Month: May 2003

bahrainBlog

The typical television commercials we get to watch on the now 10s of satellite channels and ALL of the terrestrial channels in the Gulf I think are so low in creative quality, that they verge on the obscene. Add to the fact that most if not all seem to be targeted to “sub-intelligent” viewers – meaning the Gulf Arabs in particular – that they are downright demeaning.

finally, a voice from the middle east. welcome, mahmood. it seems that the rss feed in xaraya beta is broken, what better incentive to fix it than to enable a friend to reach the world. consider it fixed 🙂

Quack

<miko> gregor you’re such a geek 😉
miko wonders when gregor will start speaking in XML
<miko> would be no problems with interruptions tho cos everyone would have to wait until the </comment> tag
<drew> That won’t be long.
<gregor> i would have long ago, but can’t make up my mind whether i should emit atrtributes or elements
<miko> and getting last word would be easy with </argument>
<miko> hehe oh dear
<gregor> hm, i should reserve a namespace
<johnny> gjr ?
<drew> gregorspeaksxml.com
<johnny> that’s not specific enough
<gregor> xmlns:quack=”http://greg.abstrakt.ch/2003/speech&#8221;
<johnny> quack 🙂 hehe
<johnny> you need a personal namespace though
<johnny> unless you wanna share your namespace with the rest of us 🙂
<johnny> then we can all quack
<miko> see we laugh but i bet he goes and does it 🙂
<miko> that would make us quackers
<gregor> the incentive is there for sure

world wide watchers

Basically, it attempts to protect chemical plants, reservoirs and airports—all targets where terrorists could get horrifying results with relatively little effort—by a system involving 10M Webcams and a stay-at-home army of watchful citizens.

this doesn’t go nearly far enough. to make this really secure, webcams need to be everywhere. watch the watchers in an endless recursion.

Open Source Research

monday night was spent at HSG talking about open source, community dynamics, reputational games, marketing strategies, scalability issues, entrepreneurial aspects, parallels to the scientific process, open source versus open standards, and many more which i since forgot. in attendance were.

after a blogging pitch, michi and myself demonstrated the use of blogs for scholarly communication. with success, it seems, some are already toying with blogs, and with luck we will get blogs.ifb.unisg.ch up and running soon.

Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web

i want to invite jo walsh to oscom 3. she recently gave a talk which would fit into the semantic web track quite nicely.

this is a kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places.
it is an experiment in gonzo geographical data collection, with location grid data extrapolated from and converted between different sources on the internet, and new connections made between them.
it is a semantic web project; it provides a scheme for semantic web identification of places via unique uris. the interaction with people aspect uses FOAF, in the hope that friend-of-a-friend networks can benefit from collaborative filtering as well as collaborative mapping.

very cool.

Operation transformation

hydra makes me want to have a mac.

Editing documents in groups can be a challenge. Versioning systems like cvs or subversion can help your group to keep a consistent copy of your document, but don’t go that extra distance. Wouldn’t it be great to edit the same document, live, in real time, together with everyone in your group?

Hydra uses a replicated architecture with concurrency control being achieved by a technique called operation transformation: operations which arrive out of date are transformed so that they can be executed without disrupting the session (“optimistic concurrency control”). An overview about the techniques and problems can be found in Operational Transformation in Real-Time Group Editors: Issues, Algorithms, and Achievements.

full stop

CrashBonsai is the creation of John Rooney, an artist who is torn between the desire to create and destroy. Recently, he has been making bonsai plants, and combining them with model cars and trucks which he has creatively smashed and melted, to create “CrashBonsai,” little living car crash sculptures.