Sean McGrath

AALL Conference, end of July, Washington D.C.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:19:00 +0000

So, I've just finished my slides for the American Association of Law Librarians conference coming up in D.C. end of July.

This is the first AALL conference I have attended and I'm really looking forward to it. If you are around the D.C. area 25-28 July and interested in meeting up, let me know.

I'll be talking at AALL about the challenges involved in preserving law and other legislative artifacts. How XML doesn't necessarily help unless you approach it exactly right[1].

[1] In this case, "exactly right" is at odds with the standard XML orthodoxy. Hint: the wrong place to start is with a logical model of legal texts as "structured" artifacts.

Lisa Hannigan

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Ever since I came across Damien Rice I've been watching out for evidence of his backing vocalist Lisa Hannigan branching out on her own. She is waaay to good to be a second fiddle.

And now she has. I hope she plays more dates in the US soon.

If you have not come across her before thing of a mashup between Norah Jones, Leonard Cohen with a touch of Mary Margaret O'Hara.

Oh for two slices of ... something

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:39:00 +0000

One of the perennial risks with Atkins-style diets is that there comes a point where you really, really want two slices of something to hold your bacon and cheese together in an ergonomic and non-messy way. The urge to grab that wonderful but seditious invention - bread - is very strong. Lettuce works but just doesn't feel right. Especially if you just lurve the smell of toast:-/

I am reminded of Woody Allen's hilarious short story about the Earl of Sandwich...

All joking aside, s/he who invents something that is very low carb (that rules out most of the so-called low-carb breads on the market), and can function like bread in a sandwich, has a bright financial future.

Suggestions?

Jython 2.5!

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:34:00 +0000

Great! Jython hits 2.5. I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl and using it extensively in upcoming projects.

Balisage looks good (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:39:00 +0000

Again, the lineup for the Balisage conference looks good.

Some of the talks look intriguining. Markup as a nomic game sounds very interesting. Lots about pipelines...

I see that Michael Kay is going to talk about Jacskson Structured Programming and how it relates to XML and XML processing. Yay! Back in 1996 I gave a talk about JSP/JSD and SGML processing at SGML '96. I'm looking forward to reading Michael's paper. Jackson's inversion concept was a stroke of genius and his JSP/JSD work has very much influenced how I think about XML processing.

More techtorials?

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:37:00 +0000

I'm soliciting feedback/suggestions on the techtorials I have been doing with ITWorld.

I know that the handwriting quality is a problem for some people. Its tough writing with a pen interface and my handwriting is bad to start with...I have some ideas to address that.

I'm wondering whether the format has legs, what topics would be of potential interest and so on.

If you have something to say on the topic please use Left Field Techtorials feedback site or comment on this blog, or e-mail me.

career damaging self-description

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 16 May 2009 14:13:00 +0000

career damaging self-description: some thoughts on how programmers describe themselves.

Risidual risk

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:30:00 +0000

A techtorial on risidual risk Is it secure?

Microformats...here we go

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:00:00 +0000

So Google will be adding microformat parsing to HTML. Who would have thought that semantically rich content-in-the-wild would turn out this way?

Certainly not most of us XML types back in the Nineties. Microformats, microdata, rdfa. Fascinating. I'll still call it semantic steganography though.

I wonder what Master Foo would make of it all?

Entering the twilight zone

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Heh. A heckle-meter for Twitter

Congrats to Timetric

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Congrats to Timetric on their Seedcamp London success.

The notion of using the Web as a base platform for numerical quantities, leveraging all we have learned from the textual Web era, is growing apace and it is exciting to watch.

The next big thing on the Web, in my opinion, is numbers.

AtomPub...

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:44:00 +0000

Atompub is the subject of Hugh Winkler's REST hypothesis post. I think I agree with most of it. When history is written, I think it will show that without the visual nature of the Web, it never would have taken off as an IT substrate. I.e. The web was something you looked at. It attracted end-user eye-balls first. The droves of substrate diver-types came second. No end-user eyeballs to fuel the fires, no web. Or, looked at another way, no compelling end user application out of the box, no reason to engineer a compelling IT substrate.

The slippery bit here is the stuff that eyeballs look at on the web. We all know that the web started as "pages" where electronic "page" had a strong analogy to a paper "page". The content was forged from tags that marked out paragraphs and bold and headings and what not...

...but that was then and this is now. Moving from mere pages to full-on applications requires more than just html. More than just declarative syntax for end-user-facing text. For a while, the technical answer seemed obvious. Allow browsers to work with structured content if they want to and render said structured content using stylesheets.

For reasons I do not profess to understand, this never really happened. Somewhere along the line, the "structured content+stylesheet=dynamically rendered page" equation broke down. Javascript began to flex its Turing Complete muscles and today we are staring down the barrel of a completely different concept of a web "page"...

...In the new world, it seems to me that HTML is taking a back seat and becoming - goodness gracious me - an envelope notation into which you can pour Javascript for deliver to the client side...

...where it gets turned into HTML (maybe) for rendering using the HTML rendering smarts of the browser.

It is as if declarative information is disappearing into the silos that are not on the web - but interfaced to it. Interfaced by application servers that convert content server side into Javascript programs to be EVALed by the client. The EVAL-ed javascript is then further EVAL-ed by the end-user eyeballs that birthed the success of the web in the first place.

So what? Well, There is a big loss happening I think. At least, I believe it is a real risk. Maybe I'm just a pessimist. I see content disappearing at a rate of knots into silos that are not on the web. Access to these silos is being controlled by application servers that are spitting out programs. Not pages-o-useful-content but PROGRAMS.

We are doing this because programs are so much more useful than mere content if we want to create compelling end-user-applications and because if you squint just right, content is a trivial special case of a Turing Complete program. Just ask any Lisper.

This is happening somewhat under the covers because HTML - gotta love it - allows JavaScript payloads. But if 99% of my pages are 99% JavaScript and 1% declarative markup of content, am I serving out content or serving out programs?

Maybe JSON is pointing at where this is all headed. Maybe we will see efforts to standardize data representation techniques in JSON so that the JSON can be parsed and used separately from the rendering normally bound to it? Maybe XML-on-the-client-side will have a resurgence?

I don't know which way it will go but I would suggest that if we are searching for what exactly the web *is* we have to go further than say it is HTML, as Hugh does in this piece.

For me, the web is URIs, a standard set of verbs and a standardized EVAL function. The verbs are mostly GET and POST and the standardized EVAL function is the concept of a browser that can EVAL HTML and can eval JavaScript. I don't thing we can afford to leave JavaScript out of the top level definition of what the Web is because there is too much at stake.

There is a huge difference between a web of algorithms and a web of data. For computing eons, we have known that a combination of algorithms and data structures lead to programs. Less well known (outside computer science) are the problems of trying to build applications using one without the other or trying to fake one using the other.

Lisp, TeX, SGML...all of these evidence the struggle between declarative and imperative methods. Today, the problems are all the same but the buzzwords are different: JavaScript, XSLT, XML...

We have not solved the fundamental problem: separating what information *is* from what information *does* in a way that makes the "is" part usable without the "does" part and yet does not impede the easy creation of the main application which unfortunately (generally) needs to fuse "is" and "does" in a deep and complex way.

Anyway. Enough Sunday morning rambling. If this stuff is of interest to you you might be interested in Orangutans, Oxen and Ogham Stones.

Questioning the form of the question

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:08:00 +0000

We live in interesting times on the web-o-data front. An interesting discussion is taking place on Jon Udell's blog.

Lets imagine a Web awash with machine readable numbers and with the ability to perform all sorts of wonderful calculations for you on said numbers behind the scenes. So wonderful if fact that you, as an information consumer, do not need to know or care if the answer to your questions was pre-computed or computed on the fly.

Now. How would you best like to express your questions to this web-o-data/computations? Visually? Textually? What software abstractions exist now for framing such questions? Google has a text box. Geo-systems have maps. RDBs have query-by-example and good old SQL. What else? Lots of programming languages of course, but what else can we use in an end-user, non-programmer context?

Well, I think the spreadsheet is one of the most powerful abstractions for asking questions of data/computations ever discovered. However, there ia a huge disconnect between the old spreadsheet concept of offline, localized data/localized formulae and what the Web enables.

We kmow how to decentralize the data. All the bits are in place. We have the HTTP, URI's, XML, CSV, JSON, RSS/Atom. We know how to notify people/processes when data changes : e-mail, RSS/ATOM, XMPP, WebHooks yada, yada.

Two necessary bits are late to the party. The first is well on the way : cloud computing. It is what will allow us to take *a computation* and put it on the web as a first class, always-on, scalable resource. Once we can compute easily in the cloud, we can derive facts from existing facts and - critically - derive notification events when the inter-relationships between fact objects change. (Sidebar: Change...think about how many business functions you know of that are triggered by the changing relationships between facts. Lots right?)

The second missing bit is the paradigm for asking the questions of the web-o-data. Wolfram Research are making exciting noises in the area of natural language questions. The Geo brigade are creating ever more fantastic stuff for geo-located data. RDF etc. continues to provide a grand unifying theory of it all but...where is the end-user facing paradigm for interacting with a humongous web of smart numeric data and its concomitant legion of web-hosted computations?

I think the spreadsheet metaphor is an interesting place to start. Facts are cells. Questions (known as formulas) as also cells. New facts and new formulas can be created based on existing facts/formulas ad infinitum.

Now put that concept natively on the Web.

Wow.

Balisage: The Markup Conference. Call for participation.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:02:00 +0000

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009. Deadline for papers approaching fast. You know what to do.

Loose coupling of the temporal kind

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:18:00 +0000

A short screencast explaining my views on Loose Coupling

Capitol, Washington D.C.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Some pics from this weeks trip to Capitol Buildings, Washington D.C. here.

I had the great privilege of visiting the House chamber floor on my visit. My goose bumps have not yet subsided.

Look, let me draw you a picture

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:50:00 +0000

techtorials - an experiment with an electronic sheet of foolscap

Grand slam!

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Victory is ours! http://www.rbs6nations.com What a game. What a team!

Attend XML Prague : right now

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Just click here. Excellent.

Numbers on the web and Recombinant Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:35:00 +0000

In a comment to my recent blog post on timetric and open scalar data, Sean Park points to hypernumbers:

Hypernumbers

I'm hoping that soon now, the number of entities live in the business of giving numbers homes on the Web will reach the recombinant growth threshold number R.

R is a term we use in Timetric-land for to capture the economic/biological concept of "recombinant growth. Thankfully, R is, I think, in the low single digits in this case :-)

It is straightforward to see how entities can independently host numbers that collectively can be mashed-up to create new host numbers. The more the merrier! Less obvious[1] is how the fabric of the Web can be made to support the critical concept of near real-time calculations and update notifications on those numbers so that "calculating" is as easy as "hosting" is today.

Then of course, there is the minor sounding but hugely thorny issues of naming the numbers (the URIs), namespaces, normative copies yada, yada.

Hard and interesting problems one and all. Problems well worth solving for the value they will bring. I would suggest that this emerging space is the future of what today is known as a "spreadsheet". It is not a desktop calculation experience hosted in a web browser. That is not particularly interesting as it just takes a desktop paradigm and puts it on the Web. I'm talking about radically rethinking the whole concept of a spreadsheet. I'm talking about something that is not so much "on the web" as "in the web". Built in. Native. All around you. All the time. A worldwide interlinked network of bazillions of numeric quantities. All updating and being updated in line with their semantic interconnections (known in today's terminology as "spreadsheet formulas"). All ready to be used to create yet more numbers and drive decision making at client and server levels of the ecosystem.

[1] Dare I say "cloud computing"?

Open (scalar) Data

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Sean (no relation) over at the always-interesting Park Paradigm is thinking about the relationship between the semantic web and financial (numeric) data : Semantic shemanticrich open data is what we want.

The world is literally awash with very, very useful scalar data types. The big gorilla being integer and fractional[1] quantities that change value over time. I firmly believe that in order to make these things first class members of the Web, they need to live *on* the web.

Simply put, numbers need URIs with RESTian APIs for management. Lets put that layer in place first. Then we can make RDF statements about numbers (and numbers at idempotent points-in-time). We can also provide feeds that describe time series changes using things like XBRL...

That is what the www.timetric.com is all about.

[1] Financial markets love fractions, as do market makers of all forms horses, two-flies-on-a-wall etc.

Carbs - their part in my downfall

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Eve has started blogging about the fattening effect of carbs and is pointing out that low-carb regimes like Atkins are not as crazy as some would have us all believe.

I thought I would weigh[1] in with my story. A few years ago I woke up and found myself weighing 18 stone with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a stressful, largely exercise free lifestlye.

I tried the standard approaches, precise calorie counting, fruit for lunch, nothing after 6...all that stuff. No joy. I stumbled upon Atkins and the geek in me was intrigued. I have a soft spot for contrarian conceptual models that put received wisdom through the wood chipper. I decided to give it a go although I was very skeptical. Especially when I read the sentence in the book that says something like "Remember to eat regularly. You may forget to eat.". Yeah, that will happen...

But it did. I found that I had essentially complete control over hunger pangs. With Atkins, if you are hungry you eat. That's it. It is just that you are very careful *what* you eat. Hunger pangs are not part of the recipe. You control them so that they do not control you.

So, the weight started to come off. I joined a gym and the weight started to fall off. I lost 2.5 stone without a single hunger pang. "This is trivial", one part of me said while another part of me was thinking "Perhaps my insides are turning to mush. Perhaps by arteries are disintegrating or getting clogged with lumps of cheesey egg roll wrapped in chicken skin?".

I went to the doctor for a checkup and my blood pressure and cholesterol were both significantly better than they were before. Now as a geek, I'm always wary of conflating correlation with causation. I don't know if was purely the weight loss that dropped the BP and cholesterol. Maybe the diet was not a part of it. Perhaps the diet was the primary driver of the weight loss? I don't know...and neither, it seems does medical science.

I have my weight under control now. Every now and then I fall of the wagon and it starts to climb up again - especially now that I live in the epicenter of the processed carb universe - the USA. Every now and then I drop some more carbs from my intake and the extra weight goes away. No panic. No problem.

Yes, yes I know that I really should get some exercise too but, heck, who's perfect? I'm working on it. Quit nagging! Yes, yes, I know that the scientific/medical community is very much split on this whole low-carb issue and maybe I'm killing myself.

I've seen scientific controversies before and been involved in a few (if you allow "computing" to be classed as a science that is). This one looks very familiar. It smacks of Thomas Kuhn. It also smacks of "Big Carb". Consider me a walking experiment if you like. If the low-carb lifestlye kills me, the lack of activity on my blog will let you know I was wrong and the "fat makes you fat" brigade were right :-)

[1] Ho ho ho

Python API for Timetric

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Jacob has created a Python API for Timetric with a nice Pythonic API.

Take a look at Timetric

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:10:00 +0000

Some time ago, I had some ideas burning a hole in my head. Ideas I knew I had no time to pursue but felt pretty passionate about. My Two Django ideas in need of good homes posting resulted in some meetings and some false starts...but it also resulted in meeting up with three ace Django/Python programmers / "recovering" scientists, based in the fine city of Cambridge, UK. Three of the smartest folks I've ever met to boot.

It took me all of, uh, 20 seconds to explain one of the ideas to them and the result, a mere matter of months later is http://timetric.com/. it is now in public beta and you might like to check it out.

The idea is simple but has significant consequences in my opinion

The basic thought is this: What if numbers were first class members of the Web ecosystem?...

What if numeric quantities had their own "home" on the Web? I don't mean a great big slab of numbers, or a database, I mean the actual numeric quantities themselves : the time it takes you to drive to work, the spot price of gold, the average daily rainfall in Tanna Tuva...whatever.
What if the changes to those quantities are recorded through time? You would end up with a time series for each numeric quantity.
What if each time series was a blog, with its own feeds, its own simple web based update mechanism etc?
What if all these numeric blogs lived out in the cloud so that it can scale to silly numbers and provide very high availabilty?
What if the entire system provided simple webby APIs so that developers can upload as well as download stuff easily?
And last but definitely not least...what if new time series could be created using spreadsheet like formulae - and automatically updated when any of the underlying numeric quantities are updated.

That would be pretty interesting. Not a database on the web, not a spreadsheet on the Web. Something new and much more interesting on the Web.

It will be fascinating to see what types of applications get built on top of the Timetric platform.

Dochead screening tool

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:11:00 +0000

Partly in jest and partly in complete seriousness. Here are a list of things I believe contribute to docheadedness.

A love of language. This can present itself in a love of reading, puns, typography, poetry, concern for the beautiful renderings of the theorems of Ramanujan.
A love of classification. This can present itself in a love of folder structures, meta-models, abstractions that blur distinctions between nouns and verbs. Formalisms like speech act theory, FRBR, HyTime, RDF. Frameworks like ebXML, TEI etc.
A love of reference and citation. Language referencing language. Language that references itself. Dynamically typed programming systems. Recursion.
An output-centric mentality for computerization. IT is good if it helps you produce great outputs quickly. Everything else is secondary.
A love of patterns. This can present itself in a love of music, logic puzzles, dance, cooking.

I do not know any dochead who score 100 on these but I don't know any docheads that score 0 either.