Neat. Mindwheel port for Windows posted by developer

Neat. Mindwheel was an impressive interactive fiction created by Synapse/Broderbund back in 1984, authored by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. I am currently reading Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, and it is interesting how lyrical, and yet claustrophobic and in places even creepy Mindwheel can be, much like Pinsky's Inferno. This download is a Windows port, and what's really cool is it has been made available by Steve Hales, the lead developer for the project, and apparently also designed the audio sub-system in the ultra cool T-Mobile SideKick. From his about page: "If anyone remembers: Fort Apocalypse , Slime, Dimension X, I coded and designed them with Ihor Wolosenko. I also coded and co-designed Mindwheel with Robert Pinksy, the famed poet and author. Working with Robert changed the way I read and write words forever. He was writing History of my Heart during the development of Mindwheel, so they have familiar themes. You can even get a deeper meaning behind Mindwheel, by reading this book. Although, he claims, they are not connected." Cool. Mindwheel | Igor's Software Laboratories Created in 1983, 1984. This was a mind blowing experience. My first experience with many computer science concepts that are commonplace now. Object oriented programming, Virtual Machines, AI, language...

Hot processing!

Great story from Ken Holman, quoted for coolness and also for #refrigerator... Hot processing! So I'm standing here at my desk preparing my UBL 2.1 PRD3 D1 package and I have two very long XSLT transformations to run. One takes 98 minutes and the other takes 124 minutes, running in Java in BSD on my Unibody MacBook 2.66GHz I7 (dual core; quad process). Input file 10Mb; output files total 183Mb. I used to run these two tasks sequentially, but I today checked out "Activity Monitor" and discovered that while each transformation starts off using about 250% CPU time (sharing processors while building the memory structures), they quickly become single processor 100% (±2%) only (while traversing the memory structures). So I decided to run them simultaneously instead of sequentially, saving me (theoretically) close to 98 minutes since most of the time appears to be at 100% and when they are both running Activity Monitor says they are both running at 100%. So far so good ... but within minutes the fans on my machine get too noisy to talk over! I check the status bar and, sure enough, both fans are running >6000rpm. My fans so very rarely make any noise, so this is very noticeable and annoying. My very wise wife suggests I go to the kitchen and get the flat-bottomed aluminum frying pan to place under my machine, upside down so the flat part of the pan is full on the bottom of the Mac. Maybe two minutes later the fans are running <4000rpm and we can talk without raising my voice over the fan. Well, now as I'm typing this Google+ post the frying pan is getting hot! The fans are up to 4800rpm again and slowly rising. So, I've just gone to the kitchen, brought out a second aluminum frying pan, put that one under the Mac, and put the first frying pan into the refrigerator to cool down for the next swap. Within a minute the fan is back down <4000rpm. My review and editing of the above takes five or 10 minutes. Already this pan is heating up as it isn't as substantial as the first pan ... fan speed up to 4400rpm ... but the first pan will be cold by the time I need to swap again. Such a simple improvement! Wish I'd thought of it. View or comment on Piers Hollott's post »

Tim Bray on dynamic typing, Android, Java

See, this is why I respect Tim Bray's opinions so much; because he is a tireless member of my post-SGML/functional programming tribe. For instance, see this post on static vs. dynamic typing, and why it's not such a big deal with mobile Java for Android. I particularly like this comment, though: "From: Tim Converse (Dec 29 2011, at 10:32) "The Java language in particular suffers from excessive ceremony and boilerplate. Also it lacks important constructs such as closures, first-class functions, and functional-programming support." This is a very concise version of the case for Scala over Java." Bingo. ongoing by Tim Bray · Type-System Criteria Starting some time around 2005, under the influence of Perl, Python, Erlang, and Ruby, I became convinced that application programs should be written in dynamically-typed languages. You get it built f...

Embassytown

Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art." High praise from Ursula LeGuin (in her Guardian review), one of the writers who have really driven the potential for Science Fiction as artform. Best book I have read so far this year, for what that's worth, Embassytown is a maverick read, setting out a subtle but profound agenda, and then carrying it through to a stunning conclusion, much like Suzette Haden-Elgin's Native Tongue or Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange. If you have read it already, read the first few chapters again - it's amazing the detail employed to carefully inch the story forward, play it backward, then when all the pieces are in place, unleash it.

Miéville is known for his disapproval of the high fantasy genre, and this is the complete opposite of that, dealing with language not as a way of identifying class and race, but undermining this notion, as in the works of Burgess, Burroughs or Lessing, demonstrating how language creates class, language creates race, language creates culture, and then, going on to demonstrate, quite graphically, how language is also, to quote Burroughs, "a virus sent from space" - a destructive addiction.

China Miéville has always been a deep and deeply intelligent writer. Embassytown shows that he is, simply, a great writer who should not be ignored.

View all my reviews


Embassytown by China Miéville – review

XML Prague 2012 conference sessions

XML Prague 2012 conference sessions: Opening Keynote - Jeni Tennison  The eX Markup Language? - Eric Van der Vlist XML and HTML Cross-Pollination: A Bridge Too Far? Robin Berjon and Norman Walsh What XML can learn from HTML; also known as XML5 - Anne Van Kesteren Panel discussion on HTML/XML convergence - Norman Walsh XProc: Beyond application/xml - Vojtch Toman Understanding NVDL - the Anatomy of an Open SourceXProc/XSLT implementation of NVDL - George Bina JSONiq: XQuery for JSON, JSON for XQuery - Jonathan Robie, Matthias Brantner, Daniela Florescu, Ghislain Fourny and Til Westmann Corona: Managing and querying XML and JSON via REST Jason Hunter Treating JSON as a subset of XML: Using XForms toread and submit JSON - Steven Pemberton RESTful XQuery - Standardised XQuery 3.0 Annotations for REST - Adam Retter Compiling XQuery code into Javascript instructionsusing XSLT - Alain Couthures Implementing an XQuery/XSLT hybrid - Evan Lenz Transform.XQ: A Transformation Library for XQuery 3.0 - John Snelson Building Bridges from Java to XQuery- CharlesFoster My first XSLT editor - Tony Graham A Wiki-based System for Schema and Data Evolution - Lorenzo Bossi and Alberto Trombetta Standards update XPath/XSLT/XQuery 3.0 - Michael Kay and Jonathan Robie Closing keynote - Michael Sperberg-McQueen

Cool technology of the week...

Pretty amazing... the Lytro is coming out next april, at a 400-500$ price tag.... It is a "light-field" camera, which means basically the camera takes in all light which falls within its field, and you can focus the picture after you have taken it. Depth of field is digitally constructed. Of course, one result of this is that your picture files are very dense and very large. The form factor is based on the optics required, but also looks nice. Lytro: The Biggest Thing to Happen to Photography Since Digital The Lytro is the world's first consumer light-field camera. Here's the backstory of how it's made and why it's so different from other cameras on the shelf.

For those Football Fans who remember...Happy...

Quoted for #refrigerator... When I was a kid, I thought William "Refrigerator" Perry was cool because he had his own GI Joe. In retrospect, that was pretty cool.

For those Football Fans who remember...Happy 49th to William Refrigerator Perry...Great DT who played for the Bears and Eagles...I think he was one great Defensive Lineman

Tuesday+

Several years ago, an acquaintance of mine started a project called "Topic Tag Tuesday". This was back when we were both spending more time on Twitter, and it was great entertainment. In order to hone my own writing, I would like to do something similar on Google+ to see if the entertainment value still holds up.

I am curious if the a Google+ Circle will lend itself to this sort of project, so I'm creating a new Circle, called Story ("Story Circle," see?). On Tuesdays, I'll post a blurb in the Public stream asking for topics. Comment on the blurb with a topic, and I'll add you to my Story Circle. Later that day, I'll write a short story incorporating one of the topics and post it back to the Story Circle, completing the loop.

If you're interested in this idea, follow me on Google+.

Quoted for #refrigerator... this xkcd comic is truly a masterstroke of overdetermination.

Money: refrigerator / if I had a million dollars...

Hour long, but really good

This is kind of a follow up to the Zizek piece from the Guardian below. What can be done to reform the Republic for which it stands. This video is an hour or so, and you should watch it. @Google: Lawrence Lessig: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It youtube.com - In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal...

Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rereading this book... read it when it was first out in the early nineties after loving Hand's earlier Winterlong trilogy. Didn't like this as much at the time because it couldn't compete with the overabundance of wow that were Liz Hand's science fiction - including Mars Hill, I suppose.

In retrospect: I have two favorite writers, Liz Hand and Guy Kay. Kay's novel Tigana features this crazy Benandanti vignette based on Carlo Ginzburg's historical writing in Night Battles, and the Benandanti in Waking the Moon offer a great companion to this. If I was going to recommend a first book to read by Hand, I would suggest Glimmering or Mortal Love because both of these are steeped in wow. Or Winterlong, which still ranks in my 5 or so favorite books.

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Grahame Grieve on National Projects and Standards

From his Health Intersections site, this is Grahame Grieve on National Projects and Standards, and the tension between the two. I'm a standards geek, and I live for this sort of discussion. In this very concise article, Grieve discusses why projects at the national level rely on international standards groups, and how this introduces stress factors into these projects. I also appreciate Lloyd McKenzie's comment about the interoperability across borders. This is one of the promises of using international standards, but in reality, it rarely comes up, and comes with it's own host of issues. Interoperability between two sibling releases of a standard can be trying enough, let alone between two nations localization to the same standard. But that is what makes the work exciting. National Projects and Standards « Health Intersections Pty Ltd   There's a difference between the goals of the national project, and the value proposition of using standards, and this difference can create considerable tension...

Right to bear arms meets right to ride bears

Artist Jason Heuser Creates Alternate Bad-Ass United States History The illustrated artwork of Jason Heuser creates an alternate historical reality where famous figures in United States history are total bad-asses. Limited prints of his illustrations are available ....

Slavoj Žižek: Occupy first. Demands come later.

I love Žižek's writing - he always extends just beyond the obvious triad: discontent-protest-demands, in this case, to ask what absence really underlies the presence of the event, what really is at stake. Worth reading twice. (via Guardian) Occupy first. Demands come later Slavoj Žižek: Critics say the Occupy cause is nebulous. Protesters will need to address what comes next – but beware a debate on enemy turf

Health Documents v. Health Messages or Elements

Useful breakdown of same key factors in the use of Health Documents v. Health Messages by John Moehrke: Healthcare Security/Privacy: Critical aspects of Documents vs Messages or Elements Healthcare Security/Privacy. Discussions of Privacy and Security in Healthcare by John Moehrke. Topics: Consent, Access Control, Audit Control, Accounting of Disclosures, Identity, Authorization, Auth...

Michael Geist on Canada's National Digital Strategy

Canada's National Digital Strategy: Hidden in Plain Sight Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote address at the Cybera Summit in Banff, Alberta. The conference focused on a wide range of cutting edge technology and network issues. My opening keynote discussed Canada digital economy legal strategy. While the formal digital strategy has yet to be revealed, I argued that the digital economy legal strategy is largely set with legislative plans touching on lawful access, privacy, online marketing, and copyright. Michael Geist Cybera Summit 2011 youtube.com - 2011 Cybera Summit introductory keynote by Michael Geist, Law Professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

How powerful is Diwali ? This is what India...

How powerful is Diwali ? This is what India looks like on Diwali night :) Picture from NASA

Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator

Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator works on biopolymer gel the Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator is a concept where the Bio Robot cools biopolymer gel through luminescence. A non-sticky gel surrounds the food item when shoved into the biopolymer gel, creating separate pods. The design features no doors or drawers, and the food items are individually cooled at their optimal temperature thanks to the robot. And since it can take any orientation (hung vertically, horizontally, and even on the ceiling), and can be modified in size, you can fit it in any apartment. Designer: Yuriy Dmitriev Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator (7 photos)

Curate something!

So, here's an idea: curate something. Anything. In my case, due to an odd concatenation of circumstances, I have taken it upon myself to curate stories about people and their refrigerators. This activity consists of periodically querying Google+ and Twitter and the www at large for a single word, and republishing anything particularly exciting or funny this turns up. A single word. That's all. I suppose I label the post for posterity as well. Try it. Curate something.

Originally posted on Google+ by Adam J. Cohen:

I spent the late afternoon refrigerator shopping because our fridge suddenly stopped cooling. It smelled like the coil might be burning out and this fridge is old, possibly over 20 years old. Just for fun I thought I'd take a look and see if I could find a problem. The coils on the fridge were getting way too hot. On closer inspection, I found a mouse that had stopped the fan from cooling the coils. I removed the mouse (he was beyond repair). Now that the fan is moving again, the fridge is working. Cost of new fridge between $1100 - $1500. Cost of repair, $0.00. Lesson learned, look for some obvious problems before dropping a bunch of money on something.

Haha! Defiantly so!

via +Joseph Lee, via +Wil Wheaton on Google+ We all know Oreos are delicious, but did you know they make a great canvas for cameos? Dating as far back as 332 BC, cameos are defined by contrast, usually with a raised light relief against a dark intaglio, which serves as a dark backdrop. With that in mind, Oreo's most defiantly fit the bill and is another example of food too good to eat. Check out Judith G. Klausner's page for more examples of her art! #Oreo Cameo http://jgklausner.com/work/oreo-cameo

Goodreads: recommended reading by Northrop Frye

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination by Northrop Frye
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book quite a long time ago as part of a course on CanLit and poetry. I love the way Frye uses language to express ideas, and ideas to create/curate identity... and rereading this book makes me want to go back and reread Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry, as well as works by Atwood, McLuhan, Innis, Lampman, Birney etc etc... if you are Canadian and you like poetry, you should read this book because it might introduce you to a previous generation of Canadian romanticism or a previous previous generation of Canadian classicism.

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Ada Lovelace Day 2011

Ada Lovelace day: in my little XML corner of the world, I have learned more than I could possibly mention from +Eve Maler , +Jeni Tennison , Priscilla Walmsley and +Lauren Wood. Many thanks to all!

This animated presentation by Dan Pink is...

This animated presentation by Dan Pink is easily the coolest thing I have seen so far today (via +John Moehrke) on the nature of work, purpose and incentive. Healthcare Security/Privacy: Standards work is motivating because it gets used and improves lives Healthcare Security/Privacy. Discussions of Privacy and Security in Healthcare by John Moehrke. Topics: Consent, Access Control, Audit Control, Accounting of Disclosures, Identity, Authorization, Auth...

Neal Stephenson - Innovation Starvation

Neal Stephenson on society's failure to mobilize to "get big stuff done":

"Today's belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age."

Or in other words, blame Google, since a quick search for a solution to a problem demonstrates either, apparently, that it can't be solved, or that it already has been solved, occluding the possibility that it may not have been solved adequately, and it may not have been solved recently.

Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute

By Neal Stephenson

Structured Product Labeling...

I am currently reading about SPL (Structured Product Labeling), an XML-based standard used in the pharmaceutical industry, engineered to reduce pharmaceutical error. The SPL Standard, DailyMed, and the Consumer – DCLnews Blog By DCL's Vincent B. Donadio, Editorial Contributions from DCL's Howard Shatz In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented an XML-based standard for drug labeling (among other thi...

One of countless remarkable things about Eno

One of the countless remarkable things about Brian Eno... The Microsoft Sound In 1994, Microsoft corporation designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, The Microsoft Sound (.wav). In the San Francisco Chronicle he said:[19] The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem — solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 31/4 seconds long." Brian Eno - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Brian Eno. Eno at The Long Now Foundation, 26 June 2006. Background information. Birth name, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. Born, 15 May 1948 (1948-05-15) (age 63) Woodbridge...

Goodreads love for Rohinton Mistry

Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have to admit, I've shied away from Mistry's novels due to "not having enough time to read such a big book"... After reading these short stories, I plan to make time for A Fine Balance or one of Mistry's other novels.



View all my reviews

Use Cases and Test Cases

Traceability from Use Cases to Test Cases The article illustrates a formal method of deriving functional test cases from use cases, including how to create a use case, derive all scenarios, and create reasonable test cases, as well as use IBM...

This is why I love MulberryTech's xsl-list...

This is why I love MulberryTech's xsl-list: sombody asks a question about an error message during parsing in oXygen using the Saxon 9 parser... and George Bina and Michael Kay respond with an answer, seemingly within moments. xsl-list-digest-subscribe@lists.mulberrytech.com Consultants specializing in XML Applications for Prose Documents | Mulberry Technologies, Inc. XML and SGML implementation consulting for publishing from Mulberry Technologies, Inc.'s staff: Tonya Gaylord, Debbie Lapeyre, Wendell Piez, B. Tommie Usdin.

Tactics for Engagement

A useful set of tactics for engagement with a standard, via Graham Grieve:

How much should we engage with a standard? « Health Intersections Pty Ltd Health Intersections Pty Ltd. Home. About; Ask me a question about HL7; CDA Tools; Courses. V2 to CDA Mapping Course. Enrolment Form. Roadmap to Blog; Text Display Formats. HL7 v2 FT Type; HTML Colour...

Tactics for Engagement

A useful set of tactics for engagement with a standard, via Keith Boone: 

Healthcare Standards: Tactics for Standards Setting: Lead, follow, or get out of the way. I have to make up my travel budget annually every December/January. In order to do so, I have to look at the overall strategic picture for standardization, and then pick the tactics that I think I wil...

Structured Data Website Launch

Structured Data Website Launch (via Gregg Kellogg) A number of Web developers from the RDFa, Microdata and Microformats communities announce the launch of the Structured Data website and community. There are a number of syntaxes for expressing structured data in HTML today: RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. While each syntax has its own parsing rules and data model, the underlying concept among all of them is the same - to express Structured Data in HTML. The Structured Data website (http://structured-data.org/) provides resources to learn about, markup and debug structured data in HTML, including RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. One of the new features, not available anywhere else, is a unified Structured Data Linting Service (http://linter.structured-data.org/), complete with Google Rich Snippets and schema.org examples (http://linter.structured-data.org/examples/) in both Microdata and RDFa format. The Structured Data Linter provides a unified service for verifying and visualizing the structured data contained in web pages, and supports the RDFa and Microdata syntaxes, with Microformats support on the way. At the time of this announcement, the Google and Microsoft testing tools do not support schema.org markup in RDFa or Microdata. The need for such linting service has been expressed many times on the schema.org mailing list and we are happy to announce that the service is now available. Gregg Kellogg has been instrumental in creating the linting service with support from Stéphane Corlosquet. Web developers may now use the linter service to ensure that their schema.org Microdata or RDFa markup is valid. The Structured Data Linting Service is a beta launch and thus contains a number of bugs. That said, we felt that it would be best to get this tool into the hands of the Web developer community. We invite the Web developer community to try it out, report bugs (https://github.com/structured-data/linter/issues), suggest new features (http://groups.google.com/group/structured-data-dev) and contribute new ideas and code. All of the source code is released under a public domain dedication and is available on github (https://github.com/structured-data/).

Structured Data on the Web Structured Data on the Web. More and more of the world's data is moving onto the Web. We want to share, re-mix and use this data to build more awesome Web applications. Using structured data techn...

Via Health Intersections: Resources For Healthcare

Resources For Healthcare (RFH): Grahame Grieve's proposed response to the HL7 Fresh Look Taskforce, using 37 Signals' uberREST Highrise API as a jumping off point.

RFH defines a RIM-based ontological framework for Resources For Healthcare, based around an exchange, data dictionary and workflow management.


Letter to RFH readers

Letter to RFH Readers. Grahame Grieve 13-Aug 2011. This specification arose from the remit of the HL7 Fresh Look Taskforce: if HL7 started again from scratch with a new specification, what would a goo...

So, what's important about this? This proposal draws on the HL7 v3 RIM, the Reference Information Model that underlies the HL7 specification. The RIM is a pictorial object model which defines the life cycle of the different messages that comprise the HL7 clinical domains. Because health information is very much workflow based, the RIM-based part is important. moving away from a service architecture towards a REST architecture is indicative of a general shift towards simplicity in the IT industry as a whole.

The timing of this proposal is very much driven by the questions raised by the HL7 Fresh Look taskforce. I recently joked that HL7 v3 is still at a turning point, like one of my son's Choose You Own Adventure books. This screen capture from Graham Grieve's Health Intersections blog recently is perhaps an indication of the signposts facing HL7 v3:

I'm crossposting this to my personal weblog...

I'm crossposting this to my personal weblog for further ingestion. This is partially an experiment in google+... when the article (which I shared to blogspot by email) receives the message, it will post as a draft, since google+ sends blogger (along with the original post here), the credentials I am using to transmit the post... Question: How to store a CDA document in a relational database « Health Intersections Pty Ltd Question: How to store a CDA document in a relational database. Posted on August 16, 2011 by Grahame Grieve. 2 commentsLeave a comment. A question (by the ask me a question link above): I am trying to...

Can't argue with that...

On Pitchfork, via @camera_obscura_ on Twitter

Pitchfork: Watch Neko Case and My Morning Jacket Cover Kenny and Dolly's "Islands in the Stream" With their specific combination of beardedness and hotness, My Morning Jacket's Jim James and Neko Case are kind of ...

Cross posting from google+ to blogger

Well that's kind of cool... thanks to Rick Klau for the know-how.

Paul Di Filippo reviews a book on identity...

Piers Hollott shared Piers Hollott's post with you.

Piers Hollott Paul Di Filippo reviews a book on identity by Gary Younge (Barnes & Noble) Second New Review at B&NR I survey a non-fiction item about identity politics: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/I n-the-Margin/Who-Are-We-And-Should-It-Ma tter-in-the-21st-Century/ba-p/5445 Posted by Paul DiFi. View or comment on Piers Hollott's post » Join Google+

Context+

Here are a couple initial thoughts about Google Plus:

1) I would really like to be able to create some content (like a photo album), and publish this to my circles, using different contexts for different circles. Fine grained, but I think this would be really cool. When you post on your blog, you post photos and then you write a story, and you think the story is the content. But when the post comes up as a result of a google search, it's the pictures - the real content - which you see. With short posts (Twitter, Posterous, Facebook, Google+), it becomes more obvious that what is readily shareable is videos and pictures (my content), not words (my context).

2) Because I can't access Twitter during the work day due to a firewall restriction, I appreciate how several techies I follow collect a week's worth of tweets into "Short Form Fragments" - why couldn't Google+ automatically do this for me, collecting a weeks "stream" into an automatic blogger post? Again, this would be very cool.

Canonical Context

The word canon has a literary meaning - in this context, a canon is a set of writing felt by someone to embody and exemplify the norms of those works which are non-canonical. An anti-canon is just a canon appointed by someone else to oppose a hegemonic canon.

In mathematics or informatics, a canonical form is a normative way of expressing or describing an object, so again, a norm created by a group to facilitate sharing of concepts.

In Superman comics, Star Wars books and so forth, "The Canon" refers to the fictional history which is considered (ostensibly by the publishers) as normative by the audience. Other histories may have taken place in alternate realities, parallel storylines and the like, but the canonical events are the ones which "actually" took place, and the chronology within which they are taken to have occurred. Fan fiction, for instance, is non-canonical.

Deepening Context and Content (cont)

For instance, here is an application I've talked about before, which one day I would like to build, what I have called a Content Engagement System, though I don't know if I really like this terminology. As with a standard CMS platform, a logged in user would be able to create a textual context, with associated images, video, documents... Within this textual context (which I will start referring to simply as 'context' since this translates roughly as 'with text', right?), another user can identify a phrase, and rather than linking out, the way a standard hyperlink works, link in. Sounds kind of odd, but this is essentially like adding a comment, except the comment is associated back to a phrase within the original context. In HTML terms, this is similar to a link to an anchor within the same page, and in a textbook we would identify this as a footnote.

Okay so far. A blogger posts something, which is then considered canonical, after which anyone else can add footnotes, and these offer an alternative view. A use case then: say I am writing a novel, which is serialized in weekly installments. The math is something like, 1000 words/week = 52,000 words/year, which then gets bundled up into EPUB or PDF and flogged off on Kindle, Smashwords or whatever. The idea is to create demand through serialization, then capitalize on the demand with the actual content.

But, and here's the thing. I want to engage my audience. And but, I want to entertain my audience. And but, a vocal minority within this audience typically demands something edgier; or racier; or, well, smuttier. Which, for the purposes of illustration, let's assume is not really my style. So what I want to provide is the canonical safe version of my novel, and a mechanism, a backstage, which allows the audience created by the canonical story to add (share) their own non-canonical additions to the story, which can then be linked to from within the canonical context as an alternative or supplement. This is similar to a literary parallax (events viewed from multiple vantage points).

More on this at some point. This is an idea I really want to pursue... but it is hard to articulate, so bear with me.

Deeper Context and Content

I've posted several times now about what I consider the differences between context and content, and why the word "content" kind of annoys me. It's okay, I don't mind being annoyed, and in the right context, content is fine. What I find annoying is that the two terms augment each other, but, so often, one is used when the other is more appropriate. For instance, if I have a web page that you can use to download a PDF of an article I have written, and this web page contains an excerpt of the article - the PDF is the content. Everything on the page, as far as I am concerned, is the context for your act of downloading. Of course, this is important if I am concerned about monetizing, since I have no problem with requiring a specific digital signature or some sort of payment; and I feel that everything else, the context, is like a smile. Why not give this away?

It's quite simple really. People require, create, digest and absorb context. But people like stuff. They like content, because it is something they can grasp onto, whether it's a PDF, an MP3, JPEG, AVI. Something "file-ish." The reason I bring this up, I suppose, is because, well, these things are easy. You can set up a microphone, you can use Prince, DocBook or FOP to turn your words into something more portable in a document format... then you can shade down your context a bit, broaden it, focus attention on the page content. Everything else is really just part of the transmission wrapper. The rest is just part of the vector.

I mean really, is a platform like Blogger or Wordpress actually a Content Management System? No, at best, these are discontent platforms. They separate us from content by masquerading context as content. It's not a bad thing, but I feel it's something we need to move past. You take good pictures, make a commodity out of your pictures. You tell good stories, make a commodity out of your stories. Allow people to focus through the context.

On The Jungle Planet

This is a picture my 3-yr old drew of Amberwood Entertainment's Rob the Robot, on the Jungle Planet. At left, you can see a tiger. The planet, apparently, has frightening red eyes!

Ontology of Dream Landscape

A couple things I have been thinking about recently, which come together in this: even dreams typically have a location, but it is a unique quality of dreams, at least the ones I have been having lately, to feature a location in isolation, that is separated from character or context; and: in matters of taxonomy, more than three levels is seldom viable in practical terms, but two is seldom sufficient.

In the work I am currently involved in developing a financial application, I see a three-level vocabulary emerging which I have witnessed in other domains, typified as category, type and subtype.

If I was attempting to describe an ontology of dreams, therefore, I imagine I would use a category of "location", a type of location name or "realm", and a subtype describing each specific "locale" within the realm. So, for instance:

/location/a_forest/one_of_many_paths

What I would like to do is build an API, attached to a cloud storage, to allow people to describe their own dream landscapes in these terms. More on this as it develops. Please comment as you see fit.

Context, content and getting over ourselves...

I am a huge fan of Lucas Gonze's weblog, where he wrote something recently which strikes me as quite profound.

Keep music from the web in the web. Don't go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes.

Instead, he advocates bookmarking and playing music in the page that contains it, once again returning to fundamental link between URI and resource, between index and content.

What, for that matter, is a Content Management System? The term is a necessary evil; it's not like it is meaningless. But when you use this term to refer to WordPress or Blogger, I get an uneasy feeling, and reading Gonze's comment really cemented for me the reason why. The text on the page in front of you? It's not content. It's context. The page may provide content, but it is itself a context for whatever content it provides.

More on this later, just passing around the lightbulb moment, as it were.

Abie and Rondo Redux

Sorry, broke the link in the last post. A better title would be "The Adventures of Abie and Rondo..." And this link should work.

Abie and Rondo

Abie and Rondo is a serialization of children's adventures I am writing for Web Serial Writing Month this year. The premise is simple: brother and sister team Abie and Rondo travel to remote locations to right the world's wrongs. Irony abounds, and good times are had. I have recently added truly awful vector art courtesy of yours truly, along with pithy captions.

More than anything else, this is an experiment to see how much I can accomplish with very little effort, using the tools at hand (Blogger) without a great deal of modification (JavaScript hijacking the page layout). When WeSeWriMo is over, I will summarize my experience in some sort of "lessons learned" post.

Enjoy.

Because it's a while since I've 'blogged about Identi.ca...

Here's an idea: SourceForge is connected with a great community of open source developers; Twitter is connected with a great community of individuals, some of whom are open source developers. One of the great value propositions for me for Twitter is that rather than following an open source project, I can follow the projects creators, and receive timely information about updates, patches and the like... as long as I am actually logged into a Twitter client when the update in question is pushed out. There is a lot of noise.

Yammer is great for organizational transparency, or so I've heard from people who are using it, but it's a walled garden - I wonder what would happen if a similar approach were taken with an open source repository like SourceForge? What if an open source status network like laconi.ca were hosted and synchronized with the group of individuals with SourceForge projects? Then you could follow this entire list or a segment of this list, and get updates in a timely fashion without the background noise, or aggregate this stream into the broader stream that you might normally follow.

Might inject a bit of life into the open source community as well.

The other side of transparency

Really quick, I just wanted to jump in and say, with regards to Facebook privacy, there is another situation that I have yet to see adequately described. The situation I am seeing described is when you publish a piece of yourself, and it goes further afield than you anticipated, ie you share photos with someone with whom you had no intention of sharing.

But consider the obverse situation, when you publish a piece of yourself to your social circle, and it is withheld for some reason from a portion of this circle because of a change in privacy setting, or confusion about the impact of the privacy settings you have selected.

In many ways, this may create more distrust in the platform, when someone in your social circle feels slighted because they did not receive the expected update. Of course, this happens with email spam filters as well as social network privacy settings. In either case, it creates an atmosphere of distrust in the platform.

Tab Sweep - 2010 05 14

Dare Obasanjo on Facebook:

Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective

danah boyd on Facebook:

Facebook and "radical transparency" (a rant)

Not surprising that Facebook is facing criticism; I appreciate danah's demonization of transparency, and the distinction she draws between being exposed and exposing oneself. One of the things I appreciate about Twitter is that the level of exposure of any conversation I have there is dictated directly by the object graph of those involved in the conversation. If I want to curse and swear, I can engage someone in a conversation with whom this is appropriate. But there is always a risk of exposure.

Dare's point is also well taken on many levels, but particularly from my viewpoint, ontologically speaking, that Facebook is leveraging RDFa and not microformats, and that RDFa is an exponentially more robust technology specifically due to the use of namespaces. And what better way to identify arbitrary URIs as social objects than by using namespaces? In issues of transparency and privacy, it seems that disambiguation, ie clarification of social context will become increasingly important.

Reread danah's rant, especially the Zuckerburg quotes referring to the artificiality of sustaining a multiple identity. My own reaction to this is equally violent, and I call BS - all relationships in a social graph are virtualizations or supplementation of something that they are not, actual relationships. They are by definition artificial and demand disambiguation.

My travels in Flex-land keep coming back to the importance of namespaces outside the strict context of XML. Their time is coming; more widespread use of RDFa and the need for disambiguated rather than radical transparency are definitely indicative of this.

Seminal Granularity: I <3 the </>

It's no secret, I love me some XML, whether as an exchange format like XBRL, a messaging standard like HL7 or NIEM, or a document framework like DITA or DocBook. I am not sure what appeals to me so much about data-enrichment using tags, but it has something to do with reducing entropy by adding structure and meaning. In addition, I would rather model something using the sort of extension and restriction available in NIEM than the classical inheritance strategies presented by OOP. I have heard from several sources recently that the seachange from an object-oriented to declarative paradigm is underway, and I am pleased.

But more than this, I just love the angle brackets in a way I could never feel about dot-notation, and I am not alone in this.

I am attempting to develop a notion I am calling "Seminal Granularity." This notion appeals to my background in structuralist literary theory - "seminal" and "granular" are both agricultural references, both seeds, but whereas "seminal" has patriarchal overtones, granular is more mercurial. Between the two axes there lies a tension, bringing to mind a transclusive dilemma.

Simply stated, the transclusive dilemma is this: when faced with modifying an object, do you create a reference to the object for modification, a seminal approach which binds the new object to the original; or do you create a clone of the object, a granular approach which results in modification to the new object becoming estranged from the original, releasing the object through mimesis.

A viral licensed open-source project, for instance, is by design both seminal and granular. The project itself exists as a single seed, and it allows granular modification with the caveat that modifications are returned to the original seed.

Edit: there is also an odd kind of tie in with this short story, The Ice Box.

The transclusive dilemma is a real phenomenon; you cannot do both. Seminal granularity should be about finding ways to negotiate this problem. A wave can't be a particle either, right?

Talking Points: Collaboration and Documentation

A few years ago I wrote about a project I developed for my then employers, which I open sourced under the name CaseBook. The intent was to single-source end-user documentation which could be be transformed into internal and client acceptance test scripts. As I developed it, the project involved XML, Schematron, XSL and XQuery, hosted in an eXist database and accessed using webDAV.

At the time, I had barely heard of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, but the approach I took shared some ideas with what I later came to learn about DITA, using concept maps, separation of topics into tasks and steps and so forth. In the mean time, DITA has gained a lot of traction, and my SourceForge page has been hit maybe 500 times.

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to collaborative writing. As Anne Gentle has pointed out on her JustWriteClick 'blog, DITA shines in environments which have a strong collaborative or Agile approach, since both of these emphasize timely repurposing and multipurposing. One of the problems I was addressing with CaseBook was collaboration between development, documentation and testing resources. Now, in part, this was because I was working in a small team, and had responsibilities in each of these areas.

I still think there is a lot of value in facilitating collaboration between these groups, and were I to develop this project today, I would start with the DITA Open Toolkit from day one.

In addition, for the last four months, I've been working with Flex, mxml and ActionScript. One thing that intrigues me about mxml is that it is XML. For instance, what if you could generate end user, acceptance or client walkthrough documentation automatically from the mxml source? Transforming mxml to DITA seems like a useful technique.

Any thoughts?

Working with Flex

For the past few months (since the start of the year), I have been working with Adobe Flex, in conjunction with a Java back-end leveraging Hibernate and Spring. The application under development is basically a public sector financial package, which does not specifically require RIA features, although UX has been established as a critical success factor.

I am following a fairly straightforward path to Flex, I suppose - early work with Action Script and other Adobe technologies lead me to Ajax, and then to Prototype and JQuery, after which I spent several years mired in JSP; and now I am back working with Action Script. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I will write more about my experience in future articles, but specifically I want to raise a couple points of interest here: as a team, we have settled on Cairngorm as an MVC framework. If anyone has any thoughts on Cairngorm and the alternatives, or thoughts about using Flex as a rapid development tool for public sector work. Also, it seems like Flex could easily become a de facto standard for certain kinds of non-RIA development because of the easy Eclipse integration, and I would love to discuss others' experience.

Please drop by and leave a comment - I have been invaded by anonymous posters!

Tab Sweep: 2010-02-03

Note: apologies to anyone actually reading this - I intend to collect and comment on things I come across during the week, then push the post out via Twitter on Friday. As this is a cumulative process, if the content seems light there will probably be more later. The alternative is to keep the post in draft for a while, but this seems lame.

From IBM's Smarter Planet: Education

School districts operate on tight budgets in good times, but when Pike County found their IT budgets sliced by 80%, they knew it called for drastic measures—or true blue-sky thinking.
A rural Kentucky district of 10,000 students, Pike County administrators had struggled with providing IT resources for its students, teachers and staff. Desktop computers were still running Windows 98 with failing CD and hard drives; and access to the district's portal, which houses the applications and information the students and teachers needed,was inconsistent.
Working with IBM Global Technology Services and Desktone software, the district developed a virtual desktop infrastructure delivered as a cloud service. Students now boot the existing hardware with a special CD that bypasses the operating system and connects them instead to a high-performing virtual desktop environment. This in turn links to the district's portal site with all of the tools and information they need. Pike County can double the life of its hardware—it's planning on using seven-year-old machines without sacrificing performance—while providing students, teachers and administrators with equal, transparent access to its assets.
The district estimates cost savings of 64% over five years, compared to the cost of servicing the desktops on premises.

Now, I'm a big fan of the work that Walter Bender has been doing at Sugarlabs, as far as live booting a Sugar/Fedora OS off a USB stick, and this is more of the same. A combination of live booting thin OS and cloud computing is very potent.

Another former OLPC employee, Ivan Krstic, who now works in core security at Apple, comments on martian sandtraps. I at first thought he was speaking of golf, but apparently not. Since he began working at Apple, Krstic posts infrequently, but invariably leads to spit-take.

Apparently Mike Cane is done with his eBook Test blog, declaring the Apple iPad a future contender, or something. The vision of the iPad/iStore/iBook etc is there, even if the reality is not, yet, but we can confidently say that, yes, the iPad will change the way we read. Though I'm still holding out for the new Pixel Qi technology from OLPC alumnus Mary Lou Jepsen.

From London writer Marc Nash, an excellent critique of Roberto Bolano's 2666 and the hoopla surrounding the global reading of same at #2666 on Twitter. I am taking part in this reading, but wish I had read Bolano's Savage Detectives first, simply because of 2666's sprawling nature. Comparisons with Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest and Finnegans Wake seems apt, based solely on the fly-leaf and first 100 or so pages.

Nice Valentines Day Cards, from Save the Children.

Axiom Attic: I

Somewhere between
over the sky and
under the ground
my roots lie

An axiom-tree, idiom-bird
climb climb soil
a thermal
buried deep