autonomous web

If you give me a number, which is any year from Dr. Cham’s life, I’ll give you a synopsis of that time period. And I’ll do it as a Ruby method, so it’s an independent piece, an isolated chunk of code which can be hooked up to the voice of a robotic volcano, when such a thing becomes the apex of authoritative voice talents.

Okay, so I need you to notice def and case and when. You’ve seen the Ranges, the closed accordions of 1895..1913, back in chapter 3. They contain both ends and in between. And the backslashes at the end of each line simply ignore the Enter key at the end of each line, assuring Ruby that there is more of this line to come.

So, please: def and case and when.

 def dr_chams_timeline( year )
   case year
   when 1894
     "Born." 
   when 1895..1913
     "Childhood in Lousville, Winston Co., Mississippi." 
   when 1914..1919
     "Worked at a pecan nursery; punched a Quaker." 
   when 1920..1928
     "Sailed in the Brotherhood of River Wisdomming, which journeyed \
      the Mississippi River and engaged in thoughtful self-improvement, \
      where he finished 140 credit hours from their Oarniversity." 
   when 1929
     "Returned to Louisville to pen a novel about time-travelling pheasant hunters." 
   when 1930..1933
     "Took up a respectable career insuring pecan nurseries.  Financially stable, he \
      spent time in Brazil and New Mexico, buying up rare paper-shell pecan trees.  Just \
      as his notariety came to a crescendo: gosh, he tried to buried himself alive." 
   when 1934
     "Went back to writing his novel.  Changed the hunters to insurance tycoons and the \
      pheasants to Quakers." 
   when 1935..1940
     "Took Arthur Cone, the Headmaster of the Brotherhood of River Wisdomming, as a \
      houseguest.  Together for five years, engineering and inventing." 
   when 1941
     "And this is where things got interesting." 
   end
 end

from why’s (pungent) guide to Ruby

Henry Story:

The first thing everyone did on the web was to write a home page. Similarly the first thing people do in linked data is link their friends. If this can be shown to be useful, then it will increase the value of doing it. For the moment, writing your foaf profile is nearly just a write only exercise. Some robots read it, but the result of doing so is not immediately obvious, if at all. Once one can see what the benefit is - and here I mean close to immediate feedback - such as getting access to a campus, being able to chat with friends, not having complex logins - being better able to communicate with friends of friends - then there will be a better reason, not only for oneself to have a profile but for one to get others to have one too.

…

Everybody is interested in something different. There will be no one database that will interest everyone. And even if it did, it would in the end with a good UI not seem to anyone as if it were linked data: since people will gravitate towards the interface that best hides that fact.

Sampo Syreeni:

So in essence what we need is a distributed version of Facebook: all of the user specific metadata stored as RDF documents on the Web and/or accessible via some well-defined protocol which can also do targeted pushes and/or pulls of triples. (I wonder whether Google’s Wave stuff could help here; certainly some version of it could.) A UI layer on top of that to make it usable and beautiful. Trust, which in this case would probably be email authentication directly to your hosting node, with optional PGP crypto. Perhaps also aggregation of inter-host dataflows for efficiency.

The main problem I see with this sort of thing is that you’d have to pay for your subscription to one of the hosts (or host your own). Financing from ads wouldn’t be easy in this sort of environment, because you could always roll your own open source implementation which excluded any ad from other people’s feeds. OTOH, any particular host implementation could do whatever it wanted at the UI layer.

…

One big way to make that distinction would be to build in location independence from the start. That is, deep support for multiple identifiers for the same data, means of propagating trust from one identifier to the next, and eventually resolution services which enable you to rename data to its newest URI.

Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.

While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: “There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?”

One of the monks replied: “From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind.”

“Your head must feel very heavy,” observed Hogen, “if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind.”

foaf:tipjar
  tipjar:type webpage
  tipjar:payTo
    foaf:Group
      foaf:name Make-a-Wish Foundation
      foaf:homepage http://www.wish.org
  tipjar:info Donations go to Make-a-Wish foundation, provides gifts and services to 
              disabled children with a high expectation of dying.
  rdf:resource http://www.wish.org/home/giving-shopping/giving.htm