Category: Internet

My trusty Palm Vx will no longer take a charge. As the Pythons would say, “It’s bleeding demised.” Which would be less of a problem if its address book data were synced to my laptop, but when I was using the Palm 4 beta (the last time I got a sync to happen successfully—another issue) the address data never came across.

The Vx was an “old-generation” handheld, back when people with USB connections were the exception rather than the rule, cell phones were separate devices, and Palm still had overwhelming market share. If I were to be in the market for an inexpensive new handheld I wonder what it would be…

One of the people we met at the eBusiness Conference on Thursday is asking the $42,000 question: how well do these technologies coexist? He writes,

“I wondered if you had any work/research going on in the space of Web Svcs deployment environment with either .net vs J2EE and/or both co-existing.

We have completed a prototype EJB/J2EE ws in a Websphere app container but have a grp of dev who are more VB and Vis C++ programmers. I want to consider how to leverage their skills in this space where possible.”

I guess the question I would have back is, why not? But as I wrote back, “Sadly I have little actual deployment experience in this area, having been closely focused on business school for the last two years.” Anybody out there know better than I do?

Jim McGee: Bootstrapping weblogs at the Kellogg School of Management. Ah, so that’s how they’re doing it at Kellogg, my option 2. Jim teaches a ten-week course in Knowledge Management at Kellogg in which the class members create weblogs. “Mildly subversive,” indeed, but I think it’s a good way to get future business leaders thinking about sharing knowledge and about the power of the flow of information.

Jim also says he’s been subscribed to my RSS feed ([Macro error: Can’t call the script because the name “rsslink” hasn’t been defined.]
) for a while. Always great to meet a reader. I didn’t find Jim the conventional way (my referer logs) — he’s the first hit at Google for “kellogg weblog”. By way of comparison I’m somewhere around the 19th hit for “sloan weblog”—not that I blog about Sloan that often.
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I just got out of Tim Berners-Lee’s discussion of the Semantic Web at the 2002 MIT eBusiness Conference. As it turns out, I think Dave’s description of what the semantic web concept means is closer to describing it than mine, but mine is a complementary vision. Fundamentally, the semantic web is about giving meaning to raw data present on the web in other formats, such as plain old HTML pages, so that the meaning of a particular piece of data and its relationship to other data on the Web can be understood by machines. The key pieces of the vision are:

• A common understanding that data in the semantic web can be expressed in a subject, verb, object framework
• A common way of identifying what a given piece of data is through applying a unique URI through a framework called RDF
• A set of ontologies that relate different semantic concepts together.

Dave’s example is bang on for the basic concept – “TBL” (subject), “MIT eBusiness Conference” (object), “will be presenting a keynote at” (verb). I think it’s complementary to what Google does. Google knows that something is authoritative because of the link relationships it has—I link to and am linked to by a lot of sites and therefore my articles float higher in the system than a page that isn’t linked to by or doesn’t itself link to anything else.

But that only goes so far. If I’m searching for information on a common noun like jaguar, Google doesn’t know a priori whether the information that it returns to me is about Jaguar the car, jaguar the animal, Jaguar the Atari gaming device, etc. The search engine Manjara at Yale can take a stab at separating the links by clustering the pages based on commonalities in the words on each page. But the semantic web concept gives the author power to identify what he’s writing about by unequivocally expressing the linkage to a semantic definition through RDF.

What about my example? It extends the idea of all this data being ontologically parseable and imagines that data being passed about by Web Services. So if you can express through a URI linkage what you mean by the title of a weblog entry, or the price of a contract line item, then the system receiving the web service call can interpret your request in a more reliable way without having to meet system by system and agree on your taxonomy beforehand.

Alas, I didn’t get to talk to TBL before he was hustled out. Maybe I can get a chance to open a dialogue with him before I graduate and see if I’m on track.
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John Robb points to this new weblog from a B-school student at Kellogg. Welcome aboard, Jeb.

John: I’m hurt, man. Here I am, a management student in Boston, blogging for over a year on business and technology issues! What am I, chopped liver?? 🙂
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You saw it in these pages first: Cape Clear has a Mail to Google interface.
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Dave talks about Tim Berners-Lee’s semantic web. Dave, I don’t think I get it either, but here’s my shot at another, complementary vision:

1. The Manila API defines a message to consist of a bunch of things, including title, message body, potentially link and news item department, and other whatnots.
2. The Blogger API defines a message to consist of a slightly different bunch of things, including a message body.
3. With the semantic web, you could have data about both APIs living on a server somewhere, including how they map to each other. Then any Manila enabled tool could post to anything that supported the Blogger API, as long as the receiving tool was aware that the semantic mapping was out there somewhere.

Or, in a business context (well, the previous point was a business context too):

1. My application deals in line items for a government contract.
2. So does the government’s, except theirs structures line items completely differently — it views the important elements as the financial payment data, where I care about how the widgets are to be made.
3. I’ve never done business with the government before, but if my system uses a semantic mark up that is available on the net and is mapped to the government’s system, I can send them a transaction marked up in my format and theirs will know how to interpret it without any extra coding.

I may be way off base here. But I’m presenting a poster at MIT’s Annual eBusiness Conference on Thursday and will hopefully get to talk to Tim about this in more depth (he’s speaking at lunch).
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Interconnected: Googlematic. You can now do a Google search using AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger; see the page for details. This is the sort of incredible mind bomb I was hoping to see when Google opened up its new API.

It occurs to me that someone should take the next logical step and create an email gateway to Google. There are times that it’s helpful to have a permanent record of searches, for instance when researching a topic for a paper. Email would be one way to automate that process.
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Google: Google Web APIs. I’m getting really excited about this—integrating Google search through SOAP with AppleScript. Integrating the results of a Google search, as data not a link, in a web page. Long term trending of topics that I want to keep up. Making ego surfing a lot easier.
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New York Times: Microsoft, I.B.M., and Verisign to Cooperate on Web Security. A preannouncement of WS-Security, “a standard set of extensions to … SOAP … [which] can be used to build security features into Web services applications.”

No detail of what is involved, except that WS-Security will “work with existing security software technologies … like Kerberos and public key encryption.” Apparently the spec will be published, but no words when.

I’m glad to see Microsoft and Big Blue working together on this, but with no substance behind the announcement it smells of a PR move to reassure nervous customer execs.
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Wired: Software Writers Patently Enraged. In a nutshell, software company A is awarded a patent for a specific method of doing something that lots of other software companies do (in this case, encrypting and decrypting documents). Company A then goes after Software Companies B and C to request license fees for infringement. Companies B and C argue that the patent should never have been issued, since their products considerably pre-date the patent application and since at least one has published “prior art” describing the technique in question.

There have been variations of this story written many times in recent memory, including such lulus as British Telecom claiming a patent on the hyperlink. In the Rambus case, the machinery of justice seems to be grinding against obviously fraudulent patents. But the more severe problem for most software companies seems to be these patents that many would argue never should have been issued in the first place.

Am I missing something? It seems like the PTO should be finding the prior art and refusing to issue the patents. Without this, all software writers would seem compelled to develop enormous patent application libraries on the off chance that someone will come along and patent something they wrote five years ago–a kind of IP Mutually Assured Destruction?
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Salon: A unified theory of software evolution (via Slashdot). The upshot is that software development (a) goes much more slowly than a linear rate; (b) is driven by various feedback loops including market demand, internal debugging, and the whims of individual developers; (c) can be characterized as a tradeoff between debugging and growth. The author of the theory, Meir Lehman, characterizes the issue as managing entropy.

While this doesn’t seem groundbreaking on the surface (heck, even Microsoft has figured out the last point), it’s a fact that escapes most managers of software development efforts, often with disastrous consequences (remember Rhapsody?). It’s also funny that, even in a surface examination of this question, you run into the most painful problems with software engineering: how do you measure software development? how do you manage the trade-off between specifications and adapting to the unknown?
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The Confluence Project: ” The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.” Thanks to Shel for pointing this out. So far, out of the 12,757 confluences (latitude and longitude intersections) out there that occur on land there have been 1611 documented by the project. This is a pretty cool idea—and seems to be pretty well executed.
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So I just tried out the new Google feature — sites that are related to yours. My favorite match–the first one after my homepage: the Amazon page for TMBG’s Mink Car. However, it does pull up Doc, Adam Curry, Wesley Felter (Hack the Planet), and Flangy… but not Dave.
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Infoworld: HP scoops Gelato into Linux:

“HEWLETT-PACKARD ON Monday announced the formation of the Gelato Federation, advancing its agenda to develop Intel’s 64-bit Itanium processor family as a commodity chip platform for the Linux operating system….HP’s hope for the Gelato Federation is that it will blend ingredients from the research community, the Linux open-source community, and Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chip family to solve problem of scalability, grid computing, and other architectures based on those three ingredients.

Dig deeper: www.gelato.org: focus on “real world problems in academic, government and industrial research.” Dig still deeper: Open Source Development Labs, of whom HP is also a sponsor. Mission: carrier class and data center Linux.

What’s going on? HP invests in two Linux based consortiums aimed at different market segments, unified around the idea of improving the performance of Linux especially on very high end hardware. Thought: they’re fighting other competitors at both ends of the server market by developing a high quality scalable operating system that is open and essentially commoditized.

Can they capture value? Right now, I think their issue is mostly getting back in the game.
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