Compiling Rmutt on MacOSX Leopard (gcc -arch x86_64)

Keeping my notes findable: Rmutt on MacOSX will build cleanly if you change the CC line in the Makefile to be:

CC = gcc -arch x86_64

That is all. For those who haven’t tried it, Rmutt is a grammar-based nonsense generator along the lines of the Dada Engine (see also Web version). The Dada Engine powers the near-legendary Postmodernism Generator, though I’m lately thinking about putting these kinds of tools into a hosted (openid/wiki etc) environment where people could collaboratively build up shared grammars.

Syndicated 2008-10-03 12:40:52 from danbri's foaf stories

Karen Coyle on information linking

Just stumbled across this, after meeting Karen Coyle here at DC2008. A nice account of why we might care about linking information (and linking data):

Much like people, the real meaningfulness of information is how it interacts with others of its kind. Information that is alone or out of context is inert and cannot reach its potential. Usability is the key to information value, but usability can rarely be applied to any individual information unit. When libraries buy or gather bits of information in the form of books or journals or web sites, they do so with the express goal of making all of the information in their collection usable in the context of the library. A modern scientific treatise should be bolstered by the classical thinking that made it possible. Works promoting one political or moral point of view should sit on the shelf beside those promoting the opposite view. There are millions of invisible hyperlinks between these works that can be discovered by alert readers following Myst-like clues buried deep in the texts.

Meanwhile, Cat’s Cradle and Bokononism are now on my reading list…

Syndicated 2008-09-26 12:30:40 from danbri's foaf stories

Problem statement

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

It was in the NYTimes, so it must be true. Will the last one to leave the Web please turn off the lights.

Syndicated 2008-09-22 08:17:39 from danbri's foaf stories

Mozilla Ubiquity

The are some interesting things going on at Mozilla Labs. Yesterday, Ubiquity was all over the mailing lists. You can think of it as “what the Humanized folks did next”, or as a commandline for the Web, or as a Webbier sibling to QuickSilver, the MacOSX utility. I prefer to think of it as the Mozilla add-on that distracted me all day. Ubiquity continues Mozilla’s exploration of the potential UI uses of its “awesome bar” (aka Location bar). Ubiquity is invoked on my Mac with alt-space, at which point it’ll enthusiastically try to autocomplete a verb-centric Webby task from whatever I type. It does this by consulting a pile of built-in and community-provided Javacript functions, which have access to the Web, your browser (hello, widget security fans)… and it also has access to UI, in terms of an overlaid preview window, as well as a context menu that can actually be genuinely contextual, ie. potentially sensitive to microformat and RDFa markup.

So it might help to think of ubiquity as a cross between The Hobbit, GreaseMonkey,  Bookmarklets, and Mozilla’s earlier forms of packaged addon. Ok, well it’s not very Hobbit, I just wanted an excuse for this screen grab. But it is about natural language interfaces to complex Webby datasources and services.

The basic idea here is that commands (triggered by some keyword) can be published in the Web as links to simple Javascript files that can be single-click added (without need for browser restart) by anyone trusting enough to add the code to their browser. Social/trust layers to help people avoid bad addons are in the works too.

I spent yesterday playing. There are some rough edges, but this is fun stuff for sure. The emphasis is on verbs, hence on doing, rather than solely on lookups, query and data access. Coupled with the dependency on third party Javascript, this is going to need some serious security attention. But but but… it’s so much fun to use and develop for. Something will shake out security-wise. Even if Ubiquity commands are only shared amongst trusting power users who have signed each other’s PGP keys, I think it’ll still have an important niche.

What did I make? A kind of stalk-a-tron, FOAF lookup tool. It currently only consults Google’s Social Graph API, an experimental service built from all the public FOAF and XFN on the Web plus some logic to figure out which account pages are held by the same person. My current demo simply retrieves associated URLs and photos, and displays them overlaid on the current page. If you can’t get it working via the Ubiquity auto-subscribe feature, try adding it by pasting the raw Javascript into the command-editor screen. See also the ‘sindice-term‘ lookup tool from Michael Hausenblas. It should be fun seeing how efforts like Bengee’s SPARQLScript work can be plugged in here, too.

Syndicated 2008-08-28 16:19:30 from danbri's foaf stories

Miracle of binary

The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters. It is a letdown befitting the Wizard of Oz, but it has been a boon to computers.

– Willard van Orman Quine on the Universal Library

(via Borges’ Library of Babel indirectly found via Dan Connolly’s RDFization of the animals quote)

This somehow reminded me of a couple other links I found earlier on Turing Machines built in Conway’s game of Life: one from Paul Rendell, another from Paul Chapman. These machines also have a kind of strange beauty…

Syndicated 2008-07-28 12:11:04 from danbri's foaf stories