the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I am fully supporting the Log Format Roadmap. Let's get some work done. (it sounded good at the time :)

A Semantic Web shoebox - annotating photos with RSS and RDF looks cool. Link from Andrew. Something else, "
Protégé-2000 is also an open-source, Java tool that provides an extensible architecture for the creation of customized knowledge-based applications.", link from stuck-on-mobile-e-com.

I was thinking about SICP and came up with a good description of what it teaches. "Building with programming langauage (trademarked named removed) bricks". I definitely want to explore this idea further. I am sure it has been said before, I just need to find out who said it, and what they meant. It is an important concept. Programmers are building large structures out of smaller parts that fit together. SICP teaches how to make sure they fit together well. I am still on chapter one.

Aaron Swartz and Sam Ruby have some interesting ideas. They both want to know what it will take to make it easy to innovate with weblogs.

I found a new idea (to me at least) for controlling caching in browsers. This technique uses the Etag header storing a session id. This should work fairly reliably.

Weblogging the National Education Computing Conference. This is great. Easy web site publishing is definitely changing the face of all kinds of conferences.

Eric Raymond dicussing the relationship between plain old hacking and fancy new-fangLed refactoring.

Second, open-source hackers can learn from agile programmers how to wake up. The terminology and conceptual framework of agile programming sharpens and articulates our instincts. Learning to speak the language of open source, peer review, many eyeballs, and rapid iterations gave us a tremendous unifying boost in the late 1990s; I think becoming similarly conscious about agile-movement ideas like refactoring, unit testing, and story-centered design could be just as important for us in the new century.

I love it when things work exactly as I expect them too. Unfortunately usually my expectations for computer software are very differfent than the developers'. I am pleasantly surprised that Mozilla Firebird 0.6 address bar automatic search goes directly to the first result in Google. In Mozilla it takes you to the Google results page. I peeked at the javascript that controls this behavior, but I couldn't figure it out. Now I don't have to.

It looks like there is a new concept called Prior Learning and Assessment to take into account the learning that occurs by actually doing something. Empire State College has been doing this for years. I don't know if they have ever definied it as a formal process, but they have been giving credit for twhat they call experential learning since 1971. Empire State College is part of the State University of New York. One of these days I do plan on getting one or more degrees from there.

Computer Clubhouse is and Intel supported project to provide a provides a "creative and safe after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities work with adult mentors to explore their own ideas, develop skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology". There don't seem to be any close to me. You can check out the locations. It also seems they are not sponsering any groups except in "target geopgraphies." That seems very unfortunate. They could at least provide organizational support to people who want to start this type of project. Some web based advice would be great. I am sure it would be possible to find local sponsers to provide space and computers, as well as techical advice. It seems very short-sighted to not allow community-based groups from anywhere to be affialted with such a project.

Thanks to Andrew for the link.

Update:

I had some more coherent thoughts about this. It looks like from their About Page that the Computer Clubhouse organization along with Intel, and other sponsers are deciding where to focus their efforts. Obviously they can't just sponser every community. What if instead of the money flowing from a central core on sponsers, communit based groups sought out community-based sponserships. Then the Computer Clubhouse organization could provide support, and ideas on programs etc, with funding coming from local sources.

Someone has probably already thought of this. I will have to research the ideas more. I just need to find out who is already doing this type of work. If you have any information, add a comment, or email me at dave@thedesignexperience.org.

The latest version of Sharpreader, an RSS aggregator that runs on the .NET framework, adds some nice new features to imitate including "Auto-purge: after x days or after x items." It doesn't say if this is a per feed setting or not. I think idealling a aggregator wide default that is applied per feed, with an optional per feed override would be best.

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida mentions that in an economy dominated by creative workers. compensation is not the main focus of work. Creative people will work for "challange, enjoyment, to do good, to make a contribution, and to learn." This sounds similar to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, where the quality of one's work, and it's effect on others defines the economy.

An interesting presentation I should look at: http://simonstl.com/articles/open/index.html

I tried Firebird 0.6, its fast. I can't stand the fonts. On Linux, Mozilla 1.3 looks great. I am using some truetype fonts and they are antialiased. It is very easy on the eyes. In Firebird 0.6 and Mozilla 1.4rc1 the truetype fonts are not available and antialiased fonts don't work. I consider this a bug in Mozilla, but there really is no way for me to understand why it works in the older version of Mozilla, but not the newer one. I have searched bugzilla and google with no results. Am I the only one?

Ok, I just didn't look in the right place. I stopped by #firebird on irc.mozilla.org and found out there are forums for Mozilla and Firebird at http://www.mozillazine.org. From there I learned there is a seperate xft enabled build. This I find very strange. Maybe they want to make it lean, but lean and hard is read is not really ideal for a web browser.

Update: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23 will list all the various Firebird builds.

Albany, Schenectady, Troy was ranked third in the list of "Best Places with the Best Education." As this is the area I live in, I was happy to hear it. There have been lately some interesting collaboration between industry, government, and education around here. Maybe it will lead to better technology job opporunities.

Last year I linked to Richard Florida's creativity index, which ranked Albany second among medium sized cities. I am reading his book, The Rise of the Creative Class right now. I agree with about half of what he says so far, but I am still in the beginning of the book. I will try to write a better review when I am finished.

Jeff Davis setup an RSS feed of CVS commits on the openacs repository. Brilliant! I am subscribed.

I started this weblog back when I wasn't sure where I was going, but I thought the web was pretty cool. I was reading Scripting News pretty often and had read Philip and Alex's guide to web publishing at least once. Besides that, I had someone taught myself enough to install a Linux server on some spare hardware and hack a little on OpenACS.

Since then OpenACS 4.x has grown. I started out with really no understanding of this very complex system. I just started hacking, and reading source code. A lot of source code. I experimented and even convinced some people that I had a clue. Now about two years later I feel that I actually have a good idea what is going on and can make some excellent contributions.

I encourage everyone who thinks they might want to be a hacker to try the things you think will be too hard. In porting my first package from oracle to davebql for OpenACS 4.5 I had to dive right into the acs-kernel and acs-content-repository, two of the more complex, and key packages in OpenACS 4.x. Taking that jump, and quite a bit of trial and error was a great learning experience.

Similarly, I recently stuck my toe into the water of Linux kernel programming. The two readers I have already know I purchased a laptop. I wanted to get ACPI working to report battery status, control the fan, adjust processor speed and al those fun features that "just work" under other operating systems. Unfortunately there were some bugs in the ACPI definitions built into the BIOS (I have no idea how it works under other OSs, they must just ignore bugs and depatures from the spec). There is some information about fixing this on the net. I really had to poke around in quite a few places and look at the same thing 10 or 15 times, but eventually I gained enough understanding to fix a few of the problems. After finding someone with a similar laptop I was able to be ACPI for all the devices working. In addition to getting ACPI working, I can now recompile my kernel with one eye tied behind my back. I recommend Debian and the make-kpkg process.

So, I think besides an interest in hacking, you also need a strong intolerance for things that don't work. I really don't like it when things aren't working, and it gets me motivated to fix it. I definitely appreciate the people working on the Linux kernel who are figuring out these things for all of us.

There is a petition to support a proposal to support the Public Domain Enhancement Act to Reclaim the Public Domain. Basically the idea would be to charge a $1 renewel fee after 50 years to renew a copyright. It is believed that around 98% of copyrights would not be reclaimed in this way, rebuilding the public domain.