Blog Posts

Mud Slinging vs. Cutting Diamonds

James Gosling recently described 2 types of development tasks. I like the description. I couldn’t see any way to link directly to the post, so I’ll drop it in here as an excerpt.

I’ve had conversations with several folks in the last couple of days about the craft of software engineering. There are all sorts of ways to slice it up, but one that I find useful in some situations is to divide programming tasks rather crudely into two categories: mud slinging and diamond cutting.

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iVideo: Video capture for iSight

Just came across iVideo on freshmeat. I downloaded it to see what it does, and lo and behold: it captures DV video from my iSight camera!

I just captured a short (9 second) but huge (180MB) video clip, and it looks like it’s a standard DV file (QT Player opened it - I didn’t try importing it into iMovie, but that shouldn’t be a problem).

With this and evoCam, there are a few options for iSight users to record and publish stuff from the camera.

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WWDC Is Now Over. Now to implement...

First, a little haiku:

conference is over.
brain is full. too much info.
rush now to write code.

It was a completely amazing conference. King and I have been talking about some stuff that is making my head spin a bit. Seriously, this is going to take some time to sink in.

The next version of the repository is going to kick some major ass. Distributed searches. Natural language queries. Automation out the wazoo. Focussed helper apps to, well, help out…

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WWDC Continued

WWDC continues to rock. Totally like drinking from a firehose… A LOT of info here. King and I just met with some WO folks about some issues we’ve been facing on the next version of CAREO and they were extremely helpful (thanks Andreas, Bill & Scott!!!)

Some interesting sessions this afternoon, then down to Cupertino for the Campus Bash. Should be fun. I’m bringing my camera so I’ll continue to look like the typical tourist.

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WWDC2003

We arrived at SFO just fine yesterday. Took the BART from the airport to Powell, and it turns out it was the first day for the airport leg of BART to be open. Celebrations and camera crews everywhere. Weird.

Walked around downtown SF last night. Man. Those hills are one heck of a workout. Climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill, then went to the top of Coitt Tower. Great view, but oy my legs.

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Simple vs. Advanced Search

Tim Bray just posted some of his experiences in building a web search engine, and how people use simple vs. advanced search.

It’s a good (and short) read. I’ve noticed a similar pattern of usage, although I don’t have any form of statistics to back it up. Looking through the logs in CAREO, hardly anyone uses the advanced search page. I think I’ve only really used it while building/testing it… Simple search does everything I need.

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RSS As Killer App

Alan links to a link linked by another link… suggesting that RSS may be the next killer app for education (what was the first/previous one?)

P.S. Hinterlands? ow.

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XStreamDB and CAREO

I’ve got XStreamDB up and running, storing over 2000 IMS metadata records, as well as a few DublinCore and RSS files to test out multi-schema queries.

It works like a charm. It’s got full text indices on all metadata stores (I’ve created roots for each schema - analogous to tables in RDBMS land). I’ve added a “Meta” root that will store audit-type info for each metadata document (creator, creation date, permissions, …) and have whipped up a simple XQuery statement that will retrieve all metadata documents associated with a given Meta document (using GUIDs to identify assocations - again, analogous to table joins in RDBMS land).

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Ubiquitous Computing, Periphery, and Knowledge Management

This link to an article on Micah’s weblog came to me via Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students. The summary is a nice overview of how peripheral knowledge (i.e., not “core”) helps us to understand our way through the world.

First, the more the periphery is engaged, the smarter we are . No amount of conscious working out can replace the intuitions of the expert. The smartest people are the ones who have built up the thickest periphery, and can apply it quickly to new problems. A fully engaged periphery also goes by the name of “flow state”, familiar to athletes.

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Working on XStreamDB WebObjects EOAdaptor

I’ve got some time to play with XStreamDB now, so I’m working on the EOAdaptor that King started, trying to flesh out the functionality for use in CAREO/Extreme.

The fun part will be mapping EOQualifiers normally intended for SQL-ish things into invoking XQuery-ish things… It may not be difficult after all, but there is definitely a learning curve in my near future.

It does have a good “code smell” - letting EOF do all the heavy lifting involved with caching, locking, sharing the records, and having the code that invokes the queries be relatively transportable to other technologies (once appropriate adaptors are written).

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