Sat, Nov 20, 2004
My Blogging Patterns
#
I recently replaced the blosxom
calendar plugin on my right-hand sidebar with the
flatarchives. One
interesting side effect is that it shows a remarkable consistency in
my blogging patterns over the past year and a half. July, August, and
November have been heavy blogging months for me, whereas September has
been particularly dry. There's a simple explanation for the September
numbers: burnout. Not quite sure how to interpret the heavy blogging
months, though. (5UX)
/personal |
Posted at 12:17pm
Do NICs Exist?
#
DougEngelbart, the inspiration behind BlueOxenAssociates and one of
our advisors, gave a
talk for
the Bay Area FutureSalon last night. I've heard him give this talk a
hundred times, but it's always an interesting experience. I tend to
pay more attention to the audience than to Doug -- observing their
reactions to different slides or anecdotes, listening closely to the
questions. (5US)
I also monitor my own reactions, which have become surprisingly
consistent and more intense over the past few years. It not only
demonstrates the key points where I differ from Doug, but also the
growing convictions I have in my own beliefs. TheBlueOxenWay is
heavily influenced by Doug, but it's not identical to his way of
thinking. (5UT)
A key difference relates to Doug's view of
NetworkedImprovementCommunities? (NICs). An audience member asked
whether there were any examples of NICs that currently exist. Doug
said no. That's wrong. If you listen to or read Doug's description
of NICs, then you can point to many, many examples of them. That's
not to say that all of these groups are effective NICs, but they
certainly practice bootstrapping and they certainly emphasize
knowledge capture and sharing. (5UU)
The problem is not that NICs do not exist, it's that they are not
aware that they are NICs. Once they realize the importance of certain
practices, they can be explicit about evaluating and improving them.
The challenge is not creating NICs, it's improving them. (5UV)
JamieDinkelacker is currently writing a paper with a similar thesis,
where he identifies several existing NICs and evaluates them based on
Doug's written criteria. It will be an important contribution to the
literature, and I'm really looking forward to it. (5UW)
/collaboration |
Posted at 12:06pm
Wed, Nov 17, 2004
Purple Good, Red Bad
#
EricSinclair spotted this gem:
"Let's
Paint the Town Purple." The author makes a very compelling case, but
we're not going to change our color scheme anytime soon. (4RT)
(For PurpleNumber-specific hilarity, don't miss MarkPilgrim?'s
"Pink
Numbers.") (4RU)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 10:52am
Mon, Nov 15, 2004
i-names for Sale
#
I've mentioned IdentityCommons over and over again for the past year.
(See "Identity
Commons: Empowering the Individual" for a detailed introduction.)
IdentityCommons global i-names are now available, and until January 25, 2005, you can
purchase
the rights to an i-name for 50 years for only $25. I've posted
more details at the
WateringHole. (4QN)
My global i-name is =eekim. (I
also have =Eugene.Kim and =Eugene.Eric.Kim.) Join the
crowd, and support a very worthwhile project.
Buy an i-name today! (4QO)
/collaboration/tools |
Posted at 3:04pm
Blue Oxen Company Blog
#
BlueOxenAssociates now has a company
blog in addition to its collaboratory
blog. Be sure to check it out and subscribe to its
RSS feed. (4QM)
/blueoxen |
Posted at 2:39pm
Sun, Nov 14, 2004
Election Redux: A Call for Conversations
#
Trudging through the surge of commentary in the blogosphere following
the elections, KellanElliottMcCrea's
post jumped out at me.
He wrote: (4Q2)
There is a political theory that says that people who disagree with
you aren't fundamentally bad people, but misguided, or perhaps coming
from different backgrounds. Having just spent a couple of hours
talking to someone who voted for Bush I'd have to say I disagree. He
is superficially a good person, but deep down firmly believes that
might is right, American lives are more important then any other
lives, that policies which discriminate on race make statistical
sense, human rights are a privilege but capital rights are
inalienable. How do you answer that? We can quite civilly agree to
disagree, and go back to our regular neutral pleasant conversations
not to mention a few moments of uneasy solidarity making fun of
Christian fundamentalists, but the chasm of understanding is so vast I
can't imagine what crossing it would look like. (4Q3)
I know many people who feel the same way as Kellan, and I find this
troubling. Is intelligent discourse truly a lost cause? Are we as
polarized as those
red and blue maps make it seem? Is conversation pointless? (4Q4)
No, no, and no! (4Q5)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 5:07pm
Subclassing Perl Interfaces
#
GerryGleason, who has done a ton of work for PurpleWiki recently, and
I have had an ongoing discussion about when to use base classes in
Perl. The reason the question comes up at all is that Perl base
classes do not behave the way base classes do in "real"
object-oriented languages. Because Perl does very little in the way
of type-checking, defining interfaces as Perl base classes doesn't
give you the same benefits as it would in other languages. (4PS)
Nevertheless, when you have multiple classes with the same interface,
I think it's good practice to define the interface in a base class, if
only for the discipline of doing so. When we were designing a new
pluggable back-end architecture for PurpleWiki, Gerry and I first
discussed the API using the Wiki, then Gerry went off and implemented
three different backends simultaneously. Today, I created a base
class for those backends, and in the process of subclassing them, I
discovered a bunch of inconsistencies and subtle bugs in the
implementation. The point is not that Gerry is a sloppy programmer.
Anyone would have made the same mistakes in the process of
implementing a new architecture quickly, especially doing (and
learning from) multiple implementations simultaneously. The point is
that the process of creating a base class forced us to rigorously
examine the interfaces of each implementation. Even though Perl
doesn't do as much as it could with base classes, the processing of
implementing base classes and subclassing them forces us to do our own
checking, which results in better code. (4PT)
Perl doesn't leave you totally helpless when it comes to base classes,
although again, you have to do extra work to get the behavior you
want. For example, you can "assure" that methods are overloaded by
defining methods that croak in the base class. If these methods are
not overloaded, then they will croak when they are called. (4PU)
/tech/perl |
Posted at 2:02pm
Sat, Nov 13, 2004
Connectivity Parties, For-Benefit Organizations, and Post-Modernism
#
I spent some time today with GerryGleason, who was in town for the
weekend. I was telling him about a CodingSprint BlueOxen was
planning, and he asked what those were. When I explained them to him,
he said, "Oh, we used to do those for NFS. We called them
ConnectivityParties?." Back then, folks would gather together at
conferences, set up a bunch of hardware, and code away. Yet another
demonstration of the timeliness of good patterns, regardless of what
they're called. Of course, the ubiquity of high-speed wireless and
four-pound laptops make it much easier these days. (4PK)
Gerry had two other language-related insights. We spoke about the
problem of non-profits getting caught up with the language of
business, and thus losing sight of the importance of things like
volunteerism, caring, and so forth. I pointed out that the term,
"non-profit," immediately frames these organizations in the language
of business. Gerry told me that he had had this conversation with
PhilCubeta in the past, and that they had come up with the term,
"for-benefit." I like it. Even though BlueOxenAssociates is an LLC
(a legal for-profit), I think I'll start referring to it as
"for-benefit," because that captures the essence of what we're trying
to accomplish. (4PL)
On a more scholarly note, Gerry is reading KenWilber's
Integral Psychology, which has a chapter on modernism and
post-modernism. Wilber says that out of modernism emerged three
distinct disciplines -- art, religion, and science -- and that science
(and by proxy, rationality) eventually trumped the other two.
Postmodernism disputes the distinctions between those three fields.
However, many people -- both critical theorists and scientists --
misinterpret postmodernism as a rejection of science. I don't think
science and postmodernism are orthogonal. You can be a good scientist
and reject the notion of universal objectivity. The problem is with
framing. "Postmodernism" is framed as a reaction to "modernism,"
which is historically accurate, but which undermines the essence of
its underlying values. I recognize, without irony, that this is a
postmodernist interpretation of why postmodernism is misinterpreted.
I'll shut up now. (4PM)
/personal |
Posted at 6:32pm
Tue, Nov 09, 2004
Purple 1969 Flashback
#
JamieDinkelacker and I had a very stimulating conversation about all
things collaboration and DougEngelbart last night. Something he said
about the IETF reminded me of something. If
you check out IETF RFC 2 (circa
1969), you'll notice alphanumeric references in front of each paragraph.
Those are equivalent to what we call hierarchical identifiers in
PurpleNumbers. (4DE)
This is no coincidence, of course. Hierarchical identifiers are
stolen from DougEngelbart's Augment system, where they were called
structural location numbers. As for RFC 2, it was written using
Augment by BillDuvall? at SRI. (4DF)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 6:27pm
Sat, Nov 06, 2004
The Wiki Prayer
#
LisaPiazza pointed me to the WikiPrayer, which she discovered in an
article on
Wikis in EducauseReview: (2S6)
Please, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference (2S7)
/collaboration/tools |
Posted at 12:45am
Fri, Nov 05, 2004
Software Lifecycle According to Different Programmers
#
FenLabalme has a
diagram
that he often shows people and that he recently put on the Web. It
shows three different answers to the question, "What is the software
lifecycle?" -- one from a new CS grad, one from a senior programmer,
and one from an experienced software architect. (2S5)
/tech/programming |
Posted at 11:47pm
