open-source package of sorts and try to find out what its stack of operation looks like, why is this information so hard to find? Or compare the Java event model and the .Net model. Or OSes. It seems it's very hard to agree on these things, but I doubt the state of things isn't because they've tried and failed, but because they haven't tried. It's a big world and this is a big field, yet this has not been tried in any meaningful way.

Sure, the technologies promoted through OASIS, ECMA and W3C in themselves have various solutions and tries to bind stuff together in a coherent way as not to confuse us too much, but even within their own stacks of proposals and standards there are huge gaps, great leaps of faith, and generally no clear direction. Even W3C who pushes the semantic web movement hasn't got anything to say on the matter. It's starting to drive me bonkers.

Ok, I'm done. My steam has gone out, but I'm not feeling any better. Off to do my own thing, like the rest of them. :)

Update: Ok, it seems I'm not getting my message across. Let me create a simple (and wrong) example ;

SOA : Start
SOA : Configure
SOA : Map
ENV : Start
ENV : Configure
ENV : Map
APP : Start
APP : Configure
APP : Init
APP : Connect
APP : Perform
APP : Teardown
ENV : Teardown
SOA : Teardown

Here we got an application session events where SOA is, er, SOA, ENV the "environment" (whatever that should mean), APP is an application, and so forth. This list should be HUGE! Think of all the interesting events one could generate from you turn the computer on until someone gets Rickrolled on the other side of the planet! I want to map environments, systems and eco-systems, with labels. In some regards it's an enumerated list of points that any computer system traverses on its path from being loaded into memory until it leaves it. And possibly then some.

I want to map the software system world! I want to know what people call their various points on the software stack, what they call their events, how they see them work together, how they forsee workflow interactions, how they define system integrity, thoughts on implementation, named entities, the works.

I can find heaps of this stuff, but none of it is globally agreed upon, it's all tucked away in projects or companies, it's their own version of how things should be and what happens. Even big players such as Sun / Java and Microsoft / .Net have very different event models and ontologies, and they are not compatible in any meaningful way. I would expect some parts of CORBA had done work in this area, but what I've seen is very transaction oriented where clients already know the ontology and uses CORBA to travel through rather than be defined by.

As an example of the closest I've found so far in the realm of mapping machine-parts ("machine" here is "software systems") is the Open architecture computing environment which tries to define up the most important parts of software systems (although the final version was released in 2004 ... these things can be considered to be final? Where's the clouds?), but lacks the ontological and semantic definition, has no event or message structures or standards, nor does it have any notational value or end-points which, admittedly, I could spend the next couple of weeks doing, but let's see what else is out there.

Making any sense?

Update: To be even more specific, trawling through IPC is really what I have been doing for the last few days, but getting to the core ontology of all of this is soooo painful. Surely someone out there have done something like this? I've even gone through POSIX trying to gleam what nuggets I could find, but the system level of that beast is just so low it's not funny. Promising is the DBus architecture and event stack, but this again is very low-level, covers only a fraction of the software systems, and is littered with duplication of complexities.

Anything else I should hack at? Yes, I've gone through the most of the WS-* stack as well, digging into past knowledge I had hoped to never see again, but here as well as most other technologies out there they seem to be obsessed with being so flexible that they forget to be defining. So, we get a lot of scaffolding and frameworks that you can extend and define your stuff in, but no clear definitions of what the world looks like. Even an obvious contender like WS-Events and the less-know WS-Event from Hewlett-Packard have nothing more than a functional approach to defining and registering events but that's it, leaving the defining to some semi-ontological layer.

But I'm still convinced lots of people have done this sort of work, especially in these Semantic Web haydays. Browsing through the thousands of OWL ontologies in Swoogle for 'software architecture' (which doesn't really cut it, but is the closest term that yield results) leaves me just overloaded. Sure, the OpenGroup SOA ontology for example, does provide me with, eh, lots of interesting stuff, but again it's a special domain (SOA, obviously) using a certain moniker (service orientation, which sucks when you want to define events across operational stacks).

Argh! Can you tell I'm going bonkers?

A submersive state of mind

2009-07-28T12:35:00.003+10:00

Sorry for the low blogging of late. I've hit the opposite of a blog-drain; I'm in a state where there's simply too much to write about, and instead of just exploding with it I retract into myself think I should mull on it a bit before I pop it out. Today is one of those popping days, and I want to talk about something that has been new to me for the last 5 months or so and has proven itself to be a mixed bag of pro's and con's ; working from home.

As of the beginning of this year I started to work for Free Systems Technology Labs, an Indian company bent on doing funky stuff the right way with the right people (I had to say that, didn't I?), and as such I now live in my wife's home-town of Kiama, a couple of hours south of Sydney, Australia. We moved here from Norway at the beginning of the year for a number of reasons, but being closer to (my wife's) family also with little kids and the nice climate were two strong contenders (but we're still talking about moving back to Norway someday... or somewhere else entirely, wherever fate and lust drives us, really).

Working from home can be boring, I know, but we're actually living in a 1880's built old two-storey farmhouse, verandahs all along the house, with some of the best views in town. Here's a pic I took last evening before finishing up work for the day. Yes, it can be hard concentrating on hard-core ontologies and magic Tuple-stores when you can stare at the sea for hours, and it doesn't help either that there's a number of comfy chairs with fluffy pillows right outside my French-doors that leads out to the verandah. Especially on a nice sunny day. Like today.

So, in order to break up my day I've got a schedule of sorts. First, after the kids are out the door for school and breakfast is tidied up, if I still got tea left I bring it upstairs to my office. Now here's a crucial part of my day; do I sit down and get started, or go and get dressed? Ah, the number of times I've written important emails or talked on Skype in my underwear. Well, the sensible thing to do - and, really, what I try to do every morning - is to get dressed. I know it sounds pathetically lame to lament over this, but it's so easy to just get going. I'm not going anywhere, right?

Well, that's the thing. Part of my schedule, which I don't do absolutely everyday, but every so often, is to go to my local coffee-fixer-upper-place. I gives me an excuse to get dressed, and makes for a nice 2 minute (!!) stroll down the picturesque Kiama town-houses, all the way to the bottom of the hill to get my double-strength coffee, double-strength chocolate Mocha. Some days when I do my walk on lunch time, I might even get one of their amazingly yummy salmon on Turkish-bread, and just stroll another minute down to the park, sit in the sun on the grass, and enjoy the serenity.

Of course, too much serenity is kinda boring, especially when your mind is racing with ontologies, event-models, dual-stored Tuples, or worrying if I need to consider using Bessel functions for subject equality in the Topic Maps Reference Model, it can get a bit busy in my head. Thankfully when the day is over I've got a way to kinda deal with all that, but during the day itself it's sometimes hard to focus on just one thing and one thing alone. So I need to schedule even such things.

I do have a schedule, though. 9am - 10am is the time for all things not specifically work tasks related, such as emails, news, blogs, etc. At around 10.30am till about lunch I do the more practical things about my work, such as coding, writing, testing, dowloading and installing, meddling, fiddling, prototyping and breaking my machine. Then I have lunch, quite often with my wife who downstairs somewhere chasing Samuel around, trying to stop him from getting into stuff he shouldn't. And then after lunch, at about 1pm, I fix my machine and do more thinking-related stuff, hold meetings (mostly through calling through Skype at around 2-2.30pm when India is getting into the office), write emails, and try to come up with plans, thoughts for the next day, and scheming in general.

I try to follow this pattern as much as I can. It's a lonely job in many ways as I don't have that office intermingling that I love. So, to keep myself sane I go places. I often go to the Kiama Library where I meet up with Tim, the crazy-fun-beardy local IT librarian. I sometimes meet up with a few guys I know around the place (not that many) and even got to meet up with Murray Woodman from Sydney the other day. As often as I can, at least once or twice a week.

And then, just like in over a week or so, I go to India (Bangalore mostly, but sometimes Mumbai) for 10-12 days to do an intense stint of socializing, hacking, planning, talking, planning, teaching, drinking excellent Chai tea, more planning, around the clock until I don't know what day it is (which suits, given the jet-lag). Then back home for another 2-3 months of working from home again.

It works. It's not perfect, but it sure beats living a crazy stressful life in a big city where you don't have control over your surroundings. Here, if I'm stuck with something and need a break, I put on my slippers, open the door, and walk 4 minutes to the beach. All is well, and when I get back I know for sure that implementing the Bessel function in my Topic Maps Reference Model is an excercise for the modeler and the TMDM engine, not for the technical implementation itself. Problem refreshingly solved.

Oh, and do come and visit. I'll buy the coffees.

Sorry, moderation switched on

2009-06-30T20:17:00.002+10:00

Sorry everybody, but I've been attacked by spammers of late, and have had to switch moderation on, at least for now, but I'm terribly liberal and will approve every single message that talks badly of my, uh, bum. When things calm down again I'll turn it off I'm sure, but I seriously wish Blogger.com had a better comments system (or even a better way to kill spam from an infected site; the current way is just absolute rubbish and painful!). Or maybe this is another sign from below to switch to WordPress which I've got a half-finished Topic Maps plugin for and integrates against my shiny new xSiteable Framework 3.0. Hmm.

Linux sound-system sucks!

2009-06-24T22:04:00.004+10:00

Yeah, so I've been running Linux / Ubuntu now for about 4 months, and it has been a pleasure almost the whole way. I've had to dabble in Windows from time to time, especially "supporting" our two other Windows machines in the house, but every time I meddle with them, I'm extremely happy to return to my Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. For the most parts.

There is this one area which sucks, though, and I mentioned it in one of my previous reports that I couldn't get the microphone to work. Here's the low-down on this whole thing ;

Ubuntu comes out of the box with ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and PulseAudio (a client/server system for sound over networks, amongst other things), and the two connected together in GNOME (the default Window manager it uses) should in theory work. But the forums and intertubes are abundant with problems relating to sound setup, anything from sound not working at all, some aspects not working, cracking or garbled sounds, and so on. Because Linux is open-source and has the advantage of "so many options", then the disadvantage of "so many options" also becomes quite clear.

When you write your software you write for either OSS (Open Sound System; try Googling for OSS and they'll translate it into Open Source Software ... AAARGH!) or ALSA, and both packages have wrappers for eachother, but it means that there's a multitude of ways to reach that haven of good supported sound. We can throw ESound and Gstreamer and JACK into the mix for further confusion as well.

So, one perticular part of these options was that the Linux kernel guys decided to throw out OSS and put in ALSA instead, at around Kernel version 2.5.x or so. The reason was mostly that OSS v.2 was in wide use as the developers entered into a lengthy v.3 rewrite, the company that sponsored them changed the license (dual license, one branch for GPL [often lagging], another for a sellable version). Then they scrapped v.3 to start on the new and improved v.4, which was to be fully GPL'ed and all things sorted out. In theory, but in the mean-time the world moved on, and ALSA became the standard.

So, back to my story. My sound system was finally working, except for the fact that my microphones (plug and internal) didn't work. I tried it all, including downloading and manually compiling and modding the Kernel with the latest version of ALSA drivers and libs, without any luck. (Well, I upgraded ALSA nicely, but alas no microphones). I tweaked manually the modprobe configuration files, upgraded and updated any Esound, Gstreamer or ALSA thing I could find, tweaked their links configs, reset them, autodetection and manual stuff, on and off, on and off. It drove me nuts!

So in the end I got the whiff of the OSS story. First it was simply dismissed because it was "the old system", but as more and more reported success with the latest OSS v.4 where ALSA failed, I thought I'd give it a try. I removed anything ALSA and PulseAudio (and frankly, not that many people have a need for PulseAudio, even less be able to correctly set it up, so why make it default?), installed some dependencies for OSS, downloaded a .deb package (trickier than it sounds), restarted, installed, configured (setup GNOME with the OSS sinks), and ...

Microphones work! They friggin' actually work, and after only 4 months I can make Skype calls which I need for work. But, as sound in general works fine - and here's the punchline! - now the left channel has crackling when the sound reaches a certain low / mid threshold (no, the mixer is set correctly; this is weirder in that it's only in the left channel. It's not overdrive, but some clicking-ish noise), and I can't friggin' get rid of it!

And yeah, you try searching the intertubes for Ubuntu 9.04, sound and OSS v.4 where "OSS" is treated as "Open Source Software" by Google. Bloody smart-arses.

Sure I love Linux, but I friggin' hate the Linux sound system. And I hate Google a little bit, too, this time.