Tonight I found myself wondering in Wegmans, an incredibly overstocked and expensive supermarket, waiting for my wife to finish shopping while I mulled over some design quandaries having to do with our current project. We're trying to match our existing object model with RDF, since we'd like to leverage as much of the power of RDF and related technologies as we can. Why build when you can borrow? Besides, we'd like to integrate with the world, both now and in the future. That's the point of standards, yes? So, here I am, using a supermarket as a development example. Two...

After reading Shelley's New Year's doubts, saddened there need ever be a question in her mind of her true effect, I remembered why I quit the Well: people can be cruel, and it hurts most when you're being real. Right now it seems clearer: Many of us have sorrows and fears that run through us, that define us. Humans are so wonderfully, so frustratingly, frail, that our hard edges & whiplash reactions often steal the show. But from a different perspective, it's easier to see the pain involved in hurting others. My father was a tyrant, who wielded his verbal...

A few days ago, I was chatting with someone about browser cookies. He wanted to know why this site collects them. I told him it was to help keep statistics, that without cookies there's no way to determine the true number of returning visitors. You see, many ISPs use rotating IP addresses, particularly when people log off, then log back on. Without cookies, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 1000 people who visit once (and never come back) and 200 people who visit five times. If the former, I'm wasting my time. If the latter, I'm doing...

Anyone who's made software for any length of time will be familiar with the perennial quandary: how do we uniquely identify human beings. First and last names are no good. Home addresses and phone numbers change all the time. People are reluctant to give out Social Security Numbers. This leaves the most unlikely candidate of all: email addresses. How did we arrive at email addresses as our universal identifer? Nearly every web account uses email addresses. PGP uses email addresses. Even FOAF uses email addresses (hashed or not) as the primary key. Seems odd that the thing about us that...

I'm not sure why, but I get along great with Irish and Scottish people. It sounds strange to say, especially having grown up in America where such distinctions are becoming as important as eye color. Much of America is its own kind of monotone, with regional flavor, but a shared sort of sameness. It may have something to do with my grandparents. Arthur Falconer, Sr, left Scotland with the Merchant Marines at age 15 and sailed the world till he settled in New York City, where he met Sally King, herself from Ireland. The fact that my grandparents sounded the...

I started a science fiction story back in 1986 about a small device called an "Immuexus", which was essentially a tablet computer with a semantic user interface. Instead of a mouse or touchpad, the user used a special pen that served three purposes: first, it was used as a pointer for the screen, much like a mouse; second, it could scan text (and OCR it) while reading a book, line-by-line; third, it had gyro-like sensors, so you could use it to navigate a 3D visualized space by tilting it forward and back, left and right. Back in 1986, this really...

To prep for my upcoming talk with Dan Brickley, father of FOAF, I figured I'd indulge myself in some wild and irreverant conjecture before hunkering down to a more concise and clear FOAF Tangle Yarn. Imagine someone casts a spell, and we all woke up tomorrow without fear of universal IDs. Let's say Dan bought the domain "humanity.org" and established a worldwide FOAF repository. To make this really wacky, let's say someone invented a cheap way to determine a unique hash ID from our personal genetic code. I can see it now: I walk into my local pharmacy, drop a...

Tonight I was negotiating fees with an illustrator for reproduction rights of our upcoming icons and title screens. She quoted numbers from the Graphic Artists Guild, which has the website address gag.org, which is kinda funny. My family business was an advertising agency, so I know how creative folk usually charge for logos, graphic design, and illustrations. They first size you up and try to determine how much money you're gonna make, then charge accordingly. As tonight's illustrator put it, it's not fair to her if she gets the same amount for a Times Square billboard illustration as for a...

While in Sanibel, in between sessions, I was pacing with my portable phone, handling a client crisis back home. Much of the crisis had to do with mismatched expectations. They'd say, "Why doesn't it do {that}? I need it to do {that}" I'd say, "I mentioned {that} in the design talks. You said you didn't want {that}." They'd say, "But of course we need {that}. This isn't what I wanted at all." Same old story. Software is a difficult thing to make, particularly when you're making it with people who aren't used to thinking about their needs abstractly. Seems like...

Probably the most used RDF schema, besides rdf and rdfs, is Dublin Core, a metadata standard established to describe documents. The first thing you should know about Dublin Core is that it has nothing to do with James Joyce or the city in Ireland. This Dublin is in Ohio, which is where some semweb pioneers met in March 1995 to establish the standard. The next thing you should know about Dubin Core is that it's simple and useful. How so? Well, Dublin Core is a set of fifteen essential things people want to know about a document: its title, its...

Of the various labels I could saddle myself with, "entrepreneur" rings true. This may seem like bragging, but it's really not. Entrepreneur means "one who assumes risk for a business venture." I know Inc magazine wants you to think entrepreneurs are the new breed of cowboy, that we're all on our way to being Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, always seeing past the industry buzz to the "new new thing". That's just a lot of journalistic hokey. Entrepreneurs are people who take a chance on an uncertain idea. They risk their time, their passion, and their money for something that...

What's in a name? Well, when you're selling something, quite a lot. A good product name can focus people on your core benefit. It can crystallize the characteristics that set you apart from your competitors. Names can be inspiring, inviting, intriguing. Most of all, they can make money, which is why trademarks are their own little turf war. Today we lost "Akimbo" as a product name. Turns out there's a startup in California that choose the name four months ago, headed by the co-founder of ReplayTV. We had a nice chat this evening. Very likable guy. While it's not clear...

Today after terrific talks with Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, I read up on the W3C to see just why Immuexa should consider joining. I found their Seven Points page, which I recommend you run off and read right now. Pretty good, yes? This is the kind of language I respond to: simple, direct, inspiring. The friendly drawings help too. I've been visiting the W3C site for years to read up on standards, but it wasn't until I read this page that I really grokked their purpose. If I were them, I'd take it a step further and make something...

Last night, I was driving around in a snowstorm, trying to think of a new name for our desktop product. The name game can drive you nuts. It's best to think of it as a game you play for fun, like Concentration or Password. There's a continuum of obviousness when it comes to naming products. Years ago, when trying to name an EDI engine that translates medical records between different databases, my manager insisted on "InfoServer" as a name. I had to go over his head, taking my name, "Rosetta", to his boss before they went with it. At worst,...

This morning, I woke up and looked out on a new landscape: What I love about snow is what I love about writing: the clean sheet of paper. There's that sense of fresh perspective, that anything is possible. The best software design starts the same way: without assumptions. Some call this "thinking outside the box." To me, even that phrase is too constrained. My view is that you've gotta think as if the box never existed, or put another way, do "zero mass design". Zero mass design starts without constraint. You begin with the impossible, then scale it back to...

I'm surprised more people don't use IRC. This might sound nuts to those of us that do, since we rightly think too many people already use IRC, but given the number of people that use the web, that use instant messenging, that read and write blogs, I'm surprised the number of IRC networks, channels, and users isn't much higher. Tonight I explored Search IRC, which is pretty useful resource. The numbers are fascinating. Over a million users, connected by 7000 servers, forming 600,000 channels on 1500 networks. Have a look at the network stats. Four IRC networks with 70,000+ users:...

I lived in Florida for a few years in my mid-twenties in a town called Bonita Springs, between Naples and Fort Myers, just south of Sanibel. It's where I started my first business in 1989, hoping to create something like the web. It's where I first faced the business world as an adult, where I took my first "slings and arrows", where I did a lot of growing up. After I left Florida for Pennsylvania, my parents moved to Bonita permanently. I went back to visit at least once a year for the next eleven years. A lot of life...

How often have you worked on projects where your company first re-evaluated its project infrastructure and development plan? "I think the task priorities should be Hairy, Ignorable, and Pointless." "We need to change our source-control system to MultiMegaMerge." "Let's create a worldwide distributed automatic build like Seti@Home, only more secure." Everyone's got their own opinions about project management, which is why there's so many products in this space, most of them homegrown. Around the time I decided to quit Lotus, they had an all-day, all-hands meeting at a local conference center to "discuss" our new development process. Sitting in the...

Blogs are abuzz with the most recent online nuisance: comment spamming. Someone figured out they can improve their website's Google rank by posting automated comments with their website's URL to popular blogs. Spammers hope that googlebot comes along and records their spam before the blog owner has time to manually remove their mess. It's working. Current solutions all have their problems: manual removal takes too much time, IP blacklists sometimes include "poison pills" (third-party web URLs that spammers include with their own), bayesian filters are too much of a moving target, automatic URL redirection breaks the back button. There are...

Blogging's only a few years old and we're already debating what's real blogging and what's just journaling. I know lots of people spend lots of time pouring themselves into their pages, but really now, isn't it a bit early to be discussing authenticity in the new medium? From where I sit, I see three kinds of blogging: smalltalk, writing, and listing. Lots of people do the listing thing: post a link, write "interesting...", and they're done. Plenty stick to smalltalk: writing about their day, telling us what they had for lunch, who stopped by, etc. Fewer have the discipline for...

Today's my birthday, which ordinarily doesn't mean much to me, but this year I've been dreading it. No, I don't mean the usual "I'm getting old" thing. Today I'm sad because of my memories of my last birthday, which was really sad. On my last birthday, I'd been home less than a week after a rough month in Florida, most of it unplanned. My mother was dying from cancer. She'd just been brought home by the hospice folks. Though she was still fighting with a risky chemo treatment, her prognosis was very bleak. Ever since I moved out of my...

Just watched the movie Boycott, which depicts the beginnings of the American civil rights movement, with Rosa Parks sparking the Montgomery bus boycott, an impressive and effective example of civil disobedience led by a young and uncertain Martin Luther King. The boycott, which eventually led to the repeal of the Alabama segregation laws, got started simply because a small group of people got organized enough to say "we are tired" and "this must change." "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."—Margaret Mead There's a...

May 15, 1931 — January 23, 2003 Rich in love, a woman whose gift was giving. Her heart, her warmth, her laugh, she gives herself continually. Like a stream, her love flows through everyone she meets. From Chicago brat to Bonita Rose, she served the skies till she met a man to love. Together they made a home and raised a family, but it was she that taught us all to love. Her kindness, her strength, her wisdom, she's mom ... the reason we are all rich in love...

Today I rode on a bus with 40 college students to Washington DC, tagging along with my wife and her choir for a short two-day tour. On the way down, we watched "Legally Blonde 2", which is kind of a "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for a new generation. Even though it was pretty cliche throughout, I'll admit to a weakness for anything having to do with how the US Congress makes a law. The driver dropped us off under the Washington Monument and my wife and I walked to the Smithsonian castle. It was very cold, with snow flurries,...

After two terrific concerts, one last night and one this morning, the choir stopped in Baltimore to visit the Inner Harbor and the aquarium. It was my first time back to Baltimore in 17 years, since I'd dated a woman who went to Johns Hopkins in 1987. Something about young love makes a place doubly nostalgic. I'm glad I got to make new memories with my wife Paula, so now Baltimore's not just "the Lauri city", but instead that place we saw the cool aquarium together. It's strange now writing about this, since I didn't even bring Lauri up while...

For my birthday, Paula bought me the Winged Migration DVD. We'd seen it in the theaters last summer and loved it. Tonight we watched it again. It's one of the most breathtaking movies I've seen. Over four hundred people spent four years filming birds in flight to make a ninety minute movie with no plot, few humans, and next to no narration. To some, I'm sure this is a very boring movie. "Look, birds flying... whoopee." As for myself, when I came out of that theater, my understanding of birds had fundamentally changed. I'd seen them on the ground, at...