Friday, September 16, 2005
Covers can sell books
The Twisted Framework has been steadily taking a certain portion of the population by storm for some time now.
No surprises then that an O'Reilly book is cooking. The cover alone will sell some books!
posted by Sean 5:18 AM
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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Language, Thought, Zachmann
Dave Megginson writes about the Zachmann Framework and points to an interesting critique by Graeme Simsion which raises the hind legs of an old hobby horse of mine. Namely, the extent to which language can influence thought.
Although 'linguistic determinism', as it is called, can be pushed too far very easily, it is a force to be reckoned with. Compared to others it is a week force, but non-zero. To my mind, its effects are too often ignored. (I'm reminded of a story told about a Richard Feynman lecture. Feynman says "gravity is a weak force". At the back of the auditorium, something heavy crashes to the floor with a bang. "weak, but not zero" continued Feynman.).
I wrote about the impact of language on thought from an XML perspective in How to model a bishop and from a programming language perspective in In praise of IT multilingualism.
posted by Sean 1:01 AM
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50% of what you know, you don't.
Most scientific papers are probably wrong. Lets say that paper itself has a 50/50 chance of being wrong...Thats still a lot of wrong stuff out there.
posted by Sean 12:07 AM
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
The sound of silence
Silent running rues the lack of noise emanating from office computing machines these days.
posted by Sean 10:54 AM
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Monday, September 12, 2005
XML, processing models, data liberation
Mike Champion says that XML liberates data from the applications that created it.
In simple applications - especially data oriented - this is true. In more complex applications, it rarely is.
Take web browsers for example. Pages for display to a human. The "meaning" is in the presentation - how the content looks. Now, lets say the content is in an XML format and everyone has access to the schema. Does it follow that all browsers will display the data the same way?
No. In any non-trivial presentation-oriented application, there is a processing model which must be adhered to if the semantics of the data are to be faithfully preserved.
posted by Sean 2:05 AM
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