I'm a big fan of clear explanations. If you want to explain something to someone (and given the alternative is letting everyone learn from their own mistakes, this has got to be good), clear explanations are really important. I've tutored computer science at uni and I've explained open source concepts to a whole range of people as part of my work at OSS Watch and come to learn that an analogy can be very useful.
Imagine my pleasure at reading this analogy of a really rather complex compiler / interrupt issue.
For the record, I know nothing about the x86 interrupts, since we were taught interrupts using the much simpler RISC SPARC system.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Tinkering with suffix-trees and algorithms
I've been tinkering with learning algorithms for my computer-go player, jgogears.
It linearises board positions and then uses classic string processing techniques, principally a large suffix-tree. Suffix-trees are widely used in information processing, information theory and compression fields of computer science. I also used them extensively in my recent Ph.D.
Currently I'm training with about 200 go games (~40k moves), giving me about 950K nodes in my suffix tree.
I've just switched my linearisation method from a strict distance measure to one which capitalises on adjacency much better.
There are a number of tuning parameters for the rate at which I grow the tree. I'll be tinkering with them as I increase the number of boards I'm using for training.
It linearises board positions and then uses classic string processing techniques, principally a large suffix-tree. Suffix-trees are widely used in information processing, information theory and compression fields of computer science. I also used them extensively in my recent Ph.D.
Currently I'm training with about 200 go games (~40k moves), giving me about 950K nodes in my suffix tree.
I've just switched my linearisation method from a strict distance measure to one which capitalises on adjacency much better.
There are a number of tuning parameters for the rate at which I grow the tree. I'll be tinkering with them as I increase the number of boards I'm using for training.
Friday, 14 March 2008
RedHat's MugShot and lockin
I've been playing with MugShot, the RedHat's venture into the social networking sphere. I was initially impressed by the site, which has builds a dynamic (if HTML-only) website while asking for really very little information and not asking for any confidential information (i.e. no asking of gmail passwords to pester friends to join up). The website is slick and glossy, if a little heavy on my dialup connection.
The more I use MugShot, however, the more I see it supporting rather than undermining lockin in the social networking sphere.
1 Login with Gnome account or local username/password
While many of MugShot's Gnome account initial target audiance may have had Gnome accounts suitable for logging into to MugShot, I'm guessing that a really small proportion of people they knew did. Login using openid or similar would be great.
2 Supporting only a small number of services, and not flexibly
It's great that mugshot supports delicious. However, by only supporting a single service of this kind, not only are my magnolia bookmarks unsupported, but the current delicious control over the social bookmarking market is strengthened. I understand that the differences between the delicious and magnolia APIs are largely cosmetic, and find it hard to believe that much effort would have been required to support it. Similarly, there are a number of exciting competitors to youtube, amazon, facebook and other MugShot supported services which could be supported with very little time and effort on the part of MugShot.
The services that are added, use a one-size-fits all approach, when I know of no two long-term users of (for example) facebook who use it in the same way.
3 No machine-readable export
There is (that I can see) no constructive machine readable export of any kind from MugShot. Two basic RSS feeds (which aren't advertised in the GUI). No RDF/FOAF, no blogroll for integration into the next generation of social networking and web services. MugShot may see itself as the top of the social networking heap, but until that's evident to the rest of us, they need to play nicely with third parties, both below them and above them on the heap. Failing to export anything useful in a machine-readable format is not playing nicely.
4 No "deep connection" back to the data sources
Having configured MugShot, I can see lots of books, photos and links that those in my network find interesting. But even though Mugshot can tell the difference between books, photos and links when it's displaying them and knows about the accounts I have on services for bookmarking, favouriting or commenting on books, photos and links it doesn't offer functionality to bookmark, foavourite or comment on them. By not driving content and information back to the underlying datasources, MugShot undermines the underlying services and devalues them, in so doing it also (a) devalues the commitment and investment I've made to those systems and (b) reduces the likelihood that those services will go out of their way to help MugShot.
5 "Invitation to tinker" only covers look-and-feel
MugShot has a great system for creating skins for music players, and several hundred people appear to have accepted this invitation to tinker and made come great skins. Unfortunately only cosmetic changes are possible. What I would like to see is a generic feed subscription creator which let me add new services that MugShot could listen to. Just like the music player skins, only a very small proportion users would bother, and most of those who did would not produce anything to shout about, but with a feed subscription creator, each success would lead to a whole new service that Mugshot could access and channel to their users. Such a effort would completely alleviate issue problems with the small number of supported services.
MugShot has an invitation to tinker in the traditional open source web 1.0 sense, with a wiki and version control system, but it doesn't have an invitation to tinker in the web 2.0 sense in which users can scratch their itch (and make the project better) from within their browser in the way the yahoo pipes, for example, does.
The more I use MugShot, however, the more I see it supporting rather than undermining lockin in the social networking sphere.
1 Login with Gnome account or local username/password
While many of MugShot's Gnome account initial target audiance may have had Gnome accounts suitable for logging into to MugShot, I'm guessing that a really small proportion of people they knew did. Login using openid or similar would be great.
2 Supporting only a small number of services, and not flexibly
It's great that mugshot supports delicious. However, by only supporting a single service of this kind, not only are my magnolia bookmarks unsupported, but the current delicious control over the social bookmarking market is strengthened. I understand that the differences between the delicious and magnolia APIs are largely cosmetic, and find it hard to believe that much effort would have been required to support it. Similarly, there are a number of exciting competitors to youtube, amazon, facebook and other MugShot supported services which could be supported with very little time and effort on the part of MugShot.
The services that are added, use a one-size-fits all approach, when I know of no two long-term users of (for example) facebook who use it in the same way.
3 No machine-readable export
There is (that I can see) no constructive machine readable export of any kind from MugShot. Two basic RSS feeds (which aren't advertised in the GUI). No RDF/FOAF, no blogroll for integration into the next generation of social networking and web services. MugShot may see itself as the top of the social networking heap, but until that's evident to the rest of us, they need to play nicely with third parties, both below them and above them on the heap. Failing to export anything useful in a machine-readable format is not playing nicely.
4 No "deep connection" back to the data sources
Having configured MugShot, I can see lots of books, photos and links that those in my network find interesting. But even though Mugshot can tell the difference between books, photos and links when it's displaying them and knows about the accounts I have on services for bookmarking, favouriting or commenting on books, photos and links it doesn't offer functionality to bookmark, foavourite or comment on them. By not driving content and information back to the underlying datasources, MugShot undermines the underlying services and devalues them, in so doing it also (a) devalues the commitment and investment I've made to those systems and (b) reduces the likelihood that those services will go out of their way to help MugShot.
5 "Invitation to tinker" only covers look-and-feel
MugShot has a great system for creating skins for music players, and several hundred people appear to have accepted this invitation to tinker and made come great skins. Unfortunately only cosmetic changes are possible. What I would like to see is a generic feed subscription creator which let me add new services that MugShot could listen to. Just like the music player skins, only a very small proportion users would bother, and most of those who did would not produce anything to shout about, but with a feed subscription creator, each success would lead to a whole new service that Mugshot could access and channel to their users. Such a effort would completely alleviate issue problems with the small number of supported services.
MugShot has an invitation to tinker in the traditional open source web 1.0 sense, with a wiki and version control system, but it doesn't have an invitation to tinker in the web 2.0 sense in which users can scratch their itch (and make the project better) from within their browser in the way the yahoo pipes, for example, does.
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