This post is for my parents.
Over the years, as they have seen me grow up, branch out, move out, move away, they have repeatedly asked what it is that i do. And my erstwhile answer, writing software, is ever more inaccurate. Yes, i do write software, but i do so much more, too.
I have always been an avid reader, I love to communicate new ideas, I cheerlead things that are below the radar. At the same time, I am much more interested to start than to finish. I love the first 20%, I loathe the last 20%. I am impatient, restless, driven.
I am passionate about knowledge, networks. I freely give away. I drink from the fire hose.
Serendipity is my drug, tunnel vision my kryptonite. I seek out the big ideas in every field that will reveal its treasures to my inquiries. I synthesize, recombine, mutate. infect.
As the ideaspace and the meatspace overlap in curious and intertwingled ways, as the virtual engulfs the real, I break open the floodgates for abundance where scarcity and drought prevailed.
I peddle in stigmergy, gfn, emergence, memetics, acceleration, bootstrapping, osmosis, power laws.
I am a trader in ideas.
Tag: identity
Names
People ask me sometimes why I insist on my full name, including the middle name, in attributions. Most people do, but you have to search for both Gregor J. Rothfuss and Gregor Rothfuss to get the full picture, and that leaves out attributions like Gregor or Greg (don’t use Greg, btw). You could argue that you don’t want that level of transparency, but face it, it is here. so anyway, I did a search on friendster to find a friend of mine, and I got 8 results. which one is it? Names define our identity. In the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. Now it does. So I am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? Some considerations:
- Only use meaningful combinations of characters. No ewrjp ewrerwh
- Make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
- Have mappings between languages
- Would numbers be impolite? Somedude23 certainly is
A linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. I wonder if it would be at a manageable length? Elke suggests Indian names (based on deeds) or email-style names which are based on association: someone@somewhere. Of course, for the glut of people at hotmail, that does not work, because the association is meaningless. I wonder what other naming schemes may be of interest?
2007-12-06: Thais try to have names as UUID: Any 2 families that are related will have the same last name, and usually quite complicated ones at that.
I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful. Here’s a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name. Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be.
2015-04-23: I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
2016-03-11: Changing your last name for some dude had always been in extremely bad taste. The confusion leading to it has always been puzzling to me.
We’ll each keep our last name and take the other’s name as our middle name.
2022-07-04: Names should be chosen
I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage arranged by your parents. It’s not the modern thing to do, and a sign of a very conservative traditional family.
Being assigned a name at birth will still be common place, but this name will primarily be a placeholder until the name choosing ceremony, when you get to choose your legal adult name. Perhaps this happens at 12, or 16. The bureaucratic friction in changing your name which is currently normal will be reduced to make it super easy to do. The name changes will also be tracked on the blockchains, making it both easy to monitor and hard to scam. They system would only work if there was a continuum between names, so changing a name was not a way to hide.
Once changing your name at the threshold of adulthood is easy, changing your name later during adulthood will also be easy. I’d expect people to go through life with multiple name stages. We see the hints of that now with nicknames, and trail names, and playa names, and online handles and pseudonyms. The main difference is that these new names will be legal and it will be easy to track their lineage, since the ledger of names is public. The average person might have 3 of 4 hames in their lifetime.
2022-07-19: Dolphin names
Dolphins cannot use voices as their identifying feature because it becomes distorted at different depths. They instead invent a melody – a pattern of sound frequencies held for specific lengths of time – that they use to identify themselves for the rest of their lives. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can even imitate the whistles of their friends, calling out their names if they are lost. Additional information, such as reproductive status, can be conveyed by changing the volume of different parts of the whistle, not unlike how people emphasize certain words to add nuance. Dolphins living among seagrass gave themselves a short, shrill name compared to the baritone sounds of dolphins living in muddier waters. Meanwhile, small pods displayed greater pitch variation than larger groups, which may help with identification when the probability of repeated encounters is higher. Marine researchers still don’t know why some bottlenoses base their whistles on family members and others on lesser acquaintances.
While the signature whistles of female dolphins will barely change throughout their life, male dolphins may adjust their whistle to mirror the signature whistle of their best friend. In addition to an individual signature whistle, groups of dolphins may invent a shared whistle to promote social cohesion.
Breeders to feeders
elke remarked yesterday that the meta trend underlying all the (mo)blog, social software, PIM, geodata pushes is the desire of people to rebuild their existence online, piece by piece. digital immortality? breeders becoming feeders of their digital selves?
i hope she will pick up this line of thought in her thesis.
Atom
I support the Log Format Roadmap because it has a fighting chance to become the first practical step to achieve CMS content interop. Blogs will drive adoption of the principles stated in against the grain. As a weblog vendor, I support it because it will drive the adoption of better tools, and will increase the market for everyone.
2003-06-27: Sam Ruby has been spearheading a major standardization effort in the blog world recently, and he has this to say about his motivations:
About a month ago, my interest and activity in this space kicked into high gear. I started attending weblogging conferences.
Far from claiming to have been the inspiration, it is still very nice to think that OSCOM was able to contribute to the drive towards standardization. This is the stuff we are talking about.
2004-06-08: So that is what Greg Stein has been up to. The sprint was much fun, as were the drinks.
Ever since Atom first popped up, I’ve been interested in it, and even attempted to join a small sprint/discussion at Seybold last year to talk about WebDAV. The bomb threat shut that down, but we simply moved locations for drinks rather than hacking 🙂 So while I’ve been tracking it generally, my specific current interest is through my work at Google. I’m the engineering manager for the Blogger group, so I’ve gotta pay some attention to what we’re signing up for 🙂
2005-09-06: All feeds for this blog now serve Atom 1.0. It will be interesting to watch if anyone notices / cares. Longer term, /atom.xml is the canonical url if you want to subscribe.
2006-10-18: RSS / ATOM / OPML schematron is much easier to work with than the mysterious feed validator code. Plus it works for really huge feeds. This has the README for the RSS validator. Pretty out of date, but a good starting point. For one, you need the latest schematron from Rick Jellife, not the old one on this site.
2006-11-21: Gdata JSON. They also do jsonp, and reuse the Atom serialization.
2006-12-01: GData for Google Spreadsheets. The data web circle gets more complete. This is (one) counterpart to the web formulas in Google Sheets. Now as to how GData can play in the semweb space. Maybe via Queso.
2007-01-31: Tim wonders how to use Atom categories properly. Link to the wikipedia url of the tag I’d say.
2007-02-14: If you browse to a page with an RSS or Atom feed, you get the option to immediately add that feed to Google Reader for mobile via Mobile Proxy Feed Discovery.
2007-03-31: Some Atom extensions by nature to encourage text mining. I don’t know.. They do not seem to reuse core Atom in their examples. Plus I am not sure how useful a word count really is.
2007-05-16: GdataServer
Generally speaking, the Lucene GData Server is an extensible syndication format server providing CRUD actions to alter feed content, authentication, optimistic concurrency and full text search based on Apache Lucene.
2007-05-25: APP frontend to LDAP. This might enable some interesting scenarios.
2007-06-01: Opensearch / Atom interface for Swiss whitepages. Nice!
Wir haben für unser Telefonbuch eine Schnittstelle entwickelt, welche es erlaubt unsere Telefondaten in anderen Applikationen oder Websites zu integrieren. Die Schnittstelle basiert auf dem Konzept von REST. Die Resultate werden als Atom-Feed geliefert, welcher mit OpenSearch- und tel.search.ch-spezifische Felder ergänzt ist. Mit Hilfe eines Schlüssels werden die Resultate auch strukturiert zurückgeliefert. Die Resultatzahl ist pro Abfrage auf 200 Einträge beschränkt.
2007-06-08: GData Fails as a Protocol
Gregor Rothfuss wondered whether I couldn’t influence people at Microsoft to also standardize on GData. The fact is that I’ve actually tried to do this with different teams on multiple occasions and each time the I’ve tried, certain limitations..
2007-06-10: Oy. And all this because I asked Dare why Microsoft doesn’t use APP.
There was quite a flurry of blogging about the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) over the weekend, all kicked off by Dare Obasanjo’s criticisms of the protocol. Some of the posts were critical of Dare and his motives, but I’m thankful he started the conversation.
2007-07-26: The chorus for putting more REST into GIS / mapping gets louder, yay
The only thing needed to bring together this messy new world Atlas, is a global agreement about the structure of the data used to annotate the maps, as well as agreement on the format for retrieving such.
2007-07-28: WFS simple was hijacked, as usual, by people who don’t understand why worse is better. This is why I am not in the least interested in WFS and am betting on APP instead.
if the geospatial standards community continues on this path of isolating itself, of looking upstream to the ISO rather than downstream to the distributed neogeo developer community, it will miss out on being connected to amazing things.
Here’s a Feature Demo of a RESTful WFS-T with a call for GE to support posting of features. I would go further and ask for APP support.
Version control for Collaborative Mapping. Calls for diffs and patches. Might be built on top of an APP infrastructure, imho
The next major area of tool improvement I see is expanding the wiki notion of editing to more of a merging revision control model, with branches, versions, patches and eventually expanding in to distributed repositories. The ‘patch‘ is a small piece of code that can be applied to a computer program to fix something. They are widely used in the open source software world, both to get the latest improvements, and to allow those who have commit rights to a source repository to review outside improvements before putting them in. This helps create the meritocracy around projects, as they don’t let just anyone in to the repository as they might break the build. Such a case is less likely with maps, but sometimes core contributors might want to see a couple sample patches before letting a new member in. In the GeoServer versioning WFS work we have a GetDiff operation that returns a WFS Transaction that can then be applied to another WFS. This fits in with the technical part of how a patch works – they’re really easy to apply to one’s dataset. But unfortunately a WFS transaction is not as easy to read as a code patch. The other great thing about patches is that when leaf nodes are updating their data they can just request the change set – the patches – instead of having to do a full check out. So I’m still not sure how to solve this problem, the WFS Transaction is the best I’ve got, but I think we can do better, have a nice little format that just describes what changed.
Better UIs for Collaborative Mapping. More calls for rollback tools, and would like to see GE post to geoserver, etc
I think we need more user friendly options for collaborative editing. Not just putting some points on a map, but being able to get a sense of the history of the map, getting logs of changes and diffs of certain actions. Editing should be a breeze, and there should be a number of tools that enable this. Google’s MyMaps starts to get at the ease of editing, but I want it collaborative, able to track the history of edits and give you a visual diff of what’s changed. Rollbacks should also be a breeze – if you have really easy tools to edit it’s also going to be easier for people to vandalize. So you need to make tools that are even easier to rollback.
2007-07-29: Atom Futures
AtomPub sits in a very strange place, as it has the potential to disrupt 6 or more industry sectors, such as, Enterprise Content Management, Blogging, Digital/Desktop Publishing and Archiving, Mobile Web, EAI/WS-* messaging, Social Networks, Online Productivity tools. As interesting as the adoption rates, will be people and sectors finding reasons not use it to protect distribution channels and data lockins with more complicated solutions. Any kind of data garden is fair game for AtomPub to rationalize.
2007-07-30: Towards signed feeds
Why Digital Signature? This idea was first proposed by James Snell, and it’s a good one. Mind you, the benefits are a little bit theoretical, since no feed-reading clients that I’ve seen actually check a digital signature. The argument for this is similar to that for TLS; a bad guy who could somehow insert a fake press release into the feed could make zillions by gaming the share price. A verifiable digital signature would let someone reading the feed know that the news in it really truly did come from Sun.
2007-07-31: Atom for KML. Nice. I want to do more, but this is a good start. The Atom / KML meme spreads. Perception is reality, and I approve.
2007-08-03: Appfs
appfs can mount remote resources exposed via the Atom Publishing Protocol as a local filesystem.
2007-08-07: RESTful partial updates. Maybe useful for APP / KML to supplement update
over the past couple of months, there’s been a lot of discussion about the problem of partial updates in REST-over-HTTP. The problem is harder than it appears at first glance. The canonical scenario is that you’ve just retrieved a complicated resource, like an address book entry, and you decide you want to update just one small part, like a phone number. The canonical way to do this is to update your representation of the resource and then PUT the whole thing back, including all of the parts you didn’t change. If you want to avoid the lost update problem, you send back the ETag you got from the GET with your PUT inside an If-Match: header, so that you know that you’re not overwriting somebody else’s change.
Zend Google Data Client
The Zend Google Data Client provides a PHP 5 component to execute queries and commands against the Google Data APIs.
2007-08-14: Winer on Atom. Sore loser.
2007-08-19: How to deal with the sliding window problem where feed producers update more often than consumers, and consumers thus might miss entries.
A standardized way to get at previous entries that have scrolled out of a feed, and at the complete archive.
2007-08-28: YouTube GData. Nice to see more media-heavy usages. Now we have pretty much all of them, only KML is missing.
2007-10-29: APP Lock-In. So cute. Microsoft is in a tight spot: Admit they have no strategy and use APP, or invent their own. It seems they are trying to build a case to do just that.
It seems that while we weren’t looking, Google move us a step away from a world of simple, protocol-based interoperability on the Web to one based on running the right platform with the right libraries. Usually I wouldn’t care about whatever bad decisions the folks at Google are making with their API platform. However the problem is that it sends out the wrong message to other Web companies that are building Web APIs. The message that it’s all about embracing and extending Internet standards with interoperability being based on everyone running sanctioned client libraries instead of via simple, RESTful protocols is harmful to the Internet. Unfortunately, this harkens to the bad old days of Microsoft and I’d hate for us to begin a race to the bottom in this arena.
2007-12-06: FeedSync. The full syncing requirement makes this heavy weight
Although FeedSync is capable of full-blown multi-master synchronization, there are all kinds of interesting uses, including simple one-way uses. Consider, for example, how RSS typically has no memory. Most blogs publish items into a rolling window. If you subscribe after items have scrolled out of view, you can’t syndicate them. A FeedSync implementation could enable you synchronize a whole feed when you first subscribe, then update items moving forward. It could also enable the feed provider to delete items, which you might not want if the items are blog postings, but would want if they’re calendar items representing cancelled events.
Avoid reunions
i attended a reunion on saturday, and i wish i hadn’t. memory is a curious thing, but the way it works, it tends to emphasize the good, and neglect the bad. i’d much rather have fond memories of a past long gone, than to destroy that illusion in the vain attempt to bring it back. for that particular reunion, i now have fresh memories of people i held in high esteem, and the new memories are far less impressive than the ones they replace. a pity really to spoil it like that.
identity theft
while dubya claims to enhance security by fostering denunciation, the theft of identities continues unabated.
the government has failed to protect the voters from identity fraud, and instead protects only the banks and government bureaucrats
and don’t think it only happens in the us. companies everywhere are busily profiling their customers (in able to deliver personalized spam), and the notion that any data that is created through the activities of a person should be their property is foreign to them. maybe i should get a new face, and jump into the fray.
Hailstorm alternatives
Dave Winer’s xmlStorageSystem is a proposal to implement a hailstorm like cloud to store xml data. Bery interesting. I hope this gets broad support. Google has already some juicy stuff.
xns.org has been developing xns for several years and aims for the hailstorm space. it seems like every day brings a new initiative in the web services arena. note to self: i ought to write up a comparison of the various identity services that are being developed:
- hailstorm
- xmlstoragesystem
- xns
oh my!
Gregor J. Rothfuss 