Being one of the most innovative OSS projects in my eyes, the Bitfluxeditor is final gaining more and more attention. As Christian Stocker, the creator of the Bitfluxeditor, wrote, the Linux Magazine published a report on the XML WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, it’s not available online, which would be nice to gain even more awareness for this nice tool.
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The Phenomenon "Linux"
Rainer Fischbach has written a wonderful article on Linux and what it means that e.g. the town Munich has decided to go for it. Unfortunately, it’s available in German only. You’d better learn some German, because this article is worth it 🙂
Via Timon
Thesis 5: Understand the Knowledge Market!
I wrote quite some reports to my Weblog about the UKUUG 2003 conference in Edinburgh. Some people might ask – and I asked myself: “Why does he give away his knowledge?”. In fact, travelling to conferences is quite some fun, but also quite some work.
The reasons to go to conferences is meeting with and talking to people, doing “human networking”. If you’re a speaker, conferences are the platform for your project to let others understand what you are trying to achieve. Conferences don’t pay out quickly in terms of new customer deals. Instead, they often pay out only in terms of “knowledge exchange”. Thus, it might be a good idea to keep to yourself all the good contacts you made at the conference, and all the good talks you have heard.
Writing reports about any session that you’ve visited is even more work. Especially if the aim of the reports is to let other people assess the importance of the talk in terms of “did I learn something new?”. Usually, this is done within companies – but I do it for the public of the Weblogging community.
Why? Because I am a saint? Definitely not! I do it for purpose and I want to “earn” something. Weblogging is about selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. The whole Internet is. By providing precious information to others, I hope to raise awareness of people and thus my share in the knowledge market. Being known to be knowledgeable can in fact pay out in real cash – or at least in Blogshares 🙂
Weblogs perfectly fit into the mechanisms of knowledge markets. They are a vehicle for selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. They offer the ability to individuals to invent themselves as a product in the knowledge market: to show what they know, how they deal with information, on what their decisions are based, which actions they take, which results those actions bring.
Saints? No. Egomanics? Maybe. Rather clients as well as servers of the knowledge market 🙂
UKUUG: Raddle network emulator
In his lightning talk at the end of UKUUG 2003, Andrew Findlay announced the very young Raddle project, which provides software to test network management systems.
UKUUG: Dasher: An information efficient text entry and control system
There’s not a lot to write about the Dasher project that Matthew presented – instead, you have to see it! Check out the Dasher project homepage. This animated GIF demonstrates how Dasher works and how it provides a completely different way of writing text. It’s so cool, that the audience applauded after Matthew’s first demonstration of the software during his talk 🙂
UKUUG: Automated Website Synthesis
Siu-Wai Leung’s talk Automated Website Synthesis was quite an eye-opener for me at UKUUG 2003:
Basically, Siu-Wai presented a proof-of-concept how to apply Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Semantic Web technologies to transform annotated content to a Website. Read it again! His talk was not only about how to present annotated content on a Website, no, it was rather about how to automatically create a Website from annotated content! In fact, what he talked about was ontology-based web content development and design.
He perfectly demonstrated the use of such an approach for aviation accident reporting. The tools he used are the HEIDI ontology (HEIDI is the abbreviation for “Harmonisation of European Incident Definition”). Furthermore, upon any aviation accident, a sophisticated pilot report form has to be filled in. Furthermore, data is automatically being recorded storing e.g. the altitude and speed of the airplane. Based on that data, Siu-Wai was able to create a graph showing the altitude of the plane, or a tree of events of the aviation accident.
The Website prototyping was done using a Simple Website Interface Model (SWIM), the Web Modelling Language (WebML). More on the technology behind can be found in Siu-Wai’s paper (PDF).
At the end of his talk, Siu-Wai summarized that the ontology-based mapping of information, Website, and perception is an AI problem (that’s his mapping hypothesis). He presented some ideas of how this could be achieved in the future. I very much liked his idea to use genetic programming to mutate the design of single Webpages or complete Websites to find the most suitable format to present the information to the user – an intelligent way of adaptive and personalized C/KMS.
That was a cool talk 😉 The aviation accident reporting demo seems like a perfect prototype to exemplify the possible advantages of AI and the Semantic Web. Also, the idea of genetic mutations of info visualization acknowledges the reality that every individual has a different way of filtering information and offers a higher flexibility in personalized content presentation then the theme-based CMS currently provide.
Collaborative Learning Environments: "KoALA", "Learning Lab"
I met Jan Kiszka at UKUUG and he pointed me to the following two projects:
KoALA
Information seems to be available in German only. The project is about collaborative training software and headed up by the ZDT of University of Hannover.
Learning Lab Lower Saxony (L3S)
“The L3S is part of the Wallenberg Global Learning Network (WGLN) which is coordinated by the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL).
Central research areas of the L3S are:
– Educational Technology and Collaborative Learning
– Digital Media and Semantic Web
– Innovations in Learning
– eLearning Curricula and Content
The work of L3S includes research, consultancy and technology transfer as well as infrastructure and support in the field of innovative teaching and learning technologies. Thereby L3S aims at the permanent introduction and use of these new technologies into education.”
Jan had a nice IBM R40 Notebook with him, maybe that’s my next one 🙂
XML Features in PostgreSQL
Christian has some info on XML and XPath features in PostgreSQL, provided via UDF. Yes, I would also love to see something similar in MySQL!
With the XSLTkit project, we provide some XSLTs that allow transoformation of XSD to e.g. SQL CREATE TABLE statements. We also plan to do the same with XUpdate to SQL ALTER TABLE transformation. This way, you can use XSLTkit to emulate a XML database on top of a RDBMS or LDAP.
LinuxTag 2003: Kaj on MySQL and SAP DB
Just attended Kaj Arnö’s talk MySQL, SAP and the Enterprise. Kay explained the development process of merging SAP DB and MySQL. For the mediate future, a proxy will be integrated in the SAP DB client, which allows MySQL users to manage SAP DB via the MySQL clients like mysql, mysqldump, mysqlimport. In the long run, functionality will be added to MySQL that covers the functionality already provided by SAP DB (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, standardized error behaviour, …). At the end of this process, the “MySQL Enterprise” edition (this is not the official, but the working name) will incorporate the best from both worlds: MySQL robustness, ease of use, and SAP DB enterprise functionality.
It’s also good news that all the nice DB management GUIs available for SAP DB will then also work with MySQL.
UPDATE: MySQL has branded SAP DB MaxDB
UKUUG: Source Control and Configuration Management using Perforce
Looking for an alternative to CVS (because CVS has its quirks), I attended Tony’s talk on Source Control and Configuration Management using Perforce.
The problem, perforce aims to solve is: developers want to focus on developing, not reporting, but managers want to know what’s going on.
Some features of perforce:
– client/server architecture
– off-line development support is rudimentary
– self-repair and recovery features
– atomic transactions ensure data integrity
– clean workspace, no CVS files, . files
– you can rename file extensions, move directories without loosing version tracking
– each branch is placed in a different directory (e.g. main/, release_1/, release_2/)
– branch views track intention, for example by merging branch directories: dev/* -> my/*
The perforce company has about 60 employees and 2400 customers (e.g. HP). The perforce software is closed source, but a special license for OSS projects is available.
Sandro Groganz 
