MishMash

Emergence Hierarchies and Software Subsystems

Richard Demers adds to his earlier comments on subsystems.

I discussed the last of those linked posts, and Richard responds in the comments.

The best answer I can give is that a subsystem remains an object, defined by a class, but with the property of "containing" objects it encapsulates at the next lower level of the emergence hierarchy -- with the property of "containment" enabled by an enhanced virtual machine. Subsystems, as objects, interact via messages, and I suspect that interactions are constrained to subsystems within the same hierarchical level. So what linguistic support is needed? Not much, but at least VM, class library, and tool support for the abstract class of Subsystems. [Richard Demers]

This description, which has echoes of the Python approach to modules (and almost everything else) of treating them as dictionaries, would lead me to similar conclusions to those of Runar Jordahl, but which are apparently a misunderstanding (see below). They also confirm that my introduction of Koestler into the conversation was justified, since this object-as-object-collection structure is definitely a holonic architecture (which is realised in software as the Composite design pattern).

Anyway, in response to Runar, Richard writes:

The inter-personal information manager (iPim)

Some intersesting ideas from Mark Sigal with his sketch of the inter-personal information manager (iPim):

Simply put, saving online information is messy today - do you bookmark it, email it to yourself, do a "save as," or a copy and paste? It's all very ad hoc, suggesting that the vehicles for saving online information and importing shared content have to get better … [O'Reilly Network, Mark Sigal, The inter-personal information manager (iPim)]

One thing in particular struck me, as I struggle on trying to work out how to keep jotting private thoughts, polishing them, moving them towards my blog or a public wiki, and onwards towards ossification in the form of academic journal papers, was this comment:

Basic publishing support within the information manager seems like a requirement, as it allows private information to easily be converted into public data without changing environments. [O'Reilly Network, Mark Sigal, The inter-personal information manager (iPim)]

If I was able to set up "buckets" as Mark mentions in his reply to a comment, then one set of buckets would certainly be for "papers in preparation". At an early stage I could just throw things into them which might prove relevant: journal papers to refer to, web pages, links to any weblog posts I write on related subjects, web pages, random notes as they occur. As time goes on, some of these papers might become two, or merge. Some structure might appear, in which case sub-buckets might prove useful (or at least some sort of imposed ordering of stuff in the bucket — the metaphor is breaking down).

Another point I'm interested by is that this iPim should be largely glue, pulling together web services, local already-available tools, and so on. The power of being able to send little pieces of RDF around, and even to store RDF as lots of files, while also being able to pour all of it into a queryable triple store has recently been dawning on me, and this idea seems to reinforce that.

The Origin of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls

Amazon.co.uk: Books: The Origins of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls

I just noticed this book on our library's new purchases shelf. It looks like an interesting summary, with papers from Dijkstra (Cooperating sequential processes, Hierarchical ordering of sequential processes) and Hoare (whose book "Communicating Sequential Processes" is now available online, I discover) among others.

Amazon have the title wrong, although I can understand why. "The origin of" sounds odd and seems unlikely.

timeanddate.com

I've just come across timeanddate.com. An essential for anyone who has to arrange virtual meetings with people in different countries, like this.

The skill of writing

Wow.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. [Edwin Schlossberg Quotes - The Quotations Page]

Model Theism

Model Theism: Belief in any particular model of reality.

Confusing a thing with a web page about it

I notice the following on Libby Miller's weblog, referring to the RSS+events module.

I'm really pleased to see that it's been updated so that the event is a 'thing' in itself and isn't confused with the webpage describing it … [Libby Miller]

Which I am noting here mostly so I can find it again if necessary, but also because hints at something which has been bugging me about RDF, but which is (I think) more cleanly dealt with in Topic Maps.

If you use an URI to represent a non-addressable object like a person, then it better not be the URI of an addressable object (like a web page) because if it is then you can't distinguish between statements about the person and statements about the web page. In Topic Maps you can talk about the resource at a URI and the thing indicated by a URI unambiguously, so for example I could make statements about my official web page and also make statements using the URI of that page as a subject indicator for me.

Ah. In her previous post Libby comments more fully:

My experiments with RDFical and RSS 1.0 use foaf:topic to separate the RSS 1.0 feed item (with its url) from the event itself (which might have a homepage, but is not itself a url). This issue is analogous to people and urls. People are not webpages though they may have homepages. Events are not webpages, though they may have homepages and other pages about them.

…

Chris was arguing that the rss link did not have to be a url, but could be a non-url uri, and therefore not confusable with a webpage. Ok, that seems more reasonable, although I worry that people will in fact tend to use actual urls of webpages, especially because that's what RSS is designed for. [Libby Miller]

I think that when it comes to naming models the worry expressed here isn't an issue. There is no existing tradition of having a well defined web page per model (not distinct from modelling tool) or model implementation, so a format which declares that models shall be given URIs which are not URLs of web-retrievable objects should be fine.

Intellectual Honesty

Edd Dumbill's comments on intellectual honesty have some relevance to my last post, and are worth reading anyway.

The state of affairs demands that we take a big step, and stop looking only to breathless yes-men. We must find people who will criticise us honestly and make them our friends. We must learn to view being wrong as an essential step to getting it right, and not as another vote for the worthlessness of our existence. We must, foremost, be honest with ourselves. [Edd Dumbill]

Innovation and Open Source

IT Managers' Journal [via LWN] has an article about Mitch Kapor's take on the open source software development model. The opening paragraph caught my eye.

The software development model that produced Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Windows and created long lists of multi-millionaires in the process is all but over, says Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, the EFF, and Open Source Application Foundation. In its place stands open source software, where the model is, "Do good work, make a decent living and maybe make the world a better place." [Chris Gulker]

Of course, this is all well and good coming from someone who made his own fortune from software like, er, Lotus 1-2-3. More interesting than that, though, is that Kapor is now ploughing a considerabke amount of that fortune into the Open Source Software Foundation. There is something about this which feels uncomfortably like using wealth created using the old model to subsidise the new model. Whether or not the old model created any value is neither here nor there if the new model cannot raise the capital needed to get started, or if it unsustainably depletes the available pool.

As the article alludes to later, we might separate more-of-the-same software (the vast bulk of it) from genuinely-something-new software.

Tablet farce

The Register draws attention to the poor performance of Tablet PCs.

With Tablets failing to attract many 'corridor warriors' and premium pricing making them highly uncompetitive in market awash with bargain notebooks, vendors continue to find making money an uphill battle. Under a million will be sold this year, less than five per cent of the global notebook market, with HP the leader. [Andrew Orlowski]

In other words, a technology which is desperately needed by all sorts of people is being destroyed by greed and lack of imagination. The hardware manufacturers must take some blame, too: a Tablet by its very nature must be held in the hand while writing on the screen. They need to be thin, light, with long battery life. They aren't laptops, so why try to make them compete on power with laptops?