Knives on a plane? Believe it.
I flew from Dulles International Airport on Monday and forgot to remove my Leatherman Squirt from my keyring. I put my keys in a bin with my shoes when passing through security and the TSA simply didn't notice. Neither did I until I was on the plane :/
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Aidan Beats Sarah
Wow. My son, 10, today gave his sister a succinct and cogent description of the Bush Doctrine on the way home from school today. He covered all the basics, including the ethics of preemptive strikes, the use of sanctions and inspections and the limitations on presidential power. Take that, Sarah Palin :)
Truck Fire on I-81 Today
I traveled from Fredericksburg to Lexington, Virginia today in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley to kick off a seminar series that I organized at VMI. Unfortunately, an accident involving a semi rig completely shut down a section of I-81 this morning about 8 miles South of Staunton for many hours and I arrived late. I was luckily still able to give my talk.
I haven't seen any other reporting on this accident other than this blog post, which is surprising considering the amount of time the entire Southbound lanes were closed. Traffic was still crawling through a single lane a couple of hours ago.
I haven't seen any other reporting on this accident other than this blog post, which is surprising considering the amount of time the entire Southbound lanes were closed. Traffic was still crawling through a single lane a couple of hours ago.
Friday, September 12, 2008
The Canary in Ohio
I checked in with my favorite indicators of political opinion in the swing state of Ohio today; my parents. Their political position in support of McCain was not surprising, but the details are interesting.
My mom, 81, favors abortion rights, but loves Sarah Palin. She stopped listening to the Youngstown radio station because she "couldn't believe how hard they were being on her." She suspected that the reason the media was being hard on Palin was "because she is a woman." She was amazed to hear about a poll that suggested that the women of Ohio were supportive of Obama, because everyone she discusses politics with supports McCain.
Palin's lack of understanding of the Bush Doctrine did not bother her at all: "She'll learn." When asked about Palin's religious views, especially her assertion that the war in Iraq is "God's Plan", she dismissed it as propaganda from the Obama campaign. I pointed her to the video. We'll see what she says after viewing it.
My mom also didn't care that Palin linked Iraq to 9/11. My mom does, too. She didn't fully believe me when I explained the Big Lie and that even George Bush has publicly repudiated the notion.
My dad, 82, expressed disdain for all four candidates and the electoral process in general. He was not rocked by the allegations that McCain may have used his Senate influence to tamper with a DEA investigation, saying that "they all do that sort of thing". He went on to say that he has been going to the library to rent old movies and other videos until two weeks before the election. At that point, he will try to listen to the position of both candidates and make a decision.
My mom, 81, favors abortion rights, but loves Sarah Palin. She stopped listening to the Youngstown radio station because she "couldn't believe how hard they were being on her." She suspected that the reason the media was being hard on Palin was "because she is a woman." She was amazed to hear about a poll that suggested that the women of Ohio were supportive of Obama, because everyone she discusses politics with supports McCain.
Palin's lack of understanding of the Bush Doctrine did not bother her at all: "She'll learn." When asked about Palin's religious views, especially her assertion that the war in Iraq is "God's Plan", she dismissed it as propaganda from the Obama campaign. I pointed her to the video. We'll see what she says after viewing it.
My mom also didn't care that Palin linked Iraq to 9/11. My mom does, too. She didn't fully believe me when I explained the Big Lie and that even George Bush has publicly repudiated the notion.
My dad, 82, expressed disdain for all four candidates and the electoral process in general. He was not rocked by the allegations that McCain may have used his Senate influence to tamper with a DEA investigation, saying that "they all do that sort of thing". He went on to say that he has been going to the library to rent old movies and other videos until two weeks before the election. At that point, he will try to listen to the position of both candidates and make a decision.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
China as an Island
This makes sense!
John Mauldin, an analyst at Investors Insight, came up with an awesomely useful idea: Instead of thinking of China as a huge land power, imagine them as an isolated island. Geographically, politically and demographically it makes a lot of sense.
John's idea is just part of a larger analysis of China to be found in this article, although the site was not responding today when I checked it.
The graphic is worth repeating. It is powerfully concise:
I found both the graphic and the link to the original article on Strange Maps, a blog worth watching.
John Mauldin, an analyst at Investors Insight, came up with an awesomely useful idea: Instead of thinking of China as a huge land power, imagine them as an isolated island. Geographically, politically and demographically it makes a lot of sense.
John's idea is just part of a larger analysis of China to be found in this article, although the site was not responding today when I checked it.
The graphic is worth repeating. It is powerfully concise:
I found both the graphic and the link to the original article on Strange Maps, a blog worth watching.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Running for President? No, Thanks.
I had to laugh at this interesting thought from my dad:
Dear Dave:
I finally decided that I have only one interest in the upcoming election and it involves your birthday.
Since you and Obama are of the same generation and about the same age, it occured to me that your life experiences are much broader than his.
You have served in the military, have operated a business under difficult circumstances, and have never had to shape your beliefs for political purposes as all politicians do.
Just wanted you to know I am glad you are not running for president.
Love,
Dad
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Bernadette's Mom Has Passed
Bernadette's mom died this morning at 2:30 AM US EDT. She passed peacefully in her sleep at 91 years old.
The family requests that mourners consider sending a contribution to the Rhode Island Hospice or your local Hospice. Contributions are tax deductible.
The family requests that mourners consider sending a contribution to the Rhode Island Hospice or your local Hospice. Contributions are tax deductible.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
NetKernel Architects Conference
This year's NetKernel Architects Conference is being held 25-27 September 2008 at the University of Mary Washington, right here in Fredericksburg, VA. Brian and I are helping Peter and Randy from 1060 Research to organize it.
1060 will be introducing NetKernel version 4.0 Pre-Release. Each attendee will get a copy on the first day. Brian and I had the chance to see and play with it last month in London. All I can say is, wow! Fans of resource-oriented computing are about to get a very powerful tool to add to their toolbox. The Architects Conference is a great way to learn the concepts and get a jump on the competition.
The conference schedule and price list are on the Web.
Y'all come down now, y'hear?
1060 will be introducing NetKernel version 4.0 Pre-Release. Each attendee will get a copy on the first day. Brian and I had the chance to see and play with it last month in London. All I can say is, wow! Fans of resource-oriented computing are about to get a very powerful tool to add to their toolbox. The Architects Conference is a great way to learn the concepts and get a jump on the competition.
The conference schedule and price list are on the Web.
Y'all come down now, y'hear?
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
New Linked Data Blogroll
Talis has set up a blog aggregator for discussions of Linking Open Data at http://planet.linkeddata.org/. Good show, Talis.
Gartner Gets FLOSS; Late as Usual
A new report by Gartner on Free/Libre/Open Source Software concludes, " ... if you do not think you use it, then you use it; and if you think you do use it, then you use lots more of it than you know." No kidding. They rightly call out the fact that many common big-enterprise vendors use FLOSS components, but fail to mention FLOSS use by the dominant players like Microsoft.
The full report is accessible only by those with money, but KMWorld reported on it, as did ZDNet. Both reporters focused on the use of FLOSS by cloud computing centers, but the report is much more interesting than that. The most interesting statement to me was the positioning of SaaS for enterprises as a primary cost-cutting measure. SaaS is just another form of outsourcing, but this time to a much more level playing field.
Gartner is a funny organization. I haven't quite forgiven them for reporting in 1997 (!) that the Web was not likely to be important to businesses. They even gave that ridiculous statement a 70% confidence rating, IIRC. This time, they seem to be on track, but reporting a bit late. Why wait until FLOSS use is so ubiquitous in mainstream software before telling enterprise CIOs about it?
The full report is accessible only by those with money, but KMWorld reported on it, as did ZDNet. Both reporters focused on the use of FLOSS by cloud computing centers, but the report is much more interesting than that. The most interesting statement to me was the positioning of SaaS for enterprises as a primary cost-cutting measure. SaaS is just another form of outsourcing, but this time to a much more level playing field.
Gartner is a funny organization. I haven't quite forgiven them for reporting in 1997 (!) that the Web was not likely to be important to businesses. They even gave that ridiculous statement a 70% confidence rating, IIRC. This time, they seem to be on track, but reporting a bit late. Why wait until FLOSS use is so ubiquitous in mainstream software before telling enterprise CIOs about it?
Monday, August 04, 2008
Digging out from Under
Whew! I've submitted my Ph.D. thesis (finally) and am now waiting upon the reviewers. It should be a couple of months and then an oral defense. I may be able to post more regularly once I find my inbox so I can start clearing it.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
The World's First Metadata
I spent a good bit of 29 June at the British Museum in London. Those Brits really know how to loot! Attached is a picture of Mesopotamian girginakku from 5300 years ago. Girginakku were clay tags that were hung off of tablets or rolls to provide clues to their contents. They were originally used as tokens much like an IOU, but evolved into the world's first metadata.
The keepers of the markers ("rab girginakku") were the first metadata wranglers; the intellectual forebears of SemWebbers. Cool, eh?
On the right in the photo are bullae, clay envelopes containing girginakku, presumably to keep the girginakku from being tampered with before they were needed (sort of like a modern lead seal). Unfortunately, neither the girginakku nor the bullae were described in this detail or given their proper names on the descriptive cards near the artifacts. I only recognized them for what they were because I have recently been researching the history of metadata.
The keepers of the markers ("rab girginakku") were the first metadata wranglers; the intellectual forebears of SemWebbers. Cool, eh?
On the right in the photo are bullae, clay envelopes containing girginakku, presumably to keep the girginakku from being tampered with before they were needed (sort of like a modern lead seal). Unfortunately, neither the girginakku nor the bullae were described in this detail or given their proper names on the descriptive cards near the artifacts. I only recognized them for what they were because I have recently been researching the history of metadata.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Making Glass
Bernadette and I had the fun of learning something of the art of glass making last week. The resident glass blower at Oglebay Park, WV showed us the basics and let us make some paperweights. Great fun!
Monday, April 21, 2008
Semantic Technology Conference 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
SWAMM
The Software Agent Maintenance Model (SWAMM) is a NetLogo model of a software maintenance methodology I have been working on. A runnable Java applet of the model is available at: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dwood/models/SWAMMApplet/SWAMM.html
Monday, March 31, 2008
Cherry Blossoms 2008
Another view of the cherry blossoms surrounding the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC on Sunday, 30 March 2008. The Combat Air Patrol contrails are visible over the Washington Monument.
Cherry Blossoms 2008
Bernadette and I had the great fortune to view the cherry blossoms surrounding the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC at sunrise on Sunday, 30 March 2008. They were at their peak and the light was just perfect. It rained today, so we were especially lucky not to have put it off.
Appreciation of beauty seems so antithetical from the normal activities of Washington, DC, but perhaps that should make us try harder. The contrails of Combat Air Patrol jets painted the sky behind the blossoms.
Appreciation of beauty seems so antithetical from the normal activities of Washington, DC, but perhaps that should make us try harder. The contrails of Combat Air Patrol jets painted the sky behind the blossoms.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Semantic Conference Scheduling Application
This year's Semantic Technology Conference has a nifty new semantic conference scheduling tool, courtesy of fellow Zepheirans Uche and Eric. Nicely done, guys!
The scheduler allows you to graphically fill out a calendar of sessions that you want to attend. Conflicts are immediately visible. The faceted navigation on the left allows you to find sessions based on tagged data (speaker, company, topic, day, etc). When you are happy, you can import your schedule right into your ical-compliant calendar. I wish all conferences had this.
The scheduler allows you to graphically fill out a calendar of sessions that you want to attend. Conflicts are immediately visible. The faceted navigation on the left allows you to find sessions based on tagged data (speaker, company, topic, day, etc). When you are happy, you can import your schedule right into your ical-compliant calendar. I wish all conferences had this.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Beyond Redirection: Rich and Active PURLs
It has been a while since I posted about the new Persistent URL work being done by Zepheira and OCLC. That is partially because the work has gone much more slowly than we had planned. We have been actively gold plating the new PURL server because we are trying to satisfy several communities. The result, though, is laying the foundations for new services for the Web.
The key to the new PURL service is the typing of PURLs. The existing public PURL service at OCLC returns an HTTP 302 (Found) response, causing a Web client to redirect to another URL. The new PURL server allows PURLs to return one of several status codes (301, 302, 303, 310, 404 and 410).
We can go even further, though. The original PURL server had some internal concepts like "cloning" a PURL (basing a new PURL definition on an existing one) and "chaining" a PURL (allowing multi-person management of a URL resolution process). Combining these concepts with the choice of HTTP response codes got us thinking about arbitrary types of PURLs.
We have been experimenting with types of PURLs that combine with other services. A "Rich" PURL, for example, is the combination of a PURL and metadata. We have a prototype service that combine strong identifiers with rich metadata, providing the building blocks for other semantic applications. Rich PURLs are a combination of two related services: A PURL server for management of the resolution and RDF (or other metadata format) file hosting.
The W3C TAG finding regarding the use of HTTP 303 responses seems to suggest that we could use rich PURLs in interesting ways. For example, we could do the following:
A 301 PURL pointing to an RDF resource == Metadata about an information resource
A 303 PURL pointing to an RDF resource == Metadata about a non-information resource (i.e. a physical or conceptual resource)
That usage would be consistent with the TAG finding, even if it goes a bit beyond it.
NB: You can tell if you get a PURL by looking at the PURL header in an HTTP response.
But wait, there's more. What if a PURL pointed to a Web service (in the sense of dynamic content, not necessarily limited to SOA Web Services, but including them)? The combination of a Rich PURL and a metadata reference to a Web service yields an "Active PURL". That is, an Active PURL is a PURL naming a graph of metadata describing a Web service.
Consider a simple Web service like an RSS feed. Placing an Active PURL in front of that feed allows you to describe how that feed should be handled. You could name the facets that you want to use to make an Exhibit or provide any other presentation advice you desired.
Alternatively, an Active PURL might itself by a sort of Web service that provides dynamic metadata about another Web service and can either serve the metadata or redirect to its target service. Such an Active PURL could be used to name a SPARQL graph, accept query parameters for it and return metadata about it, such as a count of results or information on the meanings of columns in the result set. I believe that named graphs are very handy things and something that we as a community are paying inadequate attention to. Given that SPARQL may be the query language that finally integrates our silos of relational databases, fronting them with Active PURLs seems like a promising line of research.
Lists of URLs as proposed by Stu Weibel would be easy to implement as an Active PURL.
Perhaps the most interesting use of Active PURLs to enterprises might be the ability to provide standardized RDF metadata about SOA Web Services as well as relational databases. UDDI is so broken, we might as well fix it with existing SemWeb standards. That is not a new idea, but the application of Active PURLs to the problem is, I think.
The key to the new PURL service is the typing of PURLs. The existing public PURL service at OCLC returns an HTTP 302 (Found) response, causing a Web client to redirect to another URL. The new PURL server allows PURLs to return one of several status codes (301, 302, 303, 310, 404 and 410).
We can go even further, though. The original PURL server had some internal concepts like "cloning" a PURL (basing a new PURL definition on an existing one) and "chaining" a PURL (allowing multi-person management of a URL resolution process). Combining these concepts with the choice of HTTP response codes got us thinking about arbitrary types of PURLs.
We have been experimenting with types of PURLs that combine with other services. A "Rich" PURL, for example, is the combination of a PURL and metadata. We have a prototype service that combine strong identifiers with rich metadata, providing the building blocks for other semantic applications. Rich PURLs are a combination of two related services: A PURL server for management of the resolution and RDF (or other metadata format) file hosting.
The W3C TAG finding regarding the use of HTTP 303 responses seems to suggest that we could use rich PURLs in interesting ways. For example, we could do the following:
A 301 PURL pointing to an RDF resource == Metadata about an information resource
A 303 PURL pointing to an RDF resource == Metadata about a non-information resource (i.e. a physical or conceptual resource)
That usage would be consistent with the TAG finding, even if it goes a bit beyond it.
NB: You can tell if you get a PURL by looking at the PURL header in an HTTP response.
But wait, there's more. What if a PURL pointed to a Web service (in the sense of dynamic content, not necessarily limited to SOA Web Services, but including them)? The combination of a Rich PURL and a metadata reference to a Web service yields an "Active PURL". That is, an Active PURL is a PURL naming a graph of metadata describing a Web service.
Consider a simple Web service like an RSS feed. Placing an Active PURL in front of that feed allows you to describe how that feed should be handled. You could name the facets that you want to use to make an Exhibit or provide any other presentation advice you desired.
Alternatively, an Active PURL might itself by a sort of Web service that provides dynamic metadata about another Web service and can either serve the metadata or redirect to its target service. Such an Active PURL could be used to name a SPARQL graph, accept query parameters for it and return metadata about it, such as a count of results or information on the meanings of columns in the result set. I believe that named graphs are very handy things and something that we as a community are paying inadequate attention to. Given that SPARQL may be the query language that finally integrates our silos of relational databases, fronting them with Active PURLs seems like a promising line of research.
Lists of URLs as proposed by Stu Weibel would be easy to implement as an Active PURL.
Perhaps the most interesting use of Active PURLs to enterprises might be the ability to provide standardized RDF metadata about SOA Web Services as well as relational databases. UDDI is so broken, we might as well fix it with existing SemWeb standards. That is not a new idea, but the application of Active PURLs to the problem is, I think.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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