I’ve been developing another section for my website, but I’ve been using XML processing features not available in PHP 4. Now that I’ve shifted to a more modern host and the holidays have come along I can finish off the section and add it to my website . It is something that I have been developing with help from some researchers at The Open University and hopefully will eventually be published on SourceForge.

During the switch I’ve also taken the chance to change to a much cheaper (and less flexible) hosting package. This unfortunately means that I have had to say goodbye to a lot of content which I was hosting for various people. Although I say ‘unfortunate’ I am actually rather glad to be rid of them, as I no longer have to worry unduly about breaking my website on a whim.

As far as work goes I’m still slogging away on the same project. Battling with conflicting interests and bloody politics… The project would be a doddle if we weren’t all so infuriatingly human about everything, but alas I don’t see any progress being made on that front for a long time. As I fear is the case with all knowledge management work, the project involves simplifying and making understandable and usable the complexity that is society (society in what ever form you happen to be looking at).

The first random thing I’d like to write about is probably another item in a growing catalogue of evidence that I’m obsessed with everything Google. For a while now I’ve been using their mapping tool (cunningly named Google Maps) to find my way about and for all those other occasions one needs to reference a map. Obviously one of the big uses is getting directions from one place to another. One aspect of which annoys me across all mapping tools is the inability to customise your route… when you know what they have suggested is just plain wrong! Well Google have done it again, now you just click on the route and drag it to another road, it will recalculate the route for it.

Along similar lines of “things you’ve always wanted”, I’ve started thinking about how to make my own piece of writing software. You might shout angrily that it is a silly idea because so many already exist… and you’re right. Unfortunately none of them really suit the way I like to write. I want to be able to separate out the ‘content’ I produce from the document and from any kind of presentation. I want a semantic writing tool. I’ll write more about it in time, as my ideas come together.

By ‘Information’ I mean pretty much all the data/knowledge bound up within the processes that go into producing a real live piece of engineering. One of the ideas that has been floated in my direction centres on “Information push”. This is trying to provide people with the information they need before they realise that they do.

Related to all of this I’ve been lucky enough to be able to start a project to map the skills within a large engineering company. I’ve been told not to broadcast this, so I won’t mention names here. There is potential that this might lead into a sponsored PhD which might mean the direction following the wishes of the company but (besides the extra money) there would be huge advantages to having a ‘real’ aim for the project and someone with a vested interested in my work.

I came across a Dilbert cartoon strip the other day which struck a rather nice chord given some of the responses I get when I become a little too enthused about my chosen subject:

Colour scheme

I was inspired to change to a much darker scheme having read an article on how the colours effect the energy required to display a website. Essentially, bright and light colours require more energy from your monitor.

Feeds

These feeds represent online content which I have created. Although in the case of recommended posts and bookmarks this creation might be considered a bit abstract. This was an idea I had a long while ago, and then not so long ago came across a way of quickly and crudely implementing it.

Up until today the feeds have been read, parse and output each time the page was called. This was causing significant delays in the page loading times. As of today a static file containing the parsed feeds is generated every 12 hours. The index page then calls on the static file when a request is made which means that no time is wasted on parsing the feed and preparing the output.

For those interested I’ve done this quite simply by writing taking a php file that was parsing the feeds and having it write the output to a static file. I then have a cron job run the php file at 9am and 9pm everyday:

0 9,21 * * * /usr/bin/php -q /PATH/generate_static_feeds.php > /dev/null

The last bit of that command “/dev/null” sends the output into the ether. Without it the server will e-mail the output of the script… which for some purposes can be rather useful.

In time I’ll be working on a more complex way of displaying the recommended posts, which will allow me to write a little note to go with each explaining why I have recommended them.

I have tacitly realised this on several occasions but have usually shrugged my shoulders and accepted it. Today I’ve decided to make steps to rectify the situation. I’m going to add the Financial Times and The Daily Mail to my feeds (I might have to change the latter as I’m not sure I’ll be able to survive reading it for long!). This is a paltry step really… but what else can I do? Perhaps I should try befriending a Tory voter?

The term Intellectual Property (IP) describes well what I’m talking about, that being the concept that the same rights which apply to your material goods (e.g. your computer) can be extended to your thoughts and ideas. If I’ve got my history right IP came about as our products became more complicated… more information was squeezed into products to make them faster, more efficient, et cetera. This increasing lead to information becoming the valuable component of a product, rather than the raw materials. The use of IP has accelerated in recent decades as companies rush to protect their valuable property – IBM being a prime example, currently holding in excess of 40,000 patents.

Someone who has come up with a great idea is quite right to want to some recognition for it (and by recognition I mean money), after all they need to put bread on the table and so forth, however, cracks in this principle start to appear as the ‘people’ with the IP rights are more frequently corporations, who have an insatiable hunger for bread. (Corporations, unlike your normal crack pot inventor, are out to extract every penny from anything they can get their hands on.)

IP is now deeply ingrained in society, it surrounds, wraps up and protects everything from copying or reuse. Protection coming in the form of law suits and counter-suits, with corporations vehemently attacking any threat to their ownership of a piece of knowledge.

The practice of considering knowledge on the same level as material goods is flawed, unlike material goods once ‘created’ a piece of information can be replicated infinitely without real cost. But once you’ve created this piece of information, you want your reward, you want to be paid. So you charge for people to use this information (or to buy a product which manifests it), enough to cover your costs, you also need to ensure your future is safe so you charge a little bit extra to help you develop ‘the next’ piece of information. But you’re a corporation so ‘costs’ are insatiable (your employees always want to be paid more, your share holders always want larger returns) and you strike upon the idea of charging people by how much they value a product.

Now consider the example of pharmecutical companies that develop ‘life-saving’ drugs, how do you value a life? This is what they do everyday, and they are pricing some people out of the market!

These few lines aren’t a very good expression of what I’m thinking and if I thought about it I would probably realise I have greatly misrepresented the issue. I’ve written a few more words more specifically in relation to the information in the design process as part of my university work.

I’ve added two bath area and will be adding more!