May 27, 2006
Multiple sets of Terminal windows in Mac OS X
Having three screens up 24/7, it's easy to accumulate windows. I typically have several dozen available on my Mac, spread across a few dozen apps. In general, this is quite convenient. When I'm not using an app, I hide it (via cmd-H) and all of its windows disappear. If I only want to get a few windows out of the way, I WindowShade them or send them to the Dock.Unfortunately, these approaches don't work very well for applications that have lots of windows. Terminal programs, for example, may have dozens of windows, each presenting a different shell and/or application context. Mac OS X doesn't let me hide some of an app's windows, so that's out. The Dock and WindowShade are awkward ways to manage dozens of windows; simply dismissing and retrieving a set of several windows becomes quite a hassle.
April 17, 2006
Mechanical augmentation of Wikipedia
I'm a big fan of Wikipedia. I use it both as a personal reference tool and as an easy way to add depth to web-based documents. However, I think that its utility might be improved by a bit more mechanical augmentation. This augmentation could take (at least :-) three forms: generated pages, automatic content, and requested content.
April 13, 2006
Ontiki: first steps
Previous weblog entries (Ontiki: an ontology-aware wiki, Mechanically-augmented wikis) have discussed the possibility of creating structured wikis, using mechanical (i.e., software) augmentation. This entry is a very early status report, discussing my initial experiments and early progress in this effort.
March 12, 2006
Our Spotlight book is out!
Spotlight, introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), is Apple's new desktop search feature. Although it isn't perfect, it's quite a useful addition to other forms of file-system navigation. So, when SpiderWorks asked me to write a book on the topic, I jumped at the chance. Now, after a year of off-and-on effort, the book is available for purchase.
March 6, 2006
Mechanically-augmented wikis
I've been thinking about ways to augment wikis with mechanically-harvested information, navigation aids, etc. The result would have the convenience and flexibility of wikis, but wouldn't depend on humans to provide all of the content, links, etc. As an example, let's consider the problem of generating detailed documentation for large collections of software.Technorati Tags: knowledge representation, model-based documentation, ontiki, ontology, semantic wiki, wiki
March 5, 2006
Using DBMS tables for inter-application communication
I have been thinking about ways to integrate some large applications and frameworks into an even larger system. In line with the Perl virtue of Laziness, I'd like to write as little code as possible, particularly if it means making changes to the apps themselves. At the same time, I'd like to avoid supporting a plethora of interfaces and protocols. Fortunately, I may have hit upon a useful approach.Technorati Tags: DBI-Link, DBI-Link, DBMS, ontology, Perl DBI, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, semantic wiki, wiki
March 4, 2006
Polyglot Programming
Programmers who are facile with multiple languages frequently combine them, to great effect, in single projects. In Using PHP as a Macro Pre-processor, I only used two languages (HTML and PHP), but others (e.g., CSS, JavaScript) could easily have been added.
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