James Tauber's Blog 2005/08/04
DataLibre DOAP
Almost exactly a year ago, I asked:
how can I use my own website as the authoritative source of my own FOAF and DOAP information while at the same time that information being available in directories for searching, rating, etc.
Well, it looks like O'Reilly's CodeZoo supports the DOAP part of this (discovered via Edd Dumbill)
I'm still no closer to a DOAP-Atom plugin for Leonardo. Any volunteers?
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 4, 2005 : Last modified Aug. 4, 2005 : Categories datalibre : 0 comments (permalink)
Paul Graham Has Done It Again
I've commented before that Paul Graham and I share a lot of the same views, he just expresses them much better than I do.
Well, he's done it again with his latest What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
Just last week I was trying to explain in a comment on mnot's blog that:
large companies have far more in common with centrally planned socialism than free market capitalism
Well, Paul Graham basically says the same thing and he ties it in beautifully with blogging and writing open source software:
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like commmunist states.
Whereas I stumbled to say:
People need to see themselves as individuals in the market rather than employees of corporations in the market.
Paul Graham says:
Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start buying it from another, you don't have to explain why. No one can accuse you of unjustly switching pipe suppliers. Justice implies some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in transactions between equals.Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. And that seems a bad road to go down.
My sentiments exactly.
Read the whole thing.
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 4, 2005 : Last modified Aug. 4, 2005 : 0 comments (permalink)
Missing OSCON
When I first found out that OSCON would coincide with my return to Australia, I did seriously consider stopping over in Portland on my way home for a week.
I spoke at OSCON in 2001 and it was probably my favourite conference of the 30 or so I spoke at 2000-2001.
So it was a tough decision but in the end I decided I just wanted to get home as soon as possible.
Now that I'm home and hearing good stuff about OSCON, I kinda wish I was there :-)
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 4, 2005 : Last modified Aug. 4, 2005 : Categories conferences : 1 comment (permalink)
Ordering Goals Rather Than Prerequisites
The outcome of my simulated annealing program is a list of prerequisites to learn along with an indication, every so often, of what new goal has been reached. Running on the Greek lexemes of 1John, you might get something starting like this:
learn μαρτυρέω learn θεός learn ἐν learn εἰμί learn ὁ learn τρεῖς learn ὅτι know 230507
This gives seven prerequisites to learn and then a goal that has been reached (230507 = 1John 5.7). The problem is that two of those words are unnecessary. You only need to learn μαρτυρέω, εἰμί, ὁ, τρεῖς and ὅτι to be able to read 1John 5.7.
The problem is that the program is ordering prerequisites first and only then establishing at each point what goals (if any) have been achieved.
I can see two solutions:
- write a post-processor that walks through and, at each goal, takes any "unused" prerequisites and postpones them to after that goal.
- change the program to order goals rather than prerequisites and work out the latter from the former
The second is probably considerably more work but probably ultimately preferred.
UPDATE: I'm almost embarrassed to report that not only was changing over to ordering goals not as hard to do as I thought, but the particular way I did it performs 200 times faster than my previous prerequisite ordering script. New script is at http://jtauber.com/2005/08/sa_goal_ordering.py
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 3, 2005 : Last modified Aug. 3, 2005 : Categories python : 4 comments (permalink)