Whim

How To Find A Cable Car In The Fog: Category-Based Navigation

Something else I found (in addition to the Center in a Box I'm now working on!), in my recent searching at Berkeley: "Category-Based Navigation" -- drilling down through the faceted data, in this case describing photographs of "life at Berkeley & environs."

(or "dim light" anyway...)

When I recently went looking for interesting doings at my grad school alma mater, U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), I found not only Professor Glushko's "Document Engineering" initiative (with whom I've made contact, and will help with beta-testing one of their products soon), but also this quite interesting, Endeca-like (I'd seen their dog & pony show about a year ago?) drill-down navigation and search tool.

I find this really interesting, and would love to someday work on the metadata design for this sort of approach.

(See final link for your cable car in the fog...)

Wm.

http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/flamenco.html
= BAILANDO ("dance" in Spanish), or "Better Access to Information using
Language Analysis and New Displays and Organizations"
= FLAMENCO ("pink bird" in Spanish ;^) stands for "FLexible information Access
using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations"
(Python, MySQL & Lucene)

Commercial Implementations
"Several commercial implementations of ideas related to those we've
explored in Flamenco are now available. These include Endeca, Siderean
(formerly bpallen's teapot system), and DieselPoint."

SIMS 202: Information Organization and Retrieval
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is202/f02/PhotoProject.html
The Photo Project
"...outcome of this project will be a sensible and usable classification to
structure and describe photos, and a browser application to look at the
photos within that classificatory structure..."

Example drill-down search URL:
http://flamenco.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco/202photos/Flamenco?q=conditions:3/location:35&group=location
Conditions = "Lighting | Brightness | Dim"
Location = "Geographic Area | U.S. | California | Bay Area | San Francisco County"
Results: 7 pictures (one including cable car in the fog...)
====================================

MapQuest 3 Pointer: 44 Cedar Street in 2 Nearby Towns

Always entertaining to come upon ambiguities in information exchange.

A friend e-mailed saying we're "practically neighbors" when MapQuest helped him to see where I live (47 Kingston, Somerville (near Davis Square)). He let me know he lives at "44 Cedar Street, near Porter Square." And so I promptly turned to the same online tool to see where that might be, and typed in "44 Cedar Street, Cambridge, MA", and indeed found a very nearby address! But it wasn't really near Porter Square, unless you gave that a quite wide interpretation... Hmmmm.

Ah-hah, I wonder is it good old 44 Cedar Street, Somerville, MA? Ah, yes, clickity-click, type-type, and there it is, another nearby address (and near Porter Square). Interesting.

It was then I discovered that MapQuest can do something I'd never asked it to before: "Add Location":
You can put a bunch of addresses on one map, label them, assign icons (like pins, stars, and so forth), and get an enormous, quite custom, URL that you can then zing around in e-mail, blogs, and browsers to share the joy.
Fun!
================
My e-mail back to Lars:
MapQuest: Maps: map

I'm enclosing the enormous URL to a funny custom map (with not one but three
positions) I drew using MapQuest:
- my house
- your house
- and your ghostly Cambridge cousin's house
[that is, the "44 Cedar Street" in that other nearby, "Somerville wannabe"
town ;^) ]

=============
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?mapdata=EifUonSP7c3NebxVtmnURk6gd9UfB7oWLkAmxk5YqGYn1XOtbF3ImklA8DcrGdnaAPAezR9hRk6Ar1eyGlQm2uCD%2fhiBqoXEJzZS1%2fnPeXY9wntTEmBQSuHLkragdC2wl1hY1j5Z0P8%2bb4NVxANJfybniK6liEFZGSOo%2f9rL%2fANrRLixeRKDp1NMEhzlgH4rmX566zOuExdr6ZmXlcJ1aK1LAqRwrLUz4EHiRH%2fRCjvGmPLTwkpIPJw3mienpHT4T5IDTThmk0%2fPSqv1Tviz%2fscKC3K8xcPWc%2fkKeYwU8V5ldNEir42Uifu6rjpcBMwBPeMM0lDMskjIP4Qm8NZrmFmAX1KeJ8aTpNopGzEiyRCnEfw3FdRTPmtZ1Knte1Kq%2f1m2ID%2fmDbyeKKYgCUFzRqGQ2DN0XIT1tavUnF1w7cnDIjeBpWK5KepkVYUnGfABhh0i7TwfGPRFnjUTEf%2fIwyfqCRYPmttadqNryWLG4LEA153ai6UUhBaa3%2bPClHRB%2bI%2fumBzBC0NvbLCCONH8XmJCSXLANiTCdk35yZvJ9T5DQy7nPviiEiAZuG34HDZFUvqWWarGOPUVhRclxMD%2bjiuqxZzUTun8JWAaZ67fE%2fJC3PsS8hJYJ1sSj9fCB2r%2bqx1%2bIUpRpsmUjQGMUxbT%2fZR2jyKAzAhY5IyYb7faBy%2fLVJDCSDPsQYzmVBxSQQgCR8cIRB85AMGlrqTh2fR2rddWjSJBLyfVEVyW0hp%2f1%2bipNBtgfofDrmktqaT9Wy7a%2fMM5FzCCKHsdPPGYk1a5j1YRt5u5ZKARJyaQNAHfiyCC6crIHd%2fjvF7KZZzj6yBbqKBtjl3bFSrhWGuHHJmHtDziIhj9z%2bqLZWK3SI012Wzfdb5mP8PCh1a4vSD25%2fw7dHDGBjUsklGL7m0cC%2fa%2bHBxUwr5BetQ3JcErDTlbRfuHwLJQHn6Dtv%2fX2BapSLKM0mMPuMN9jYA%3d
=============

It's funny because though you did mention "near Porter," you didn't say which city, and I first typed in Cambridge (!). Interestingly (as you'll see on the map, if you can get your browser to swallow the whole enormous long URL -- you may have to manually chop out any linebreaks created by e-mail sending & receiving), the 44 Cedar in Cambridge is even more of a "practically neighbors" location...

Undoing Five Years of Damage (?)

It's a little unfair, and yet I find I have to write up my feelings and conclusions from a little local discovery yesterday.

We're talking about the exciting techie information world of "retrospective conversion," the two-word term of art coined by librarians a couple decades ago when they faced the daunting task of getting all that paper-based catalog information online.

Yesterday's little discovery wasn't of a situation that daunting, but it also was a situation you'd think (in glorious hindsight, of course) wasn't as inescapable as the librarian's plight. For decades (centuries?), librarians had to use paper. But what excuse was there, in this other case, for adopting proprietary software solutions in the recent (dim?) history of 1998 web application development?

The nearby (unnamed) university situation was that since 1998 (data collection more in earnest since 2001) one school had devised an online course website build tool, using ColdFusion (writing to Oracle).

By spring of 2003 someone concluded that it was best to abandon that proprietary format approach, to migrate course software to the wider university-based Java offering, and to spend some money "retrospectively converting" those five or so years of course instance data sets into a nice, neutral, TEI-Lite XML vocabulary. This remedial effort restores that data to its original state of "free" potential once more, by means of rendering to a standards-based, open source, text-based, openly processable information format. And so this modest investment in Perl mongering salvages the larger investment in corporate memory, and effectively "banks" the content, against some yet to be foreseen purpose/application.

-----
So, my feelings and conclusions?
Well, I have to say it's really kind of interesting (amusing?) (perhaps a bit of schadenfreude there...?) to find this example of the need for "retrospective conversion" as applied to such a short stint of history (fewer than 5 years!), as opposed to that enormous legacy catalog data libraries faced.

Maybe what this discovery really ought to be is a bit of a humbling message to overzealous "solutions providers" (like yours truly?) evangelizing certain approaches... On the other hand, I also think it pretty well validates my avoidance (since ca. 1999) of anything short of Java, XML, Unicode, and other real standards-based, open source, text-based solutions. No more Microsoft
VB, Lotus Notes, Macromedia Flash/ColdFusion and the like for me.

Anyway, a bit of vindication, for one (me) who's been there ("done that"), but has since been pretty well able to renounce those kinds of dev. environments.

Wm.

European Commission v. Open Source

Clicking this morning over to the homepage for Apache Cocoon Lenya (a Swiss-initiated, open source concern), my websurf was interrupted for 60 seconds by this announcment (read below):

[Gist: Patents v. Open; sign a petition (they say they've got quarter million); this news is already a little late ("August 27").]
================================
Update: More patent news (Microsoft's IE use of ActiveX):
Setback for Microsoft Ripples Through the World Wide Web

"The court ruling and its potential impact, according to Mr. Weitzner, points to the larger issue of the need to keep the basic software of the Web free of patent royalties."
``If you try to charge individual companies for patents on Web standards, you risk balkanizing the Web and breaking it,''

Plaintiff: Michael Doyle, the founder of Eolas Technologies in Chicago, while he was an adjunct professor at the University of California at San Francisco. Wants $1.47 a pop for Windows licenses sold...

Consortium of firms working to minimize damage to web browsing experience: Real Networks, Sun, Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft.
========================================

Important notice

On September 1st the European Commission is going to vote a revised
version of the European Patentability rules. The proposed revision
contains a set of serious challenges to Open Source development since
regulation regarding software patents will be broadly extended and
might forbid independent development of innovative (Open Source and
not) software-based solutions.

The European Open Source community is very concerned about the upcoming
new regulation and has organized a demo protest for August 27, asking
Open Source supporting sites to change their home pages to let everyone
know what is going on at the European Parliament.
[ The Apache Software Foundation has decided to support this initiative, and this is why you
are seeing this page. ]

For further information please see
http://swpat.ffii.org and
http://petition.eurolinux.org.
[ You will be redirected automatically to the Cocoon homepage in 60 seconds
(or continue on to cocoon.apache.org/lenya/index2.html). ]

Gregor Rothfuss Sporting An Apple Sweatshirt

I'm happy to be hosting Gregor here in Somerville, Massachusetts, for a bit.

And I'm happy to be having a glass of wine with him, as we cavort in Apple and Wyona gear.
Now sitting at each of our Movable Type blogs (he on his ultra-non-Mac I.B.M. Thinkpad).
G'night, all.
Wm.

BlogChalk - Where Added To Who

Spend enough time looking at blogs, you learn a gazillion things.

Phil Wolff not only actually said something nice about me ;^), but his "a klog apart" is rife with blog-o-stuff I just gotta learn about.

One step at a time.

Here's the "blogchalk" phenomenon:

---

This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Massachusetts, Somerville, Davis Square, English, Italian, William, Male, 41-45, Technology, Literature. :)

---

Slight interpretive services: I speak English (I am American, of Irish descent); I also claim to make my way satisfactorily in Italian (lived and worked there two years). My interests include Technology (web development stuff, XML & so forth), and Literature (including theater).

My first Chalk Searches:
http://bstpierre.org/bc/
"Davis Square" = 0
"Somerville" = 0 (!)
"Massachusetts" = 6
3 were dupes, somebody in Haverhill
1 featured James Bond girls homepage mega-pic (Taunton, Weir neighborhood, wherever that is)
couple were gone/dead
One guy actually lives in Somerville (you'd think he'd come up under Search #2, no?), but his blogchalk isn't part of his page. There you go.

Hmmm.

I thought the point was to drill in geographically, maybe get a "descending count" from some kind of GUI as you narrow in, & Etc. This was just free text search. Ah well.

Over to Google:
"blogchalk Davis Square"
- Gray Davis, (some) Square
- "I used to live in Davis Square, now..." (at least a couple on that theme)
- "blogchalk Wellesley" (boh?)

Meanwhile, out West, "Oakland" (Phil's hometown) yields 32, and narrowing in on "Adam's Point" gets 20 ("a klog apart" correctly coming up under both, natch).

(But then, _quite_ strangely (?), "California" yields 3? (u tell me). And "United States" also yields, three. (But not the same three.) Veddy interesting.)

Well anyway, I like the idea, and who knows maybe with time something will even come of it. Surely there's a blogger or two down the street...
Thanks, Phil! (3,000 miles distant)
Wm.

BloggerCode - Cryptic Subtracting From Clarity

But the "decoder" brings all that Clarity ringing back, in a jif!

A sort of Whimsical take on how to describe your blogging along thirteen interesting axes:

Mine (for now): B1 d t+ k s- u- f i o x-- e l- c-

Maybe "Subtracting From" isn't fair--a terse cryptic code can be a powerful means to a quick--possibly even useful--description of a complex phenomenon, so, you'd may as well give this one a whirl and let the world sum you/your blog up in a few letters and keystrokes...
(though becoming a skilled _reader_ of those few strokes calls for a tad more investment in system familiarity than ought to be strictly necessary, seemingly (perhaps?) somewhat defeating the appeal of the briefness of the code? Ah, communications.)

At any rate, I'm afraid I can't recall (or re-find) which blog led me to this one. (Things happen so fast, what with all these browsers open!)

Wm.
P.S. Here's the verbose version: (you get more chuckles filling out the form than reading the result)

"I've been blogging for 1-3 months. I own 1 domain and keep my blog and any other content I produce on the same site. I manage my blog with Greymatter, Movable Type, or other management system running on my own web host. I link only to sites I like to read (and sites that I have time to read) on a regular basis. I've looked at my stats reports, but I can't remember the last time I checked them. I don't link to any of the A-list blogs (Megnut, Kottke, Robot Wisdom, etc.)... if I ever want to visit their site, I'll just follow a link from someone else's blog. I try to post once a day, but it doesn't always happen, and that's no big deal. I blog from either home or work, but only after my work is done and when I get some free time. My entries are a mix of some original material, some web links, and links and comments about other blogs. Some people like to get it on with other bloggers, but for me, the last thing I need is to get sexually involved with one of these neurotic blogging pinheads. I have posted at least a photo of my face on my blog, but not much more. Memes and web surveys are, for the most part, pretty stupid, so I don't really participate. There are a few select people I've specifically kept in the dark about my blogging but, for the most part, most people know about it or could easily find it via a web search."

http://travis.kroh.net/blogger_decoder/?code=B1%20d%20t%2B%20k%20s-%20u-%20f%20i%20o%20x--%20e-%20l-%20c-

New Goings-On...

Current, new goings-on in the realm of resume-building, connections-furthering, knowledge-deepening.
One from California, one from Switzerland.

1. - Alma Mater (grad school) = U.C. Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS)
Has a campus-wide "Document Engineering" project I am now tapped into, via a meeting last week with Prof. Glushko:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~glushko/
I will serve in a role of "Boston-based (alumni) beta tester" of their "Center in a Box" automated website development system (Cocoon + XML Schema-driven):
http://cde.berkeley.edu/initiatives/centerinabox/

(See my blog entry http://www.reilly2001.info/whim/archives/000015.html)

2. - Apache/Cocoon/Lenya open source CM software group from Zurich is currently establishing a Boston office = I am working out a consulting role with them. They've got Zurich's premier newspaper as lead client:
http://www.wyona.com/references/
I made their acquaintance at the Harvard-sponsored OSCOM conference held in May:
http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/Program

San Francisco, Content Management

San Francisco this week, for Content Management extravaganza:
Gilbane Conference on Content Management at Seybold San Francisco 2003 ("at-a-glance").

Logistics information below (hotel; phone numbers; etc.)

Some Shared Logistics Info:

CONTACT
Cell Phone = (617) 290-9689
wreilly@cmsreview.com
http://www.cmsreview.com/Editors/
william@reilly2001.info
http://reilly2001.info

AIR
I'll be getting in late Monday morning (6:00 A.M. out of Logan (!)), and
departing Thursday evening v. late (11:45 P.M.).

HOTEL
Staying at the Canterbury Hotel on Sutter Street
http://www.canterbury-hotel.com/
750 Sutter Street * San Francisco, CA 94109 * 415-474-6464 * Guest Fax
415-474-5856 * 800-227-4788

SCHEDULE
Tuesday evening I've an appt. with former U.C. Berkeley professor and a couple
of his students; otherwise (so far) free...
http://cde.berkeley.edu/
http://sims.berkeley.edu/
Tues. eve. event:
http://www.sdforum.org/p/calEvent.asp?CID=1151&mo=9&yr=2003

Resume

My first real draft of my resume.
Legible, if kinda oddly HTML-ized by Open Office Writer/Web. (It was worse pasting in here from the MS-Word HTML-ization).

Time for feedback (and modifications...).
Wm.
(For real thing (and current version), click to /resume )