mercredi 15 octobre 2003

Beyond software: how the open source model could change lives "Collaboration replaces the corporation"? Now there's music to my ears! 'Open Source Everywhere' is the title of a new article in Wired 11.11 (Nov 2003), where Thomas Goetz takes the battle against cholera in developing countries as his starting point for a discussion of "open source" cooperation. We're not merely thinking computer software any more, Goetz declares in his long, detailed survey. That was just the beginning. Take frogs. "...Michael Eisen slogged through swamps in Costa Rica studying the mating behavior of frogs. That's what biologists did, he figured - and if he had to fight off a few leeches along the way, so be it. Now he's all about coding, crafting blocks of genetic data and churning them through his computer. 'It's a great time to be a biologist,' says Eisen, a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 'Origin of Species is the best thing ever written in biology. But you just wish Darwin knew about genomics.' "Yet if biology is in a renaissance, there are still relics of a medieval age," Goetz suggests. "Most aggravating to Eisen is the state of scientific publishing. It affronts him. And he wants to destroy it. "His weapon is open source. Unlike Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who didn't set out to take down Britannica, Eisen has the publishing community squarely in his sights. Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl programming, can give rise to a new distribution model for scientific research." That's just a juicy extract from a wide-ranging review of the impact of open source in several domains of our lives. "It forces industry to reckon with openness rather than hide behind intellectual property. In driving down the cost of software or encyclopedias or biotechnology, open source is unleashing billions in capital otherwise put to woefully inefficient ends," Goetz writes. I hope he's right to be so optimistic! 11:00:25 PM  link   your views? [] Sorting, chucking, classifying: trash and OS X news I just bought a new pedal-bin on special offer at the local hardware store: get a biggish one and a small one for the bathroom is free. Blue was what I wanted to go with some of the furnishings, but then I changed my mind. Letterbox red, UK-style, would do very nicely! Why hide the trash can when it's a good-looking model and the very last thing you want to do is keep it discreet? Certain people have no excuse left to imagine that almost inaccessible spaces behind the beds, kicked deep under the washing machine or even simply dropped on the floor are fine places for litter. When it comes to my hard disk, which had also become an almighty mess, I'm just beginning to master the finer arts of using DEVONthink, first praised here in mid-August. The screenshot shows that I haven't been making the most of a tool whose potential and power for classifying and correlating all kinds of data has taken time to sink in: But the chaos does give an idea of the sheer range of things you can file away in it. As I sort that out, the brains at DEVONtechnologies have today hauled their stunning internet search, filter and classify tool, DEVONagent, out of beta. If you're a news and research fiend using Mac OS X, this application has steadily got better and is now unbeatable. Like the bin manufacturers, the German firm are currently offering two tools at a reduced price (provoking polite moans in the user forum from early purchasers asking "What about us?" My guess is that we first birds paid an extra fistful of dollars for the privilege of making suggestions that have seen the help manuals considerably improved). Meantime, NetNewsWire, which I use virtually all the time now for 'blogging as well as newsfeed gathering, seems to be going through the birth pangs of better betas on an almost daily basis. The latest, version 1.0.6fc2, is niftier than ever -- best picked up at VersionTracker, along with its still-free partner, NetNewsWire Lite. The man behind Pixture Studio, Hide Itoh, last month made such radical improvements to his image adjustment tool, QuickImage, that it's become my "default application" for some of the the pix I 'blog (just as the DEVON people are making the best use they can dream up of the hidden strengths in OS X's Services menu). The genius of QuickImage is that it's not in fact an application at all. Instead, a contextual menu allows you to do a lot of things to pictures without having to open a special programme. The screenshots available via the developer's OS X page show in an instant what I find complicated to explain in words. I see that Hide has this month done something similarly clever for rapidly checking out those ubiquitous .PDF files. Note: in that screenshot above, that's NNW tucked away behind DEVONagent. Inspired by a recent article and some posts at the O'Reilly Mac development site, I've of late cut down on irrational use of an overloaded dock. It's trimmed now (right-hand side) almost exclusively to a launchpad for internet apps, while it took a couple of hours to sort the rest of what I use into time-saving categories in DragThing drawers. It's an opportune moment to mention the very cool DT, by the way. Its developer, James Thomson, is as Panther-minded as everybody else. James is promising to release DragThing Five tomorrow, at 12 dollars for an upgrade by current users and a slightly cut rate for newcomers. Old friend DT 4 is mainly bottom left in the screenshot. The tiny blue bar at top right is a DT drop-down where my mounted disk partitions are now tidily tucked away. And the white, grey, yellow and blue thing at bottom right isn't a new flag design for my anarchist island. MemoryStick, a cunning little freebie by Matt Neuberg, keeps an eye on what my Mac's doing with its own brainpower as I work. 8:51:36 PM  link   your views? [] The Condition: Rainer's remarkable reference The state of my guts became a "no-no" subject here after recent outbursts, in which I feel that: a) I wrote more than anybody could possibly want to read, b) even if you did, it was probably as embarrassing to digest it as it was for me to post it. Today's mail changed that. Along with an apology from my ISP for recent poor service occasioned by a massive spam attack, there was a note Rainer sent on Monday with a potentially extremely helpful link. "Novel research shows that alterations in serotonin signaling in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract are present in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). These data shed light on the alterations in gut motility, secretion, sensation, as well as the clinical manifestations of IBS, which include abdominal discomfort, pain, bloating, constipation and/or diarrhea." This report from an expert gastroenterology gathering (EurekAlert!) in Baltimore just might be, for me, a case of "eureka"! It fits nicely with ideas put to me by an X-ray specialist, who last month spent part of the several hours devoted to monitoring the passage of a revolting concoction through my small intestine by engaging me in talk of alternative lines of investigation. For years, finding the right drugs to regulate my serotonin levels has been important (all to do with the cyclothymia I've referred to before). The X-ray man had a lot to say about that, proving well-informed in this field different from his own ... and laying the groundwork for my final acceptance that what's happened to me since May could indeed be, in good part, an instance of mind over matter. Months ago, someone important in the Factory told me that if I really was off work for "purely psychosomatic reasons", the unpleasant manifestations of the Condition bore remarkable testimony to the workings of my mind and its power! I was sceptical then. Rainer's find will be submitted to all three of my key medics in the next couple of weeks. Working from the assumption that bloghero Yang's "hypothesis" is correct -- that what's happened to my guts with no evident physical cause apart from a few oddities has much to do with my head -- I've become actively engaged in tracking down treatment for stress management. In a long, long discussion Monday with AFP's workplace doctor, I was told that during the week before I had to quit work, I was singularly and most unusually rude to the medical staff. I have absolutely no recollection of this! I do remember rushing upstairs to get just anything to "stop the fucking diarrhoea!" so I could get back to the Desk to deal with a breaking news story, but certainly not swearing about anything apart from my bowels. It would seem, however, that this forgotten episode left quite a mark and I learned that my stress rate was clearly right "off the thermometer". Since a lot of journalists were in a similar state at that stage in the so-called "War on Terror", I really can't have thought anything special about it. The tension was just part of the job... And that's why -- the understanding that high stress is just a regular feature of the agency journalist's life -- I took it so very badly a couple of weeks ago when Dr Yang finally put it to me that I could just have cracked up, in what has literally been a gut reaction to year after year of accumulated stress. Now I've begun to get over the acute embarrassment of this hypothesis, I'm starting to feel grateful, first that it isn't anything more physically serious, and then to the many friends and colleagues who don't seem to think the worse of me for it. Today's tip from the man in Brazil is like another big piece of jigsaw suddenly falling into place. Rainer spotted it on EurekAlert!'s public news list pages, part of his regular diet. The whole, wide-ranging EurekAlert! science news site today becomes another must for the blogroll. Thanks, RB! 1:46:28 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.