Archive for February, 2007

Travel directions according to Google

Published by ugo on February 15, 2007 in fun and google. 2 Comments

GoogleMapsSydney.pngA couple years ago I made fun of Microsoft for suggesting a trip across most of Northern Europe for going from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway. It’s only fair then that I poke fun at Google now for suggesting that you cross Sydney Harbor (going via a toll bridge) if you merely want to go from 200 Sussex Street to 201 Sussex Street, which amounts to basically crossing the street.

Google Embarrassed in Australia | TechCrunch: “Reporters at a Sydney, Australia newspaper discovered an embarrassing flaw in Google’s Map product - Google recommends a 10.4 kilometer trip, across the harbor and back, to go the thirty steps from Google’s Sydney headquarters to a hotel located across the street. The suggested route would also include a AU$3 bridge toll. Any query for driving directions from areas east, south or west of Google’s headquarters will suggest the same detour across the harbor, using a toll tunnel or bridge.

Google is blaming MapData Sciences, the Sydney-based company that supplies the mapping data to Google, for the problem. I imagine MapData is working on a fix rather urgently.”

At least they don’t make you cross half a dozen national boundaries and a couple seas to get there.

Misunderstanding REST

Published by ugo on February 14, 2007 in atom and web. 3 Comments

Dave Winer discusses Yahoo! Pipes and in the process says something so wrong that I don’t even know where to start picking it apart.

In this case, the target is the huge, rich base of RSS feeds, which is designed to work with one kind of aggregator, a River of News, and if you structured Pipes around that — a filtration process for a river, it might bear some immediate fruit, but its built on a different model.

This might be true if you limit yourself to RSS, which is not very useful beyond aggregators. Maybe if you started using Atom instead, you might discover it is suited to a much larger category of applications.

It assumes that each feed can be dealt with as a procedure call, which according to the REST philosophers, it can, but in practice, feeds don’t take parameters, so they’re the least interesting kinds of procedures, like clock.now in UserTalk. Sure there are some verbs that build on that verb, date.month, date.year and date.dayOfWeek, but nowhere near as much as verbs that have rich parameter lists, which are like the gateways that Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell are so excited about.

Equating feeds to procedures? Is this supposed to be consistent with REST, in Dave’s mind? Reality check: There are only four verbs in REST: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

See XML-RPC for Newbies for background; a Pipes that could do XML-RPC could be interesting, esp because the Metaweblog API is an XML-RPC application, and is widely supported by blogging tools and CMSes.

XML-RPC? Talk about flogging a dead horse.

In the RSS world, and therefore in Pipes, there’s no way to tell if items in two feeds are talking about the same thing. The best you can hope for is keyword serendipity, which all the demos so far do, and those make for unsatisfying demos, because you know you couldn’t deploy a useful app out of the concepts they illustrate. Very much like the early demos for HyperCard, Marimba, and my own Frontier.

Now it’s possible that a company like Yahoo, with its diverse flows of information, and nearly universal support of RSS, could add enough metadata to their feeds to be sure two items in different feeds were talking about the same thing, and then we’d be somewhere interesting.

Once again, if you used Atom, you could rely on every item having a unique identifier, and a universally unique one, being a URI. You could also reasonably expect that two copies of the same item, no matter which feed they were found in, had the same id. Unfortunately, RSS offers no such guarantees.

Looks like Dave is just whining here because Yahoo! Pipes is not like XML-RPC and RSS is too weak for doing anything besides aggregating news. If he had the courage to look beyond what he invented many years ago, he might find something actually useful was invented in the meantime.

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How young-earth creationists can get a PhD from a secular university: by lying

Published by ugo on February 12, 2007 in skeptic. 3 Comments

Marcus RossIt’s a well known fact that creationists are a bunch of liars and hypocrites, but nobody, until now, went so far as to be duplicitous to the point of writing a whole Ph.D. dissertation in geology, “working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework”, describing events that happened millions of years ago, while at the same time being a young earth creationist.

This guy basically has no intellectual honesty at all, and it’s no surprise that he’s now got a job teaching at Liberty University, that bastion of science that requires that is employees profess faith in “a young-earth creationist philosophy.”

It’s also no surprise that the IDiots at Uncommon Descent were quick to brag about the news:

How young-earth creationists can get a PhD from a secular university | Uncommon Descent: “Now that the NY Times has reported it, I may as well publicly extend my congratulation to Marcus Ross. He serves as a role model for how ID proponents and even young earth creationists can matriculate through Darwinist controlled institutions.”

Look, a creationist with academic credentials in a relevant subject! I guess that’s true, as long as you can overlook the fact that his credentials are based on a thesis that goes straight against the creationists’ beliefs.

But let’s forget about those lying sacks of shit and instead rejoice in celebration of Charles Darwin’s 158th Birthday!

(Via PZ Myers.)

The Pinocchio Problem

Published by ugo on February 10, 2007 in devel. 1 Comment

Here’s another masterful rant by Steve Yegge (emphasis mine):

Living software has a command shell, since you need a way to talk to it like a grown-up. It has an extension language, since you need a way to help it grow. It has an advice system, since you need a way to train and tailor it. It has a niche, since it needs users in order to thrive. It has a plug-in architecture, so you can dress it up for your party. And it is self-aware to the maximum extent possible given the external performance constraints. These features must be seamlessly and elegantly integrated, each subsystem implemented with the same care and attention to detail as the system as a whole.

If you ignore the nonsense about consciousness, I think Stevey pretty much nails down the defining characteristics of software that is designed to last for a long time and doesn’t require rebooting every time you introduce a trivial change.

Speaking

Published by ugo on February 8, 2007 in apache and opensource. 0 Comments

One of my proposals has been accepted for the upcoming ApacheCon Europe 2007 conference, so it’s highly probable that I’ll be entertaining people there about “An Architecture of Participation for Open Source”, whatever that means ;). The conference program is not yet online, so you’ll have to wait until it is before reading the abstract and deciding whether it’s worth attending or not.

It’s nice that this year ApacheCon Europe is in Amsterdam, a city where I’ve recently spent only a few weeks in all ;). I could have appreciated a less familiar location, but all is not bad: looking at the calendar the timing looks perfect for a family trip, considering that April 29th is a Sunday and May 1st is Labor Day holiday in Italy. We’d just need to take April 30th off from work and be able to spend four days (including Koninginnedag) as tourists. Since every time I’ve been to Amsterdam has been for work, I was never able to visit places like the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh Museum, which have the nasty habit of closing down at 6 PM on weekdays.

Coming to a more local event, I’ll be speaking about “Ruby for Java Programmers” at the next Milan Java User Group meeting on Feb 22nd, to be held at our offices. Also in this case, the program doesn’t seem to be online yet, but it’s the same talk I already did at OSCCON 2006, RailsConf Europe 2006 and ApacheCon US 2006. I wonder if I should do it in English, as I probably know it by heart in that language already.

Magic Leiden

Published by ugo on February 2, 2007 in photography. 17 Comments

Magic LeidenI took this picture last night in Leiden (where we had a Joost meeting). Strangely enough, it was one of the rare occasions when I found fog in the Netherlands, apart from my very first trip to Amsterdam, more than one year ago.

I think the fog lends a special atmosphere to the Dutch towns like Amsterdam and Leiden, with their canals. Unfortunately, I only had a lousy camera with me, so the picture is quite blurry and noisy, but I think it captures quite well the atmosphere of the moment, and the lone biker is sooo Dutch.

More pictures in this Flickr set here, including a couple nice shots of this morning’s sunrise taken from the plane.

Speaking of Joost, I still have a few invites left, so if you want one, leave a comment here stating your full name, email address and URL of the blog or website where you intend to mention Joost.

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