I visited the Smoky Mountains last weekend. It was about a 6 hour drive from Raleigh. Krishna arranged the entire trip.
Smoky Mountains is a big range of mountains along the North Carolina border. The range has a lot of greenery, has hundreds of trails and a very long history aging back to the Native Americans. It boasts of creatures which are found nowhere else in the world. Wikipedia has a detailed description of the Smoky mountains.
Ever since I realized the limitations of my Canon PowerShot A630
My initial plan was to go for a Canon Powershot SX10IS
In order to test the camera before buying, I planned a trip to Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary. Vinay, the guy who sold me the camera asked us to go early in the morning. So we left at around 4am from Bangalore and reached Ranganathittu around 7am.
So finally I took the plunge. I have migrated my site to WordPress and hosted my blog here. I am planning to permanently move from Livejournal to here.
Considering that I have been blogging in Livejournal since 2004, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. However I had to take the plunge some day, and I thought the time has come.
So what have the major painpoints been?
Things were not easy. Exporting my Livejournal blog posts and importing them to WordPress was one thing. Setting up WordPress as my primary hosting, while allowing the rest of the site to function smoothly was another.
Once these were done, the rest was easy and the results are fascinating. I was able to setup my photo albums, analytics, Feedburner and integrate widgets for Friendfeed, Twitter in no time.
There are still some minor issues here and there, especially with migrating my content from the old site to the new one – I will work on them as and when I find time.
So, feel free to browse my site and let me know what you think!
This post is an analysis of an early document on Hypertext Design Issues.
The key ideas being discussed in this document are on Hypertext – whether links should be monodirectional or bidirectional, should links be typed etc.
These discussions were conducted in the early days of the web. It is interesting to know how things have evolved since the time this design was made.
Let’s first get some facts right:
Hypertext links today:
What are the implications of this design?
The conclusion?
Well, it’s tough to say how optimal the design of hypertext on the WWW was. Introducing multi-directional links and typed links would definitely help the technical people out there, but would introduce complexity which would perhaps have made it so tough for the web to flourish that it wouldn’t be what it is today.
Today, while I was searching for my name in Google, I saw that towards the end, it showed my Delicious bookmarks in the search results. There is definitely no occurrence of my name in the pages that were listed in the search results and the only connection I could see between ‘me’ and the search result is that I have bookmarked these links in Delicious.
Is Google making use of the Social Graph information that I provided while I was trying out Google Friendconnect? Doesn’t this raise privacy concerns?
Ever wonder why hyperlinks in the World Wide Web (WWW) are unidirectional? Why are links not typed? Why are links many to one and not many to many? Why do browsers have the restrictions that they have today? Why is the web the way it is?
A lot of the answers to these questions are hidden somewhere deep in the web itself. Having come across several technical issues with the web, I began to wonder what the initial creators of the web perceived the web to be? What was running in the minds of the users when they came across the idea of the web?
I started tracing back into history to the very beginning of the WWW. That’s how I came across the ‘original proposal of the WWW‘.
So here are some of my notes on the paper:
(Content in italic are from the paper.)
The initial use-cases for the WWW were related to project management – communicating project ideas, storing technical details for retrieval later, finding out who wrote a piece of code, fetching all related documents for the current task. Most of the proposal revolves around the system to allow for multiuser hypertext access which is non-centralized and non-hierarchical.
Linked information systems have entities and relationships. There are, however, many differences between such a system and an “Entity Relationship” database system. For one thing, the information stored in a linked system is largely comment for human readers. For another, nodes do not have strict types which define exactly what relationships they may have. Nodes of similar type do not all have to be stored in the same place.
What does this mean?
We do have entities and relationships, but there are no fixed rules. Entities don’t need to have types and any two entities can be related to each other. There is also no restriction on where the entities are stored.
The key ideas around Hypertext were put down by Vanevar Bush in 1945 in the form of Memex. There were several attempts by people to implement Hypertext and also Hypermedia (linking images, video etc). Ted Nilson coined the word Hypertext in 1965 and subsequently also coined the term Hypermedia. The first implementation of Hypertext in some form seems to be from Doug Engelbart in 1968. The buzz around Hypertext picked up during the late 1980’s – there was a dedicated Usenet newsgroup, a bunch of conferences starting with Hypertext’87, several ACM papers, workshops etc. All this happened even before the WWW was born. There were several commercial products too, like Hypercard from Apple.
TimBL had also tried his hands at building a hypertext system, which he called Enquire. TimBL claims to have built it as early as 1980, although the first mention of Enquire seems to be in this proposal made in 1989.
When I started researching on Hypercard features, I realized one thing. These products are easily 20 years old. Technology has changed a lot in this time. It is really hard to imagine how many of these products looked like. Either the source is not available in its entirety or it is tough to compile. This reminds me of what Grady Booch said – about having an archive of source code similar to the archive of books, videos, music and web pages.
Anyway, the most important difference I see between Enquire and Hypercard is that Enquire was more of a ‘programmers playtool’, while Hypercard was targeted towards end-users.
So while Hypercard had ‘fancy graphics’, Enquire had typed links and was available for multi user access.
About the requirements that TimBL put down for the WWW:
* Remote access across networks, Heterogeneity, Non-Centralisation – These are what are now taken for granted. The WWW is ubiquitous, it never breaks as a system, it can be accessed from just about any device that is Internet aware.
* Access to existing data – This was one of the reasons why the WWW became popular. It was easy to get existing data onto the web with minimal effort.
* Private links –
One must be able to add one’s own private links to and from public information. One must also be able to annotate links, as well as nodes, privately.
Frankly, I am not sure what TimBL means by private links ‘from’ public information.
* Bells and Whistles – Graphical access to the web was considered optional.
* Data analysis – This is one thing that has not taken off.
It is possible to search, for example, for anomalies such as undocumented software or divisions which contain no people. It is possible to generate lists of people or devices for other purposes, such as mailing lists of people to be informed of changes.
It is also possible to look at the topology of an organisation or a project, and draw conclusions about how it should be managed, and how it could evolve. This is particularly useful when the database becomes very large, and groups of projects, for example, so interwoven as to make it difficult to see the wood for the trees.
The Semantic Web is showing this promise.
* Live links – These are what are now called ‘Dynamic pages’ and most popular pages on the web are ‘live’ in that sense.
Much of the academic research is into the human interface side of browsing through a complex information space. Problems addressed are those of making navigation easy, and avoiding a feeling of being “lost in hyperspace”. Whilst the results of the research are interesting, many users at CERN will be accessing the system using primitive terminals, and so advanced window styles are not so important for us now.
As I read this, it gives me a feeling that TimBL was not thinking of making the WWW a ‘public’ web that would be used by just about everyone. Even a non-techie could build a page of content and hook it onto the web. Usability seemed to be of least importance.
The only way in which sufficient flexibility can be incorporated is to separate the information storage software from the information display software, with a well defined interface between them.
This division also is important in order to allow the heterogeneity which is required at CERN (and would be a boon for the world in general).
A client/server split at this level also makes multi-access more easy, in that a single server process can service many clients, avoiding the problems of simultaneous access to one database by many different users.
‘information display software’ – Now that’s what the browser is! Also this is what created the need for HTTP, HTTP server and HTML.
Do we still visualize the web as just content linked via Hypertext? How can we accommodate social networking and the whole realm of developments around Web 2.0 and social network applications?
The web has surely come a long way!
(Note: Draft content – subject to change)
This post is a part of the AfterThoughts series of posts.
Post: A query language for searching websites
Originally posted on: 2005-01-27
I blogged about the idea of a query language for websites back in 2005. Today, when I was doing my feed sweep, I came across YQL, a query language with SQL-like syntax from Yahoo that allows you to query for structured data from various Yahoo services.
There is one thing that I found interesting. The ability for you to query ‘any’ HTML page for data at a specific XPath. There are some details in the official Yahoo Developer blog.
The intent of YQL is not the same as what I had blogged about. While YQL allows you to get data from a specific page, what I had intended was something more generic – an ability for you to query a set of pages or the whole of the web for specific data, which is a tougher problem to solve.
In order to fetch specific data from a HTML page using YQL, all you have to do is:
1. Go to the page that you want to extract data from.
2. Open up Firebug and point to the data that you want to extract (using Inspect).
3. Right click the node in Firebug and click on ‘Copy XPath’.
4. Now create a query in YQL like this:
select * from html where url=”
Although the idea seems promising I wasn’t able to get it to work for most XPaths.
I guess the reason is the difference between the way the browser interprets the HTML and the way a server would interpret it. For example, if there is no ‘tbody’ tag in your table, the Firefox browser inserts a ‘tbody’ tag and that would be present in your XPath, while a server that interprets the HTML after Tidying it wouldn’t see one. One way we can solve this is to have the same engine interpret the XPath on the server side as well or be as lenient as possible when matching the XPaths. I had similar discussions with the research team in IRL when I was working on my idea of MySearch, which had similar issues, and there were some interesting solutions that we discussed.
I would say it is only a matter of time when someone will crack the issue of fetching structured data from semi-structured data present in the web and make it available to other services. Tools like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, YubNub and YQL are just the beginning.
I have made several attempts at this right from using one of these tools, to building my own using Rhino, Jaxer etc, but until now the most content solution is a combination of curl, grep, awk and sed.
Ever since I blogged about iRead back in April, a lot has changed. We have introduced tons of new features, and there is really not one place where we have captured all of them.
So this is my attempt to describe the features to our readers.
As you see, we have been busy! We have tons of new and exciting features lined up and we promise to provide feature updates as frequently as possible. A lot of these features revolve around making weRead a truly social application.
By the way, you can get some quick updates on weRead in our Twitter page.
Happy reading!
PS: Features and feature names are subject to change.
As information is becoming cheaper everyday and as we are getting access to more and more information, I see one problem. There are certain ‘well known theories’ which are being proved to be untrue. Also of how ‘facts’ are generated when in fact it had never really occurred. These are things that we studied during our schooling as ‘facts’.
On one side, this is a good thing. It makes you question everything you read or hear and not just accept things blindly. But on the other side, it makes you feel, well, then, what do we believe?
Wikipedia is a classic example of information accuracy and the arguments around it. Do you trust Wikipedia? Take an example of a controversial article – say Scientology, or about Crop Circles, or say the Nazca lines. Would you believe what Wikipedia has to say? Well, isn’t there a slight possibility that the theory is wrong, especially when there are mathematicians, archaeologists, physicists or historians who subscribe to either sides of the controversies.
What if a vast majority of the people actually believe something that is actually not true? Wasn’t the earth believed to be in the center of the solar system and that the sun revolved around the earth?
Here are some things that I came across in recent days:
1. The theory of evolution and the theory of Intelligent design.
2. The Sphinx mystery – is Sphinx older than it was initially thought to be and does it have connections to mars?
3. The Aryan invasion theory – did it really happen?
4. Global warming a myth?
5. Aliens and UFO’s – has anyone really spotted them?
6. Man landing on the moon
Well, the list is endless. If you look for information on any of these, you will see tons of information that can convince you either ways.
Not all of us are mathematicians, not all of us are theoretical physicists. Nor do we have the time to verify every single ‘fact’ we come across.
So the question is how do we believe what we read and who do we trust and believe?!
So finally the news has been made official.
Lulu today announced partnership with weRead (iRead).
Lulu is a platform that enables wanna be authors, musicians and other creators to bring their work directly to their audience. Publishing is free, and the lack of middlemen means that the freedom lies in the hands of the creator. Lulu was founded by Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat and an extremely successful entrepreneur. Lulu is the world’s fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books.
With this partnership, there are several exciting things that we are looking at.
With weRead, Lulu users now get a simple way to make their creation available on all popular social networking sites and promote their work. As for weRead, users get a much larger catalog of books, some of them which are not available anywhere else.
Well, this is definitely just the tip of the iceberg and we see several other exciting things ahead.
News about the partnership from the Lulu site:
“Lulu (www.lulu.com), the world’s largest marketplace for individual, educational, and corporate authors and publishers to bring their books directly to market, announced today an alliance with weRead (www.weread.com), the leading social networking application for books where readers can easily discover and recommend books to their friends on social networks and therefore, the world.”
Over the next few weeks, you should see several new features on weRead. There is one theme that we are concentrating on – make weRead more social, which is why we thought it makes better sense to name it weRead rather than iRead.
The future now looks promising!