Orcmid's Lair |
||||
|
|
2004-04-17Page 23 Seems So Familiar. Something nagged at me about the page 23 line 5 exercise. From some deep place there was a hint of recognition, and I surprised myself by going to a book that had this to offer: You provide delicious food for me in the presence of my enemies. You have welcomed me as your guest; blessings overflow!All right, this is the place but not how I remember it. I checked the same place in another (older) resource, one given to my grandfather on the occasion of his second marriage on April 2, 1923, and containing family birthdates back to 1877. This is more like it: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Others may find this unsurprising, but as a pretty non-religious fellow, I am surprised that I recognized in this exercise a reference to 23rd Psalm, the one that begins "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." I have no idea whether that figured in the choice of pages. The first-quoted version is of Psalm 23:5 is from The Living Bible: Paraphrased, A Thought-for-Thought Translation (1979 edition). This does not strike me as an improvement over The Holy Bible: Self-Pronouncing. This is a 1913 edition of the authorized King James Version, and was something that came to me from my parents. I purchased the newer edition because I was interested in where "In the beginning was the word" shows up, and I had forgotten that I already had a Bible in the house. Jeff Sandquist - Microsoft Evangelist - Have you thanked a soldier lately?. Jeff reminds me of something that I talk about and that I don't do: Simply acknowledging someone for committing their lives in service to their nation. There is something odd about speaking to soldiers in airports, maybe because I think of them as part of the security arrangements and my identity is always worried about doing something wrong or inappropriate. That's a pretty lame statement. I am blogging this because I think this is an important reminder. I remember how terribly soldiers were regarded in the Vietnam era. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. It had nothing to do with my disapproval of either war. And I will take Jeff's advice. I can start this weekend. [later:2004-04-29 I didn't see one uniformed warrior in my travel from Seattle to Kaua'i and return, from April 18 to April 27. I don't know if I was simply inattentive or everyone is otherwise occupied. I had an interesting conversation, while in Kaua'i with a friend who was concerned about a political cartoon. The paper showed two people at a table, each reading the news. One paper had a headline about the losses in Iraq increasing. The other was open to the comics page and Doonesbury was identified on that the page. I took it that people gain political perspective from different places. My friend thought it showed the reader of the comic page as using unreliable sources or even being disinterested in one of the most important issues in our international existence as a free people (my words). What neither of us knew about was what happened to B.D. I didn't learn this until April 30. I still can't look at that strip without weeping. Then, this weekend, one Seattle newspaper managed to do without pictures of flag-draped coffins at Dover AFB. On the front page, they simply printed thumbnail-sized photographs of each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq in April. The sacrifice of our warriors (read that every way you want) is also being brought to vivid attention by accounts that are showing up in the blogosphere.] AtomEnabled.org. I was just reading about the expectations that the Blogger folk have for Atom (including being the evolutionary path for their API). Here is a site that they recommend for learning more. I see there are Atom-Powered Wikis now. Actually, I'm just looking for a version of the "atom" button that I can put on my blog page, but I am happy to accumulate all of this other interesting material at the same time. Jeff Sandquist - Microsoft Evangelist - BloggerCon - Visions from Users Lisa Williams. There are some nice photographs on this bloglet and an interesting set of capsule remarks. One comment I keep noticing is a complaint about people not putting full articles in their news feeds. I always thought the idea was to provide summaries to not overwhelm people's news readers and make picking and choosing work easily. Apparently that is not the case for everyone. I will switch my feed from summary to full just to see if that matters. I can see how having a full tear-sheet/clipping rather than a snippet is valuable for packrats like myself, and it preserves the material even if the blog vanishes, so I will provide the same from my site. Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective. I am finding many blogs related to .NET as the result of exploring Channel9 and the fan-out from that. This leads me to a new set of problems with regard to my interest in Toolcraft and wanting to feature it somehow in my nfoWare work. Meanwhile, here is more about Trackbacking and also some leads on how wikis and blogs show up on .NET-oriented systems. There is a fair amount going on, and it is showing up more-and-more in the wild open spaces. 2004-04-16Cognitive ScienceInformation SystemsThe Nature of IdentityJOHO - There's No 'I' in 'Identity'. My response to the blog question about secret identities points down a different path than David Weinberger wants to follow. In this deeper, April 15, 2004, JOHO article, David digs into the question of identity by looking at "real world" identity to see how it might be properly-reflected in digital identity, or used to clarify digital identity. My suspicion is that the reverse may be more revealing.I have this suspicion that pursuing "real world meaning of identity" may end up being too difficult. And the illustrative definition of Digital Identity (their capitalization) demonstrates to me that people who work on the digital side are as confused about identity as anyone and more confused about what a digital identity provides that I would have expected. I suggest that identity ambiguity in the digital world involves confusion by (1) problems with identity in the real world and (2) forcing identity in the digital realm to have anything to do with the real world when, I suspect, it never will. Unconcealing digital identity might inform the "real world meaning" of identity by coming to grips with what little there is in digital identity's "meaning." ("Meaning" is the tip-off, but I don't know if there is cheese down that rat-hole either.) I don't have a clear analysis at this point, but I see a number of leads to follow, including wrapping up Data and Reality, a longstanding reading assignment that I have set for myself. Usability of RDFBill de hÓra: RDF: I fought the markup, and the markup won. Here's Bill's concession that RDF/XML doesn't work. The key passage:"No-one I know can write it down without making mistakes, no-one I know can read it without getting confused. But people are expected to believe after coming into contact with RDF/XML, that RDF is really quite simple. And that the tools will save them." Bill is very clear that he finds RDF powerful and important. But the way it is written doesn't seem to work, and time has not improved the situation. Caveat Lector: It's the Syntax, Stupid!. Dorothea ranted about problems with RDF Syntax and the difficulty of using it. (I must confess that I figure out RDF descriptions by writing out triples and then choosing a tidy way to write the RDF/XML.) Bill de hÓra links to this December 2003 bloglet and adds more to the argument of syntax being so important. Slashdot Moderation. Well, I bit the bullet and actually did some meta-moderating (rating of moderations by moderators) and earned, thereby, some moderator points. There are now two things to figure out. First, what exactly was my experience and what have I learned from it? Secondly, how should I use my 5 moderator points and why (other than because they expire if unused)? On top of this, I am looking at peer rating systems, because they figure into webs of trust also. One of the features I like about the Slashdot system is that no rogue can run amuk and screw up the system. I would like to understand that better. Simpletracks :: Kalsey Consulting Group. I am busy working to figure out how to send TrackBack pings. This is an automated way notify a site that I have posted something that refers to an article on that site. What the notified site does with it is up to them. The usual behavior is to append a summary about my posting as part of the comments on theirs. Down the road, I want to be able to receive TrackBack pings and reciprocate. For starters, I just want to ping. There are two steps:
TrackBack Development. This is the Movable Type site's accumulation of information on Trackback, as well as postings about it. There are lots of TrackBack thread trackbacks, so I suppose this is the ultimate sandbox for the idea. I want to see if I can have it work with Blogger and whether I can operate it without going completely cross-eyed. Raw: some music software for ya. This is nice. On nfoWare I want to look at audio and synthesis as another very interesting aspect of situated data (in terms of MIDI files, fidelity of sounds, and so on). Danny Ayers did some work along the same lines and he is declaring it in the public domain. I am going to download his material (in Danny's 2000 directory) and remember to let him know what gets made of it. I am happy to acknowledge his contribution and whatever develops from there. It will be a valuable exercise in treating public-domain content as part of something that has a different license for the other bits, if that is found to be workable. PUBPAT Activities > Protecting the Public Domain. This page provides an interesting claim about how many patents are unwarranted, although no demonstration or citation is provided. The specific request for reexamination of a Microsoft patent is available for download as a PDF. What's fascinating to me is that the Public Patent Foundation refers to FAT Technology, but that is not exactly what the disputed patent is about. It is about the technique, which we saw introduced in conjunction with Windows 95 (and some version of Windows NT), by which long file-names are used in FAT file-system directories along with a (derived) 8+3 filename that is the one used for the actual directory-entry tied to the file's data units. (The Microsoft claim is not specific about the length of short file names other than noting there is a limit. One of the prior-art claims uses 14 as the magic limit on the length of "actual" file names.) The basic challenge, in using a file-system that has a fixed limit on the name of a file, is the introduction of long names using directory entries that will not confuse the underlying system and from which the appropriate "true" entry can be found. That is the subject matter of the Microsoft patent that is being challenged here. Keeping in mind that the FAT file system was introduced in the mid-seventies, any patents on the fundamental approach have either expired or are near the end of their life. The patent being questioned is for an improvement that allows alternative, long names to be used for files carried in a system like FAT. The posturing about Microsoft causing public harm in its wielding of this patent is in the front section. Then there is presentation of "The Substantial New Questions of Patentability" that uses patents previously-granted to others as evidence of prior art. It would seem that the last claim is the one that will be reviewed for its merit here. As I only play a lawyer in the soap opera in my head, I feel safe to say that the discussion of Microsoft choice of licensees for any patent it holds is a separate matter resolvable in a different venue, if at all. (Honeywell attempted to interfere with the Eniac patents based on an anti-trust argument, but the court found the demonstration of prior art to be the compelling factor, as I recall.) It is fascinating to me that the press release is about how this move preserves competition. Yet the "Substantial New Question" brings up 2-3 other unexpired patents that people will need to license in order to employ the technique in any file system. PUBPAT News > Request for Reexamination of Microsoft '517 FAT Patent. I find it weird to see so much posturing around a simple matter. Patents are legal monopolies granted for a certain time for what is considered a socially-desired (and constitutionally sanctioned) arrangement. If a patent has been granted erroneously, it is certainly appropriate to challenge it. What I find remarkable is that two paragraphs speak to the fundamentals, and the rest is about mind-reading of Microsoft intensions, band-waggoning on the presumption of Microsoft monopolistic behavior, and so on. The only part with beef in it is the demonstration of prior art and failure of FAT to qualify for a patent. Over-turning the patent makes the rest of the discussion meaningless, so what is the point of blowing so much smoke into the issue? Who is this supposed to impress? 2004-04-15eCompute ECC2-109 Project. This is a summary (to be expanded) on how a particular attack on a cryptographic method was organized and carried out using distributed computing. I am interested in these because I am curious about how some of these schemes end up being vulnerable to what are essentially search techniques. RSS 2.0 Specification. This on-line specification is referenced by Sandquist in talking about RSS feeds from Channel 9. This is different than the guid I saw used in a URL for a Permalink, though not entirely independent. What interests me, here, is how the definition of GUID has been morphed even farther from UUID and it could be provided by a URI that happens to be globally unique, independent of whether or not it can be used to find the item. The GUID I saw is based on a UUID and it can. So there, if only for Sandquist's own blog! Confused? You're reading my mind. (Very sideways reference to a mantra that comes up in The Demolished Man.) Uh, How Channel 9 Uses RSS, Remember?. OK, well there is an easy to use little XML icon on the top of the main Channel 9 page. This little article tells you how to find it. Jeff says that if you subscribe to that, you will see the top-level threads for the entire site. I am confused by that. It is not like turning on a fire hose, although there is a fair amount of activity. There is a description here of the deeper level of Channel 9 feeds (neglecting the blog feeds that are also available), and I see that I am easily confused about the fact that Channel 9 forums are sort of like blogs too. And this blog has its own feed (and Sandquist has his own domain name), so there is that to deal with too. Jeff Sandquist - Microsoft Evangelist - How Channel 9 Uses RSS. OK, now I'm on Jeff's Blog and looking at the article. What I noticed, while capturing the previous note is the URL for this bloglet. The Channel 9 blokes are using GUIDs (also know as UUIDs outside of the MS ToolSphere) and I find that fascinating. Barring sins of commision and omission, that means every bloglet under Channel 9 is uniquelly identified using a decentralized system that accomplishes global uniqueness and will not run out until some time after 4000 A.D. This is a lot different than the URI scheme that is popular in some other quarters. If you look at the link you can also see that the Channel 9 scheme is alread set up for any replacement that might be needed in the future. There are many ways to quibble about this particular approach, and it is fascinating to see, nonetheless. RSS on Channel 9 (Logged in as: orcmid)/ I have been nosing around the Microsoft Channel 9 and dropped a few comments here and there, but I haven't figured out how to find my own breadcrumbs or create an useful map to the dungeon, just yet. The site is very idiosyncratic. I think it is a Microsoft thing. One weird example is that the site tells about my login in the header title of the pages it serves up. This is not where I would look for that, and I often don't see it. But the scriptlet that opened this little Blogger notater for me sees it and I am going to leave it there so you can see it too. One thing I can't figure out is how the Channel 9 RSS feeds work, and this seems to be a common situation that Jeff Sandquist noticed and is addressing. So I am walking through this description on his Blog to find out what I can. Oh my. You'll want to see this too. The Apostolic Creed. This is a quick capture of some material related to articles of Christian faith and what it means, to many, in claiming that faith as ones own. I went looking for this because I was wondering what the comparable statement would be for a devout Jew and a devout Muslim. I am not any of the three, so it might be that the question might not fit the case of Judaism and Islam, but I am not sure. As you can tell, I am not sure of the proper designations, either. Oops!I managed to click a "Post & Publish" button while merrily blogging away today. My normal gathering-mode operation is to use the little clicklet (what are those things called, the little javascripts that are stored as bookmarks? scriptlets?) that just posts my note and the page I'm memorializing into a trail of unpublished bloglets. Some time later, I go into the Blogger editor and tidy things up, add headings, and so forth.I'm not that embarassed about it, and I learned something. The titles that Blogger makes up for my bloglets don't show in the blog, but they are used in the RDF feed and they are seriously non-informative. I see many "ACM News Service" titles, which I preserve in the bloglet, supplemented by what the newsblurb is about. So, something to repair when I do edit accumulated clippings into published bloglets. E-Commerce News: Security: The Porous Internet and How To Defend It. This is an interesting article. It juxtaposes Keromytis and Bellovin in a peculiar way. The first thinks TCP/IP is broken and despairs of fixing it, the second is not so sure that fixing the highway is necessary when banks leave their vaults unprotected. You can tell where my sympathies lie. And I do think it is important to avoid a decontextualized view of Internet protocols. The difficulties of security are around end-to-end situations, and the end points that want secure communication can have as much as they can stand. This morning I received a call by a recording that was apparently from a carpet-cleaning service. I hung up on the recording as is my habit, forgetting that I don't get many of these calls any more and that my phone number is listed on the national do-not-call registry. Next time I will listen to any recording long enough to figure out how to report it, and let the caller know I am doing that. It would be great to use a recorded message to do that. These seem to be from local firms that have not learned that their calls are verboten. [Later: So, is this a problem with the transport (the telephone system) or with the end-points?] The AGNULA project - AGNULA Documentation. After reading the top-level tutorial documentation, I came back to the overall page to see what kind of license is being employed for the documentation that is being created to hold this compilation project together. I can't find a documentation license. My, my. I am definitely coming up with a case of bad attitude around this effort. And I really like the work that is being done in Italy on various open-source technologies. I think I will go perform some kind of penance in my own space. The AGNULA project - Dave Phillips's Tutorials. This is a good description of how Agnula is organized and how the integration is accomplished around ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It is also funny in that it presents this marvelous litany to free software at the beginning and, while it mentions the four freedoms that all open-source software shares (and it includes non GPL-ed elements in the distribution), it never mentions the tiny little restriction on derivative works that is at the heart of GPL's viral uniqueness. The expression "truly free software" is used often enough to think that these guys protest too much. The AGNULA project - The AGNULA home page. Here's the home page of the project, with a nice reminder that GNU is pronounced with a strong G (and not like the "nyu"-like sounding that is the Italian way). However, I suspect that AGNULA is pronounced the Italian way. I see that Libre Software is the term here, and there is a strong chauvinistic stance with regard to that. AGNULA is apparently a packaging effort. The funded project, carried out in Firenze at the Centro di Ricerca, Produzione e Didattica Musicale "Tempo Reale", has this non-technical and non-scientific objective: "3. Cultural objectives. Providing a audio system based on Libre Software will demonstrate the important contribution of Libre Software to truly creative usage of applications, such as the one expected by professionals and amateurs from audio computing; for the first time, users will be able to completely control, customize and adapt audio applications to their needs and to the fullest extent - reaching far more original and creative results than with pre-canned proprietary software." What I find interesting is that I can't find the actual statement of license, nor can I find, on the site, any indication of where to find the source codes. Basically, I can download ISO images of distributions (!), but that is about it. I am not sure that downloading 4 CDs worth of software is what I have in mind, especially when it is not built for anything that I run. There is a source-code CD image, and that might be fun. It's only 262MB, so I will give that a try, and see how to find the various licenses and the origins of the packages that are gathered here. [I stopped the download after finding more use in the tutorials.] IST Results - Promoting Innovation for the Information Society: A 'free' boost for multimedia. This is even funnier. IST is a program of the European Union that operates in 4-year blocks. They are currently creating the 2005-06 program as the 2003-04 Work Programme is being wrapped up. This introduction for the AGNULA project starts out with a campaign speech for how free- is better than open- and that user rights are not addressed in open-source software. This bunk (if it is meant to impeach the Open Source Initiative) is prefixed by the claim that "Although technologically and economically superior to their proprietary counterparts, GNU/Linux operating systems are very rarely used in audio and multimedia production." So, it is necessary to climb over this cruft to get to the beef. ACM News Service: A 'Free' Boost for Multimedia. This news blurb is interesting on two counts. First, there is advocacy about free- in preference to open-source, which seems peculiar for something with EU backing (whatever that means). Meanwhile, I am very keen about this kind of develpment and want to know more. ACM News Service: Concern Grows Over Browser Security. This blurb points to increasing concern over outgoing connection to malicious web sites. These connections are easily masqueraded in HTML-format e-mail messages, and they tend not to be caught by firewalls because they are not detected as incoming attacks. My personal approach is to not send HTML-format e-mail to anyone, and to cancel most mailing lists and advertising mail that can't be obtained in plaintext. And of course, when reviewing quaranteed e-mail suspected of being spam, if it looks like it might be friendly, but it is in HTML or a dangerous multi-part MIME form, I don't open it anyhow. A new concern for me is that NewsGator, my feed-subscription news reader, uses MS Outlook HTML-formatted notes for the summaries, and I can't even see the actual URL that a link will take me to. This leaves open the prospect of a malicious link being delivered by an RSS or ATOM feed. There has already been an April-fools exploit based on a kind of bait-and-switch presentation of a web site that was replaced once enough people recommended the site to their kindred spirits. So, all of the information is there. I will send something about this to the NewsGator folk. Meanwhile, I will simply not follow any links within feed-summary items, and go to the blog instead, where I can inspect the URLs of article links before I follow the links. And, really, businesses that do not monitor outgoing DNS requests need to deal with that. My per-computer firewalls have spyware blockers that use HOSTS to block access to unfriendly domain names and there is even more control over what pages from individual web sites are allowed to do. ACM: Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice. This is the 1999 version 5.2 of the recommendation from the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices. It has recently been adopted by two Australian societies as their code. I am very keen on finding actionable approaches that are fully in the spirit of this code, and it was interesting to review it today, in conjunction with my on-going study of real-world engineering versus the superstitions an fantasies that computer professionals seem to harbor about the analog and physical as different than the digital and intangible. This code is definitely addressed to engineering conduct in the world. Living on maintenance - Loosely Coupled weblog, Apr 15th 2004 8:39am. This Phil Wainewright entry looks at the probability that integrated application systems such as SAP are going to become dinosaurs in the near future, suggesting how the business model will be eroded by higher-value competing substitutes. What interests me is the suggestion that customer lock-in will become increasingly difficult. There is an opportunity for a highly-transparent approach, and the organizations that are able to build sustainable relationships around an open, standards-compliant approach will be interesting to look out for. XML.com: An Atom-Powered Wiki. This Danny Ayers find covers some important aspects of Atom as an API with HTTP-carried requests and responses. Some important characteristics are dealt with in the tidy Python demonstration, and issues of Wiki format arise (along with mention of WikiML). Slashdot | Ethereal Packet Sniffing. I used Ethereal in my Computer Networking course as a way of finding out what protocols are used by closed packages such as Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. I also used it to debunk a claim about SSL having an unencrypted mode supported by common browsers. I would recommend it simply because it does provide a great demonstration of how protocols are used, especially application protocols atop TCP and UDP. It is also a little daunting to see how much traffic there is that arises inexplicably. This is a welcome review, and I must remember to cite the book and other sources on Ethereal when it comes time for me to account for networking in my work on Situating Data under nfoWare. 2004-04-14Advogato's trust metric. Advogato is also an experiment in application of a trust metric. My eyes glaze over looking at the particular approach, although I do recall when this work was begun. It could work as a device for creating trust networks in accidental communities that have some requirement for trust appraisal and, perhaps, some consequences-diminishing maneuvers. For my work, this is interesting with regard to bootstrapping of communities and working through trust considerations that influence agreements to participate in distributed operation and also have a ductile response against a rapidly-spread corrupted object. Getting back to the social aspects, I am not sure I have any reason going farther than just this much. Advogato Mission statement. Here's Ralph Levien's 2000-02-22 statement about this site as a haven for free software developers and as an experiment in a peer-rating system. The diary server is a kind of blog service. I am not sure that I qualify as a member of this community, and I wonder what it would be like to be rated by, or more-likely, ignored by this collection of wild-eyed individuals. Advogato. I am not at all sure why I am here, and how to snap out of it. I have been hopscotching from blog to blog, swimming against the ether, and have arrived in what, for me, is some sort of alternative universe. It all started because I found a list of blogaffinities that included Don Box, Tim Bray, and Miguel (sorry on names, my short-term memory just shorted, the mono guy). Where I fell off my comfortable plane of existence was when I got to advogato and someone who said he'd (at one point in the past) certified esr as a Despicable person. And as I read the top level of Advogato, I am pretty sure I am in an alternate reality in which speculation and cynicism are the law. It is painful to be here and reminds me that I have no idea I am going to handle the meta-karma request on slashdot. As far as I can tell, the raters they want rated are not operating from any critical principles that I can understand at all. I will go back and figure out what to do there, since I don't need the karma and it will be interesting to see whether I can overcome my desire for recognition and looking-good to be straight and straightforward in my appraisal. That will be later. For now I want to see what I can find here that goes beyond cultivation of a group psychosis. 2004-04-13Trevor F. Smith - Exterior: The 23rd, 5th meme
The preceding sentence and begining of the paragraph is
The "(box below)" is three pages beyond that paragraph, and emphasizes that specialized audiences care about esoteric things, but that doesn't work for broader audiences.
I would rather have reached for Michael Crichton's autobiographical Travels, but it simply wasn't the nearest. And I can't resist:
[later: When anderbill took on this assignment, and linked to me, I started tracing backward through the sources to see where this started. I dug back about 8 levels and I think the chain of sources is simply broken.] ACM Ubiquity: On Writing in a Graduate Program. An interesting article on what the scholarship and writing requirements are for typical graduate programs, including on-line ones. ACM News Service: Spamhaus Proposal Aims to Stop Spam. There is still more movement around finding a neutral mechanism that inhibits Spam at the edges of the e-mail "network." I am not clear on how this fits with all of the other proposals, and I suppose this is something I simply keep an eye on. ACM News Service: In the Trenches With Antivirus Guru Mikko Hypponen. It is interesting to see the discussion of machine language and the need for machine-language skills to be able to analyze worms and viruses. This is no longer required for IT, and apparently not for computer science. I wonder where the appropriate specialization can be cultivated in a reliable manner. 2004-04-11CommunityWiki: AuthorshipModel. This is an interesting analysis of the authorship conditions and relationships on Wiki pages, and how to account for them. It seems clear to me that some pages might have some preset conditions on what their authorship model is. I like that notion. It could tie to the template used for the page (which might provide visual cues as to the model) or maybe it is semi-orthogonal. CommunityWiki: WikiSWOT. I couldn't figure out what SWOT was, so here it is described in terms of how it applies to Wikis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. It is from business analysis. ACM News Service: The Next Job for the W3C. This Tim Berners-Lee interview discusses areas where the Web will be developed next. There is great emphasis on collaborative, on-line activity, such as concurrent work on a document, ability to annotate and comment, and other activities that are already emerging in various communities already, it seems to me. Great attention is given to RDF, and also the need for security in terms of authenticating who ones collaborators are, etc. EGEE Project. This follow-on to the EU Datagrid is for grid-enabling of E-Science for Europe. It will be interesting to see what AnderBill can tell me about this, since he is working on a data preservation and access working group. The DataGrid Project. This is the DataGrid project. It ends in March 2004, with movement to the next stage. The work product of the DataGrid project is available under an open-source license. ACM News Service: Data Finds a Place on the Grid. Interesting. The idea is to apply grid computing principles to creation of (literal) data grids, with metadata and descriptive techniques for location and platform-independent access to content. This is of high interest for me. Wired News: See-Through Voting Software. This is Kim Zetter's 2004-04-08 Wired article. There is nice detail and a great analysis about the transparency of VoteHere (which is extraordinary), especially because the use of the methodology is so confirmable that the source code is not needed. So I should use this as an example of confirmable experience that does not involve exposure of source code and any proprietary technology reflected therein. What interests me is the application of this kind of cryptographic verification to other activities, including P2P activities. ACM News Service: See-Through Voting Software. This article is very promising in terms of what it provides for public engagement and ability to confirm ballots. It is also interesting for naming a "Microsoft cryptographer." SSRN-The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law by Lawrence Solum, Minn Chung. From Vince Cerf via Larry Lessig, this is a wowsa. It is an interesting example of the extension of a technical, architectural principle into a social sphere, that of legal regulation. Very impressive, and a nifty illustration that artifacts do indeed have politics. Savannah: Storm - permanent storage - Summary. The Storm project has the same usual suspects as FenFire. Crudely put, it seems to deal with the back-end. There is the usual matter of the non-Gnu project page not reflecting the actual status here. storm/storm/README - view - 1.12. Benja has a storage system called Storm, and it works off of cryptographic hashes to provide indelible storage (current-version and other notions are handled by updateable references/links). There are a number of interesting design principles. Savannah: Fenfire - a hyperstructured UI - Summary. I would say there is more to it than that. This is the non-GNU project page. It needs work, but the left-corner image makes it worth visiting anyhow. The project is more advanced than this. It is just that the active project site is elsewhere. Vision of Fenfire. More accurately, Fenfire is a Free Software package, and it seems to be after the key aspect of RDF: "anyone [is] (technically) allowed to say anything about anything;" I don't know how one deals with the fact that RDF allows this by not having it be clear what "anything", "about", and "say" end up being. Just the same, this does seem to be the key to RDF and how that perspective is explored here seems worth digging into. It is another Java project. Fenfire. Danny Ayers coughed up this link. Fenfire is based on the notion that "Everything has to do with everything else." It is a descendent of the Xanadu vision but seems to have cut the traces. It is also an open-source project and some interesting visualization tools. The Bamboo DHT -- Introduction. This is about a Distributed Hash Table mechanism that serves as a building-block for P2P. It can be thought of as a directory or a cache, with distributed maintenance and updating. That is an interesting topic, with regard to P2P bootstrapping and that great principle: think globally, act locally. Bamboo is a BDS-licensed open-source implementation. It is implemented in Java. It uses the Berkeley DB and some other packages, including RPC. This looks like an opportunity for abstraction and federation, but I can't tell yet.
|
|||
