ShelterIt - My digital think-tank

Tabs dumping

2010-09-03T13:27:00.000+10:00

I'm in dire need to dump all the interesting stuff lounging around in my various tabs in various browsers (don't we all use more than one browser at a time?), so I can make more space for whatever weird stuff that comes my way. I'm sure this particular collection will say something about where I'm mentally up to these days, but I have no fear! So here goes ;

Hawking hasn't changed his mind about God : This one is an obvious story from this week, about one of the smartest people in the world making obvious declarations about the nature of, well, nature, but it's interesting all the same, coupled with some other news about being able to test the merits of String Theory.

What happened to behaviorism? : Is Skinner dead? Well, yes, but is he truly dead? As in, Schrödinger's cat dead?

Amateur astronomer reporting a UFO : It is said that there's a good reason astronomers don't report UFOs, because they most likely know what they're looking at. But what happens when they don't?

What is morality? : Another brilliant endeavor by Luke Muehlhauser, a nice little introductory eBook on moral philosophies.

Infrasound : Yes, interesting in its own right, but have a look at the Ghost on the Machine, when you instead of thinking you're seeing ghosts you investigate properly and think scientifically; a whole new world can open up and be explained a lot better.

Did freedom evolve? : Evolutionary epistemology and free-will, what can be more fun?

Journal of Evolution and Technology : Good guy Australian philosopher and author Russell Blackford not only pointed me to this eminent online journal, he's also writing for it in various capacities. It looks really good, a must read. (And both him and me are present in the blog comments on the previous item)

Porter Stemmer : Don't stammer, stemmer, with Porter. Mince words, not meaning. Cut words down to their stems, and use that for semantic analysis.

Protovis : A brilliant data visualizer toolkit which I'm using quite a lot these days. And simple to integrate into stuff. Um. Like, Topic Maps. Yeah, I'll blog more on this later.

Salut Baroque! concert, and true love

2010-08-26T14:25:00.000+10:00

Ok, so last night I went to see the disgustingly good Salut Baroque ensemble at the Conservatory of Music in Sydney, and I got mostly what I expected (Hans Diether Michatz [who's student Shaun Stewart is my two girl's violin teacher!] in his normal good form, Valmai Coggins getting more and better sound out, Tim Blomfield doing his usual funky bass violin, the beautiful Monika Kornel making me wish I was a harpsichord, Sally Melhuish keeping it all together) with a few new faces worth noting ;

Matthew Greco was a new name (and face) to me, playing remarkably well (although the Folia could use some extra booyah!) and with an extraordinary body language. He seems to be involved in a lot of good stuff, so I'll keep me ears open for more. Brilliant left-hand technique.

Simon Martyn-Ellis was a pleasant addition to the line-up; mellow playing smooth as silk which I'm sure he's "inherited" from one of his teacher, the best lute / theorbo player in the world (uh, yeah, I'm biased), fellow Norwegian Rolf Lislevand (of Jordi Savall fame, and who was musical director of the last concert I went to in Norway, the 1610 Vespers by Monteverdi, and you see him briefly in this video I recorded from the event and which I wrote about here). Or maybe he's got talent, who knows? :) Really nice playing.

Then there was soprano Anna Fraser which had a most delightful timbre to her voice! No unnecessary vibrato, no fake phrasing, just full goodness the whole way. Loved her voice.

And then there was my new love, soprano Jane Sheldon, who blinded me with her expressive and passionate rendering of anything she did, clear, passionate and full of life, no silly-billies or cheap courtesying, beautiful as a summers evening. Even sitting still she moved in the most enthralling way. Of course I can't here write a love letter without lamenting much about the meaningless of life away from mountains and the severe lack of spring in my walk to and fro work, so I'll spare you the details, except to say that she did a most thrilling Zefiro Torna I've ever heard a non-Italian ever do (yeah, I'm a Monteverdi geek).

Oh, Salut Baroqe, you tease me and pain me and drive me crazy with all that I long for. Until next time, thanks a lot.

Updates and recommendations

2010-08-18T16:59:00.000+10:00

Right, so here's where I'm up to these days ;

I'm working for a local (but fairly large) health care provider as their intranet guy (building an empire from scratch, and may well include Topic Maps) both in design, implementation, usability, and process management, a role that is being expanded crazily with every day as we discover new territories to conquer and submit to our new reign of knowledge management. So yes, I'm actually enjoying it, even though the challenges are sky-high and densely packed.

I'm writing a book tentatively (and probably) called "The well-tempered monkey" (with some fancy sub-title, I'm sure), and it's about evolution, baroque music, the IT industry, software development, human psychology and cognition, category theories, philosophy, geeks, procreation and laser-guns! I'm roughly 1/4 finished with the first draft, and it contains heavily edited blog posts, lots of new writing and thinking, and my own pictures and designs. (Can an eBook embed music? If yes, I'll put some of my music in as well for good measure) Looking for tips, but think I'll make it a eBook-friendly PDF with a donate button at this point, unless you have a better way.

A good friend and librarian / cataloger Saskia has started a new blog called "All things cataloged", and she is well-versed in the black art of Topic Maps and identity management. You should check it out, it's good stuff.

Today I stumbled upon a Dutch version of a Norwegian classic by Sigrid Undset on a lonely bookshelf in the corridors of a health care facility in Albion Park, Illawarra. Man, that was a seriously crazy moment!

I'm closing in on xSiteable RESTful event-driven resource-oriented PHP framework for enterprise application development with embedded Topic Maps / identity management. I've started documenting the thing, and I'll release it soon-ish, I think. It also feature a funky Topic Maps-based XSLT dynamic GUI templating framework that I think should be a project all by itself, but hey, I'll throw it in for good value.

I've created a number of upper and core ontologies that I might release at some point, some of them obviously designed for more fuzzy Intranet stuff, but I'm increasingly getting all representialist on my arse, outing basic category theory and generally thrashing the good name of entites everywhere. I feel a long blog coming on.

Did I mention that all enterprise knowledge management software friggin' sucks? Like, sucks balls? All of them. I've tried them all, extensively, and they all just fail the one simple rule I've got; make KM easy for people. Confluence, Atrium, Documentum, SharePoint, SocialText, LifeRay, all the portal apps and associated server technologies, Vignette, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun (hehe), I could go on and on, they all SUCKS BALLS! They are technologists solutions to human problems, and failing basic compassion and respect for the generic user! Usability is not about pretty friggin' colors and cute graphics! I'm disgusted with the state of affairs as the usability of these things have not improved much or at all in the last 20 years I've worked in this field. (And yes, I'll friggin' make my own, I'm sick of this ...)

Anyway, on that happy note, life isn't so bad, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next crazy chapter in my life. We'll talk soon.

I would think that, too

2010-08-03T20:59:00.000+10:00

If I were you, I'd think that this blog didn't exist anymore, that it was abandoned and left behind in some digital heap of leftovers and unwanted peripherals. But no, it's still here, still serving your humble host as a way to express himself. But wait, if that is true, where is it? Where's this expressions you speak of?

Fair question. And the answer is a bit complex, but since my Indian adventure ended I've had a really shitty time finding proper income, especially given that I live in a region that is chemically free of IT jobs. It's pretty here, and life is nice and slow, but my family can't live off pretty and nice and slow (or so my wife and kids tell me). I've done a smidgen of contract work, but laughable as it stands, and it has in general been quite difficult for me to focus on much else. Of course I could vent here every day about my struggles, especially the vile and evil ways of the recruiter (and a lot of blame has to fall on those morons who hire them; shame on you) but I've been sparing you, good reader, from a repetitious stream of vile and frustrations.

Sure, some interesting things have happened, and a lot of it will be revealed in due time. But right now things are slowly falling into place (although not all is as good as it could be), normality returns, and I'm having a cup of tea before bed, and wanted to pop this message out there that things are looking up, if only for a brief moment.

One thing that has happened which I'm somewhat excited about is that I've decided to write a book, and I'm already 50 pages of edited and (re-)written materials. the title and contents will come a bit later, but I'm thinking of a self-publishing model in eBook form, but I'll take any advice at the moment. (It's a book for technology developers, managers and entrepreneurs - very broad in scope! - on the more philosophical side of things)

Anyway, I'll let you in on the details of work later. I'm in Australia for now, but there's a Norwegian adventure possibly a bit later on, but as with all things in my life, the details are light and fluffy.

Can you just stop this obsession with books?

2010-06-28T11:04:00.000+10:00

Hey, Library. How are you? It's been a while since we last had a serious talk, but I've been busy. Anyway, I've got a few minutes to kill before I have to fly off again, so care for a cup of coffee or something? Great!

So, how have you been? Busy, eh? Yeah, I know the feeling, always striving towards the future, making things better, solving more complex problems, finding within yourself which path you should travel, all those things. Yeah, I've been busy, too. Life is always in motion, always changing, and we cling to those things that don't while learning and re-learning to let go of that which does.

Oh, that's not what you've been doing? Right, you've ... tinkered with FRBR? And you're excited about RDA? No, no, I'm not disappointed, I just thought, you know, the last time we talked that we knew that was a bit of a dud, you know? That the future of the library isn't in, well, bibliographic?

Look, Library, I know you love your books, I really do, but didn't you agree with me that the world was more than just books? Yeah, so why are you still obsessing with them? Why is your world still revolving around small rectangular physical paper-based objects with words in them when there is simply so much out there? Heck, there's even all of that stuff in the books available in other formats and mediums, too, but you seem to just have a fetish for paper? What's up with that?

Can you just stop this obsession with books? It's not healthy for you. You go on and on about the measurements of the paper, what it weighs, you talk only about what it looks like, who wrote it, when it was written, who printed it, and so on. In fact, you go on and on about how to simply read and describe the title of the darn thing, and not once do you dig into the content of the thing to tell me what this thing is really about. Sure, you pop out some keywords about it, but seriously, you got all that from reading the sleeve cover, I mean, come on, have you even read the darn thing?

Look, I know why you do this; so that, through your brilliant description, others might find it when they search for whatever you described it as. The problem is that the ratio of getting it right for all people is about the word-count of the book itself. It's not good to have a few butchered select words about a tome of knowledge or inspiration. You're not helping people on their path with this sort of stuff. People are not interested in books. They are interested in its content.

You need to stop talking about books, and seriously - as in, right now! - start talking about content. Otherwise, all that will be left of you will be an epithet of what you once was. And I hate to see you down, my friend, I really do. But the power to change is from within. You will have to want to change. I'll help if you like, heck, we all will! We all love you and think you're the greatest, but seriously, you have got to change, you have got to shape up and lose that bibliopheliac addiction.

Ok, sorry to sound so glum and direct, I don't have the time for a long boring committee meeting. Thanks for the coffee, by the way, it was great. And great seeing you again, I've missed our little chats! Take care, ok? And call me if you need anything, alright? Love you. See you later.

Updates : Hate and rage

2010-06-24T16:26:00.000+10:00

Hi, folks. It's been quiet from me for the last little while. This whole "chasing up a new job" thing has kept me busy, and, to be frank, rather uninspired. But I should keep you updated (so I shall do that at the very end of this post), but I also need to vent before I explode!

Recruiters.

That word I've just written up there? It's a synonym with "arsehole." (But wait, there's more! I could add 'incompetent' and 'nasty' without blinking!) Not because they will come right out and be arseholes; no, that would be terribly unprofessional of them and possibly lose them money. No, they are arseholes in a subtle but deviously efficient way.

I had a stint a few years ago dealing with recruiters when I wanted to quit working for the National Library of Australia. I sent out my CV, wrote letters, wrote emails, called and talked with them, on and on. Those experiences are mirrored by my experiences of late. But before I leap into a lament, let me ask you something, where "you" are people in companies and organisations across the globe who might be looking for good people to join their team :

Why the bloody hell do you use recruiters? What is it that you hope to gain from using them? Is it simply that you think that quality people are queuing outside their shop, waiting for those skilled recruiters to match the perfect candidate up with your perfect job description? Seriously? Is that what you think? Because if that's so, I feel the need to tell you that that is not what's happening.

Recruiters are evil. No, no, it's true ; they do not care about the people involved in the recruiting process, they care about their commission in doing so. They are evil, money-sucking bastards that don't give a rats ass about who they match with whom, and so in being arseholes they treat people like crap. Unless they feel there's a slight chance of a match they simple will not contact you, they will not answer your emails or calls. And what do they base their matchability on?

Shit skills. Every time and every single recruiter I've had the pleasure of "talking" with during this last month of riding the Boogeyman their complete lack of understand of what the hell I was talking about was shockingly clear. The client wants a senior developer with MySQL skills, and I say "No problem, I know mySql, in fact I've been doing Sizzle for the last year." You can hear the humming buzz on the line as the other side tries to process this. I say "It's a MySQL fork". More silence. "So, you haven't done any actual MySQL work, then? Ok, that's too bad ...", so I interrupt "What? No, I've done MySQL for years [I mean, for fuck sake, I've been a web developer since 1997!], I was just pointing out that I'm really into the matter of things and hack on forks and play around with unofficial features through MariaDB and ...". Recruiter breaks in with, "so, er, mariaDB, right, so no recent MySQL work, then?"

Or when asked about PHP I said I've done Zend Framework for years, which the job description mentioned as a bonus. "Right, but have you done any PHP work?" Or when asked if I know SCRUM, and I said sure, and that I've done a bit of MODENA of late as well. "So, no real SCRUM experience, then?" Or when asked about if I know XML well, and I say that, sure, I've even created a full Topic Maps engine in XSLT, written a canonical XML dataset serializer (for some obscure project), and get a "well, I meant if you have any core XML skills?" Obviously not. Or how about being asked

Look, people, you're putting these people in charge of finding you the best people? Please don't. Every company I get direct contact with I have a good open dialog with. Recruiters are fucking areholes who treat people like disposable napkins (fit for wiping their saliva from thinking about their commissions, I suppose), and you should not use their services. It's not good for your organisation, nor is it good for the progress of humanity.

Right.

Now, the update. It's very short; I had 6 good leads. I blew one (I aimed too high with that one), 2 were with recruiters (and obviously they don't get back to you unless someone has thrown money at them, so I'm counting them out as I cannot find out what the actual companies are), 2 are in Norway (and they're pretty good, in as much as if nothing else happens within days, we will decide to move back to Norway), and 1 up-in-the-air with a really funky company locally that has great potential (but might fail due to time).

So, all in all, we're in a pretty downy, unstable, crazy place. We're considering taking off for a couple of weeks in a camper-van and see the south coast, but we'll see. Frustrations are running high, and I think the family needs to chill for a little while.

Take care!

Topic Maps visualisation

2010-06-03T14:24:00.000+10:00

I've had a screenshot of a demo I made some time ago just lying around on my desktop, sulking for being forgotten and ignored for so long. I guess I wanted to polish the demo up and make it live at some point, but I've been distracted by a pandemonium of butterflies that has taken up room in my house of late, so I'm just going to dump it here ;

What you're seeing is parts of the Opera Topic Map by Steve Pepper represented as a Treemap (similar to the Protovis thing that Patrick linked to today), and the concept work well as a way to browse around the Topic Map itself, even through smooth zooming in and out of large and small groups of things.

The next fun thing is another tool I've made that takes some YAML structure or XTM as input, and create pretty decent graph representations of the map using GraphViz ;

This one is an ontology that is especially made for a portal I'm doing for Claudio Monteverdi, the baroque composer (and a hero of mine). Here's what a partial input looks to get the idea ;

   Music:
   (c) Work:
   (i) L'incoronazione di Poppea:
   (i) Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria:
   (c) Form:
   (i) Madrigal:
   (i) Motet:
   (i) Canzonet:
   (i) Mass:
   (i) Trio sonata:
   (i) Opera:
   (c) Style:
   (i) Primo prattica:
   (i) Secondo prattica:
   Person:
   (i) Monteverdi, Claudio:
   (i) Monteverdi, Baldasarre:

This method is perfect for sitting down with customers and clients, and just jot out models, ontologies and concepts; all you need is a text editor. (You'll notice that assocs are made through (c) (i) and a few others, which basically are assoc templates you can define more of, so a meta ontology for ontology construction. Yay! :) It's a couple of PHP classes (one of them being the PHP Topic Maps engine I've talked about before that I'll wrap up if I get some spare time) that generate DOT from the input, and serves up a generated image on refresh, so basically you edit the text file, save and hit refresh. Very fast. I might even consider an inbuilt editor in the browser, but pah!

Anyway, just a quick dump there. I'm also working on a far more complicated TM visualisation thingy using RaphaelJS to play directly on the HTML5 Canvas using native and SVG graphics, and it's looking very good so far. I'll show you more when things gets closer to something I won't hide in shame over ...

Need my brain?

2010-05-28T10:07:00.000+10:00

Recall how I have been neglecting my blogging due to just too much work these days? Well, the day when the crazy busy stops is today. After working non-stop with some pretty lofty crazy funky Topic Maps stuff, getting some traction on the potential and seeing some light at the end of a very busy tunnel, it's a bit odd for me to announce ;

My project has been canned for strategic reasons, and I'm out of a job.

Well, now, things move quick around here; the one moment I'm crazy busy doing crazy stuff, next I'm crazily trying to figure out what to do next. If anybody need a brain for hire, this is your chance!

The stupid thing is that I live in the Illawarra / Wollongong area, an area renowned for lack of jobs and being chemically free of IT and innovation (the local government tried to fix that by calling Wollongong 'the city of innovation' and build a huge innovation center that's too expensive for any upstarts to get into). I guess this is a good time to link to my LinkedIn profile, no?

However, I'm not bound by that we must be living here. I'll go anywhere, especially interesting places, interesting countries. I've got three little kids to worry about so I can't jump too quick, but I certainly can hop around New South Wales and possibly Canberra, and sort out where to live after that. Or I can telecommute, or fully work from home. I'm not fussy at this point.

I guess this is where I tell you what I can do; through my 20+ years career I've chewed over and gained specialist expertize in just slightly too abstract things, like Topic Maps (a fantastic technology that doesn't exist in Australia, but obviously should and you should hire me to teach you how to kick arse!), XSLT (a fantastic technology far too few use and truly understand, but you should and you should hire me to teach you how to solve complexity with simplicity!), AI (a crazy notion only researchers use, and I'm not a qualified researcher, but you should hire me just because you value solutions over credentials!), library technology and science (a dying cluster of concepts, but you should hire me to get you up to speed and make you thrive and survive!), epistemology (don't even know where to begin with this one, but you should hire me because I'm telling you!), and training / speaking / coaching on a mixture of the above (been on the conference speaking circle a bit, and held tons of training sessions and seminars). I guess more conventional stuff I can do out of the box is complex PHP (lots of that the last few years) and front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, JS/JQuery, the usual suspects) and middle-tier stuff (JSP, JSF, XSLT, a bit of Ruby, a pinch of Python, Perl if I'm crazy, ASP / .Net to some degree) ... heck, I used to be a proficient C developer in my early days, and there's really no language I can't meddle in. Oh, I know; I'm big on architecture with SOA concepts and REST technologies, although I'm not one of those who think the UDDI is great and promote ESB or any somesuch bundle of WS-* wherever I go, even though I can do that, sure (but I'd recomend a RESTful approach for a simpler and richer infra-structure). I've created CMSes of various kinds, frameworks (event-driven, load-balancing, etc.) and APIs, query engines, Topic Maps engines and KM platforms all from scratch, so it feels a bit silly to explain what I can and can't do. There's probably nothing I can't do as such.

My strong side is being creative, though, to see possibilities, opportunities and plan for that in mind. I'm one of those who embrace somewhat agile methods without being an agile-head (coaching is, in fact, a satisfying way of getting things done), and have a special interest and knack for project management. If you need a project manager with a coaching style in areas of knowledge management and using Topic Maps, well, you know who to call. :)

Anyway, in the off-chance that you think I'm the guy to help you out, you can reach me all the time at alexander.johannesen@gmail.com. And if you've got pointers, point me there, or point your pointers here. It's a tricky situation when it happens this abruptly, but I took a risk going into this project, so I knew this was an option. Let's just hope it pans out alright. And thanks for any help you can provide in this crazy time. :)

What I did last weekend ...

2010-05-21T17:18:00.000+10:00

I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but work and, uh, work got in the way. However, as a band-aid for low blogging I bring you a special edition of "What I did last weekend!"

The week before (Tuesday? Wednesday?) I was out on my lunch-time walk to get much needed coffee (a poor substitute for Masala and / or proper Chai tea), when I was coming back up the hill I noticed something interesting in front of me ;

On a trailer of a big four-wheel off-road monster of a car, a big white boat similar to the modern fishing vessels around down by the harbor was attached, except it was all white with a big blue logo on its side which read "Australian Museum."

I was intrigued, and I wondered to myself if they were lost or something, accidentally taking a wrong turn to somewhere exciting and had to turn down our street to get directions or something. I had stopped, and while pondering these things, a lady came out of the rental house it was parked in front of, and we started some idle chatter about why this boat (with all its magical capabilities) were here of all places.

Well, it turned out that the Australian Museum once a year goes out on a collecting excursion to collect samples for both the collection and for scientists as well. I showed some vague interest in the matter (I think I fell to my knees, pleading for insight, frothing at the mouth), and was invited in to have a look at their setup. I got up, and skipped into the house like a little girl, giggling and grinning all the way.

I looked at their photo setup, talked some technical stuff, and then moved downstairs to their lab setup. They were a bunch of people (6 in total, I think) of about my age and up, and I had a quick glance and a lovely but quick chat with them as I mentioned that I'd love to show my kids, and we were all invited back on the weekend.

That's what I did last weekend; I took Lilje and Grace down to their lab, and we got stuck talking to the most wonderful bunch of scientists for about 2 hours. They showed us their findings, specimens, the worms and other invertebrates, plants, shrimps, urchins, you name it, all sorts of little critters who mostly got put in formalhydrane for an all expenses paid trip to provide us with knowledge.

The kids loved it, and I loved it, and I wish to thank the team and the museum for brightening our day and for shining light into dark corners.

Of models, frameworks and the paradigm shifts we don't see

2010-05-06T14:42:00.000+10:00

I need desperately to talk about models. I hunger for them, I need them, I love them! They are pretty, of course, arousing us and making us do silly things like buy stuff we don't need, or fooling us into buying something we think we need but we later find out that we're a bit stupid, we were mislead by the models winks and beautiful attire. However, they are often more than just skin deep, more than just the abstract notion of our perversion to objectify everything we see. Confused yet? These models are not found on the cover of glossy magazines.

These models are everywhere. They are how the brain takes a group of concepts - be it physical objects or knowledge nuggets in our head - and plonk them all into a grouping of sorts, and draw lines of meaning between the new group and the old it knows about. Together they form anything from thoughts to language to the reasoning used when voting. Between person A and political issue B we draw a relation type "opinion" with opinion C. A few fuzzy million of these, and we can pin you down pretty well.

Where do models live in our various systems? Well, they live in language, for the most part. And this is not some cryptic ballyhoo I'm inventing here, so I'll demonstrate with the humble book. Let's look at a description of a book in the foreign and mysterious language called Eksemelle ;

The book

<book>
   <title>Some title</title>
   <author>Clemens, Samuel</author>
   <pompador>In a nutshell</pompador>
</book>

"book", "title", "author" and "pompador" mean something to someone. To most people who understand the English word "book", it means those rectangular objects made of dead-trees that's got some kind of letters and / or pictures in them. They are, as we say, semantic in that they have meaning to those who knows what those words mean. Here's the word "book", and it has a definition of sorts; that is explicit semantics. But then there's the implicit semantics of what those words mean in terms of this being an XML snippet, maybe from a specific bibliographic format, maybe with an even more specific XML schema (unless the XML schema is made explicit through something like a DOCTYPE). And finally there's the tacit semantics in the space between the model, the framework, and the people who work with it. Let's explore these shark-infested semantic parts.

How are they semantic? In what way are they meaningful, and to whom? Well, let's start with who. No model is really valuable unto itself; there's always some external framework that understands (and appreciates?) the model, some "thing" that looks at and interacts with that model in order to make it useful. Indeed, a models usefulness is often measured by how the semantics of various models match up. For example, the usefulness of the MARC model can be measured in terms by how well it matches the model librarians work with and need. Needless to say, the usefulness of the MARC model can also be measured how useful it is for a bricklayer, but more on this later.

So in what way are they meaningful? Every time we talk about models, we are really talking about a translation that's going on between models. The model of the words in this blog post is translated first from my brain and into the model used by my blogging software that uses some models of the Internet and computers and complex electronic networks and systems, and then translated to the model of your brain. We take a piece of semantics, and we try to make the transition from my brain to yours - through a multitude of other models - as smooth as possible. Have I succeeded so far? Does our models match up a little, much or not at all?

Things are meaningful when the models match up, when there is little or no difference between them to make understanding the thing in one model hard to understand in another. An example of a semantic mismatch in models are indeed the semantics of the 245$a field for a bricklayer looking for his bricks.

Constraints on entities

In the past I've talked about how models are constraints on entities, and this still holds true, but it needs a bit of clarification to make sense. First, what are entities?

Well, entities is one of those words that we can make to mean pretty much anything we like, but let's take a simple view of entities being "things you can talk about", similar (or exactly the same) as subjects in Topic Maps, "concept" in philosophy, or, to the layman, "things." Anything you can think of. Any subject, fictional or real, physical or surreal; a boat, a thought about the Moon, the idea of North, the concept of the number 1, the Eiffel Tower, MARC, a MARC record, an XML representation of that record, the book the MARC record represents, a physical book, the relationship between the book and the abstract notion of a book that the MARC record represents ... oh, the possibilities are - truer than anything! - endless.

Between the entities, in the cracks of our language and our understanding, flow their relationships. They are part of our model, those notions that give our entities a meaning of sorts, what makes the semantic;

   "This book" was written by "this author"

Look at what we found in the cracks; "was written by." Isn't it grand? This trifecta is known in the Semantic Web world as a triplet, basically a tuple with a subject - predicate - object structure. Make enough triplet statements about a thing, and it grows in semantics. Let's look at our book ;

   "This book" is our subject
   "was written by" is our predicate
   "this author" is the object

Let's make another triplet statement ;

"This book" is still our subject

"was published by" is a new predicate

"this publisher" is another object

We now have a model a bit like this ;

"This book"

- "was written by" : "this author"

- "was published by" : "this publisher"

We got a subject (or an entity) that we're attaching predicates and objects to, in many ways similar to how we might add named key/value pairs of properties to an object, or create a lookup-table with column indexes between two tables in a relational database, or set named properties on a Java Bean, or even scribble two statements about a book in its margin. We're attaching some semantics to something.

When we attach meaning to something, we are constraining its possibilities that those properties might be something else. We are saying that the title of the book is X, and by saying it is X we can infer that it isn't millions and millions of other titles that it could have been. Before we put that title to the book it really had only two options;

Either the book had no title, or it could be any title we could imagine. But by labeling the book with a specific title, we're constraining both of these options, changing them dramatically from the endless possibilities we had to one specific option. We constrained the book by giving it meaning. And the more meaning we give it, the less abstract it becomes, the more constrained it becomes.

Reflections in the mirror

The models we have in our heads rarely perfectly match the model we're interacting with. The model in my wife's head is not matched well with my own model in many ways, like shopping, views on the value of shoes, the model of interacting with people (she's the one with a model closer matched to the generic likable model shared by most social and nice people) and the concept of geekery (of which she has none). And she is a person that's quite well matched in general. It only gets worse from here.

Now imagine the semantic distance between me and a computer system I've designed. I can work with it. I understand it. I can get my job done. However, I show my perfect model to a customer, and they immediately start picking it apart, pointing out how my model doesn't match their (or their individual) model. How could I have been so blind?

Here's a little secret to why usability and user-centered design works; you test your model against most other people's model in order to get to some model that you all can reasonably match with. When you don't test your model against the users models, they are bound to suck.

Models are reflections of how we humans see our world. The MARC standard most certainly reflect how the librarians saw the world, how it matched their needs and wants. My programs are often a reflection of how I see things. Your browser is a reflection of its developers model of how your browsing should be. This blog post is a reflection of me. Your computer a reflection of some manufacturer. The operating system a reflection of yet more developers views.

Sure, we try to create standards that either try to reflect some common model of things, or at least a common language in which to describe this view. However, it is terribly difficult to come to models that match well across so many thousands and millions of possible models. I'm tempted to almost say we need some constraints of commonalities on our models in order to create semantics to better understand our various models, to better agree and share them.

Where models sleep at night

Where do we find the actual models when we peer into the computer systems we use? Somewhere, surely, is that model in which we try to model to our own model rests, somewhere in there amongst the code and the interface we can point to it and say, "There!"

Mostly we can't, however there is one place where you'll find a lot, one place so holy in computer science that people dedicate whole careers to dealing with its innards; the relational database.

I need to speak about the relational database a bit because, well, so much of most computer systems out there a) have one, and b) store much of their model in there. Yes, there's alternatives, and more and more technology pop up that tries to do different, but let's be realistic about what 99% of most computer systems use, those RDBM systems. Let's have a look at a small corner of one ;

What we see is tables; columns of fields, rows of entries. These form the entities of these models. The example given even uses a tricky third table to function as a lookup-table between two tables of entity data (I won't go into too much technical details here). To get data in and out of these tables, we use a query language like SQL to say things like this simple example, "get all fields (with their rows of data) from tables A and B, where table A has a field 'book_id' that matches its value with a field 'id' in table B, sort it by the field 'title' of table A in descending order, and give me the first 40 results."

One SQL statement that matches for that is a semi-cryptic "SELECT * FROM TableA,TableB WHERE TableA.book_id = TableB.id ORDER BY TableA.title DESC LIMIT 40", or some other variety (there's tons of different ways of saying the same, with or without JOINs, sets and filters).

Let's look for our model. First of all, it's the titles of the tables, the titles of each column in them, and lastly the contents of the rows. Notice here that this is three levels of semantics nested within each query, and you need to know all of them to make reasonable statements. But what else is in our model? Well, it's those pesky relationships between things, the constraints on our entities to make the meaningful, and they exist in the query itself, in your application. Think about that for a second, think about where these things go ;

The table, columns and rows go in the database system. The querying goes in your application. The user interface (which we haven't even dug far into but is a wormhole of complexity in its own right) that interacts with you also sits in the middle, in the application. So there's a model in your database, and you reconstruct that model in your application (otherwise, how could you query the database if you don't know what it looks like?) and yet do further things that are not embedded in the database (and so, you've got a super model ... fun with pun!), translate further between your users and the user interface, translate back into the application which translates back into the database ... ah, what fun spaghetti games that makes.

Surely RDBMS and SQL is better than other alternatives? Well, it was for many years, and it was a way to solve the problem of doing things in far worse way, for sure. But we were also under the constraints of computing power in which we couldn't just do the right thing and still get a computer that gave you answers in time for Christmas. It was a compromise between the need for any answer to all your data, and that of a practical lots of answers to most of your data.

But this analogy can be taken further, especially into the world of MARC and the libraries. MARC itself was also designed with lots of peculiar constraints, funny rules and structuring, and then with the added AACR2 (and earlier friends) rules for manual data integrity, it surely reflected the best of breed at the time, reflected what they wanted and it was something that matched their onset. So we got the model of MARC (I've called it the culture of MARC in the past, but a model suits just as well) in MARC itself, in the rules we add to it, to our ILS, to our OPAC, our catalog, our acquisition, our collection management, everything. And then the model of MARC is everywhere, it even starts to dictate our human processes.

Time flies

But then time flies, and the world changes, sometimes unexpectedly and the harsher if it is. Just like there's a lot of push for alternatives to RDBMS these days because today and tomorrow is somewhat different from yesterday, the same with a push in the library world to go from MARC / AACR2 to something more like FRBR / RDA.

However.

When you create a model of the future you need to make sure it is future proof. You have to make sure that not only does the model match what you need right now, that it reflects the funky stuff you wanna do today, but it must be able to deal with the future. If it doesn't, well then you are going to have to go through the pains of changing the model sooner rather than later.

Here's a few thoughts on that process in the library perspective. FRBR was designed 15 years ago, when the world was sloooowly waking up the the new fresh brew of the Internet and technology. Take a good look at what the world was like back then, especially paying attention to the fact that books were still the main container for knowledge and information, mobile phones did nothing more than make calls, Internet devices were practically unheard of, no eBooks, no iPads, no eEducation, no eGovernment ... for Fraggs sake, the evil monster of Netscape was still alive and doing harm! I remember still writing Netscape specific code to deal with its quirks. This was a time before we all stopped hating the dying Netscape and focused on the evils of Internet Explorer instead. can you even remember back to that time and think that the world might be in your back pocket or pack in the shape of an eReader or iPhone, or that Amazon (in its infancy) would have a full-blown infrastructure including their own eReader with tons of titles a click away? Or perhaps even more profoundly, that WikiPedia would lead the way to the disjointed revolution of knowledge and information? That we would be twittering? That all higher educational institutions would move towards ePresses? That paper journals would turn to online journals? That the pricing models of online content would change? That the price of admission would change? That even the model of content negotiation would be different? That blogs would dominate the future of discourse, even the serious academic ones? That newspapers would ever fail?

Time flies. And models change. Some models are better at dealing with change, some are better at being future proof, but change they will. And when the models change, you must either change your own models, update your models, or use outdated models. FRBR and RDA are outdated models before they're even implemented. Please reconsider.

Model models

The last ten years or so there's been a stronger push towards meta models. That basically means "simple models in which you can create other models." One might wonder what such a crazy thing would do to help, but let me first exemplify through what I've seen again and again over the years I've worked as a consultant ;

The smallest changes to any complex system, where databases, tables, columns and rows must change, you've also got thousands of lines of query / SQL that also needs to change, every model along the way, from the hardwired entities of the database to the user interface controls must all be updated to this new way of looking at the world. It could even be the smallest of things, say, changing the name of a field in a table from "id" to "book_id" (some times even stupid things like this is needed because the people who create the original model [called schema] didn't worry about multi-join SQL statements that would have a hard time dealing with the ambiguity of the many varieties of "id" fields, or didn't have the foresight to think that more than one thing in your table could be rightly called 'id' ...) could cost in the millions. I know it sounds terribly stupid, probably even terribly untrue, but I swear on the grave of all those programmers who laid down their lives in pursuit of SQL ambiguity and integration and middle-tier testing, that it is a very sad truth.

The library is facing similar insurmountable trouble by switching to anything but MARC, and I suspect the cost analysis is in the multi-millions wherever you look. People are starting to ask if the change will be worth it (and with the criticism laid out about FRBR you might want to have a closer look before you leap), is there another way?

Well, sure, kinda. There's meta models, models that are somewhat ready but needs your lovely input and tweaking to get perfect. They are generally easier to deal with because, unlike models, they are designed to be a bit vague and, well, meta about it all. And yes, indeed; Topic Maps is such a technology. The model in topic Maps is simple ;

a subject is anything you can ever think of, anything you want to talk about, anything in the "real" world, like books and people and cars and thoughts and ideas and ... well, anything.
A subject is represented in a computer system by a Topic
Topics have multiple Names, can be of multiple Types, have multiple Identites and multiple Occurrences
Associations of different types tie them all together with roles

If you can wrap your head around such a concept, it's easy to build whatever you need with it, and here's the advantage ;

A standardized data model and a standardized reference model
A standardized XML format for exchange, import and export
A standardized query language and a standardized constraint language

It doesn't matter one bit what data you put into it; all of the above still applies. You can make model-agnostic queries into your data. You can mix whatever data you feel like; nothing can't be put into it. You determine yourself what level of indirection you want on your data. And you can have serious identity management to boot! Did I mention author records done right? Chuck a thesaurii or faceted navigation systems right in the model! Make software modules understand certain languages rather than the combination of languages and data, and share these! Want to see what your data merged with any other data might look like? It's right there in the standard, it comes out of the box. Play with your data, and invent new ways of interacting with it without dicking around for weeks with databases, filtering and merging. And on and on it goes.

But why do this? Well, since the model exist in a domain which is specially designed to handle the disjointed nature of your models and data, they are free to shape whatever solution you might think of (meaning, you can change the interface without changing the model nor the application logic) where you in the past were stuck with the original model design. You can copy and paste your little models and languages around. Try out new things. Merge stuff with ease. And, not the least, focus on application specifics without worrying about model integrity. Nor do you have to worry about user interface integrity, either. How to put it in a way that you could understand? It's like taking a bucket of apples and a bucket of bananas, which in the past would when mixed together make a sticky slushy fruity goo that no one really likes, would now be genetically merged to make the banapple that can still be split apart into its raw apple and banana parts if you felt like it.

Yes, I've whinged and raved about this in the library world (and other places) for years and years, but getting people up to speed on understanding models, their implications and how meta models might be a better bet, then demonstrate and convince everyone (including people with no technical background), all while standing in an elevator with some people who's off to tinker with some RDA or MARC or something. It's hard to get their attention when they don't actually see the problem.

But I'm not pushing Topic Maps, really. Well, a little, but more specifically I'm pushing meta models, and I'm pushing for better ways of dealing with your computer infra structure, to take a few good steps out of the litter sandbox that permutes the current library systems infra structural designs, and get jiggy with the future before it gets overrun by the cool kids with iPhones and iPads and whatsnot's that also, you know, have a model or two. Models that may or may not be compatible with whatever model you come up with next. If you do. Seriously, I thought librarians loved meta?

Linux Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade, ATI MobileRadeon 3650 woes

2010-05-04T14:29:00.001+10:00

(Note: If you're after my ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga, scroll further down)

As mentioned in my more eclectic piece of yesterday, I stuffed up my computer over the weekend, and now I'm here to tell you all about it as well as tell you about the latest Ubuntu release.

I upgraded through the update manager as I've always done. I know a lot of people prefer to take backup, clean the machine, install a fresh Ubuntu version, and then copy back the personal stuff, install the stuff that went missing, as a means of a more secure and painless way. I sneer at such disdain for life and adventure!

I've never had trouble with just clicking the update button that extends beyond what minor snafus you might expect, like drivers to old stuff not working perfect with new stuff, but that's in the nature of going from old to new systems, and doesn't say anything bad on the upgrade process as such. For me, it worked pretty good.

But let's go through snags, one serious annoyance, an irritated state of affairs, and a few tips in dealing with your ATI Radeon issues ;

Snags

I had mostly no trouble at all, really, except after the install the following snags are noted ;

The brightness control no longer controls the brightness (and I now must use my special function keys to adjust it). No biggie, just annoying.
My Vodafone 3G mobile network adapter software got uninstalled. Why? It was an independent third-party program. Puzzle.
The applets (minimize and desktop switcher) on my bottom panel (Gnome) has crashed a couple of times. Odd.
The system seems slower, but I need to investigate a bit further before pointing fingers.

Serious annoyance

Before we get to the good parts, I need to point out this one thing that just stands out as the dumbest thing with this release, and it is just so stupid that no amount of trying to back-pedal out of it with the lamest excuses ever is good enough;

They switched the minimize, maximize and close window icons from the right side (like the rest of the world does it) to the left (like what retarded systems used to do in the 80's and 90's)! Luckily there's a couple of easy fixes, but none which are embedded in the system to make it easy. Friggin' idiots, what were they thinking? I could write a whole book on just how stupid this was, but suffice to say, my over 10 years of UX and GUI design experience - and my personal experience in using these here new (but terribly old) ideas - screams how much it sucks big time! Icons of window control now sit on top of menus that you use all the time, and the cognitive distance between doing what you want and what will piss you off has now been reduced to a swearword's distance on a regular basis. I seriously hope this is not a hint of things to come, or I'll jump ship. I can deal with the odd snafu, but I don't want to deal with continued stupidity.

Irritating state of affairs

I have a Toshiba Satellite P300 (05Y01Y, which now is discontinued ... a true mark of comfort for me) that came with pre-installed Windows Vista which I killed by accident, and I popped Ubuntu 8.10 on there and have been reasonably happy with all this time. However, all this time there's a few things that still is terribly annoying, although I know this is the fault of vendors and not Linux (so I live with these blemishes rather than whinge about them). Over the updates things have improved (like Skype and Choqok), but there's still more hardware related issues that should have easy fixes ;

BlueTooth does not work, and probably never will. Toshiba sucks when it comes to supporting Linux, and their BlueTooth stack obviously is not supported here, nor are the default Linux stacks compatible with whatever my machine's got. However, I'm not in need of BlueTooth so I haven't spent the appropriate crazy time needed for proper investigation.
There's an insanely annoying delay (between 0.5 to 2 seconds long!) whenever a window is minimized or maximized (which also means when the application starts up, hides, reappears or closes down, you know, the sort of stuff you do all freakin' time) when I've got graphics acceleration switched on. This is apparently a bug, and it's been around and come back in various forms. There's a few suggested fixes, but mostly it just doesn't seem to want to go away. This one is seriously bad, and it amazes me that something like this could still be hanging around in an otherwise polished distribution like Ubuntu. There might be a link to the ATI drivers below as well, but the sad part is that to temporary no go insane over this, I sadly have to switch graphics acceleration off.
Update! It seems that after trying the suggested fixes for enabling 2D that didn't at first do anything, now all of a sudden the problem disappeared! Oh, joy! Come to think of it, I did do a reboot not that long ago, and re-installed the desktop switcher applet. Maybe there were some correlation between the switcher and the graphics driver? Who knows. I'm happily running Compiz and Emerald (although the latter is only an experiment I suspect will be uninstalled).
The two internal microphones on the machine has never worked, probably never will again due to Toshibas poor Linux support. Crikey, can't they just hire one or two Linux guys to at least tweak existing software with configuration options that might be compatible with some of their more popular models? I could spend a weekend to do this myself, but I've got an USB DSP that does these things which works just fantastic, so again I won't spend the time chasing it.
My external Logitech Optical Radio mouse does not work properly. It works in the sense that the accelerator insist that my whole world is either top-left or bottom-right, and there's no easy ways in Ubuntu to modify crazy acceleration, so I've just given up on it and use it on my Windows machine.
The internal ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga; this one gets its own section below.

Generics

To me, this upgrade was a bit meh. Nothing stands out as impressive, just small fixes here and there. There's the new menu's at the top so many people rave about, but I don't like nor use them, so meh. The new colors are, well, meh. I didn't mind brown. Not sure I mind purple. Meh. I like that more icons are getting the same style and form, but no biggie. The Software Center has been prettied up a bit, but still lacks what's really important, like testimonials, ratings, awards, versioning, people's comments, recomendations, field groupings, and so on. Meh. I'm sure there's more stuff around, and I'll find them eventually. The only real thing that stands out is that some old problems still aren't fixed, and my system is less responsive. Oh, and they switched from Sun to the OpenJDK Java which threw me off for a few minutes as well. Meh.

My Mobile Radeon 3650 woes

The ATI / AMD chipset has a shaky support history under Linux, but the good news is that there is some degree of support. And indeed, my screen right now is utilizing both OpenGL and higher screens and lots of colors, so all should be well. But it is not, at least not "all" well.

It's not that my latest upgrade killed my graphics setup. No, in fact after upgrade things worked quite well, except I had four ATI Control Center Catalyst icons under System -> Preferences, so I was trying to fix that, and see if there was a fix for the annoying "minimize,maximize delay" bug mentioned further up. But all of a sudden I must have fiddled with the wrong setting (actually, I was uninstalling some unrelated package that wasn't so unrelated after all).

Here's my receipt for fixing a seriously broken and mangled FGLRX install ;

Purge your filthy system of sin ;

sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* 
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati 
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-radeon

If you get an error like so ;
   dpkg-divert: mismatch on package
   when removing `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by fglrx'
   found `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by xorg-driver-fglrx'
Go to this page over here for general instructions on fixing diversions.
Go to System -> Admin -> Hardware drivers, and wait for it to collect its thoughts.
Click on "Install" or "Activate" near the bottom, and wait for it to do its magic.
Reboot.

That worked for me; your mileage will vary. Downloading the (massive; 96Mb!!) driver from ATI's homepage, purging and running the downloaded installer did nothing for me. The whole ATI graphics driver brahooha is amazingly bad and should get some cleaning up. Even the Control Center that ATI delivers looks amateurish, and it seems their software lacks any good cleaning up strategies. Or even nice GUI ways of setting up important settings (!!).

The next time I'm buying a computer for my Linux Ubuntu adventures, I'll do some pretty hefty research first to make sure I avoid at least some of the biggest pitfalls. Bloody stupid vendors. Meh.

I turned 30 and my warranty expired

2010-05-03T17:16:00.000+10:00

Todays post is different. It is not about any of the usual subjects I relay here, but about growing old, growing up, growing wary and fearing not only the future of me and my family, but growing wary of humans out of touch with reality, the political rot of the societies we create, and what power and resources together can do to harm our statistics and the people within them. And I want to give Love a brief mention, too.

(I also post this somewhat different topic because my work computer is a bit temperamental after I performed a Ubuntu upgrade, so I'm on our other computer today)

"I turned 30 and my warranty expired"

I'm actually quite a bit older than that, but not quite yet 40, but the sentiment still stands out as a sore thumb. My brain, as it matured and gained a platform of consistency, so did other parts of my body mature to their natural consequences. Slowly I'm feeling age creep up on me, a dodgy knee, faltering memory, eyes and neck trouble, difficulties sleeping.

We all know the physical constraints of growing older. But I notice more and more the inner-space effects. And no, I'm not getting old and bitter as the old stereotype will have it. No, I'm turning sad and lonely.

Such a statement, for me, have so many levels it is a bit hard to know where to begin, but let's begin with the simple and obvious ones. I am Norwegian, my wife is Australian. Where do we live? If either of us came from some country that is statistically worse off than the other, the choice would be easier. If I came from the slums somewhere in Nigeria and she from, say, England or Germany, that's not a choice; it would be a better life for us in Europe, for our children, no question. Even if we have to abandon family in Nigeria, everybody would understand to some extent. Opportunities and security for a raising family beats out war and poverty every time. But Norway and Australia?

Both countries are rated as some of the absolute best countries in the world to live in. And by that alone there are proponents for each family on both sides that can't understand the struggle to actually choose one side. We've so far lived twice in each country as a family with small children, and there's pro's and con's to each side in all aspects of our lives. It's painful to have to make a choice.

Less obvious

Since we are a family, we are a tightly knit group of people who love each other. We stand by each other, support each other, and generally try to make the best of our situations, however they come at us. And we are the best of friends.

But I used to have other friends as well, include a few best friends to whom I was very close. We currently live in (and I suspect for the immediate to intermediate time) Australia. When I moved here all my friends and family were left behind. We moved to a new area. Australians are hard to befriend in any meaningful way. So I quite often feel alone, outside of the family space. All my interests and passions, especially those I do not share with my wife, are hard to deal with ; my strong passion for baroque music. My deep love of science. Love of food. Bibliophelia and meta data. Geekery. Internet life. Knowledge management. Philosophy (ethics and otherwise). Inventions! Engineering!

Of course we make up for that in the things we do share, and this is still quite a lot to keep me sane and reasonably happy, and it helps to share these passions with her and the kids (to the level they understand). But I could use a smidgen of intellectual interest in these ignorant marshes we live.

Even less obvious

World events affect me. Some affect me because they are world events, but the ones affecting the most are the world events that other people around me don't know or care about. Living in an intellectual desert makes you conservative about the academic nurture you seek out. I feel somewhat ashamed in normal talks with people to reveal any hint of knowing stuff, even stuff that's not really all that controversy or hard or uncommon.

What to do when you're aching to tell the world the wonders of the universe, and no one around your really cares to listen? You start making silly plans ;

Making a documentary about beach ecology and geology. I've got fact checking and research done, but I'm waiting to buy a HD camera (that can also do underwater shots) for my birthday. I'm going to channel my inner deGrasse Tyson.
Plan to teach your children about the speed of light; an applicable model of air and space travel, and gee, what's the point of all of that? And see the whole "Cosmos" series by St. Sagan.
Plan to travel to the middle of the desert, looking for minerals, metals and / or interesting biology

But they are somewhat silly plans. They might happen, but the odds are against me, mostly due to work and family attire. It's not that I don't want to do these things, heavens know I do, but time is limited, and well, I need to make better priorities.

Where should we live? Where is the best place for our family to live? Should we choose easy life, rich life, busy life, interesting life? Should we sacrifice our complacent sheltered lives for richer experiences in doing good in other countries? Should we apply our collective strengths to make somewhere else who do care about bigger issues a better place for all who live there? Should we risk the personal safety of the now for a idealistic future of others?

Not obvious at all

I feel a disconnection between myself and the society we live in. I am not satisfied in having a safe life in a protected environment with the latency of science penetration lower than what's livable. There are so many topics to discuss, so many issues to sort out.

Politics suck. And I used to be a politician, so I know quite well how rotten the discourse of democracy can get when agendas are played at different levels of the game. Don't get me wrong; I love democracy - the process. I just hate the people who usually enter into it. And I hate the way the cult of personalities distorts, disrupts and corrupts the ideals laid out. And most of all, I hate how people in general have no friggin' clue about the implications of epistemology in politics, how their own ignorance of science and facts is having an adverse affect on societal progression.

Yes, I like progressive thoughts and actions, not for the sake of just progression, but for the ideal of not falling into staleness and for always question the status quo; what can we do better? Even the best of things can be improved. I'm no fan of "if it works, don't fix it!"

Adequate.

That's a word I hate to the fullness of my person. I don't have a problem with being cautious, but there's a thin line between cautious and conservative, one which I see society fail all too often. Most often it's done in a way to appease popular opinion. But popular opinion is, by its very definition, only popular and only an opinion. Why are we chasing this rather than necessary facts?

Back to less obvious

Politics in general is an attempt by the populous to reach an agreeable direction of channeled progression, but I've always held that for this to work you need to populous to also care about, study, and be able to argue with logic about the issues at hand, without falling into the pit of bias and the fear of change.

Change is the key to the universe and all that is within it; all things change, over various kinds of time scales. Rock and metal change over longer time of millions of years than one-celled animals and viruses that have time scales of hours or even minutes, and then there's everything in between. The scale in which you view the universe is a fascinating exercise in trying to understand the world around you, and by carefully understanding the context of those scales you can get a pretty amazing overview of the scope and direction of huge topics like life, evolution, geology and cosmology, and perhaps get a better understanding of your place in the cosmos.

Back to obvious

My place in the cosmos is that of insignificance. Well, I know the physical outlook, but as a human sentient being who would like the world to be my oyster, I can not only understand my insignificance but appreciate it, love it, live it. There's great power in knowing you are invisible; it allows you to see clearer that which you love.

My family comes first; they are my pillar, the platform on which I base my life, so much is clear. And as a unit it doesn't matter what the cosmos throw our way as our strength and love is in that unit. It's a self-sufficient ecosystem of family ebb and flow. Politics flow over, through and around us. People do the same. Society is the sand on our beach, tumbling around, always shifting and changing.

There's nothing so important as to embrace change. And in this light I view the progressive nature of the human endeavor; humans fighting change every chance they get. Poverty and despair is as much a result of this as is the unbalanced resource management, the political systems and the populous scientific interest and literacy.

And that is they key to my disjointedness from society, as well as the thing that keeps me going; my family. No matter where we are, no matter what friends we accumulate, we are together.

And even if it is obvious, it's not really that obvious.

Moved the blog

2010-04-30T19:39:00.000+10:00

Well, Blogger has just discontinued publishing blogs as FTP upload, so I was looking at moving my blog to my own server with a WordPress install, but laziness and problematic import filters has made me just move it to blogspot. There shouldn't be any differences, and my shelter.nu domain should forward all traffic here. Hopefully my feeds will follow through as well. Maybe I'll do the full convert in the future.

Oh, and P.S; sorry for low blogging. Gotta finish something for work first before I leap into song about all my usual silly topics.

Another bob

2010-04-27T20:46:00.000+10:00

Busy, busy, so another miscellaneous post, but have a post planned for Thursday about abstract vs. concrete models, library science and Topic Maps which should be interesting. Until then ;

Science

Oil Slick satellite image : A satellite image of the oil slick that has been spreading after the oil-rig disaster last week.

The improbability pump : A great review of two books at the same time by Jerry Coyne (professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and author of the book and favorite blog "Why evolution is true") pointing out the absurdities of two opposing poles of science ; Richard Dawkins "Greatest Show on Earth" which I've reviewed before, and Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's "What Darwin got wrong" (this last book has taken a severe beating amongst people in the field, and this review is no exception).

Against nature : A damn good takedown on women's issues, of what it means to be for or against nature, for what it means to be for or against female choices in an absurdly male focused world.

Technology

Maiana : Public Topic Maps voyeurism. Sexy and tasty.

Australia pushes net censorship in Washington : I live in a strange country that thinks that censorship in any way or form is something that can be democratically defended. Needless to say, most Australians who care about this issue are not amused.

My next toy : I swear, once time and money and life and the will to go on returns, I'll get this little puppy and stream all my digital media goodness through it. Although. Hmm. No video support. If this thing only had video support! Can you hear me, Western Digital?!

Philosophy and art

A.C. Grayling responds : Grayling is a British philosopher that I truly admire, both for his knowledge and engagement with society, but I also love his humour and low-key observations. Here he responds to Gray, his arch-nemesis of sorts, who did a review of Graylings latest book. If all rebuttals were this grand.

A Designer Universe? : Veering off onto the curb with this scientific view of the cosmological argument, by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin. "Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about?" Brilliant.

Godessey : Artist Lynne Naylor new exhibition looks stunning.

Another tidbits

2010-04-22T18:05:00.001+10:00

Dang, I'm so busy with work I don't have time to post much here these days, even though I feel another library lament coming on. Perhaps it's best for all I don't. Maybe I should do something that's at least related to work; that way I can vaguely justify it. :)

Anyhow, here we go ;

Semantic technologies

Linked Data : "recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF." : We'll start here for what the RDF crowd is toting as their best options these days. I'm not impressed, but then I'm not very keen on open-world assumptions as they don't address specific needs. Yeah, me being silly, I know.

"CTM 1.0 : A tutorial" : What it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what an isa and ako relationship is, this might give you a clue.

Pedantic Web : "Welcome to the Pedantic Web Group" A cute attempt to basically ask people to clean up their sloppy messes. It's not going to fly, but I support the sentiment.

Sam Ruby points to "Open Graph Protocol" which looks interesting, and probably something I should get involved in with my Topic Maps stuff. Possibly a combination of my embeddable PHP Topic Maps engine and this would make for a fine plugin to various packages. Hmm.

Topincs : Speaking of Topic Maps, this video looks very, very good. Robert Cerny is churning out the cherry chutney for sure.

Other technology related bobs

Aaaaaargh! Panasonic has released two items of pure lust too close together, and I don't know what to do! Lumix DMC-G10 and it's HD video toting compact friend, DMC-ZS7.

OzIA 2010 conference CFP : I attended, presented at and did the website and design for the very first OzIA back in 2006, and it was a blast. I'm suspecting it's still a blast.

DIY Steady Cam : A contraption I want to make for a project I've got planned.

Generic science

Keep freeloaders happy with rotting corpses : Another tale of some of the poisonous critters in my garden, and this time we're dealing with a Hannibal Lecter. Goody.

OCW search : "Find free university courses online" Brilliant! Ever wanted to find online course materials, either because you're doing those classes, or, like me, you're a freeloader of all the sciency goodness?

SurfScience : Brilliant blog I found mixing the life of the beach with the life of the geek.

Canberra, eh?

2010-04-14T17:00:00.000+10:00

So, due to cosmic circumstances, I find myself in Canberra until mid-day Friday. The quick yet big question jumps out;

Do I still have friends here? Friends who'd like to meetup for a cup of coffee, or a chat by the lake? Email me at alexander.johannesen@gmail.com or mob me at 044 9525 011.

Philosophical and religious matters

2010-04-10T20:47:00.001+10:00

Some might have noticed that I often diverge into very diverse topics on this blog, but lately I've made a decision; I'm falling apart and splitting it in two!

This blog, my main blog for over 10 years now (a crazy notion all by itself!) will stay pretty much as is in terms of technology (Topic Maps, REST, SOA, clustered and distributed systems, databases, software development, and so on) and its various adventures (mine or otherwise), but also keep the personal elements and especially all things library, and perhaps the odd science post as well.

The new blog - the Sheltered Objections - will focus on philosophy and religion, and will be mainly for talking about and critiquing related such topics. I felt the time was ripe to make that distinction a bit more clear, both as I have something to say in that arena (I've been a closet philosopher all my life, much to my friends chagrin) but also because I want to let people have a choice between two mostly separated worlds.

So, if you wanna follow me on adventures of the mind and of human definition, go there and subscribe. It'll be fun, I promise.

Do libraries understand the future? Or how to get there?

2010-04-09T16:56:00.000+10:00

I can be quite harsh when stating my opinions, and I often feel I get on people's toes a lot through doing so. But it's not my fault; I blame my Norwegian upbringing where we tend to state things as they are, and then we discuss things until the cows come home, but we do it with complete respect of the other side. You might say polite bickering and being tempered yet pigheaded about things is a national favorite past-time, and then some of us went on to the pigheaded Olympics and cleaned the tables and set the whole thing on fire. And then we debated with the smoldering rubble some more.

My past is littered with opinion pieces on all things library, from the culture, its place in society, its technology and direction, and I've written both here on this blog and on various mailing-lists, as well as hold presentation live in various forums and conferences. I'm a prolific library-bitcher, you might say, as most of what I say ain't necessarily wonderful praise and kissing the boots of those who make library decisions.

However.

Today I won't bitch, though. It still may not be safe for work, but I won't say how stupid the library world has been in missing opportunities, how they've misplayed the technology ball, how they've been blind to keeping up societal appearances, how they've lost their political clout, the lack of philosophical standing or progress, how current management streams are drying up the drive and kill the courage they once had, et cetera. No, that's all been said before, and I won't even mention it, not a single word, not me, not today, uh-uh, nosirree.

The reason I won't bitch about these things might be interesting to some; I don't really care anymore. I know that some of you out there who know me think I'm engaging in hyperbolic crud, because normally such a statement would grate against my ideals of love, peace and bibliophilia, but it is true; I don't care what happens to the library anymore, and this is a good thing; a thing not worth breaking is easier to shape and change. My passion for all things library have shifted.

My real passions

I have a bunch of passions, from music and movies, to science and education, from software development and technology, all the way to epistemology and philosophy. And the ideals of my library world certainly bump into or totally encompasses some of my passions, but the library ideal is one that needs to be explained not from a contextual or cultural point (also known as the status quo), but from that of the future and values that crosses over from the past and into it (also known as, err, "the future").

These days the most marked of my passions is the one of science and education. I will extend myself well beyond my borders for people who genuinely wish to know more, that wants to study, to find things out. I've been an inquisitive pain in the arse my whole life, an entrepreneur and inventor, someone who just can't leave something that works alone until I understand how it works (even if that means I'll break the darn thing in the process, a little bit like my library career). Sharing my passion for knowing is what I, as a human being, love the most.

In the past, my passion would have had a good corollary to books, because as we know the past is riddled with books and parchments as the epitome of knowledge and information. If you were to become someone important, you had books. If you were someone important, you've written one or at least starred in one. Libraries formed wherever power dwelled. But then stupid humans and their silly ideals of freedom and unity and all that crazy stuff invented something new; books and information to the people for free. Well, that's at least the ideals going from late 17th century of the western world, slowly creeping into the world and changing it more ways than the history books gives them credit.

That is a piece of history I simply adore and love, feeding my ideals and passion for protecting it, furthering it, pushing that same agenda.

But then we have the now, where most important discourse and information is still somewhat found in books. But only just; a new crazy idea came along not that long ago, the idea of making things digital and hook them together in networks across the globe. The reason we've still got those darn libraries is because the long tail still points into them, into books and journals. But what when they don't anymore?

Library : A definition

Books. And then "modern libraries are increasingly being redefined as places to get unrestricted access to information in many formats and from many sources. They are understood as extending beyond the physical walls of a building, by including material accessible by electronic means, and by providing the assistance of librarians in navigating and analyzing tremendous amounts of knowledge with a variety of digital tools."

Is your library like this? Does it do these things? How does it do it? I want to talk a bit about these things, because, frankly, they are together my list of the most important things in regards to all things library;

The potential of what the library can do and offer
The promises made
The actual offer
Plans for the future

I've written tons and tons on the potential I see in the library before, whined about the promises made and how they stack up (and how in the end made me resign from it all together), and about what drives the machinery and direction. I've written about this so much I've forgotten links and most of what I've said there. But I won't go hunting for it anymore. I mean, what's the point? And I wrote at the beginning that I wouldn't whine about it here, so let's talk about the future instead. The future is now!

This post will be more or less on the future of the library world, or, more prosaically, how the library world enters into it. They've got three choices; enter into it physically by going there, enter into it by planning for it, and enter into it by shaping it.

Boldly going there

This is the easy one, and the default one. You just go there, or, because all of time is encapsulated in the one dimension of non-spatial reality, you just sit there and let the future huddle around you. No, this isn't as zen as it sounds, it's really what most people do, go about their business, where "going about your business" usually means doing things without thinking too much, letting everybody else shape your future.

Now, as a preamble I don't actually have that ability, so it's hard for me to sympathize much with it. I can see how it works, but for me I find it hard to let that become some excuse for not improving and doing better. I'm one of those where even buying lunch is a stream of philosophical implications (how far removed from my ancestors is it ok for me to eat them?), and walk on the beach becomes an internal monologue about how it got there and the eco-system of it (narrated in a faux Sir Attenborough voice), or where my daily work is a constant bombardement of ideas and thoughts of how to do things better, how to improve that which is not quite right (I don't believe in the silly 'if it works, don't fix it' mentality which has spread across this planet like a virus), pondering language and linguistics and neuroscience even when making variable names or looping through a hashmap. Whatever I do at any given time is not a compartment, a category of activities, a single unit of a constrained domain; it's all connected, from the micro to the macro. I'm just an insignificant extension of the cosmos, trying to make things better. I'm evolution.

So, standing still doesn't work for me, but I hear lots of other things on this planet does it, and does it well. But I think that's a bit deceitful; nothing stands still, not even rocks. Nothing stays the same, give it enough time. In a few thousand years, my favorite rock around where I live will become just a grain of sand on the beach. So by this analogy, I don't think even the library world stands still. Heck, we know it doesn't. We all know that little by little, even the most conservative bastion of all things that are meant to stand still in the universe, slowly creeps and crawls their way towards some distant and different place.

So this is all about the scale of time and our place in it. Let's talk about the human scale of time, the time it takes for a generation to react to the former generation. Rocks on this scale are terribly, terribly, utterly mind-bogglingly slow. A rock from generation to generation is so slow they are practically eternal, and indeed, for much of human history this has been the default position. It wasn't until mid 19th century that we figured out that rocks were so slow that we needed to invent a brand new scale to make any sense of it, the geological time, spanning 4 billion years. Compared to a mere generation of humans, that's practically forever.

But the library world on our human generational scale is comparatively damn slow still. The building they built last generation is still there, doing pretty much the same things. The librarians in there are doing practically the same things as the last generation. The only two ways it from time to time have gathered speed is by 1) planning ahead, and 2) having a paradigm thrust upon it from the outside.

Boldly planning for it

The library world have never really had a great need for planning for the future, at least not the more organized types of libraries we've had the last 200 years or so. The world of knowledge and the written word didn't really moved much since movable type, so even if some things changed here and there they had plenty of time to get their heads around it. What is 10-15 years of thinking and tinkering with a problem that has a 100 year span?

Nothing. It's perfectly alright to spend time getting it right when the problem is, on our normal human scale, slow. But what happens when the problem isn't just fast, but changes the human culture in which our scale is rooted?

Enter the digital age. It all started with computers becoming common, not only in places that had the resources to buy expensive and complex computers, but more so when they become cheap enough to go into any home. The age of ZX80/81 / Spectrum 16/48k / Commodore 64 / Amiga / Macintosh II / BBC Micro (all cheaper home computers) changed the world as we know it, probably far more than we give it credit. I was a Spectrum 48K owner myself, living in a country dominated by Commodore 64's. So what does a 10 year old kid who wants to play games on his computer do when there are no games around to buy? He has to make them himself, and sealed his destiny and became a geek, but perhaps a bit more importantly to this conversation, I became a librarian through the process of reading, borrowing, sharing and researching the written materials (remember, no internet in those days) otherwise my programs wouldn't work and my insatiable lust for making the darn thing work would die. Luckily for me, the addiction was like cocaine, but instead of ruining my life I became a computer literate.

When you become computer literate, the world looks very different to you. Problems everywhere become programming tasks, creating a small sliver of interfacing between the digital and the real world in the process. This sliver has since grown rather large, encompassing most of society, not a trivial feat in so few years. Even in the library world it has crept in and helped out. But we need to look at what it helped out with;

Cataloging. Searching said catalog. Bookkeeping. Writing reports. Did I forget anything?

I'm not really trying to be snarky here, and of course I know computers do more than that at the library, however, when we're trying to look at the present of what they actually do, I don't think I'm all that far fetched. There's the odd interesting project, some application running on a (secondary) server somewhere, maybe a new GUI into the catalog, or maybe some exhibition website, or maybe some self-serving library-card database thingy. But seriously, it's not like the computer systems in the average (or hip and cool) library are doing anything amazing (but please point me to them if they exist! Nothing would be cooler!). It's all pretty ... well, average. Standard stuff. Even if you blog and do Wiki's as part of your communication, you're not above average. You are average.

To get out of being average when you need to be great (more on this later) you need to plan to become great. You need to come up with some activities and goals in order to move faster than not moving at all. But how does the library stack up to this?

Of course they are planning. Every day is another plan. But we need to discern between planning for tomorrow and planning for the future. Tomorrow is just around the corner, and that, truly, is just planning to stay up to date, keeping up appearances, to plan for being relevant to what's going on right now. Putting up a Wiki or starting to blog or even putting together a prototype of a search engine that presents records in an FRBR manner, or creating a process and system that streamlines ILL with digital copies and distributes them in a copyright-enabled fashion, or even a backend system that convert MARC records into RDF and spread them across a clustered system of servers in Linked Data fashion complete with cool URI's and ontologies to work with the data, that ain't planning for the future! Maybe you're about to start a project that acts as a portal for information, a collection-point, or a federated search point, or a dynamic system for understanding user requests and dispatch semantic contextual networks to semantic engines that convert them into knowledge nuggets and present them to researchers, you're still not planning for the future. These things are the least you should do, but these things are not the future, it's only today and tomorrow.

Planning now to do something funky within the next year or so is not planning for the future. So then, what is the future? And by "future" I mean to actually have one.

Boldly shaping it

You need to shape it. You need to look into your crystal balls, and determine what the future should hold. No, don't look into the ball to look for what the future holds, that path leads to stupidity, and, well, it doesn't work. No, you must insert yourself into the fabric of modern development far more than you normally have, you must reach out and not only point to the future, but invent it!

I was extremely happy to see Jessamyn join BoingBoing as a guest writer. That's a perfect example what needs to happen, a high-class librarian writing for a high-class blog, about all things weird and wonderful, reaching out with a subtle librarian view of of the world. (My favorite post!) However, even after you've immersed yourself in what's going on in society or even try to shape bits of it by your very existence, there's some bigger issues we haven't even dared go to yet. Well, let's ;

The need for conserving the libraries isn't the need for conserving the houses, or the books, or even the library cultural spot in its society (which are all good reasons, mind you). It's not to keep certain people in jobs, nor is it to keep the services alive. No, it's to preserve the librarian ideal. The librarian profession is not worth keeping if its ideals aren't in tune with reality, and I can point to the thousands of professions through the ages who have died when those parts of society it was attached to, died off. There's a certain notion of librarian philosophy that I'd like to talk about ;

"When the gulf between theory and practice in librarianship is discussed generally two themes emerge, which are that theorizing about librarianship is mostly non-existent and, when such theorizing exists at all, it is largely irrelevant to library practice."

I'm sometimes inclined to say that the reason the library world is in trouble is in the above quoted paragraph. Ok, so it's easy to see the gap between the mostly non-existent library philosophy, but we must remember and let it sink in that philosophy is defined as the action of doing philosophy, not as an archive or to think of it as history, or even use old thinking as if it applies to the now, or, heavens forbid, the future.

Library philosophy needs to happen, at least a hell of a lot more, and it needs to be a bigger part of what libraries do, it should include all librarians, it should be part of the fabric of librarianship. You need to ponder epistemological implications of digital identity, to think through the notion of copyright for the greater good, or your academic standing in an academic world that's moving to semantic networks, the loss of the bibliocentric view and the impact on collection management, or the systemic notion of semantic knowledge networks. Or you need to find out what fragmented semantic contexts offer knowledge management, or how the iPad will influence citing and sharing of notes, how to address those notes themselves as they are often more valuable than the original text (and lots of bloggers know this quite well already). Or, perhaps even more importantly, you need to establish an ethical guidebook to global knowledge management, models for information distribution and wealth, or ontological analysis of human and non-human identity. You need to re-think what those ideals are in order to preserve them. Only then can you shape any future worth having.

All those meetings and planning of cool projects you do? It's all fluff and nonsense unless there's some serious philosophies to back them up, new ideas, visions of what the future might be, and certainly visions that's based on the library ideals worth keeping. In the absence of philosophy there will be the status quo. And that's worse than standing still, even if you look ever so handsome and your moldy paper smells oh so good.

Here's a relevant quote from my distant past ; 'I'm still in love with the library ideals and concepts. I still love books. And maps. And old pictures. And just surfing the catalog. Or snooping in the newspaper reels. Or finding a microfilm, wondering what's on it, what it means, and who did it. Even subject headings and its contextual meaning. I love catalogers. And I love librarians. I just don't love what we're collectively doing with the concept of "library."' And I should add; I don't love the lack of philosophy, or the lack of shaping the future.

Let's think a bit more seriously about this. Let us philosophy!

But the question in todays post was if the library world understand the future? My assertion is, no, they don't. They understand it's coming, they understand it will involve technology, and that books will be less and less important, they understand that they need to have cool projects (and by 'cool' I'm happy to settle for just 'relevant') and to keep that up, and that they need to accommodate the onslaught of the digital impact. They understand all these things, because they are close to them. These things are on their scale, they understand these things because they deal with it every day.

But deep thinking? Good luck.

Before I write what I write before the next time I write

2010-04-06T16:50:00.000+10:00

It seems my last poll revealed that there are still people in the library world who hasn't rejected me, or, perhaps a stronger theory, likes to watch road accidents. So my next piece is being written about why the library world fails so badly at technology and seeing the future (or even their own relevance to it), but I'm somewhat busy these days with real work, so a few more days, ok?

However, all is not lost. I've got a few things to say about, well, the stuff I work with, that bucket I stick my head in every day to see if the crap I put in it yesterday has turned to gold yet. No luck so far.

There's a peculiar discussion going on in the Semantic Web mailing-list at the W3C, of which Bernard Vatant will fill you in. It's funny to watch; where are the success stories, where is the commercial viability, does it even work in academia, has it got traction, what do we do now? Why aren't more people doing it? Why haven't the world adopted this specific and undoubtedly brilliant world-view yet? Are we all mad!?

I'm sure you can fill in with our own Topic Maps echo here, but the more you dig, the more you discover that most of the sillies put up as a reason or a scapegoat for the lack of world dominance are things that, frankly, the Topic Maps community have figured out long ago, and some of those missing features in their world is a dominant feature in ours. And we haven't taken over the world, either. Bummer.

It's frustrating, I know, but what can we do? There's no amount of technology suave that can beat any status quo that feeds upon itself. No new ideas can beat old ones that seem to work, because, well, the definition of "works" is so multi-faceted and complex and, eh, making lots of money for lots of people. Semantic Web and Topic Maps doesn't make lots of many. Heck, they don't make money, period. They're convenient little technologies that will stay small and insignificant.

I have a plan, though, and it will piss off some of the Topic Maps purist (or, let's face it, even pragmatists) and hopefully some Semantic Web people as well. First, I'll rename it something cool - maybe something like NoSQL or something - and then rename the integral concepts, strip away the jargon, and make it web-friendly by injecting it straight into HTML5 based technology, and relate all queries through SQL. Mwuahaha, I might even throw some REST API's in there, just to stir it up some more. And I shall call it ; the web.

Man, I hate these technical wars over standards and ways of doing things. The thing I love about Topic Maps isn't the standard or the specs. No, it's the thinking I'm forced to do in rejecting some parts, while loving others. It's what I take from it. It's the epiphanies it yields.

NoSQL? Semantic Web? Topic Maps? SQL? They're all just abstract interfaces into a set of memory positions shaped by various registers, stacks and pops. Standardizing our ways is just a step on the ladder of the future, not a platform upon which we have to stand firm.

Anyway, the whole NoSQL thing is something I'll have to write about more later. Right now dinner and kids and cleaning the house beckons.

What to write about next?

2010-03-30T16:55:00.000+11:00

Life is terribly busy, and there's simply too many things to write and ponder about. Since my time is limited, I need to spend my lunch hours and some after time on it, and hence I'd like it this time to be about something you'd like to hear about. So, naturally, the best thing to do is to make a poll ;

Let me know what you think, and if your blog post isn't on this (admittedly quickly put together) list, pop in a comment and let me know. Let's give it until ... um, Wednesday or so.

Bibs and bobs : Extended edition

2010-03-25T17:09:00.000+11:00

Hoo boy, just when you thought your tabs were cleared, you discover that yeah, sure, the tabs in your main browser window is gone, but you forgot about a) 4 other windows full of tabs themselves, and b) circumstances of the time bringing a flurry of interesting stuff you should put out there. So, I'm here to put out some more. I'll try to classify them as I go along ;

Technology

A faster and more compact Set : For Java geeks and Topic Mappers alike, but mostly for those with both fetishes. And older post I stumbled upon once again and was meaning to look into. One day. Really soon now. Ish.

New Horizons : I'm a bit of an astronomy nerd, so what's better than the combination of rockets, science and star trekking with the fastest ever made human object!

Open Mind Common Sense : A delightfully fuzzy Semantic Web project that Danny Ayers pointed me to. It's ontologies with Social engineering. Great stuff!

Pegatron Tegra : Sexy little computer to chuck in the corner to do your digital bidding. Pure lust!

Climate change and politics

Think tanks, oil money and black ops : Where do all the climate change skeptics come from? You'd be surprised. Or not.

The Guardian responds : The English newspaper The Guardian had a series of investigational reports over the alleged scandal of the leaked email of the University of East Anglia, a series of reports they have been severely criticized for by the people involved, ranging from poor reporting to outright lying, pretty serious business for an otherwise respected and large newspaper. The Guardian has posted a reply (at the critics blog, no less). Do read the comments, though, as they are perhaps more important and interesting.

LeakGate : Scientists fight back : Tim Lambert, Aussie vegemite and all-round good-guy, follows up on the many distortions made by journalist Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times over time, and he points us to this exclusive 31-page complaints letter by climate researcher Simon Lewis. Heady stuff! Will the Sunday Times respond in the same manner or at all as the Guardian above?

Health and fraud

Quack Miranda Warning : If you read this quite common warning on your medication or supplements, beware. And, a good introduction (reading the comments) on where this expression comes from.

Snake Oil : A beautiful infographic from Information is Beautiful, showing a vertical bubble-chart of peer-reviewed double-blind tests on various compounds and organics that you mostly find in supplements; what is proven to show any workings, and what is, essentially, snake oil. I love this one!

Religion and philosophy

Does God have a future? : You know, I'm really starting a man-crush on Sam Harris after this; what style and impeccable delivery, not to mention that he actually understand both the science and the philosophical implications of both. But Deepak Chopra? The opposite; he's the biggest woo-meister of them all, arrogant and testy, wielding the power of fluffy words and interruption of others. People respect that? I'm shocked.

The God of the old testament : A rather famous quote (and a video of him reading it) by Richard Dawkins, here put in context of biblical quotes to underline what is being said.

Indian skeptic challenges guru to kill him on live TV : Well, kill him with Tantric Magic, as it were. A delightful trip down the staircase of the insanity of what humans think they can do and the brave (in this case Samal Edamaruku, the president of the Indian Rationalists Association) that stays still and proves them terribly, humorously wrong. I giggled through most of this. There's even a second part over here where the Tantric is doing the whole "terrible ritual under a full moon with a scepter with feathers and fearsome chanting, and you know, you should be really, really scared, why aren't you dead already!? Just die, will you! Bugger."

Supersessionism : Word of the day : "Supersessionism and replacement theology or fulfillment theology are Christian interpretations of New Testament claims"

Off kilter

Kirsten Flagstad : Arguably one of the absolute best opera singers there ever was. And, she was Norwegian. Did I mention I'm an opera-buff?

Ancient Literature : A long list of reasonably known ancient literature. Brilliant if you're bored.

Circumference of the Earth and the Holocene geographical epoch : A link to the Wolfram-Alpha answer to the circumference of the Earth, and to a WikiPedia article on the Holocene. I'll tell you all about why I'm reading up on this in another post in the future, but a hint is that you might see me doing some local embarrassing sciency stuff soon. I can't wait.

Pruzy's Pot : Uh, a somewhat gross unexplainable short-story of sorts. You just have to hear it, I guess. I will have nothing more to do with it.

Tidbits, miscellaneous and bits and bobs

2010-03-23T17:22:00.000+11:00

Ok, let's clear out the tabs on my browser ;

A host of mummies, a forest of secrets : "In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air."

The trouble with trusting complex science : Another round of of talking about trusting science, specifically this time about climate change. I'm quite baffled that anyone can read the article and then at the bottom shout about conspiracies, it's all bogus and lies. There's only one side of this silly debate that's got any evidence to back up their claim. Can you guess which one?

Morality, with limits : "The question: What can Darwin teach us about morality?" A heck of a lot, but not Darwin himself but more to the point the 250 years of science that has progressed since. Speaking of misrepresenting Darwin, how about the worst science journalism of the year? Personally I think it's funny the media and the general population has such a crazy-bad knowledge of what Darwin actually wrote. Maybe they should read the darn thing before venture into hyperbole?

Sam Harris at TED : Science can answer moral questions : As a follow-up to the previous link I had to post this talk by Sam Harris that should be considered very, very seriously. Religion does not have monopoly over the notion of moral behavior, and often, you can say it's the opposite (referring, for example, to the current disgusting scandal within the Catholic Church, the worst crimes, the most abhorring behavior done by self-proclaimed holy people, and then the systematic cover-up of the same. Shocking stuff!)

Spin classification : Unless you're a physicist geek, this is both over your head, and terribly boring. You have been warned.

Distributed Publications : Finally, a more techie geeky look at distributed publications, using RDF / triplets (or any graph-ish model). Jeni always talks about great stuff.

Newbie tips for Topic Maps bliss

2010-03-19T17:26:00.000+11:00

Well, hi there, pilgrim! So, you've noticed this fandangled thing called "Topic Maps", and you heard it was an interesting, smart or new way of solving hard problems of some sort? Well, you've come to the right place. Let me, as an elder of the movement, give you a few hints and tips of how to go about this complex notion ;

1. Don't do it

Yeah, I won't lie to you; unless you know more than a smidgen about information science and / or knowledge management, and especially unless you know quite a bit about data models and how to interact with them in complex computer systems, I'd urge you to stay right clear of it. Topic Maps is full of complex models, silly jargon, weird people and technical API's. Nothing in the normal world is easy, and the Topic Maps world only makes it harder. Topic Maps won't solve your problem, unless you already know how to solve it, at which point find some other technology that people actually know, ok? What's the point of building the best system out there with amazing technology that no one knows how to use, extend, appreciate or even keep a straight face while talking about it.

Also, at what technical level do you think you need it? If the answer is, not very technical at all, why care about the underlying technology? An Excel spreadsheet might fix your problem much better. Use that. Unless you know that multi-dimensional graph-based technology will save you, look another way. If you don't know this stuff it will lure you in with magical wistful promises of a better tomorrow that will never see the time of day.

2. Make someone else do it if you must

Ok, so this one isn't all that different from the first tip, but since Topic Maps indeed can solve hard problems in brilliant ways, there are people out there who could use it and help you solve them. The truth is that people who are steeped in this stuff, who knows it inside out, indeed can solve pretty much any complex issue you might have with it, and even help you become smarter in doing it, even teach you how it all works. And there's other benefits to letting them do it for you; you don't have to become one of them in the process.

The truth is that Topic Maps really is cool and brilliant and all that, but it is ridiculously hard to grasp and even harder to master, and it will change you into a weirdo in the process. Have you really got the time, resources and personality traits it takes to get into this stuff? Really?

3. Topic Maps people are few and rare, and, uh, strange

I kid you not; these guys are not your average cup of tea, so tread gently, and expect to be surprised in some way or another. Expect them to say things that makes no sense whatsoever, they have their own language littered with technical jargon even technologists wouldn't understand. I don't think they get out much, at least not outside their own field, so you need to replace your own terminology for theirs if they are to made sense of, as they themselves rarely compromise and adapt to how the rest of the world see things.

Also, expect some slight geeky behavior like mistaking things like pages, tags, websites, business objectives, servers, networks, computers and pasta for topics, topics, topics, topics, topics, topics and topics, in that order. It's quite similar to that of Asberger's syndrome, but if you know how, you can use it to your advantage, but caution and patience must be urged, and just like with the real thing unfortunately there is no cure, only workarounds.

4. Patience is not a virtue, but stubbornness might be

Look, the mystical world of Topic Maps is full of concepts you never dreamed existed, things that makes you ask fundamental questions about identity philosophy, what is knowledge, and paradigms of models and technological culture. Patience is not enough to grasp this stuff, you need sheer stubbornness and bloodymindedness to get anywhere, and - dare I say it? - perhaps some weird personally trait. Maybe a limp or a monocle. Not only do you have to understand the technicality of the stuff, but also the weirdness of the culture itself and - perhaps even more important - the personal implications this knowledge might have upon your own thought processes. You may end up getting a cape.

Once you tread down the path of Topic Maps and actually get anywhere (and that in itself is a hallmark of your stubbornness), your brain will change, you will see things differently. I'm not going to say that that is a good thing, but it can be, especially if you like uprooting your preconceived notions and planting new ones. The world is built on foundations which are far removed from the Topic Maps world, but once you grasp this other world it is hard not to see your old world in a new light, and this can be challenging. You might even start to sound like one of these blubbering idiots yourself, saying topics, topics, topics, topics, topics when you used to speak a coherent language people around you actually understood. There's great danger in getting an epiphany or two.

5. If you like your job, stay clear

Hmm, I see a pattern in my tips, but the thing is that once you have converted your old job might look boring and infantile by comparison. You might get (morally repulsive) urges to work on Topic Maps, but your organisation probably won't understand what the hell you're on about (remember, the whole painful stubborn process you went through has to happen to each and every person in your whole organisation!), and you might be looking around for another job where the Topic Maps goodness is practiced. Don't be fooled!

These jobs don't really exist. No one thinks Topic Maps on your CV is a good thing, because they, too, haven't done that stupid painful stubborn path to enlightenment either, and you'll come across as a bit of a show-off with nothing to show for it. (The exception to this tip is if you live in Norway. If you want to know why, the answer is that, again, the Topic Maps culture is repellingly weird) No one who does real business gives a rats ass about Topic Maps, and no one who does real business in the future will either. Even people who does weird but similar things who also have modest success (like people doing Semantic Web / RDF work) shun Topic Mappers. For your own job security, stay clear.

6. However ...

However, if you are weird, not scared by overly complex or outlandish technologies, if you think that strange new cultures only makes you stronger (and you've got a strong immune system to boot), if you think job security is only the stuff of boring people, and, indeed, if you have a monocle, cape and a glass eye, perhaps this might be the place for you after all.

And if so, contact me; I get off on this stuff. Otherwise, you have been warned.

And another one

2010-03-17T10:21:00.000+11:00

Here follows another tidbit collection as life and things have heated up and is stealing my time. First a couple of techies, then a few sciency ones, and lastly politicals ;

Hanvon multitouch tablet : Pure, unrefined lust!

Introduction to neural nets : Back in the early 90's I was doing neural nets, cumulative histographical analysis and other hard-core funky techniques working on real-time video motion detection for high-security systems. Good old days.

Kilroy was here : Patrick Durusau is showing no end to his delightful writing, and I'm loving it. This post here is about how librarians have been there, done that. I feel I need to follow this one up properly in a couple of days, though, as I don't feel that that is the whole picture. Sure they've done some of it, but the people whodunnit are a few good eggs in a large, large basket of indifferent eggs; the library sectors' general cowardice / conservative notions coupled with a wide-spread lack of technology knowledge means "done it" truly means "haven't done it, only sniffed it."

ZTM Topic Maps : This project has been shrouded in mystery and undocumented hysteria for many, many years. I first heard about it back in my early days of Topic Maps, and I'm happy to see it turning into a real project. Looks good, too.

Memory and the Hippocampus : How are we doing picking our brains? What is neuroscience up to these days, especially with memory and, yes, the hippocampus, my favorite body part.

Global climate change, and flogging : A brilliant short video. "The anti-science crowd isn’t satisfied with merely spreading disinformation about climate scientists."

A bat is not a bug : Tim Lambert expose "The Australian" newspaper for the anti-science pile of rubbish it is.

You can't handle the truth : A more scientific look at the dangers and impact of drugs.

Science vs. religion : A hilarious cartoon poke!

Scientology insider's nightmare childhood : "A former Scientologist who says she was a 'child slave' and alleges she saw a six-year-old boy chained up in a ship's hold is disappointed the Senate has blocked a full inquiry into the religious organisation." What's up with this country? I thought I had arrived at a good place? (But then, I've written about Australian politics before, the ultimate oxymoron)

'We are adding balance' : The sad state of education and science creeping into the corners of the USA.

Tidbits

2010-03-10T17:19:00.000+11:00

My blog entries tries to be slightly more than just links and boring commentary to the stuff linked to, but I also realize I have a life and a job which demands a lot of my time. But every day there's always one other thing I wish to talk about, yet another tab open in my browser as I stumble around the net like a blind mole looking for a grapevine in a volcano, but most of the time those things are perhaps not extensively mind blowing enough to trigger my bloggoreah to go into a full post.

So, I'm starting a new thing. As my tabs fill up and my browsers slugs down, at some point I'll just decide to post the tabs with a slight commentary, dumping them all ontp the blog, and I'm starting as of ... now ;

How to Write Great Copy for the Web : My good friend Donna Spencer (nee Maurer), the Godess of UX, just released her second book about writing for the Inter-tubes (ie. the Internet, the web), which I hear is super-good. And when it's Donna, it's always good. Can't wait to get my dirty hands on it!

Schlepping From One Data Silo to Another : I'm delighted to see Patrick Durusau (one of the smartest people I know, with a beard to match it) finally start a blog. I've been whinging at him for a long time to do so, and this blog post is the reason why; he's preaching the gospel. Just like words are nothing or very little without a context (those things we usually call 'sentences'), data silos are nothing but bunkers until they are opened up, and become fountains.

The communities manifesto : Good stuff, although shouldn't this one have been made, like, years ago?

Minards' Napoleon : This amazing demonstration of the powerful ProtoVis JavaScript visualisation toolkit, is an adaption of another famous visualisation of Napoleon's catastrophic descent on Moskow.

The New Ten Commandments : A decalogue for the modern world : An updated take on what is purported to be the best thing since sliced bread (well, given sliced bread was invented early last century, that's an expression from the oxymoronic bin), the "backbone" of what many thinks have laid the foundations of the modern world (which isn't true, but that's a blog post in its own right for later) Also in this vein, Christopher Hitchens has a funny but good piece of late on the Ten Commandments as well.

Dear James Randi : As a skeptic myself, this is hilarious! Beware of language not fit for people who's got a problem with anatomy and calling things for what they are, like, uh, vagina's. And do check out other writings on the McSweeney website; really good stuff all around, another hidden treasure.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast : Sometimes we need to take a step back and think about the words and contexts we are using. Do you know what 'culture' means when people say it?