Yaron is Writing

Archive for April, 2007

Going global

Monday, April 30th, 2007

The forms extension I’ve been working on is almost ready for release, now that the new version of Semantic MediaWiki (0.7) is out, and testing shows that my code works fine with it. I figured I’d add do some internationalization, by adding support for French and Hebrew.

It’s taken more time than I thought it would - both languages, especially Hebrew, have special characters that have to be copied manually (well, in my case), and formatted correctly. And there’s technical language that I had to find out - somehow, a lifetime of talking to relatives never taught me phrases like “‘allow for multiple (or zero) instances of this template in the created page”.

Posted in Semantic Forms | 4 Comments »

Wikimania ‘07

Friday, April 27th, 2007

The big decision for this weekend is whether to attend Wikimania 2007, in August, in Taiwan. The deadline for submitting presentations is coming up very soon, and if I went it would be cool to present something. So there’s that. On the minus side, it’s in Taiwan, which means I’d be paying $1000 just to get there and back.

Methinks the organizers may have taken the concept of a “worldwide community” a little too literally. I mean, there are Star Trek fans in literally every country in the world, and of course the Federation itself was very international, but when the fans all get together it tends to happen right around Las Vegas. But maybe the WikiMedia/Wikimania people know what they’re doing.

Posted in Semantic wikis | 2 Comments »

Back on the laptop

Friday, April 27th, 2007

I might as well state here that I left the job at the web agency. No reflection on the company itself; it was a good bunch of people, doing really solid work, especially design-wise. It’s just that my heart wasn’t into the kind of work I was doing. I’m back to working on semantic wikis full time (this time, the underlying technology, as opposed to a specific implementation), and hopefully, there can even be a business opportunity out of it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »

New forms extension coming

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

Here’s an introduction of the project I’ve been working on on and off for the last few months: a form-creation extension for MediaWiki.

The basic idea is that, for semantic wikis to really be usable by a mass audience, the’ll have to allow adding and editing data using forms: anything more complex than filling out fields, is, I think, a non-starter for the majority of potential users, despite all the usefulness of the concept. So this extension would allow for form-creation without the need for programming.

I’ve been developing and testing the code on Discourse DB, so that’s where it can be seen now. Here’s a sample opinion item page, and a sample publication page, and a sample author page, and a sample topic page. On each one, you can click on the new “edit with form” tab to get to a form that lets you edit that page. Note that in each case the form is customized for that specific page type; these are four different forms, each of which is defined separately.

And here’s the form for creating such a data-entry form page. A form page could also be written out by hand (it basically looks like HTML with some special tags), but this makes it easier to do.

There a few more features and conveniences, but that’s the basic gist. I hope to release the extension sometime soon.

Posted in Discourse DB, Semantic wikis, Semantic Forms | 16 Comments »

Around the blogs

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Let’s see what other people are writing about…

Watch an inebriated Ivan Lenin sing a song about his mother.

Karol loves pineapple mojitos and Fred Thompson. I don’t know in which order.

It’s Petitedov’s birthday! Or it was a few days ago. She got a nice card.

Dawn gets a valuable Spanish lesson.

Ace offers an alternate theory about the anthrax letters. Who knows, at this point.

Mike Linksvayer says “citizen journalism” sites are a waste of time, given how easy it is to put up one’s own content. I’ve wondered about that, actually.

Noah’s “Heroes” connection.

Pretty Numbers visited Shanghai and Beijing.

Ari got a job at an internet startup. I’ve had a few of those…

Esther links to “Supermarket 2.0″ - a video spoof of Web 2.0 made by some Israeli techies (in English). It’s a bit overly long, but cute, and it’s always nice to see stuff from Israel.

And, in serious tech video stuff, Semantic Weltbild links to a video of Tim Berners-Lee (”the father of the Web”) explaining the Semantic Web in layman’s terms. He avoids the acronym-filled jargon, which is very good.

Posted in Linkfests | 7 Comments »

The hardest logic puzzle ever

Monday, April 9th, 2007

I didn’t know there was such a description, but this is what Wikipedia labels as the hardest logic puzzle ever:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.

The puzzle, then, is, what’s the fewest number of questions you can ask to find out this information, and what are they?

The article says the puzzle was invented by Raymond Smullyan, which makes sense since he came up with the whole concept of a land of “knights” and “knaves”, where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie, and you have to try to get some useful information out of them. I used to read a lot of his puzzle books when I was young.

I actually first heard this question at a job interview just a few months ago, at a small startup (no, it wasn’t Google). I mumbled my way through an answer that I think was on the right track, but nowhere near the actual solution (I got it down to about six questions, which is far from the best answer). I never heard back from them. That was actually before I discovered this article. But, if nothing else, at least I know I got stumped by “the hardest”.

If you figure it out, I know where you can go interview.

Posted in Uncategorized | 164 Comments »

Karl Popper, the pragmatic philosopher

Friday, April 6th, 2007

I’d never heard of Karl Popper until recently, but curiously, the last two books I read mention him at length (Wittgenstein’s Poker and Fooled by Randomness). I figure it’s a sign, unless of course I’ve been “fooled by randomness”.

Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot recently; I have more “subway time” these days.

Karl Popper Anyway, Popper was a mid-20th-century philosopher, one of the many notable figures who escaped from Austria and Germany to the west during the 30’s and 40’s. His basic idea was the concept of “falsifiability”. He started with the premise that theories about the world are at a natural disadvantage: it’s extremely easy to disprove a theory, since all you have to do is find one counterexample. On the other hand, it’s impossible to prove a theory. From this, Popper surmised that there are only two kinds of theories: those that have been proven to be false, and those that have not yet been proven to be false. In other words, any attempt to describe the world is bound to be false to same extent. Whatever set of theories hold sway at any given time are those that are the most useful, and those that best fit the set of facts known at the time. Theories are useful, Popper said, both in describing the world and in decision-making, but they should never be mistaken for absolute “truth”. It’s a familiar concept for those of use who are involved in the world of wikis, where the current version of the truth tends to change in an orderly fashion from day to day.

This view of the progress of ideas as just moving from one fallacy to the next might come off as bleak, but there are certain advantages Popper saw from it. For one thing, he felt that it makes it easy to distinguish science from pseudo-science: true science sets itself up to be disproven, by making specific statements and predictions. Pseudo-science and dogmatic religious beliefs (Popper was especially preoccupied with Marxism) are careful to make no claim that can be disproven. (That’s not to say that Popper was anti-religious, just that he felt that science and belief should always be kept distinct.) And as with science, so with politics: Popper defined a good government as simply one that allows for its own removal without violence. In both cases, there’s an emphasis on pragmatism above all.

25be

Posted in Books | 238 Comments »

First project

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

The first site I created at my new job - you can see it here. The MySpace kids out there seem to like it. The concept and design are by others; I just did the implementation, based around WordPress and a bunch of plugins.

Posted in Uncategorized | 73 Comments »

Ave atque vale

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

I heard some extremely disturbing news over the weekend about the untimely death of someone I knew from high school and a very occasional commenter here, Anson Tripp. We had been teammates on both the math team and the quiz bowl team back then, and he was always on point with the nerd stuff we tended to talk about in those days, whether it was Star Trek or math theories. Anson, wherever you are, you are missed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 443 Comments »