Yes, I’m looking at you, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Reporting Services Configuration Manager is only half a solution.

Everyone else: let me do easy and gratifying things immediately, and difficult things shortly thereafter. Consider iLife your holy grail. There is no step 3.

That is all. You may return to your homes.

This is also a legacy that Mr. [Martin] Gardner leaves to generations of researchers, teachers and entertainers: don’t try to understand the whole world at once. Take only a small part of it. Or better yet: invent your own universe in which there are very few elements and very few rules — a game, a puzzle, a theory. These circumscribed and artificial worlds are like sheets of paper subject to the rules of folding, yet they can yield remarkable results having almost uncanny power.

A couple of thoughts. First, if you are designing stuff for the long term, going with one of these ports (eg a non-.NET-native language) should be considered. You always have the native runtime to fall back on. The reverse is true of C# thanks to Mono. Second, the .NET programming stack may now be officially certified as robust. Haters now dismissed, lesson over.

If you pay close attention, it’s not the technology or the people that makes things inefficient, but the processes and standards.

DECLARE @desiredDate datetime
SET @desiredDayOfWeek = 4 --& Let's find, oh, Tuesdays. I like Tuesdays, usually.
SET @desiredDate = DATEADD(dd, ((DATEPART(ww, DATEADD(ww, 1, GETDATE())) - DATEPART(ww, DATEADD(dd, 7%((@desiredDayOfWeek - DATEPART(dw, GETDATE())) + 7), GETDATE()))) * 7) + (-1 * (DATEPART(dw, GETDATE()) - @desiredDayOfWeek)), GETDATE())

Whee!

First Question.

What ever happened to distributed peer-based digital signatures and public keys using webs of trust? I am reading The Code Book, and today at lunch hit the chapter on the development of public-key crypto and the saga of Phil Zimmerman. I remember quite a fuss in the mid-90s about cypherpunks bootstrapping a decentralized trusted-key infrastructure. It seems quite relevant and do-able today. Has that project met demise and failed to get off?

Next question.

Has anybody done thinking on the epistemological criteria of encryption systems? Is there a formulation for knowledge wandering around which includes encryption? The history of crypto has seen a succession of knowledge-claims about the unbreakability of systems, and a matching set of persuasive counter-examples. Is there work in this area of philosophy? Additionally, what is the status of encrypted information? Is it knowledge, and what affect does the encryption state have on status?

Last question.

In day-to-day practice, I’ve supplanted my previous criteria for precise knowledge (being able to ask a good enough question that I can get a useful answer from someone knowledgeable) with the criteria “be able to formulate a Google search query which returns the desired information.” Is that wrong? What is the qualitative difference between the two?

Please answer below, or in trackbacks. I exist to be enlightened by someone other than myself.

We’re networking 15 million kids across the globe together.

The poor are defined as those who lack resources. Hey Brazillian street kid: here’s 15,000,000 resources. Hey Honduran farmer kid: here’s a thingy that can be the Farmer’s Almanac, 21-century style. Hey Congolese orphan kid: here’s a way to inform the planet about your situation and story, something that hasn’t been heard in over a hundred years.

This is The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer in real life.

$100 laptops + Social web + 15 million fresh faces? Technology that brings freedom. That’s what I’m talking about.

But models do have their uses, bringing out features that we cannot access IRL. It gets better when the models allow unconstrained real-time interaction with the data they represent. When you can run those models on your laptops, nerd-bliss arrives.

This morning, Mr. Peter Ryer at Boeing nailed just that with his Desktop Tool Suite of flight model software. Want your engineers in the back of the plane to watch a model of the plane as it flies, feed in real time by thousands of sensors on the plane? Yep. They can even move the camera around the airplane as it maneuvers, see the instruments and the pilot’s view, etc.

Recently I’ve read reminders from Elissa and from Andy Crouch: don’t assume the model tells the full story.

Writing, crafting, growing, accruing, and constructing software is like engineering, except where it’s not.

Fred Brooks, as I recall, had a lot to say about how software differs from hardware engineering. Hardware engineering is true engineering: you have a precisely-specified set of physical and scientific requirements (and conceptual too–your computer must be a finite state machine; a universal Turing machine). But software, ah, that is malleable to a ridiculous extent. So much so that we haven’t even figured formally out how malleable it is. My professor in college taught me how to “be the computer” on a certain scale, but there is no way you can “be” my compaq 620c running windows xp and firefox. Too much. I remember reading a story about Seymour Cray, the Cray supercomputer dude, as a kid. Cray literally dug a hole in his backyard so that he could literally model the Cray’s chip design in his head. I get to write stuff that runs on that design.

So check out what Brad Abrahms has to say about comparing what he does against what his dad, an engineering professor, does.

As the philosophizing son of a physical engineer, I perhaps I gravitated towards this computer technology thing because it had the engineering that kept the inherited genes happy while being vague enough to keep it differentiated from my dad’s Real Engineering interests.

I think there is a difference to draw here, though, between software engineering and coding (and computer science, but that’s an obvious but easily-overlooked point). From a slashdot comment:

Document your application, requirements, constraints, and system interactions (what the engineer does). Then write the code (what the coder does).

What you will quickly learn is that it’s better to be the engineer than the coder. What you’ll realize is that the engineer is the client-side guy that figures out how to solve the challenge presented and the coder is the guy who can live in Manipal.

The computer scientist is another guy altogether that sets the boundaries within which the engineer must work and provides many of the tools.

Fred Brooks also rhapsodized about why software is the greatest. And it is; the coolest Lego ever; a virtual 3-D printer that you wire up in your mind.

In sum, technology is teh r0XX0rz, 41wayz & 4eva!

The key point in my reading is that good design makes the object do the work, not get data out of the object and do the work yourself. Seems reasonable in cases where you know exactly what work the object will be doing. But designing forward, it is good to have the data available, though there is some argument about whether that data is a property purely internal.

I would like to hear his definition of an object, since my oo education taught me that an object is a collection of data and actions upon that data. Seems pretty fundamental ontologically. Of course, when I am designing, I use a different heuristic often. An object is a thing that represents a physical or logical or virtual entity. What you expect that thing to know, the object should know, and what you expect that thing to do, the object should do. I often ask, “What do I need to get from this object to do what I want?”

Further, you want to know why CC is important? It is making law via code.

Finally, I know you want to write all kinds of little graffiti on court cases. Open Source law is the idea. Now is your chance with the Legal Wiki Project. Try Grokster v. RIAA!

Bonus: is there any work on a wiki using OneNote-ish scribbling? I’m not talking about adding graffiti to existing sites, but about wiki software which explicitly enables that sort of thing. I sign into a wiki, and I can scribble on the pages. Call it the Child’s Playroom wiki.

…individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?

Further, and I harp back to my previous analogy of Maine moving next to Texas, network infrastructure has increased the value of networks a la Metcalf.

…the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight.

On the flip side of this, Cobb unintentionally touches on what this globalization means for ordinary americans like your humble author. In my analysis, the melting pot and the global village are converging. I don’t think our country’s constitution is flexible enough to accomdate that convergence. I don’t mean the document, but everything except the actual document by Mssrs. Jefferson et al.

Their point is taken, but the example given is that n log n applies to the union of two networks of equal size n. It seems in that case that lots of new connections may be formed, more so than if each network grew on its own. I can agree to n log n in that case, but a large union seems to create more opportunities, but only in cases where there are chances at intercommunication.

In their Thoreau example, Maine may not have anything to say to Texas. But a large union of two networks makes this example brittle. It’s as if Maine was suddenly moved next door to Texas. Then Maine has a lot more interest in what’s going on in Texas, and vice-versa. Not only that, they find out that there’s more in common between this Red state and Blue state than they thought. And then they form the MTFTA (Main-Texas Free Trade Agreement), and suddenly there’s even more connections, more so than if Maine had never left the cold Northeast.

Of course, a network of earthworms, no matter how large (well, within reason here…), will probably not have much to say to Texas, regardless. Merge those two networks, and not much happens. So I believe, on average, that networks do grow n log n, but there seems to be edge cases where growth is greater. Early internet, blogs, usenet, etc. Not just merging two networks, but moving networks closer to each other.

That’s hand-wavy discourse. To tighten things up a bit, I will say that networks grow faster if they share similar properties and the exposed/addressable surface area is increasing. Which explains my previously-stated cases of usenet, bbs, blogs, etc. New technology increased surface area of network that users/computers could address. Boom, n^2 growth for the network.

Sounds like arguments for open-ness and transparency too, then, huh?

Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).

Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.

The hard part was never getting the data (though that’s interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that’s pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There’s no ontology in data, it’s just data.

From the article:

“We have guys who can crack hard drives,” Mr. Alexander said. “Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it.”

The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It’s just that there’s no easy way to pull it together into something useful.

This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.

Transparency, I’ve come to realize, is vital in more than image-editing. It’s a fundamental ethical virtue. The present moment hosts a struggle between transparency and opacity that must galvanize us into living more transparently and calling for more transparency from our institutions. Government, business, education, and science must be transparent in important ways for their future fundamental integrity.

Korby Parnell tells a motivating tale of transparency at work in the splitting of the atom. But significantly, other institutions must act transparently as well. Higher-Ed springs to mind, perhaps from recent experiences. So does Enron, WorldCom, Google, and Microsoft. There’s varying degrees of transparency in each of those companies (and varying degrees of failure therein). For lawyers and their firms, there’s even less transparency, as Evan Schaeffer humorously relates.

Transparency. Not like a Johnsone-esque glass house, but like a piece of open code. Transparency over processes, models, and compliance. Not over execution and decision-trees. Think about why I believe it to be so important over the week.

–McConnell, p. 96-97.

Yes, I’ve been thinking for a while that this whole internet thing has spectacularly failed to become easier to use since, oh, ARPANET. Online life is still too tricky for all except the 1337.

Anyways, this jives with a difficult conceptual problem as the web moves to allow Unicode chars in domain names. Suddenly, my example to my mom seems quaint. This stuff is subtle and hard. For the record, good going on the FireFox team for disabling IDN until they work out the issue. Protect your users and they will love you for it. Right, MSFT & APPL? Right Verisign? Right, all ye TLD registrars who allow obvious phish attempts to register domains?

Want an example?

When people ask what I do, my past response has been that I am a programmer for a law firm. This is not comprehended well, so I’ve been toying with different ways to describe what I do. A tougher-than-it-looks task. I have settled on the claim that “I write software that is used by a law firm.” This answer reels in more comprehending faces and lighter eyes. What is different between a “programmer” and “writing software”? Well, the latter describes an action while the former is a noun.

Further, there’s the idea that what I do is somewhat orthogonal to what a writer of novels, or short stories, or essays does. I plot, I outline, I adopt the most persuasive line of argument. I practice rhetoric on the computer. Seems like a good heuristic to hang my hat on for most people.