manyoso pointed me to the word "infon". googling this term reveals that "[an] infon may be thought of as a discrete item of information" or that it can be defined as "a piece of information, possibly made up of other pieces of information, which meets the needs of a user at a given time". bingo. manyoso gets a cookie, and i get a word to use that people other than me might recognize right away ;-)
i still think monaform has more style, but this isn't exactly a parisian catwalk.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
new ideas require new words
looking at the kicker work i need to do and some of the work i have ahead of me for my "day job" i felt like doing something else. =P so i started working on a pet project that i've been stabbing at for some months now, and quickly ran into a linguistic challenge.
one of the concepts in this project is a base unit of information. specifically, what is "one piece of data" called? we often refer to such things as records, documents, objects, memes or URIs/URLs. but none of these terms really describe the way i'm dealing with information, which is divorced from the concepts of storage (document, URI), structure (record, objects) or transmission (meme). and saying "five pieces of data" or "one set of data" are each three words too long. so what does one call a "unit of information" that has no storage or structure implications?
google was less than helpful. the thesaurus wasn't a help either. i simply couldn't find a word that succinctly described what i am trying to represent. which is odd since you'd think this a basic concept in information science. but it eluded me. there's probably a really great word out there somewhere but i couldn't find it. all of our terms seem to describe information in terms of usage and form rather than in suitably abstract terms.
so i visited The Online Etymology Dictionary and came up with a word of my own: monaform. it's the synthesis of the Latin and Greek words "monas" ("unit") and "forma" (unsurprisingly, "form"). ta-da! one "discrete piece of data" is now, in seigonese, a monaform. i'm using that for now. if you have a better suggestion please email me.=)
i'm also back home from hawaii, and i'm slowly getting back into the swing-o-things. i met a lot of very cool people and had a lot of fun while there. the networking was awesome. i've been tentatively invited to speak in Malaysia , for instance, as one example of that. i also made some great (hopefully life-long) friends, and maybe even stumbled into some romance.
i was also reacquainted with that "inside-out" feeling i sometimes get when dealing with highly dynamic social events ... by which i mean that the things that i identify myself with internally are not the things others first perceive. i find the internal perspective one assumes is often challenged when engaged in sincere interaction with others. we are often blind to the most obvious things about ourselves while those things which we feel are self-evident are anything but. "you never know just how you'll look through someone else's eyes". this presents the opportunity for self examination and, hopefully, greater self understanding. or so i can only hope. =)
unfortunately my 200+ pictures are marooned on my camera, since i left the usb cable for it at my mom's house on Oahu. oops. i'll have to get her to send it out by post and hunt down either a replacement or an sd card reader in the meantime.
the day i arrived home, i had to took peyton to a doctor's appointment as he had developed a troubling cough. turns out he has bronchitis, but he is recovering nicely thanks to some medication from the doctor. he's a trooper. and goddess, did i miss him while away. i got him a wicked aloha shirt with matching shorts which he's been wearing around the house every day since i got back. looks like he's inherited some of my odd fashion tastes. world domination through procreation, baby. ;-)
one of the concepts in this project is a base unit of information. specifically, what is "one piece of data" called? we often refer to such things as records, documents, objects, memes or URIs/URLs. but none of these terms really describe the way i'm dealing with information, which is divorced from the concepts of storage (document, URI), structure (record, objects) or transmission (meme). and saying "five pieces of data" or "one set of data" are each three words too long. so what does one call a "unit of information" that has no storage or structure implications?
google was less than helpful. the thesaurus wasn't a help either. i simply couldn't find a word that succinctly described what i am trying to represent. which is odd since you'd think this a basic concept in information science. but it eluded me. there's probably a really great word out there somewhere but i couldn't find it. all of our terms seem to describe information in terms of usage and form rather than in suitably abstract terms.
so i visited The Online Etymology Dictionary and came up with a word of my own: monaform. it's the synthesis of the Latin and Greek words "monas" ("unit") and "forma" (unsurprisingly, "form"). ta-da! one "discrete piece of data" is now, in seigonese, a monaform. i'm using that for now. if you have a better suggestion please email me.=)
i'm also back home from hawaii, and i'm slowly getting back into the swing-o-things. i met a lot of very cool people and had a lot of fun while there. the networking was awesome. i've been tentatively invited to speak in Malaysia , for instance, as one example of that. i also made some great (hopefully life-long) friends, and maybe even stumbled into some romance.
i was also reacquainted with that "inside-out" feeling i sometimes get when dealing with highly dynamic social events ... by which i mean that the things that i identify myself with internally are not the things others first perceive. i find the internal perspective one assumes is often challenged when engaged in sincere interaction with others. we are often blind to the most obvious things about ourselves while those things which we feel are self-evident are anything but. "you never know just how you'll look through someone else's eyes". this presents the opportunity for self examination and, hopefully, greater self understanding. or so i can only hope. =)
unfortunately my 200+ pictures are marooned on my camera, since i left the usb cable for it at my mom's house on Oahu. oops. i'll have to get her to send it out by post and hunt down either a replacement or an sd card reader in the meantime.
the day i arrived home, i had to took peyton to a doctor's appointment as he had developed a troubling cough. turns out he has bronchitis, but he is recovering nicely thanks to some medication from the doctor. he's a trooper. and goddess, did i miss him while away. i got him a wicked aloha shirt with matching shorts which he's been wearing around the house every day since i got back. looks like he's inherited some of my odd fashion tastes. world domination through procreation, baby. ;-)
Monday, January 24, 2005
roblimo thinks my mom is hot
so the other night a bunch of us went out for dinner, including one Robin Miller. my mom met us at the restaurant and sat down for pre-dinner drinks with us. at which point Robin says, "so.. what do you think about your son bringing you to a dinner with a bunch of guys who are old enough to think his mother's hot?" woah.
i managed to recover and enjoy the next day with a minimum of scarring ;)
looks like i'll be doing some work with HOSEF and Novell to get SUSE and KDE prep'd for a kick-ass LTSP deployment set up for us in the islands.
today was spent with Maddog out on the North Shore. mom played tour guide and we had a great day in the sun and surf. Maddog rocks the kasbah and the day was amazingly relaxing.
a recent friend from calgary ("next time someone asks you what's up with your sweater, just shrug it off") emailed me again today. looks like i'll have a social calendar when i get back, which is good. =)
more impending is the start of the FSG accessibility conference tomorrow. i have to be up at 06:30. those who know me know how unnatural such an occurrance is for me. oh what i do for open source. that and free trips to the tropics. =P
i managed to recover and enjoy the next day with a minimum of scarring ;)
looks like i'll be doing some work with HOSEF and Novell to get SUSE and KDE prep'd for a kick-ass LTSP deployment set up for us in the islands.
today was spent with Maddog out on the North Shore. mom played tour guide and we had a great day in the sun and surf. Maddog rocks the kasbah and the day was amazingly relaxing.
a recent friend from calgary ("next time someone asks you what's up with your sweater, just shrug it off") emailed me again today. looks like i'll have a social calendar when i get back, which is good. =)
more impending is the start of the FSG accessibility conference tomorrow. i have to be up at 06:30. those who know me know how unnatural such an occurrance is for me. oh what i do for open source. that and free trips to the tropics. =P
Sunday, January 23, 2005
OSS in Hawaii
although one of the key Fedora Core people lives here, open source software is only starting to play out. there are a number of installations around, but it's not nearly what i see on the mainland. yet.
the reasons for this are many, but i have great hopes for a great future for Free Software in the islands. there are a great number of people here who are doing tremendous things, both in the form of advocacy as well as in the form of getting involved.
hopefully i'll be coming back next year for TPOSSCON 2006, and i'll be sure to note the progress then.
the reasons for this are many, but i have great hopes for a great future for Free Software in the islands. there are a great number of people here who are doing tremendous things, both in the form of advocacy as well as in the form of getting involved.
hopefully i'll be coming back next year for TPOSSCON 2006, and i'll be sure to note the progress then.
TPOSSCON wrap up
Thursday at the Trans-Pacific Open Source Software Conference wrapped up with a really great panel discussion about innovation in Free Software. Maddog is such a font of information. amazing guy. we're heading up tomorrow to the North Shore to check out the beaches. hopefully the waves are pumping =)
friday was the conference closer day and it too went very well. i did presentation on deploying kde that went rather well. a fellow from InfoWorld attended and we're now talking about doing some writing for them. the presentation, as with the other presentations at the conference, were videotaped and will be on the TPOSSCON website for everyone's viewing, uh... pleasure? =) i even had a projector for Friday's presentation, so it's not drop-dead boring to watch ;)
i still think the panel discussions were the real sweet points of the show though. i'll have to check those out once they are online.
tonight i'm having dinner with an old mentor and a definite role model for me: Noreen Hayamizu. i haven't seen her in several years, so it will be wonderful. we're going out for sushi. interestingly, everyone here asks me how i can eat sushi if i'm a vegetarian. after i list all the different sorts of sushi that contain no fish, they nod as if its the first time they've actually thought about it. i mean, how can you not notice and fall in love with yam tempura sushi! mmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
tomorrow's my "day off" (i've been emailing and working on various things today) and then it's off to the Free Standards Group's accessibility conference at Honolulu Community College. can't wait to see Olaf and Gunnar again! met up with Janina already, as she did a really great accessibility discussion that lasted the bulk of the afternoon (~4 hours!) with a group of people interested in this set of established and emerging technology. there were several visually impaired people there, along with social workers and those who have friends and family who have various disabilities.
monday's evening plan is karaoke with old school mates and a nice woman i met this week. i love karaoke. but that's probably because, as Terpstra likes to say, i'm such a wanka'. ;)
friday was the conference closer day and it too went very well. i did presentation on deploying kde that went rather well. a fellow from InfoWorld attended and we're now talking about doing some writing for them. the presentation, as with the other presentations at the conference, were videotaped and will be on the TPOSSCON website for everyone's viewing, uh... pleasure? =) i even had a projector for Friday's presentation, so it's not drop-dead boring to watch ;)
i still think the panel discussions were the real sweet points of the show though. i'll have to check those out once they are online.
tonight i'm having dinner with an old mentor and a definite role model for me: Noreen Hayamizu. i haven't seen her in several years, so it will be wonderful. we're going out for sushi. interestingly, everyone here asks me how i can eat sushi if i'm a vegetarian. after i list all the different sorts of sushi that contain no fish, they nod as if its the first time they've actually thought about it. i mean, how can you not notice and fall in love with yam tempura sushi! mmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
tomorrow's my "day off" (i've been emailing and working on various things today) and then it's off to the Free Standards Group's accessibility conference at Honolulu Community College. can't wait to see Olaf and Gunnar again! met up with Janina already, as she did a really great accessibility discussion that lasted the bulk of the afternoon (~4 hours!) with a group of people interested in this set of established and emerging technology. there were several visually impaired people there, along with social workers and those who have friends and family who have various disabilities.
monday's evening plan is karaoke with old school mates and a nice woman i met this week. i love karaoke. but that's probably because, as Terpstra likes to say, i'm such a wanka'. ;)
Friday, January 21, 2005
sun's open solaris
almost forgot to note the talk by a sun rep about open sourcing solaris. it was a really quick presentation, maybe 20 minutes and the rest was open Q&A. Sun still has a lot of work to do on their communication of what they are doing, as questions on copyright assignment, social contracts and patent policies were met with "i'll have to get back to you" type answers. in general, however, it looks like a open source Solaris is the real meal deal.
too bad they felt the need to invent Yet Another License, as if that was just what we needed. =( there's quite a bit of discussion here yesterday and today about how to limit the proliferation of licenses. i expect this to become a hot topic in the next year.
too bad they felt the need to invent Yet Another License, as if that was just what we needed. =( there's quite a bit of discussion here yesterday and today about how to limit the proliferation of licenses. i expect this to become a hot topic in the next year.
TPOSSCON Day 1, 2
i'm sitting in the email garden at the Trans-Pacific Open Source Software Conference, finally with a moment to breath as i got back from lunch too late to go to any of the presentations.
soon after arriving on tuesday i went out to the old digs on the leeward coast of Oahu. it was amazing how almost nothing had changed. time seems to stand still out there. after a dinner and a quick drive around the community we went for a swim in a quiet lagoon.
Bruce Perens opened the conference with the day 1 key note, and i spoke later in the morning presenting KDE 3.4. the day was dynamic and there were a lot of interesting people here. while attendance isn't very high, the people who are here are of very high quality. state politicians, people in decision making positions in city government IT, PBS, the lead people from the government group that is transforming Malaysia into an open source country .... the day capped off with a panel discussion. John "Maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Larry Rosen, John Terpstra and myself sat on the panel and discussed issues of open source and "intellectual property". great conversation, even if Perens and Larry did go at it a few times. ;)
John Hall, Terpstra, Rosen and myself retired back to Sheraton for drinks and dinner, eventually meeting up with the convention coordinators, the Novell folk and a state government senator for pizza. the pizza was amazing. mmmm. thanks Novell! we talked into the night and i eventually got back home at 1am. had a glass of wine with Kaikapu, the husband of the couple that my mom is living with at the moment, and chatted some more before hitting the sack.
6am came way too quickly, but i got up and ready and met Hall and Terstra for breakfast before catching a cab with Robin Miller to the conference. after Bill Winberg's excellent opening keynote on open source licensing, the group from Malaysia gave and excellent presentation on what they are doing. their handout booklet was impressive and their plan looks comprehensive. John Hall, Larry Rosen and I went to lunch with the Malaysian delegation and had an intriguing set of conversations. it's really interesting to see the issues faced first hand by a group in their position moving open source forward on the scale they are doing so.
there's also a really interesting open source medical track going on.
John Terpstra put the source for his KDE app Bible Time on my watch so when i get home i can fix a crash that occurs on SUSE 9.2 for him, as i have that on my laptop. hopefully i'll be able hacking-capable after tonight's fun. i'm going out again, including a meeting lined up with Weinberg to discuss OSDL related topics. at least i'm staying in Waikiki tonight rather than tracking back out to the leeward coast. =)
oh, and i got this most entertaining pen from one of the vendors at the show. it's got one of those rock-em-sock-em boxers on it that's just amazing. ok. so, i'm easily entertained. =P
pictures to follow, once i get my laptop in the same space as my camera for a few minutes.
soon after arriving on tuesday i went out to the old digs on the leeward coast of Oahu. it was amazing how almost nothing had changed. time seems to stand still out there. after a dinner and a quick drive around the community we went for a swim in a quiet lagoon.
Bruce Perens opened the conference with the day 1 key note, and i spoke later in the morning presenting KDE 3.4. the day was dynamic and there were a lot of interesting people here. while attendance isn't very high, the people who are here are of very high quality. state politicians, people in decision making positions in city government IT, PBS, the lead people from the government group that is transforming Malaysia into an open source country .... the day capped off with a panel discussion. John "Maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Larry Rosen, John Terpstra and myself sat on the panel and discussed issues of open source and "intellectual property". great conversation, even if Perens and Larry did go at it a few times. ;)
John Hall, Terpstra, Rosen and myself retired back to Sheraton for drinks and dinner, eventually meeting up with the convention coordinators, the Novell folk and a state government senator for pizza. the pizza was amazing. mmmm. thanks Novell! we talked into the night and i eventually got back home at 1am. had a glass of wine with Kaikapu, the husband of the couple that my mom is living with at the moment, and chatted some more before hitting the sack.
6am came way too quickly, but i got up and ready and met Hall and Terstra for breakfast before catching a cab with Robin Miller to the conference. after Bill Winberg's excellent opening keynote on open source licensing, the group from Malaysia gave and excellent presentation on what they are doing. their handout booklet was impressive and their plan looks comprehensive. John Hall, Larry Rosen and I went to lunch with the Malaysian delegation and had an intriguing set of conversations. it's really interesting to see the issues faced first hand by a group in their position moving open source forward on the scale they are doing so.
there's also a really interesting open source medical track going on.
John Terpstra put the source for his KDE app Bible Time on my watch so when i get home i can fix a crash that occurs on SUSE 9.2 for him, as i have that on my laptop. hopefully i'll be able hacking-capable after tonight's fun. i'm going out again, including a meeting lined up with Weinberg to discuss OSDL related topics. at least i'm staying in Waikiki tonight rather than tracking back out to the leeward coast. =)
oh, and i got this most entertaining pen from one of the vendors at the show. it's got one of those rock-em-sock-em boxers on it that's just amazing. ok. so, i'm easily entertained. =P
pictures to follow, once i get my laptop in the same space as my camera for a few minutes.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Hawaii Conferences: T-12H
in 12 hours i begin the journey to the Calgary International Airport, bound for two conferences in Hawaii: TPOSSCON and the FSG's Unix Accessibility Conference. i'll be blogging at least daily during those events and posting pictures throughout. should be fun. i'm giving two presentations at TPOSSCON, one on wednesday and one on friday.
right now i'm doing my usual run-around-like-a-chicken-with-his-head-cut-off thing that i do the day before travelling somewhere. housework, packing, last minute details...
sadly, i've had to (hopefully temporarily) disable anonymous replies to my blog due to knobs spamming the comments with pornvertisements. dicks. (excuse the pun).
kicker is finally coming together. there's still a number of regressions and bugs to deal with before it's release-worthy, but a lot of stuff has been dealt with. the mouseover handling is better but not perfect, the menubar panel doesn't come and go with the desktop menubar settings, autogrow panels still suck and buttons still appear in the wrong place when created. but we're getting there.
i added kiosk support to kicker as well, so you can now lock down individual panels, individual buttons/applets and control adding/removing of applets as well. hooray! it wasn't a lot of additional code, but very finicky and often the logic was easiest to put in the "wrong" place. really helped highlight some additional weaknesses in the design of kicker that i'll have to address in KDE4.
there's also been some nice contributions recently. Jessica Hall did up KConfigXT files for kicker and Stefan Nikolaus appeared out of nowhere slinging patches to fix bugs. both have gotten CVS accounts in the last month or so. it's great to see new people constantly arriving on the scene and doing cool stuff.
my next post will be from warmer climes. hooray!
right now i'm doing my usual run-around-like-a-chicken-with-his-head-cut-off thing that i do the day before travelling somewhere. housework, packing, last minute details...
sadly, i've had to (hopefully temporarily) disable anonymous replies to my blog due to knobs spamming the comments with pornvertisements. dicks. (excuse the pun).
kicker is finally coming together. there's still a number of regressions and bugs to deal with before it's release-worthy, but a lot of stuff has been dealt with. the mouseover handling is better but not perfect, the menubar panel doesn't come and go with the desktop menubar settings, autogrow panels still suck and buttons still appear in the wrong place when created. but we're getting there.
i added kiosk support to kicker as well, so you can now lock down individual panels, individual buttons/applets and control adding/removing of applets as well. hooray! it wasn't a lot of additional code, but very finicky and often the logic was easiest to put in the "wrong" place. really helped highlight some additional weaknesses in the design of kicker that i'll have to address in KDE4.
there's also been some nice contributions recently. Jessica Hall did up KConfigXT files for kicker and Stefan Nikolaus appeared out of nowhere slinging patches to fix bugs. both have gotten CVS accounts in the last month or so. it's great to see new people constantly arriving on the scene and doing cool stuff.
my next post will be from warmer climes. hooray!
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
how to make Konqi render better in 1 easy step; more Designer; a teaser
the people working on KHTML have done a truly great job with it IMHO. it's relatively light, it's fast1 and it's rather accurate.
but there are still websites that render horribly, at least with the default configuration. much of the time2 this isn't due to a shortcoming in KHTML, but rather because the HTML being loaded commits the sin of trying to detect the browser with some javascript hack that doesn't work and then altering the output based on that. not only is this sort of chicanery usually not necessary these days, but it's easy to get wrong which results in shortshrifting browsers that the website designer didn't bother to think of or care about.
so many websites out there try and be clever in this way and end up not recognizing Konqueror and so spit out the wrong HTML. this gives Konqueror a bad name for rendering that it really doesn't deserve. if one simply switches the user agent3 for that site to be, say, IE6 the site will often suddenly look and work perfectly!
this is because the KHTML developers have gone to great lengths to support the quirks and behaviors commonly found in other browsers which so many sites on the world wide web rely on (for better or worse? nah... for worse). but this effort goes under-appreciated due to these web site's broken "browser detection" Javascripts.
here's a "solution"4 that i think would work handily: collect a list of commonly visited websites that render poorly in Konqueror because of the aforementioned problem. then create a set of default UA settings for them that cause them to render properly. preferably, these UA settings would contain the string "Konqueror" or "Your Website Sucks And So Do the People Who Made It"5 so that they are trackable by those who might care to.
then this file could either be distributed with Konqueror or be made available, say through a Hot New Stuff download. or maybe even extend the current UA switcher plugin to have a list of "known sites" that it could reference and then pop up a little dialog asking if the user would like to switch browser identifications for better results (with a "never ask again" checkbox, of course).
someone pointed me to this article on Qt4 Designer. seems we agree on a lot of issues, and it's a nice read to boot. they even use their shift key.
that's all for now. makundi6!
but there are still websites that render horribly, at least with the default configuration. much of the time2 this isn't due to a shortcoming in KHTML, but rather because the HTML being loaded commits the sin of trying to detect the browser with some javascript hack that doesn't work and then altering the output based on that. not only is this sort of chicanery usually not necessary these days, but it's easy to get wrong which results in shortshrifting browsers that the website designer didn't bother to think of or care about.
so many websites out there try and be clever in this way and end up not recognizing Konqueror and so spit out the wrong HTML. this gives Konqueror a bad name for rendering that it really doesn't deserve. if one simply switches the user agent3 for that site to be, say, IE6 the site will often suddenly look and work perfectly!
this is because the KHTML developers have gone to great lengths to support the quirks and behaviors commonly found in other browsers which so many sites on the world wide web rely on (for better or worse? nah... for worse). but this effort goes under-appreciated due to these web site's broken "browser detection" Javascripts.
here's a "solution"4 that i think would work handily: collect a list of commonly visited websites that render poorly in Konqueror because of the aforementioned problem. then create a set of default UA settings for them that cause them to render properly. preferably, these UA settings would contain the string "Konqueror" or "Your Website Sucks And So Do the People Who Made It"5 so that they are trackable by those who might care to.
then this file could either be distributed with Konqueror or be made available, say through a Hot New Stuff download. or maybe even extend the current UA switcher plugin to have a list of "known sites" that it could reference and then pop up a little dialog asking if the user would like to switch browser identifications for better results (with a "never ask again" checkbox, of course).
someone pointed me to this article on Qt4 Designer. seems we agree on a lot of issues, and it's a nice read to boot. they even use their shift key.
that's all for now. makundi6!
[1] there are still some JS slowdowns to be found, but the HTML rendering itself is quite speedy, and KJS and it's KHTML bindings have gotten noticeably faster over the past few releases. back
[3] this is where Konqueror plugins shine. to easily switch User Agents in Konqi, one simly has to go under the Tools menu and select Change Browser Identification (or User Agent if using older versions) to get a list of possible options. this will remember the setting for this domain, and will remain persistent between visits until you reset it! this menu has also gotten a nice ergonomic reorganization in 3.4! back
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