Things versus the attributes of things (and a picture of a cow) - LONG

I am mulling some philosophical stuff about objects, duck typing and so on. Having one of my recurring bouts of ontological angst you could say. In my defence, if you spend time with dynamically typed programming languages, the (non)differences between classes and objects-with-certain-attributes has a way of being 'in your face' quite a lot. Especially if you delve into meta-programming a bit and start creating classes - as distinct from objects - on the fly.

Anyway, as part of this effort I am reading Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple.

Here is what I'm thinking. If "religion" was a base class in some OO programming language, what would it look like? What would be in the base class as opposed to in one of the derived classes and why? What would a class hierarchy that spanned say, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism etc. look like? Would you be stuck at stage one on the basis that - in one view - Buddhism for example is not a religion per se?

I suspect that you would find that there is no generally acceptable way of capturing a concept like "religion" or "moral" or "beautiful" in a hierarchical ontology. They key I think is the phrase "generally acceptable".

I'm a big fan of the concept of software as language that is written primarily for other humans to read and secondally for computers to execute. On this analysis, software must be a human language as well as a computer language. It must therefore be based on a set of generally accepted conceptualisations in order to function as human language. If no such shared conceptualisations are possible in a particular domain, is software even possible in that domain?

Is the only viable route to "pitch" software at clusters of shared conceptualisations which are, in OO speak, always base classes. Base classes
which cannot be assembled so as to be derived classes of the more general concept - such as Religion or BeautifulThings or LifeForm or ... even though we seem to have shared conceptualisions of those very concepts? Or do we?

Oh yes, the picture of a cow...

In Hagen's book there is a black and white image that looks vaguely like a man lying down but only vaguely. Apparently, it is a picture of a cow which, if you start at the image long enough, becomes self evident.

Well, I have stared at the picture and it is not self evident to me :-)

If anyone out there has it sussed, I'd love to hear from you.

How to validate a Microformat

Lots of talk about microformats going on. Thats good.

Some folks worrying about the complexity of validating documents that use microformats.

Folks. All you need is some pipeline goodness.

Step 1 - get yourself an XML pipeline execution infrastructure or roll your own. Its not hard.

Step 2 - Create a two stage pipeline for validation. Stage 1 : a transform that turns class attributes into element type names. Stage 2 : a standard element-centric validation using RNC/G, DTD or XSD.

Bill Kent. Data and Reality. Bishop's Knees.

Today I found out over on Bob's weblog that Bill Kent passed away in December, aged 69.
Kent deserves to be better known in my opinion. His book "Data and Reality" is a classic of its kind and turned on a whole bunch of light bulbs for me when I first read it.
It was in Kent's book that I first came across the deep intertwinglements between spoken language and the conceptual models that software architects build in their heads. A concept I wrote about in the ITWorld article How to Model a Bishop some years back.

Laptop Service Providers

Sometimes, all the time I spend addressing problems with my computers, really starts to get to me.
Somewhere in the latter part of the last twenty years the fun has gone out of re-re-re-re-installing printer drivers, out-foxing duplicitious modem error messages and fetoscoping boot sectors...
If someone offered me a laptop deal in which I own the hard disk but rent the locked down laptop in return for no-nonsense we-will-fix-it support of the standard configuration, I would be tempted. A laptop service provider, if you will.

Crubeens and Piggies

Python user groups are usually called PIGgies. So far, the Irish one has been known as Python Ireland. To my shame, I've only managed to attend two of these meetings but under the stewardship of Mick Twomey and Sean O'Donnell, things would appear to be progressing nicely. WIKI page here.
In my defense, Thursday is the day of the week when I am least likely to be in Dublin. OH well.

For grins, I think we should dub members of the Irish Python Interest Group crubeens.

Taking the 'I' out of 'Identity'

Taking the 'I' out of 'Identity' takes a sideways look at the problem of electronic identity and throws in a curved ball.

Jython Presentation

Ian Maurer has posted his Jython presentation given to the Cleveland area Python Interest Group.