excellent question asking advice

a concise overview of how to ask questions, from one of the perl monks

Simple TextMate Ant bundle and the problem with IDE's

In an effort to 'update' myself, I have spent the past year working in a few full featured IDE.

I have used, in anger, Apple's development IDE Xcode, as well as dabbling a bit using Netbeans.

The results are not so good.

Xcode (with interface builder) is a very nice IDE ... fast and everything a developer could ever want ... I was reminded of my days spent using Borland ;) though that being said; Apple IDE makes it hard to play nice in the continuous integration style that I have become accustomed too ... I will probably stick with just doing Objective C in it, but other stuff is too much of a pain.

Netbeans is also nice (and yes I have tried eclipse, etc) ... but running it reliably and quickly on mac OSX became too much of a pain. I think it has a clean, uncluttered interface and good stuff like simple integration with Ant and is very much orientated to the needs and wants of today's Java developer.

Both IDE's represent something of a conundrum with me. I cannot seem to leave emacs .... though I lie ... I now split my time equally between emacs and TextMate.

It occurred to me that with some very simple modifications I could make TextMate my IDE and still remain compatible with all that I do in emacs (from a workflow point of view).

First step was to create a simple bundle (the way TextMate extends itself) that lets me control Apache Ant

Download ant.bundle.zip

This bundle provides 3 functions, which is relative to the Ant build file you have currently open in TextMate;

* run default Ant Target

* run selected text Ant Target

* list out ant targets (equivalent to -projecthelp switch)

It isn't rocket science (nor should it be) and now I have the first step to developing using TextMate as my IDE of choice.

Attention Data, OpenID, my data and the social web

One of the real problems of the social web is the idea of trusting all those social apps to store one’s data ... this is intrinsically linked to issues of non-repudiation, authentication, and other security related topics.

Every site also demands entry of essentially duplicated data.

Questions like ‘should I give them my real birthday’ and ’ am I comfortable with giving out my home telephone number’ are posed every time (well for me) when I finally do get around to filling out subscription forms.

I think that this blog starts describing the problem (from VC perspective); e.g. for the social (and upcoming semantic) web to work, we need to have control over the data. I see APML (Attention Data) an interesting approach to part of the solution.

Perhaps some day we will see some standard way of providing our attention data and other data (such as profile, etc) ... in the same manner as the OpenID initiative works.

That is perhaps some day we will provide the same url to each of these social applications to inform them of where we want any data stored or referred from. That way our standard profile gets known immediately and we can somewhat start ensuring we own our own data.

However, it does remain to be seen if we will further demand data to physically ‘live’ on our data keys,
hard drives, mobile fones, etc… or if we are comfortable with putting data onto yet another 3rd party services , like Amazon’s S3 or some Google Data store (Base).

With Atom now with finished (and APP); I think APML, OpenID, and my data where I want it will start becoming a reality ... might work.

my brief thoughts on facebook ...and Web 2.0

I think the latest moves by Facebook represents an inherent problem with Web 2.0, which is once one has created a somewhat useful communication space, go hells bells to commodotize said space.

People will simply move onto other less cluttered places to communicate. I very much see things like Facebook as '8 track tape technology'... I might be wrong though.

Without intentionally being offensive ... I propose that Facebook
does not represent any real advance in software, its a matter of
scope and ‘lingua franca’ e.g. u get this number of people on any old
php based extranet and very quickly things look interesting from a commercial
point of view.

As an aside, I think that most of the interest with all things online these days, is being fueled mainly by the shift of ad spending to online entities.

Looking into my infallible crystal ball, I
think that there will be more fundamental advances in uncluttered
communication spaces then what Web 2.0 hints at. I personally subscribe to the opinion that a lot of the social applications are a thinly veiled attempt to get someone to provide their marketing data ... but admittedly some are somewhat useful.

Lastly, remember Web 2.0 applications are just successful Web 1.0 applications we built in 1999, that have been given nice graphics and scaled up to handle larger user populations ;)

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Things I have learned about Carbon in 3 days

My little pet project .... Planet Carbon that aggregates feeds about carbon related matters has already taught me a few things;

That drivers can get rewarded if they change behavior. Perhaps, as with smoking, this is where change will really start with insurance companies pressing for cost reduction. I don't drive, but if I did ... I would start doing this type of thing ;).

That the emerging economies of China and India have a powerful analogy (mobile phones) to not follow the western world's lead down an unsustainable path of growth.

That this is the 2nd time in my life I have heard this statement (with approx 15 years in between)... it seems that our evolutionary goal is to 'pave the planet'; I can see a lot of work for archivists in the future to remember all that is going to be lost.

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Planet Carbon

since I owned a lot of carbon related domains (mad domain name buying spree of some years ago), decided to put them to use;

http://www.carbonreport.co.uk/

I will try to get a design done soon ... note if anyone has any good Carbon Neutral related domains then send em along.

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What would 'spam' look like on the semantic web ?

I maybe proposing including a bit of semantic web topics for the next XML Prague...so I have started studying the semantic 'lay of the land' ... having done this some years ago, places like here are evidence enough that the sweb (semantic web) seems to be picking up some inertia.

leaving some of my notes here for personal reference later;

my top level analysis (simplistic!);

* search engines to be replaced/augmented by inference engines working on triples

* sweb hard to commercialize ?

* sweb may depend on 'mechanical turks' donating their tagging efforts ?

* it is a bit disconcerting that there is very little work with sweb and smtp & email

* IP becomes an even bigger nightmare to manage

* current architectures that underpin sweb are brittle due to evolution/revolution and volatility ... this is a common characteristic of emerging technologies (oh ya, RDF is still ugly)

As an aside, it struck me that it might be easy to 'game' the emerging architecture for the sweb.

One theoretical attack on the sweb would be to seed/impregnate data stores with ir/relevent evil triples, allowing one to 'skew' inferences or perhaps render any kind of query useless...it might be real easy to game with significantly less effort, as one could analyze the minimum set of triples (at key reference points) and go from there.

Malicious and evil viruses cost much less then spam does currently on the web....and I see no different thing happening for spam on the sweb.

Be interested to hear questions like 'What's spam going to look like on the sweb?'