Niagara 2 - the first Open Source main stream processor?

This sounds like news:

the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

Jonathan Schwartz in his blog

I wander how will it be vexed by the Free Software community.

And by the way - will this amount of parallelism help Hurd.

Return of Fora?

The most interesting presentation at the yesterdays London Wiki Wednesday was a talk by Alan Wood and it was not about a wiki - but something more like an interenet forum (or biulettin board system or ... whatever).

I was always of the opinion that there is much unrealized potential in this old software genre.
It is message based - like email or RSS - so in fact it fits better the conversational nature of most communication then document based wikis. But it is also centralized - and that means you can do many things you cannot with a decentralized system (like version control of attachments, uniform visualisation of the conversations - i.e. less need for quoting, moderation, statistics etc.). All the talk now is about Social Networking Sites - but in fact the networking part is so insignificant in all of them - and most of the interaction that happens there is exactly the same as you had on internet fora and BBSes.

Instant Messaging and Social Networking - Snimmer

Snimmer is a web based service with chat (supporting all the major networks - and even Jabber) and Social Networking features. Looks like great idea - I wander when the major SN sites will catch on with IM widgets on their pages.

See your name in hyerogliphs

Egyptian Name Translator

I've read in wikipedia that the alphabet was discovered when Egiptians needed to record names of foreign labourers - they had no hieroglyphs for their names so they invented assigning hieroglyphs to phonemes and then composing the names from them.

Pirates of the Internet

In a brilliant move the notorious Pirate Bay - a Swedish bittorrent tracker - reappriopriated the romanticism and disruptive potential of the pirate mythology in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie series:

Why Vote?

This freakonomics article is not new - but I have read it just recently. A nice economic analysis of voting - but the authors don't take into account the fact that the payoff of a vote is a dependent variable related to the number of voters. The fewer people vote the more important are they votes - so even in this pure economic model the number of voters would never drop to 0.

Reading Shah of Shahs

In the nineties, after the communism collapsed in Poland and shortly before her death my grandmother used to attentively watch at least 6 news programs on TV every day. She was not involved politically - she was just used to a different information diet. I myself do remember days when Radio Free Europe was jammed by the communistic government of Poland. It is hard to imagine now how different the world was back then.

"The Inner Ring" and "The Fight Club"

This short post is juxtaposition of two links: The Inner Ring and The Fight Club. Isn't "The Fight Club" really about how being in the "Inner Ring" has more 'meaning' and is more psychologically rewarding than material success?

"Democratizing Innovation" and web sites

Can web sites use the 'Lead Users' idea from the von Hippel oeuvre? For sure, all his ideas are applicable here. What I would like to see are some more practical methods on finding the 'Lead Users'.

Individualism as a Socio-Economic Phenomenon

Individualism lets the society test new ways of doing practically everything. The costs are beared by the individual - while his success can be easily copied by others and become beneficial for everyone. Those statements are true in our current socio-economic reality but they are not universal (imagine an nomadic tribe - at least some individualism for example in choosing the direction of the wandering cannot be copied by others after it proves successfully) - so individualism is not universal either. This might also explain the success of the western societies with very individualistic culture - this was a good adaptation for the changes or recent history.

Reading "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel

The tile is about innovation, but the subject seems to be a bit broader and include also design. Of course innovation involves design - but design not always involves innovation. The example of user designing his pizza by choosing toppings shows this quite well.

Watermarks instead of DRM

A german music website sells MP3 music with watermarks.

Teams and interfaces and disintermediation

At my current job there are repeatable tasks that require coordination between teams. For the beginning no one knows what information the other teams need to complete the task. We talk to each other, we send emails and the understanding what the counterpart expects from us is gradually building. Then we don't need to talk any more - we gather the needed information in advance and email it to them. The information exchange is less frequent but richer, the process is smoother. Then we create Excel templates - so that we have a list of all the needed info and we make less mistakes. We send the Excel attached to the emails, the other side receives it and relying on their experience semi automatically fulfills their part, usually this comes to entering the information that we gathered into the required computer systems. It fast, semiautomatic, smooth and everyone is satisfied, but what if it did not stop there? What if the information from the email was not cut and paste to the appropriate system by humans - but by a special input program? What if the whole process was not just enabled by email and Excel, but rather the communication software really supported and facilitated it?

Mailing Lists and WWW

Long after email announced dead mailing lists still constitute for me the main source of information in the most important for me topics.
Their publish-subscribe nature and the universal availability makes them an ideal tool for many communities of practice. The archives of many mailing lists represent major source of information on many topics - but the exposition of this information is far from being perfect. I can see one small improvement that would help a bit - the mailing list servers should put in the footer of the letter a link to the archived version of it. This would spare a bit of work for anyone wanting to publish a link to some interesting email conversation and in effect would improve the flow of ideas between www and email.

Why Scaffolding? Validation and learning.

The text below was first posted on the Catalyst mailing list. It is an analyzis of value of the code generation technique that was popularized as 'scaffolding' by Ruby on Rails. It describes what makes the scaffolding so efficient in converting newcommers into avid users of the framework.

I would like you to imagine you in the position of a developer that has some idea for a web project, thinking about trying a new web programming framework. There are many to choose from, or you can also go the simple way and use CGI.pm or develop something for his own - how would you decide? Every framework is lots of code, lots of documentation so it's not an easy task. After reading those mountains of manuals you can discover that some limitations make the framework not really fitting to your project (some related thoughts in http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=8826). This is that risk that scaffolding mitigates - you generate your application with minimal effort and you have a working example tailored to your database schema. You don't need to think if a example from the manual can be adopted to your data structures - you have it adopted automatically. This is the first advantage of scaffolding - easy evaluation.

The other important advantage is that it helps in the learning process. You get a non trivial working example. And again this example is based on your database schema - from the starting point you at once know much about the program. You don't need to internalize the arbitrary business rules of some unfamiliar application - the business rules are yours - so at once you can start and play with it. And a good scaffolding will give you much space for simple but meaningful modifications to tweak and play with.

Of course there are also disadvantages to code generation. It is impossible to come with a good schema to update the generated code when you release a new version of the generator and we don't want the programmers who use the scaffolding to be stuck forever to the version that they used the first time. One solution can be to limit the code generator to really most trivial part and move all other logic into traditional libraries that just happen to cooperate with the generated code - and this is what I try to do with InstantCRUD.

Spread the meme

Ievan Polkka. More internet-famouns songs.

'Vacations with stars'

'Vacations with Stars' is a concept that for now I have seen only in Polish info space. It is about tourist agencies offering holidays with some polish 'stars'. Of course the stars get the vacations for free or even are being paid for having a good time.

It seems like exploiting popularity is more and more simple - is it really a harbinger of the 'attention economy'?

The one red paper clip project suceeded

One red paperclip traded in a chain of barter transactions into a house (via Ming the Mechanic: Paper Clip to House)

What does this mean?

Perhaps it has got no meaningfull meaning at all - but maybe, I say maybe, just like The other project it shows a trend?

The magic experience of VOIP in the background

This weekend I finally got all the needed prerequisites for a Skype connection with my fiancee with whom I am currently separated by the distance of 1000km. We talked for hours but what was really magical was when we finally stopped the direct conversation and left to do our daily chores but did not switch the communication link off. This way I heard her as if she was in a room just behind a wall, talking to a friend, using the vacuum cleaner, watching TV, I even heard her shouting to me from the kitchen where she prepared some food. This was as if some magic connected our, thousand kilometers away, rooms.

When I left the flat I forgot to switch the connection off. There was a thunderstorm and I received a SMS reminding me that I left the window opened as well.

A quote

"Well, one day I was at the Institute of Advanced Study, and I went to Gödel's office, and there was Gödel," the professor recalled. "I said, 'Professor Gödel, what connection do you see between your incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?' And Gödel got angry and threw me out of his office."

from: STEPHEN BUDIANSKY On "Gödel in a Nutshell " By Verena Huber-Dyson