I recently read the expression “going non-linear” describing a person, where most people would say something like “going nuts.” Incredibly geeky; I like it.
I recently read the expression “going non-linear” describing a person, where most people would say something like “going nuts.” Incredibly geeky; I like it.
Epigrams on Programming
… as explained by Sir Kenny, From: Ken Tilton Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:53:07 -0400 Subject: Re: Newbie FAQ #2: Where’s the GUI? Jonathan Gardner wrote: > I know this is a FAQ, but I still don’t have any answers, at least answers that I like. That’s because you missed FAQ #1…
There’s a school of thought that URIs should be opaque identifiers with no inherent meaning or structure. I think this is clearly a bad idea on the human-facing web, but it is more reasonable for computer-facing web services. However, I’ve been generating a lot of RDF lately, trying to organize piles of metadata in AltLaw.…
Let’s have the database models strut down the runway: Relational (SQL): Data consist of rows in tables. Each row has multiple columns. Each column has a fixed type. Queries use filters and joins. Fixed schema is defined separately from the data. User-defined indexes improve query performance. Robust transaction/data-integrity support. Graph (RDF): Data consist of nodes…
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I couldn’t sleep last night. So I designed a RESTful interface for version control. Yeah, that’s weird. We already have a nice model for RESTful document storage in Amazon’s S3. But S3 doesn’t do versioning. What if it did? A PUT to a previously-unused URI creates a new resource with version number 1. Any subsequent…
Well, it happened. I ran out of space on the 250 GB drive I use to develop AltLaw. Not all that surprising, although it did happen sooner than I expected. I’m deleting gigabytes of cached data — file conversions, mostly — just so I can get enough space to work again. But this makes me…
I can’t help it. I just love big, complicated systems that let you get really precise about what you’re talking about. Types, classes, ontologies, schemas, normalization, denormalization, XML, RDF, XSLT, Java, … It’s all so cool. I can happily spend hours scribbling pages of hierarchies, interfaces, specifications, file formats, and the like. But at the…
Since I started working on AltLaw.org a little over a year ago, I’ve struggled with the data model. I’ve got around half a million documents, totally unstructured, from a dozen different sources. Each source has its own quirks and problems that have to be corrected before it’s useful. When I started, I was using MySQL…