From Winnemuca to the Semantic Web Nirvana: we're still far from Mother Mucca's Blue Moon Lodge !

10:23AM. Logging off from California. 7:06PM. Logging on from Winnemucca, NV. Had a lovely drive today. I'm exactly where I want to be, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. A little bit of rain coming over the Sierra. It's warm here, in the upper 50s. Had a little trouble connecting via Earthlink, it's a long distance connect so I'll probably wait to upload today's pics. [Scripting News]

Dave's in Winnemucca, NV, "in the middle of nowhere".

If you use the population density metric on the US map, yes Dave, you're really in the middle of nowhere.

But your post struck a chord in me: I'm french, I've lived in California for 3 years, and the number of US cities of which I know the name is pretty low. 50 to 100 I would say. But Winnemucca is one of them, because it's the place where Mona accidentally ends up at her grandmother's Bordello in Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (this site for a spoiler).

So using the litterary resonance metric, Winnemucca is a pretty important city in the US, considering the number of people worlwide who have read Maupin's books.

This is not just for teasing: What I'm after in this post is that I can see some useful application of semweb technologies applied to this.

What is needed is:

• Books RDF descriptions describing which places are involved in the book (this could be autogenerated for books for which content is digitized and available)
• web service: geo(placename) gives you lat/long (ICBM coord)
• RDF description about the books I like (I need to check if such a schema already exists)
• FOAF: exists today
• Open source Mapping software: exists, found the excellent article by Owen Densmore, Java Geography for the Smart Mob, Part 1: OpenMap

The application I want to build is something like this. I plan for a trip somewhere and the system could generate these maps:

• absolute litterary density: based on the whole corpus of books.
• friends based litterary density: specify how many foaf degrees I want to hop.

Books are just one example: replace it with everything you are interested in.

This is just a half baked idea and many more meta data are needed to get there: we're still far from Mother Mucca's Blue Moon Lodge !

3:54:49 PM Google It!      comment []

Omniscient Debugger: debugging java code will never be the same !

Omniscient Debugger

Did I say the big P word yet ? "Paradigm Shift" :-) I think it applies very well to this new debugging tool and the technique described.

This link was sent to me by a friend from Sun and I had no time to install it yet, but the docs and paper just blew me out !

Bil Lewis created a java debugger that records a program run, and then lets you navigate through the collected data forward and backward in time, following different navigation paths, and looking at all state at each moment.

This is the most original idea I've seen in the area of debugging during my short (8 years) career as a professional programmer.

"Omniscient Debugging is the idea of collecting "time stamps" at each "point of interest" (setting a value, making a method call, throwing/catching an exception) in a
program and then allowing the programmer to use those time stamps to explore the history of that program run. The ODB is an implementation of this idea written in Java.
It inserts code into the .class files to collect these stamps and when the program runs, time stamps are recorded."

I look forward to play with it.

3:17:03 PM Google It!      comment []

Sam Ruby's essay Topology: in the beginning was GET !

Topology.[Sam Ruby]

This essay is a cosmogony of the web according to Sam Ruby.

I need a serious refresher to my knowledge in quantum physics !

Sam's metaphors are enlightning and his style makes it always fun to read. If you haven't read it yet, be sure to also read his Neurotransmitters essay.

2:03:41 PM Google It!      comment []

Popup controls by AOL: How ironic !

AOL unveils Web pop-up controls [CNET News.com]

"The tool, called Web Pop-Up Controls, will let people zap most advertisements that pop up or appear under requested Web pages throughout the Internet, outside of the AOL service"

How ironic :-)

1:55:44 PM Google It!      comment []

Haiku of the day

My back aches-
My son begins to walk
We're both riding the train.

10:34:55 AM Google It!      comment []

What did Carlos do to his life when he decided to start his own company ? Hilarious, sad and scary post.

What did you did to your life, dammit? Carlos' schizophrenic conversation with himself about starting his own company instead of "fooling yourself with this sucky job of coding EJBs everyday and knowing they'll not even be used, as the whole project your're working on will die a horrible death sooner or later", and the consequences after he makes the move: no contracts, no money.

His text is very rich. It is at the same time hilarious, his observations being very accurate, scary because it's exactly what most programmers-would-be-entrepreneur entertaining the idea of quitting their well paying boring day job to go create cool open source software and get money doing consulting around it, fear will happen if they take the step.

Then it is extremely sad that his efforts failed and he is obliged to go back to a normal day job: the people at JBoss Group who sustain the open source app server development with fees for consulting and documentation offered us all a ray of hope that a new business model is possible for software development. Carlos' story shows that it does not work for everyone.

10:33:24 AM Google It!      comment []