Inspirational Technology

From a click through license for the beta of IBM’s DB2 Viper database.

3. Rights In Data

You assign to IBM all right, title, and interest (including ownership of copyright) in any data, suggestions, or written materials that 1) are related to the Program and 2) You provide to IBM. If IBM requires it, You will sign an appropriate document to assign such rights. To the extent not otherwise covered by your grant under the first sentence of this Section 3, with respect to any idea, know-how, concept, technique, invention, discovery or improvement, whether or not patentable, related to the Program and that you provide to IBM, You grant to IBM a non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide and paid-up right and license to include the foregoing in any product or service, and to use, manufacture and market any such product or service, and to allow others to do any of the foregoing.

I first read this as saying that anything you do with the software becomes the property of IBM. I’m not sure that’s what it says, but who knows. I shouldn’t need a lawyer to interpret the license for a piece of software that I’m evaluating.

What I think this is really trying to do is say that any feedback you provide to IBM becomes the property of IBM. I think the 2) You provide to IBM is the key, but I’m not a lawyer so how the hell do I know for sure.

This sucks, all I wanted to do was try out the software, write a few articles about it and see if maybe we want to use it in our systems, but until I know what that clause actually means I can’t even download it.

So here’s a question, why is it that lawyers are absolved of any responsibility for usability? We spend so much time worrying about usability of the software we build, but our legal agreements just get more and more hostile toward the user.

Evan Prodromou has posted what I guess can be considered a call to action in regard to microformats and RDFa. Those are clearly two ways of solving the problem of microcontent publication, with RDFa bringing all the weight of RDF along with it. Evan’s concern is that they’ll end up competing and slowing the adoption of the technology. Probably a legitimate concern given the history of other recent W3C killer specs like XQuery and XML Schema. It actually makes me cringe to think about the presence of a W3C spec in this area. I think XQuery was the worst thing that could have happened to XML databases, it basically killed innovation and the stupid thing still isn’t done.

Microcontent publication is a new area, ripe for innovation and it’s WAY TOO EARLY to worry about standards. Standards will just ramp up the complexity and kill innovation. I keep seeing the argument that RSS and HTML became such a mess because there were no standards or whatever. I just don’t buy that as a problem. The only thing that matters in both of those cases is that they were both successful, broadly successful, hugely successful, massively successful in a way that almost no standardized technology has ever been successful. Are they a mess now? Yeah sure I suppose you could argue that, but so what! At least we got to the point where it actually makes sense to worry about that. If RSS had been based on a committee designed standard for syndication it would have never succeeded. And that isn’t just theory, there were committee designed specifications for that exact thing before RSS existed and now I can’t even remember what they were called.

As technologists we tend to get caught up in trying to avoid mistakes, and we look at things like RSS and HTML in retrospect and think of all the ways things could have been done better technically. However, in doing that we also tend to forget or simply miss the reason that we’re even in a position to look back on the successful technologies. So here’s my message to the other technologists working in this space. Ignore your desire for standards, it’s too early. The path to success is paved with published microcontent, real world microcontent. The format of the microcontent is unimportant, what’s important is that it simply exists, that people are actually publishing stuff in some structured form. Any structured form is better than no structured form. Once that happens and people are used to the idea and there’s at least some value there, then we can worry about real standards to take it to the next level. For now even the Microformats effort is almost pushing things in my opinion.

And I’ll also say this, if microcontent publishing requires people to understand anything about RDF, it’s game over, kaput, fini, forget about it. RDF is what eight, nine years old now and there’s still only a very small handful of people who actually understand it. Hmm, maybe there’s a reason for that. So put your resources, reifications and ontologies on the ground and take a step back.

It’s going to be a rowdy and wild time on the microcontent frontier and that’s just how it should be. So grab your six shooters, free your mind and shootdown the standards. Yee Haw!

Looks like the iTunes Music Store now has the Complete Mozart Edition set from Phillps. This is a huge set of music cataloging one recording of every piece of music Mozart ever composed. I actually own the CD version of it, all 180 CDs and seven feet of shelf space worth of it. It’s a great set and I’ve enjoyed it immensely even though there’s still much I’ve never listened too. In the digital age with services like Rhapsody, the value of these complete collections isn’t quite the same, but it’s still cool to see it available.

A common question I see from people working with Ruby on Rails migrations is where’s the documentation? That’s a pretty good question and there doesn’t really seem to be a whole lot around right now. Here’s a few things I’ve dug up that may be helpful.

• Screencast example
• API Docs
• Getting started with Active Record Migrations
• The joy of Migrations
• Rails Migration Cheat Sheet

Also the newer books have some information on it. I suspect the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails will be the main source in the future. Also Rails Recipes has a little info.

If you know of other sources please add them as comments.

• Configuring Rails Environments: The Cheat Sheet
  Reference for setting up Ruby on Rails environments.
  (tags: programming ruby rubyonrails grid7 rails reference)

Dr. Arnaud Leene has posted a document looking at the presence of microcontent in existing systems and a little about defining what it is. He leads with business cards as an example of microcontent in the real world. I’ve also been using that as an example for a number of years when talking to people face to face about the microcontent concept. It’s a good visual example and allows you to put something in peoples hands that represents the concept. Obviously microcontent on the web is a little bit different, but the concept is close enough to be useful. Arnaud then takes the concept and brings it back into the computer world to illustrate other places where Microcontent is already being used.

I guess it had to happen eventually, but O’Reilly/CMP has really fumbled with their sending of a nastygram regarding use of the Web 2.0 term by another conference. This is a prime example of the dangers of allowing lawyers to have too much freedom. The damage to their reputation caused by this has to far exceed any value they could derive from “owning” the term Web 2.0. Sure they’re required to defend their service mark or they lose it, in this case maybe loosing it is just what they should have allowed to happen. This is a massive mistep and it’s unfortunate to see a company that has been so highly respected make such a foolish and obvious mistake.

Update: Tim O’Reilly responds. This was definitely a case of lawyer’s having too much freedom and it’s really unfortunate that most of the cost in negative publicity is being born by O’Reilly rather than CMP. I guess that’s the “benefit” of being a company that’s respected like O’Reilly vs. a company that nobody really cares about like CMP.

Along with the reboot of Inspirational Technology, this week we also launched a new site for Grid7 and as part of that included a blog where you can keep track of developments with the various Grid7 projects.

In combination with my writing lull, there’s also been a big lull in my photography. However, this months issue of Sophisticated Rider magazine does have a couple of my photos as part of the “No Bikes Allowed” article. It’s been about a year since I’ve had anything published so it’s cool to see them in print again. Nothing special really, but it’s something and the magazine is actually of pretty high quality considering the subject of extreme sports.

I also got out a couple days ago to shoot the cover for the latest Psychic Flying Monkey production The Impetus of Cletus”. The photo’s already up on the site, although I’m not sure what he did to the colors. Looks like he reduced it to 256 colors. Anyway, yes the sign was real, bullet holes and all. We set it up on the side of the road about 30 miles outside of Fountain Hills. Had a rather perplexed ADOT crew stop by to see what the hell we were doing to their sign. This was yet another time when I only got one crack at the photo. This seems to be a common thing for me know. The last four or five shoots I’ve had, have only allowed me one or two tries to get a photo for various reasons. This time, the car broke down after the first pass. Fortunately, even though the shot’s not great it turned out to fit with the look he wanted.

Over the past year my posting frequency has been horrible. I recently wrote about how this site has become a simple bot blogging site because the only thing that’s getting published is del.licio.us links. Doesn’t make for a very interesting read even though I think I have some interesting things to write about.

So we’re going to do another refresh and change of systems. For the past three years this site has run on my Syncato software. Syncato is a great system, and I’ve enjoyed chewing on my own dog food a bit, but in doing so I’ve had to ignore my more recent work. My plan is to integrate the Structured Blogging toolset into Syncato, but with the new company we’re working on a few other things before we get to that. Syncato will definitely reemerge in the future and if you’re at all interested I recommend leaving an email to be notified when we start releasing more information. For now though, I’m moving this site so that I can run Wordpress with the current Structured Blogging plugin. I’m currently very focused on the microcontent concept that I started with Syncato, and the Structured Blogging plugins are another vehicle for some of the ideas. Doing Structured Blogging with Wordpress really isn’t ideal, but it’s a starting point and we’ll be improving the tools considerably going forward until Syncato reemerges in a new form.

So now I’ll be eating a little different dog food and hopefully I can find a way to get back to writing about more interesting stuff. Time for the reboot.