Orcmid's Lair

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

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2004-05-01

 
An Evaluation of the World Wide Web with respect to Engelbart's Requirements.  Danny Ayers blogged this citation recently.  It is also interesting that the paper is based on a presentation made in 1995.  I am interested because Englebart's OHS project interests me and I would maybe make a piece of it as part of an M.Sc Dissertation Project, if I can get up to speed easily (and Englebart thinks it is cool to do).

 
IronPython: A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono.  OK, here's the IronPython link.  Fascinating.

 
Miguel de Icaza: IronPython.  I am looking for the paper that Miguel mentions here, and while at it I see that there is a very nice article and a cool example of the use of response files to avoid command-line limitations.  A great little hack that I must make sure works in my Java equivalent of copt. It would also be interesting to accept an "@" input to a data prompt. Hmm ...

 
Diary for lupus: More on Mono suitability.  Oops, here's another link from Miguel.

 
Diary for lupus: response to Mono critique.  The Mono effort is criticized because of alleged vulnerability to future moves by MS with .NET.  Interesting, it is the fear meme again.  I just caught that because I brought it up earlier today.  OK, meanwhile, here are some responses to those concerns.  Not an endorsement, but something to consider and see what provokes a "stop and think it over" response.  If I was rating this on slash-dot, I would give it "thoughtful" (which I can't, but if I could, I would).

 
raelity bytes.  Here I learn that I should look for Blosxom 3.0+2i now (why the i, is it like a BMW model number or what?).  What I am taking away from this page is that I really like the simple use of "#" for permalinks (and purpling and such).  I am also thinking that it would be cool to allow minimal XHTML in #!nfoWiki wiki text, once I figure out if I can live with those rules.

 
raelity bytes: Blosxom 3.0+1i announcement.  I am enough of a speed reader that I keep transforming Blosxom into Bloxsom and raelity into reality.  And I see enough here to want to emulate the integration model I suspect I will find if I learn enough Perl to decrypt this thingy (all 15k of it!).  I remember there is a tip about pronouncing Blosxom, but you know, that is not an Inglish syllable there, guy.

 
phil ringnalda dot com: Meet the new boss.  This is very funny.  Read the comments too.  It reminds me that we have this illusion about what "standards" are.  Yes, there is the king who stepped in the mud and decreed one foot and such.  But it doesn't happen that way these days very much, really.

The worry-warting about forking is the funny part.  I figure the only people who fret so much about that spend their lives forking other people's code (it's one of those look in the mirror to see who the enemy is kind of things).  Or maybe never writing any code because somebody might fork it.  Oh, that's me in the mirror.

 
Gel Conference (Good Experience Live).  I am wailing about the difficulty of "confirmable experience" and yet didn't trigger on the title of this conference in Heath Row's (I'm sorry, is this really a person's name, and can I have Gatt Wick?) blog on Fast Company.  I don't think I can talk about good experience, and I'm still attached to confirmable experience as a meaningful notion.  Because I am, you know?

 
Fast Company Now: The Soul of Silence.  This is too short.  Maybe because the message is very simple and I am wanting it to be more.  I have more to say about the mirror I am looking into.  I don't like that.  Mostly, my question is, "am I creating the world in which I want to live?"  There is evidence to the contrary.  Or that I am truly a devious and black-hearted soul.

 
Fast Company Now: The Experience Experience.  Anderbill and I fuss over what an experience might be, what is a confirmable experience, and how can one design an experience (for others).  Alan Cooper explains why Interactive Design does not accept the notion of designed experiences.  I have fumbled around with The Scale of Human Experience (a title that I still like and have thought more about in the past few days). Somehow, this summary has not slaked my thirst for an understanding of experience.  It is kind of "More experience, less filling."

 
James Gosling: on the Java road... Open sourcing Java.  Ignoring the particular posturing and agenda-discovery effort around IBM's open-letter adventures, there is this interesting theme about the prospect of Java being forked if it was open-sourced.  I also find the use of the "damage" that Microsoft created as an example a little problematic, although Microsoft could have done what it is alleged that was done in a way that would not have forked Java at all.  IBM has accomplished that with JWT, and it looks to me that the Microsoft folk were simply careless and perhaps too arrogant.

That is not what I meant to blog here, though. Gosling's remarks, at the end, are an expression of distrust. Yes, distrust. Not in Microsoft but in others generally (but with a handy demon to scare us with).  I say that based on observing where I have done the same thing.  In my case it was a matter of sitting on the source code (before there was open- and closed- differentiation or IP protection for software). It was also not wanting to have to deal with the anticipated situation of having to do maintenance on two different releases, coordinate patches, and a lot of other things that I didn't want to deal with.  So, it was all about me, really.  I didn't trust the community.

That was long ago.  More recently, in supporting ODMA, I have been more trusting and also more cautious about undertaking changes on my own (just as I see I am on Wikipedia).  There's still something about me underneath all that newfound timidity too.  But in fact the community has done nothing egregious about the code for the critical middleware part of ODMA being out there, and it has led to people finding problems rebuilding it and also has led to valuable bug reports from the few who have actually read that code.

 
Send us your postcards (Logged in as: orcmid).  I must do this.  It is about overlay networks, dig?  I'm in Sandquist's back yard (not quite literally) in West Seattle, but distance is all distorted between these two forms of connectivity anyhow.  Vicki and I sometimes communicate by e-mail between our two offices here in the same house.  I have even gotten her in MSN Messenger, and I can use the Intercom on our 4-line phones too (though it startles her) or I can shout up the stairs (the common household communication protocol).  Now I want to find an appropriate postcard.

 
Ward Cunningham.  I don't know why I haven't read Ward's own page on WikiWiki before. I found it because I now get to see how other Microsoft Bloggers love to namedrop discussions with Ward!  There is a lot here and I want to digest it better.

 
Fitness on MSN : Exercise & Train.  This page is about the Top 5 Exercise Questions.  I have all of these questions, so I am blogging it. 

I didn't want to blog it. I had to. First, because it is not the kind of page that will save as viewable off-line; Second because the page is framed in such a way that it won't fit a printed page either, and the ends of lines disappear.  I don't like that approach at all, and I will remember that when designing for particular user experiences and capabilities in my own work.

People like to collect clippings and make scrap books and such, as well as blog, transclude, and so on.  It is not appropriate to assume that I am always on-line and willing to figure out how to find it each time.  This gives me more to think about here.  Of course, MSN is selling my eye-balls and this information is viewed as someone's property (not mine), so there is that to deal with also.

Meanwhile, I will find a way to sequester the information that I want.  This is an example of the question: whose computer is it? It also brings up a new form of the question: "Whose eyeballs are they?"

2004-04-30

 
This Year, Tablet PC Improves in Leaps and Bounds; Laptop of the Month: Acer TravelMate C300 Convertible Tablet PC.  For what I want for my July 2005 Graduation gift, I have my eye on the Tablet PC.  Here we see that the second generation is coming out much nicer although there are some improvements Acer should make ASAP.

 
Yahoo! News - Yahoo! News.  Well, I am at the right machine for doing some syndication, but there are a lot of feeds listed on this page.  I will come back and mull them over later.

 

Computing Milieux

Collaborative and Cooperative Computing

Loose Ends

I have been allowing unpublished notes to accumulate in my Blogger and I need to give them permalinks so that I can worry about trackback and other features.  Mostly I am getting them published in some loose form so that they exist in more than one place.

 
Library Stuff is a weblog that talks about RSS feeds and syndication a lot (as well as same-sex marriage).  There is a nice sidebar on articles and pressentations, including a seminar on blogging and RSS.  Something else to subscribe to when I get onto the proper machine.

 
Open Access News is a Blog and news feed devoted to the Open Access movement, edited by Peter Suber and other contributors.  This looks like something that works for me better than the mailing list, and I will subscribe to the RSS feed when I next notice this note (and I am working on the correct computer to do that).

2004-04-29

 

Situating Meaning

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | The semantic engineer.  This is a nice biographical sketch and article about Daniel Dennett III

 
IST Results - Applying Grid middleware to industry.  This is a reference to project DAMIEN and application of grid middleware to extensive simulations.

 
Fast Company RoadSHOW: Trust-Based Technologies.  Susan Anderson of Praxis101 sent me this link for its discussion about trust and how trust is established, lost, and mended.  Although this is a surface look, it resonates with everything I have observed.

Hard Hat Area

an nfoCentrale.net site

created 2002-10-28-07:25 -0800 (pst) by orcmid
$$Author: Orcmid $
$$Date: 04-05-10 23:19 $
$$Revision: 1 $

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