Pitos Blog

I was talking with Noah Mendelsohn this morning and we got into a discussion about RDF and it’s role in the world. Noah mentioned something called DBPedia which I had not heard of.

DBPedia but it turns out to be a platform that grabs and analyzes Wikipedia content and delivers all that it can as an RDF Service. This sounds a lot like Freebase, another service which I am a fan of too, which has it’s own representations and standards, but among many other things, grabs and analyzes Wikipedia content and optionally delivers it, yes, as an RDF service.

Check out my write-up on Freebase if you’d like to know how I see it.

I know that I am selling both services short. But the point is that they sounded so similar that we started thinking were confusing the two. Apparently I am not the only one to see the similarity and wonder about it. Here’s an article by James Simmons wondering about the same thing:

“Now that Freebase is available as Linked Data a big question that comes to mind is whether these two major projects will move to assimilate one another. DBpedia and Freebase – two endeavors primarily focused on curating unstructured and semi-structured data about everything and releasing it back into the wild (with structure) – get the bulk of their information from Wikipedia, so the amount of topical overlap is assumed to be extremely high” (from Cross-Pollinating DBPedia and Freebase)

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Following on on my post yesterday about “What we don’t understand.”

As I was writing it, I was trying to use examples of simple things that just work without handholding, like an old dial telephone. Oh there’s an example. But did you notice how all the old examples are slowly falling away because they are also becoming too complex?

• Cellphone: Ok it just works, but look at how fat the manual is. What percentage of users know how to use what percentage of the features
• Television: Oops. Do you have the right remote? Wow the picture’s on but no sound! Oh wait, the sound is for Channel 5 but the picture is the DVD
• Camera: Again, just weigh the manual
• iPhone: Forget about it. Yes it’s easy for a technophile.  But multi touch? Press and hold?

No I am not underestimating the abilities of people out there. I claim that normal intelligent people are being asked to become technicians and geeks just to survive.

It shouldn’t be rocket surgery.

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I came across VentureFizz. It’s a broad resource for Boston area techies: “VentureFizz can help you see what’s buzzing in Boston’s tech community” Particularly useful is their Event’s calendar, which as far as I can see is one of the better ones. An analogous site is Greenhorn Connect, which is trying to achieve something similar but seems more focused on up and coming entrepreneurs.

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I just accidentally pinged someone over wave who I wanted to chat with, thinking that it would go over gtalk, of course normally I talk to him over aim, except sometimes I also see him on Skype. See the problem?

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I get asked from time to time to recommend ruby, rails, and other developers in the Boston area, either for full time or part time gigs. I’m developing a list of good local job resources - started so far with the help of pal Brian D:

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Just came across this odd link somewhere. He’s a good and clear writer, enjoyable to read whether you agree or not: Why People Think Computers Can’t by Marvin Minsky.

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An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about the way the media and politicians want us to react to the recent Christmas Day attempted terrorist attack.

“No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.” (from Paul Campos writing in the Wall Street Journal)

Bruce Schneier, as usual has a lucid and convincing commentary on the article:

“But as a nation we get to set our priorities, and decide how to spend our money. No one is suggesting we ignore the risks of terrorism — and making people feel safe is a good thing to do — but it makes no sense to focus so much effort and money on it when there are far worse risks to Americans.” (from Bruce Shneier’s blog)

He is always lucid and convincing. Here is a recent column in CNN, “Stop the Panic on air security”:

“As circular as it sounds, rare events are rare primarily because they don’t occur very often, and not because of any preventive security measures. If you want to do something that makes security sense, figure out what’s common among a bunch of rare events, and concentrate your countermeasures there.” (from Bruce Schneier, in CNN)

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I’ve been working quite a bit on the Open Source Digital Voting foundation project over the last 9 months or so. It’s really weird but I’ve turned myself into a mini-expert on how elections are organized and run here in the USA. It’s fascinating and way complicated.

OSDV is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing a suite of election (as in Democracy) hardware and software.

The umbrella name for that project is TrustTheVote: an open source project, which will work closely with election officials around the country to learn requirements and then develop software which in turn will be offered free of charge to those who want to deploy it. So we won’t be selling the technology, but we will be evangelizing it like crazy. Think Apache or Drupal.

Here are some links to satisfy your curiosity:

• OSDV
• TrustTheVote
• TrustTheVote Wiki
• Code, Code, Code

We are getting closer and closer to being properly funded with some major contributions so it is time for me to start finding people who might want to join the team. This being an open source project, the idea is of course that any interested person can look and work on the code.

But we also plan to hire 3 developers in the Boston area. Right now it looks like a good part of our code will be Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But that may change; it certainly will be broadened. Really more than anything I would ask if you consider yourself a really good software developer, who loves to design, write, debug and deploy code. And then secondly I would ask if working on a project that is mega ambitious and/but that has a chance to really have an impact on our society - whether that excites you.

Please contact me directly if you want to learn more or throw your virtual hat into the virtual ring.

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In my work with the Open Source Digital Voting foundation, and TrustTheVote, I just learned two new words, for your educational pleasure:

“COTS” - Commercial off the shelf
“COTS” - Government off the shelf

Ok, not all the posts here are gems, but it is also my personal memory bank

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I’ve been part of the core tech team of the TrustTheVote project and recently have been blogging over there too. You can find today’s post about Open Source e-Voting here.

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