Recently, I purchased a new laptop -- to my opinion, a remarkably well featured laptop, for its baseline price, featuring a 15" HP TouchSmart screen, and Windows 8, on an Intel Core i3 MCU with 750 gig quiet, efficient internal HDD, for less than $500 at a contemporary office supply store, "Sublime" perhaps, but it is a workhorse laptop. In the process of beginning to
outfit the same veritable workhorse, I've installed a number of desktop applications and some hardware drivers for
networked consumer devices in my PC and LAN configuration -- had shared some notes and a brief review, in
a previous 'blog entry, this week.
Sure, in
outfitting my veritable workhorse of a laptop, I've found it useful to keep my notes not only in a digital format. A spiral-bound notebook on a modest pressed-fiber clipboard, a pen, and an a sense for creating outlines -- that may suffice, when the laptop is occupied with other processor-consuming tasks, such as to unarchive a GZipped Tape Archive (TAR) of some 2 gigabytes of storage, in beginning to migrate one's software/electronics development workspace from a 16 gigabyte SD card formatted Ext4 and used in a Chromebook chroot, onto NTFS in a Windows 8 laptop.
When I was writing my notes on paper, last night -- one thing about pen and paper, it may afford more opportunities than the digital medium, for easy, novel markup and annnotation, not insomuch in a typesetter view, though certainly in a utility regards -- I noticed that I can organize some number of items in my "Laptop refit" to-do list, that I can organize some of those items each into a discrete thread of tasks and contexts -- four threads total -- across thirteen "baseline" to-do items. Some of those items pertain to a business plan I have begun developing, and that I will not be able to share much of notes about, online or in any social networking, until at least registering a domain name to develop a "web identity" for the business ostensibly modeled in my business plan. I am mostly concerned to avoid "Domain name squatting," in that much, though there is a bit of a broader concern of intellectual property rights, in my remaining taciturn about such an enterprising thing as a business plan, on this none so privacy-friendly public Internet.
With a focus set more for ethics in free/open source software (FOSS) development, less for the necessarily proprietary qualities of any endeavor of making an enterprise with one's own material and intellectual capital -- ethics, such as codified of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, such that I myself would much prefer to the GNU Manifesto, candidly, as an expression of ethics in FOSS development, in any application -- then it may be conceivable, I think, that I would begin to organize that laptop/software task "To Do" list and its context categories, to produce some public content for a wiki, out of that outline -- perhaps, to develop a wiki around my DSP42 web log, here.
As in regards to information science -- not insomuch with regards to politics -- I think that that at this point, one could ask, in a philosophical question, "What wold Thomas Jefferson Do?" but I myself am more interested in a practical question, "What may and shall I do?"
Clearly, what I shall do at first is to begin to write, to clarify my own ideas to myself, in a manner of sharing my own ideas in a literary manner, on the public Internet. This is in a manner of writing for knowledge, not insomuch of writing for "First impressions," though I should wish to write in a legible manner -- of course -- or I might leave an impression as though I was only trying to make an homage to a poem by Amiri Baraka. That is, if I would write in any too abstract of a manner -- perhaps, like in a manner of a concrete poem, with some reference to the fist Dadaists, Tristan Tzara himself, and the first rise of post-war consumerism in Europe, circa the post-WWI epoch in which there was also surrealism and perfume -- if I would write in any too subjectively abstract of a manner, my writing might be too easily misinterpreted. In this matter, I am interested more in making an article that might make some technical sense, at least "to myself," at any later time, more than in making any sort of a literally expressive "statement." This is more a journal than an op-ed, more an item of "Cobbler's notes" than of any manner of a marketing banner.
So, I am interested, firstly, in developing a concept of a model for a wiki, towards an abstract model such as would suit the semantics and structure of a wiki, without any exclusive regards towards any singular wiki medium or wiki application framework -- not only in a separation of literal logic apart from content presentation, as with XML and other normative markup formats, but moreover in developing a separation of application logic in a manner apart from, and more abstract than any single application, and namely such as must be delimited for rendition with documentation, CORBA IDL interfaces, and IDL interface bindings in any single programming language in which a CORBA ORB is usefully implemented. The matter of seperating application logic apart from application -- it might seem like, philosophically, simply a new rendition of the older logic/presentation distinction as represented around XML, but I think it is otherwise "new," in a sense -- and how that is represented in CORBA, betwixt a CORBA IDL Interface definition and its binding in a single application of CORBA -- with no too slight regards for the necessarily proprietary nature of intellectual property, in the same discussion. Though my note, as such, might seem to lend a question to the reader, but here is a novel thing to distract:
Broadly, if one may develop a suitably domain-neutral, technical model for a Wiki -- as a wiki being a web content resource -- one could easily use UML. Then, perhaps the model, "thusly developed" could be of some suitable applicability, for developing any single practical extension of the same abstract model -- as would be, then, in application of the same model onto one or more application frameworks -- in this matter, specifically for developing a single wiki, in a heterogeneous application environment, on a heterogeneous, networked systems platform, namely of a small office/home office (SOHO) LAN interfacing with the public Internet. The wiki, itself, might be comprised of files in any number of markup formats (XML, HTML, Markdown, ...) along with resources in any number of document formats (ODS, XLS, ...) -- more towards a metadmodel for an application, then, if not a corresponding metaclass model.
Sidebar: MetaIDL?
Of course, CORBA itself supports CORBA reflection, and IDL can be extended for a meta-interface protocol of some kind, perhaps to model the Common Lisp metaobject protocol, in some regards. So, even a metaclass model can be represented for interfaces, in CORBA IDL, and though it might seem like something of a "hack," in an abstract regards, but whom would suggest that one cannot make an original application of CORBA IDL? Myself, I've not studied CORBA applications for DARPA, though I am familiar with not so much. I'm interested in applying CORBA technologies for applications in consumer-grade computing, and though the consumer computing market -- in "the cloud," namely -- has much been "scaled" in recent years, and I myself would not wonder for long, as to "Wherefore and how the development of the new Cloud is inspired," on this public Internet, and/or in commercial enterprise, and/or in any broader, humanistic endeavor -- so, I am interested in applying CORBA for consumer-grade applications, with no short shrift lent for application context and user data security. Personally, I am none too familiar with boats of the sea, been gratefully land-locked in most of my life's time -- and that aside, then sure, this endeavor, "mines" it will need some efforts in demystifying CORBA, and MOF, and UML, and furthermore. I know of a practical thread, at that -- so far as CORBA, at least -- in Common Lisp, it is named CLORB. One might not have "Seen that coming," but sure this endeavor will not be much on "Surprises."
If I arrive at a sense of crisis, then, perhaps it is more a crisis of heterogeneity than of any ostensibly sentimental failure. I value diversity, much, but in trying to develop any singular platform out of a lot of differing "hacks" in technology, then perhaps one might develop more a sense of understanding about the usefulness of a central, baseline model, in computing -- such as represented of specifications of the Object Management Group (OMG), publisher of standard specifications such as of OMG MDA, MOF, UML, SysML, CORBA and its numerous extensions, and such -- and sure, I am a fan of Leonardo DaVinci's work in engineering, also. This, there's no "secrete code" and no whistling poodle in the matter, CORBA can be used on any number of popular, consumer-grade computing platforms. I'm afraid I will not be able to be a star of that, it is simply "Too obvious."
As well as of CORBA, in a sense of central models, there's also the perhaps "more recent" work of agencies of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in regards to developing specifications originally in extension of SGML, ultimately in development of XML and then of so many streams-oriented protocols applying XML. Of course, XML has its utility as a normative markup format, but -- back to the wiki concern -- there's a matter of application user interfaces, such that the enterprise standards quite leave unaddressed.
And so, one is reminded of a work by Marcel Duchamp, even.
After enough of Dadaism's response to consumerist post-WWI Europe .... Things that one does not have a photo of: Picasso's Guernica in the Green Zone. Oh, but so, Surrealism? Oh, "I've heard of it." and incoming mortars on Easter Sunday? Oh, I've heard of that, too, "Far and away," and on CNN.
So, back to tech topics, in matters more concrete than cultural: As a student of an online university -- after enough of the push-button nicety of WYSIWYG editors for web-based HTML content, those available in the university's mandatory online discussion forums, such as allowing some at least limited HTML content markup -- namely, as my being a student in the goings of an online university, "Of late," and quite the opposite of a "Fan of" any sort of ad hominem "push-button theories," candidly, whatever anyone's efforts for "getting a rise" might be thought to derive to -- well, but I wonder why Afghanistan halted the reconstruction of the Buddha statues? I've read of that -- and sure, there's history in the world, "I've heard of it."
So, but why would I want to be doling over the guttural details of consumer tech systems, when I could be preparing to disembark on a history expedition? Personally, I don't know, "Why, that?"
Because Industrial Music, and not consumerism.
Other things that one might not have a photo of may include: A bear cub jogging down a hill,
"All in good company", in the outdoors beyond agendas.
As for agendas: If there's anyone of my family whom did not move away Texas, with my grandfather D_, I wonder if historianship runs in the family, on that side of the family? The side of my family that is not the side of my family that constructed and operated a lumber mill in the early 1900's? My grandfather, whom reminds me of stories of Solomon -- pre-hipster-1960s family,
That "My family."
Diversity -- it's a topic I was born into, and it's not "Old hat," not to me.
