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.
11 January 2011
3 December 2010
Tabulat Minor
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 ;
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.
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.
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.
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.
10 November 2010
Hello, world ; what are you?
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?
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?
15 October 2010
Canberra House for sale
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 ;
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!
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
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 ;
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!
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 |
I love this house, and I'm sad to see it go. But the beach beckons me!
13 October 2010
Jokes
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 ;
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 ;
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.
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.
An interaction designer walks straight into a bar. Not a very good one, is he?
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.
20 September 2010
Bottlebums and snigglecrocks
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.
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.
3 September 2010
Tabs dumping
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.
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.
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