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

 

Più Miscellanea

Here are even more random gleanings.  I was lying awake thinking about things this morning, as part of gathering my thoughts for some writing.  So, one thing is to find a way to operate more actively with this blog and also start organizing material.  With regard to organization, it is possible to edit anything.  My approach is not to edit anything but recent material. And for older archived material, I want to do any editing on my web site rather than via Blogger.  Because Blogger pages are "purpled," I also don't want to mangle the archive much because I don't know what link someone may have bookmarked (being the perpetual optimist about some things).  What I prefer to do is annotate blogs rather than mangle them or hack them up.  At some time, I must make something out of all these research notes that I have accumulated.  The start of a new year is an interesting boundary point.  I should freeze the material that is, say, more than 3-4 months old, and remove them from the Blogger archiving attention.  I will make a job jar about that.  Watch this space.

The Atlantic | March 2003 | Caring for Your Introvert | Rauch.  Something to look at more closely when I have a moment.  A find from Chris Dent.
posted by Dennis at Tuesday, December 23, 2003

 
CSLI Monthly 2, 5 (February 1987).  This issue has an exchange between Terry Winograd and John Perry about reality, realism, and questions of how language is being used in Winograd & Flores.
posted by Dennis at Monday, December 22, 2003

 
A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work.  I am out searching for something else of Terry Winograd's, but this is something I need to come back to.
posted by Dennis at Monday, December 22, 2003

 
In defens of forest!.  This is a list of papers that may be consulted at the University of Genoa, Epistemology Section.  I found this fascinating list while looking for a paper by Terry Winograd.  I like having this link.
posted by Dennis at Monday, December 22, 2003

 
XNap - News.  XNap is a plug-in based P2P framework written in Java.  I don't know about the Java part, but the protocol plug-ins could be interesting.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
BitTorrent: News.  BitTorrent is apparently a file streaming service that uses tit-for-tat protocols so that distribution is aided by requiring downloaders to also serve as sources.  It is not clear how well all of this might work for Miser distributed objects, but I want to keep my eye on it.  There is a very active Java implementation on SourceForge.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
Marvin Minsky Home Page.  Marvin Minsky is writing a book called The Emotion Machine and drafts are available on his site.  One of the features of human cognitive behavior is the ability to adapt, to abandon one plan, find another, and otherwise be resilient or ductile, depending on ones perspective.  I am interested in how one could propose to codify such a thing, and also deal with it formally.  It almost seems to be completely contradictory and antagonistic to a formal approach.  Even so, I want to see what the connection is, if any.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
pintday.org: Certificate Authorities Demystified.  An interesting article with good discussion about self-signing and also creating a CA for X.509.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
MR: TLS | Home.  This site offers a commercial product.  My interest in it has to do with the incorporation of the following procedures:

"Macrobyte's TLS provides client side tools for making secure HTTPS requests, and server side tools for running a secure web server. It also includes tools for creating and managing 'keys,' self-signed certificates, and 'certificate signing requests' (for sending to companies like Verisign, Thawte, or Komodo, to receive a valid server certificate). "

Now what I'd like to find is open specification of those protocols and any open-source implementation of tools for engaging them.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
SSLWrap.  This software provides a way to encrypt traffic over TCP.  However, it creates a private-key exposure with a self-signed certification, so I wonder what that is about.  Something to look at concerning the trust points involved.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
Planning, Installing, and Using.  I just ran into a thread on self-signed certificates and how to use them with SSL, etc.  Something I want to understand better, so I did the recommended search on "self-signed certificates" and this is one of the first hits.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
Edward G. Nilges: On the Culture of Data Base/ Labyrinth vol. 3, Winter 2001.  The comp.software-eng newsgroup has a thread on Derrida and although there are some amazingly opinionated dismissals, Nilges offered up a different kind of appraisal.  Here is an essay that he offers as relevant to the topic.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
Tigris.org: Open Source Software Engineering.  A site devoted specifically to Open Source SE and appropriate tools.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
ISO/IEC 15504.  Here's an indication of where the TR 15504 is going to become an IS/IEC Standard Recommendation.  There is some interesting background on usage of TR 1554 and the work on SPICE.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003

 
Home / Mono.  The Mono Project provides a C# compiler and a working interpreter.  The compiler also works on .NET.  One of the things that I find is that there are difficulties tracking with .NET development.  On top of that, Mono is not supporting CAS, Code Access Security.  This may be a problem for what I care about.  I wonder whether this is part of ECMA or not, and how that will be sorted out.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, December 21, 2003