Older blog entries for RyanMuldoon (starting at number 15)

I really hate how all the books that I want to buy are in the $60-$200 range. Of course, all of these books are in Philosophy, CS, Semantics, or HCI. All of these fields find it reasonable to have very high prices on books. I can appreciate the fact that upon reading these books, I am theoretically more marketable/smart, but man, it is just a lot of money. My book list is somewhere in the $600 range right now. And that is after having gotten ~$200 worth of books in the past couple months. I am being sucked dry. :( Hopefully I'll learn enough to justify spending so much money. I hope that the authors are actually getting most of that money. Somehow I doubt it. Ah well. I'll live.

As for my article, I was hoping for a bit more conversation, but that's ok. I think that it is partially because it is a fairly specific area of study that not too many people necessarily think about. Or maybe because I'm completely off-base. ;-) I am finding it difficult to find people to do some research with. The Semantic Web stuff seems very cool, but I have no idea how I can get involved with that. Maybe I'll see if I can figure it out. Hmm..that's about all for today.

Hmmm......so far no one seems interested in my article. Hopefully that will change. ;-) I spent a bit of time today thinking more about doing a moniker-based clipbook/scrapbook program. The annoying thing is that I am becoming more and more aware of the hard parts of the X cut and paste model. And the most elegant solution to the problem would cut out all non-gnome/bonobo apps. So I can't do that. ;-) Hopefully I'll be able to solve my problems in a non-hackish way. It will just require more thinking. Unfortunately, my thinking time is increasingly split between a number of different problems/projects. And right now, my thoughts on GUI/semantics stuff is what wins out most of the time. Hopefully it will prove to be a worthwhile endeavor.

I read the articles linked from slashdot today about Napster....I have been thinking more and more that the appropriate route for developing industries on the Internet is to make the base infrastructure free (as in speech and beer), and then allow companies to build value on top of this. To some extent this happens, but not nearly enough. High-speed internet access is completely artificially expensive. Really, this should be something that the government (or some sanctioned non-profit institution) takes care of, not large telephony companies. Why? If we really want the internet to be an "information superhighway" we need to treat it like our real highways. They are maintained by the government, covered by taxes. We also have government-subsidized mass transportation (buses and subways). But then, we also have companies making a lot of money on top of this infrastructure - taxi companies, limo services, car companies, gas stations, fast food restaurants, etc. These businesses could not really have existed (or at least prospered) without this free infrastructure to build upon. We should do the same with the Internet. All base protocols, file formats, OSes, and distribution mechanisms should be open and free. Companies can then build services on top of them by creating unique content, providing a better Internet experience somehow, delivering existing content to you in a more convenient way, etc. And probably all sorts of things I can't even think of. But the important thing is that the government should recognize its roll as an infrastructure provider. One of the most important things a government does is have standards for weights and measures. Why is this important? Because it ensures that business transaction between economic entities remains fair. It is the same case for the Internet. A free market only works when everyone has a level playing field, and low barrier to entry. The Internet was originally thought of (when it first was allowed to be used for commercial purposes) as the ultimate leveler. I think that this is becoming less and less true. I really hope that the free software world will slowly but surely help bring this about. Of course, the most obvious attack to something like this is: "I don't want to pay more taxes! The government shouldn't stick its nose in other people's profit margins!" This is almost a valid complaint. ;-) When you think about it, you are already paying "taxes" on everything. You pay the telephony companies for the right to use their bandwidth. You pay the software companies the right to use their software. Soon, you'll pay the distribution companies to use their system. I'd rather have a consolidated tax. Furthermore, it would be less - because the government is not a for-profit institution. There would still be a lot of room to innovate and make new businesses on top of this public infrastructure. It just seems like the most sensical thing to do. (Of course, I think the same thing of the Health Industry, but that is a whole other diary entry). After ranting, I feel better. ;-)

jmg:As for versioning on files, I agree, it does take up extra disk space. However, I have 2 thoughts on this. First, consider the percentage of your hard drive that are actually files that you edit on a regular basis. My guess is that it is ~10% at most. Then, consider that most files that are frequently edited are text/* MIME types. Which means that it should be easy to do what CVS does, and have diffs made for each version. It should only add marginally to disk space. For non-text files, this is probably more of a problem, as I don't think that you can get anything meaningful from a diff. But, my guess is still that binary data is edited with much less frequency than ascii, so the penalty is probably not that great. If there's an ability to delete versions, I doubt that it would be a very costly feature (at least in the general case).

I haven't played with BeOS in a number of years, but as I am learning more about it, I would like to take a more extensive look at it. What it has for metadata is very cool. The GNOME project is trying to build some of that into the 1.4/2.0 platform (vFolders in Evolution and eventually Nautilus, and emblems in Nautilus that you can search by). This is a good start, but a couple things strike me: first, the usefulness drastically increases if it is implemented at a more fundamental level. Second, while I can do vFolders with all of my MP3s, I would rather be able to do ask a media player to find all the "mellow" MP3s I have, or all the MP3s similar to the one I am currently playing. The big problem is that this level of metadata is VERY dynamic, and needs an Agent/daemon to pay attention to what I'm doing, and constantly add more information as it figures out my usage patterns. The future vision that Hans Reiser has (that I mentioned in my last diary entry) could provide the foundation for at least how and where to put metadata. The problem still remains though - if I send you an MP3 across the network, how does that metadata get transported? Also, even if the metadata can be transferred with the file, what metadata is per-user, and what is general? In the case of MP3s, I think everyone can pretty much agree what "mellow" is, but what mp3s I would group together is probably different from what someone else would. I'm very interested in what other people are doing in this field, so I'm glad to hear your thoughts on the matter. What I would ultimately like to see will at best take several years.....I'm trying to figure out how this could be done in small, manageable steps. I don't want to work on something that ends up only being of academic interest....I want to work on something that I (and hopefully others) can use and benefit from. So that means tacking stuff on top of UNIX. ;-) How to go about this is a tricky question.

jmg: Thanks for the pointer to FreeBSD extended attributes. I'll definitely take a look. However, what really blew me away is found at www.reiser.org -> Future Vision. What is outlined there seems like a much better way of retrieving information. What I have yet to resolve is how to initially save a file with that system....what initial metadata is attached? for text, it is an easy problem. But for media files, it becomes more complicated. You can get standard modified time, etc, and what program edited it...but you need to be able to attach more meaningful data to it initially. Also, another feature I'd love to see built into a filesystem is versioning....I want CVS for the masses. It would be really nice to be able to do a query the filesystem for files modified within a given date range, and get the versions that were saved on that range, rather than just the newest version. Such a thing would be very useful for anyone working on documents over a long period of time. I'd like to see the hierarchal filesystem that we have today be only around for legacy purposes. But that is a long way off. ;-)

Academia: I have been really enjoying my class on the theory and design of programming languages. Since I've only really used C, Perl, Java, and other similar languages, it is an eye-opener. For one, I am now shocked that languages don't incorporate nice features like parametric polymorphism. All of this has been making me think about what I would consider an ideal programming language. My initial thinking would be to go the opposite route that Perl did: There should only be one way to do it. Having multiple ways to accomplish the same thing is dumb - it wastes programmer time, and it gets rid of the compiler's ability to optimize. Maybe some day I'll write down all my half-assed ideas into something coherent. I need to know more.

Research: I've been trying to see if there are any ongoing research projects at the UW that involve computing semantics. So far, my attempts to contact professors have been met with no replies. I am very interested in the ideas of a more semantically expressive filesystem, increased (and auto-generated) metadata, and information agents. Of course, it would be ideal if I can figure out a practical way to tack some of these ideas onto existing frameworks. We'll see what I'm able to come up with. If anything. I would be extremely psyched if I could come up with a generic framework for developing Information Agents with bonobo, but that is the pie-in-the-sky goal. Right now I am just trying to learn about the different problems, and possible ways to solve them.

GNOME musings: Even though I am not at all a major person in the gnome community, I for some reason think that I should spout my mouth off about whatever I think would make GNOME better. My big thought for the day is IDL specification. I think it would be a very valuable effort for GNOME 2.0 planning to have developers actually sit down and spec out bonobo interfaces for the GNOME desktop, and conceivably, the GNOME Office suite. In doing this, you get the benefit of a very clear roadmap, as everything that you want to do has been outlined. You also get an easy reference point for how things are supposed to interact with each other. You also get an easy repository of projects that need doing for new members of the community. Chances are new developers aren't going to be good at the IDL stuff, but are capable of implementing a given piece of functionality. Also, if everything is broken down this way into components, it is much easier to upgrade to more efficient/bug-free implementations, as necessary. We also avoid issues of vendor lock-in pre-emptively. Speaking of vendor lock-in, my other GNOME-related ramble for the day is as follows: As free software companies seek to make their money from services, we need to make sure that the same principles of openness and consumer choice are built-in. I think it would be excellent if companies like Eazel, Red Hat, and Ximian work out a common services API.....something

like a defined service interface (done with bonobo, I suppose) that each company could have an implementation of. This lets the consumer to easily change between providers. Also, it lets consumers choose one interface for doing something (witness that there are 3 different ways to upgrade your software on RedHat 7 - Eazel's updater, Ximian's, or RedHat's). This just seems like a smart idea. Companies save development costs by jointly developing the infrastructure. Consumers are able to comparison shop pretty easily...choosing whichever services they like. Ok, that's enough of a rant for today.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about Human-Computer Interaction stuff. I want to get a couple books on the subject, so I can be more informed about the basic issues involved. I have a feeling that a lot of my ideas are overly naive, and would be obviously mistaken to an expert. But, nonetheless, I continue to try and come up with some useful ideas. I've been trying to grapple with ways to implement some Information Agents in a useful manner. The big problem is infrastructure: this would be a relatively easy problem if everyone would simultaneously update their computers to use them, and all information exchanged across computers were metadata-rich, but that's not the case. It means that I need to try and think of a way for the computer to incrementally add metadata to files as it learns more about what the user does with them. Doing that introduces a ton of problems though, like how is that metadata transferred with the file to other computers? The trouble is that the best way to get this information is from the user, but it would be tedious for a user to go through everything and add metadata to it. And even then, the computer would still have to add more metadata, like association graphs. I'm thinking that to make it really worthwhile, basic libraries will have to have functions that talk to the information agents to give them relevant information. But, the problem is that I want to figure out a way to do this incrementally....so the system should only be aware that something at some point may want the information.....and then gracefully handle it as many agents are added and taken out. Not an easy problem at all. It wouldn't be bad if it were a total ground-up rebuilding of an OS and related programs, but that isn't really an option. I guess I'll just have more on my mind for a while. ;-) If anyone is interested in these sorts of things, email me. I'd be interested in talking about it.

Someday I will become more of a regular poster. Right now, I am too lazy to remember to update my diary. Since the last time I've written, BenFrantzDale and I have pretty much finished the initial version of the clipbook program. I'm having a little trouble figuring out how to check the CLIPBOARD atom for changes....once I figure that out, it will be easy. Well, that and figuring out what signal I can connect that to, so the app can be updated without being focused. Just running a poll in the main loop over and over seems like a CPU hog. If anyone has any ideas for me, email me!

Other than that, I've gotten a pretty good reception for some ideas for GNOME 2.0 that I had, so I'm trying to work with a few people to get those ideas implemented. I keep trying to catch nullity on irc, but I keep missing him....ah well. I'm sure I'll catch him eventually.

I'm trying to write my clipbook program now....it is going pretty well....I have the basic functionality working, except the actual clipboard part. ;-) I am not understanding how X handles cut and paste in a programming sense. I get how it is supposed to work, but not how to actually program it with GNOME libs. If anyone can email me a snippet of code on how to do cut/paste stuff for a GNOME app, I would be really grateful. My main questions are: 1. how can I poll the CLIPBOARD mechanism in X to automatically insert new entries into the clipbook? 2. how do I handle cut/copy events in my own program?

The other annoying problem that I am having is with using signal handlers for a gtkspinbutton. In my glade file, I connected the "changed" signal to a handler function that gets the data from the widget, and I connected the "expose" signal to a handler function that puts data into the widget. Neither of these work. I am kind of bummed, as everything else has been pleasant and easy to do. ;-) Once again, if anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it.

Iain: I was thinking that a gnapster module for GNOME-VFS would mainly be used as a search URI, as it doesn't lend itself to normal directory browsing. Such support could probably be hacked in though. It would just work the same way as when you put a Napster user on your hotlist on gnapster. Query that user for a fully file listing, then recreate the directory structure to browse. It would be the same deal as querying for keywords initially. You get the data, and then virtualize a directory for it. I think it would be, at the very least, a good test of gnome-vfs's search features. If it can't handle something like this, maybe work needs to be done to make the browsing features more robust. As I recall, Rebecca Schullman (I think that is her name) at Eazel wants to have medusa handle this sort of thing eventually. It seems like that should be in a VFS though...I think that having searching-based URIs are where the real cool things can start happening with a VFS. I guess it could work as a bonobo moniker as well, but I know even less about monikers than I do about gnome-vfs. Anyway, those are my initial, mostly uneducated thoughts on the matter.