This is a photo of a painting I commissioned from Blair Bradshaw last year. It shows the final crushing move of the
Immortal Game, circled in red. I chose Blair because I have a print of one of his other pieces and had been to his studio so was familiar with his style. I thought he would do a great job of the immortal game, which I had been thinking about getting painted for some time. The piece is 5ft square and is comprised of 64 small square mini-canvases. Blair and I spoke at length about how to visually show the history of the game. I think he did a great job and am very pleased with what I got.
I have been experimenting with Python 2.3 and MySQL 4.0.13 recently and have been using a copy of my Movabletype 2.661 database as a sandbox. Before I started a spent a few minutes working out the structure of the database. This Entity Relationship Diagram is what I came up with. I expect version 3.0 of Movabletype is different, but just in case anyone else is digging around in Movabletype and could use a map here is a pdf version.
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One day towards the end of 2000 my wife finally lost her financial patience with me. As she threw a pile of bills and receipts at me she screamed "That's it! I'm never doing the accounts or paying the bills again. You never collect receipts, you never write a memo in the checkbook, and your work expenses are impossible to understand!" She then stormed out of the room. I was in no doubt that she meant it and she has remained free of the household accounting burden ever since. I unfortunately have not. It is true that until that day I had never balanced a checkbook in my life and habitually threw bank balances in the trash without even opening them - another contributing factor to my wife's rant. In fact the only time I ever knew my bank balance was when the ATM refused to dispense cash. So it was with great trepidation that I began my fiscally responsible life. I figured that as I had designed and built large financial software systems I ought to be able to use a small one. So after some research I selected Quicken as they had a large share of the market and had a version for Mac.
more >>I just re-wrote the first four sections of the Wikipedia article for the term Computer. The Current page is here.
This link to the change history page for the article currently shows one change on line 6. This was a trivial typo that I just fixed in my final version. Over time this link should change to show all the modifications to the article made by other people. I'm curious to see how signifcant the changes will be...
When Stephen Hawking said "The only thing nature abhors more than a vacuum is a naked singularity". He was talking specifically about the laws of physics in relation to black holes. But his observation could equally apply to the body of human knowledge and the existence of unprecedented phenomena. The only thing that drives our desire for knowledge more than a complete absence of information is the presence of a single, undeniable but unprecedented piece of evidence. Such tantalizing evidence demands explanation.
more >>In 1936, [Howard] Aiken had proposed his idea [to build a giant calculating machine] to the [Harvard University] Physics Department, ... He was told by the chairman, Frederick Saunders, that a lab technician, Carmelo Lanza, had told him about a similar contraption already stored up in the Science Center attic.
Intrigued, Aiken had Lanza lead him to the machine, which turned out to be a set of brass wheels from English mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage's unfinished "analytical engine" from nearly 100 years earlier.
Aiken immediately recognized that he and Babbage had the same mechanism in mind. Fortunately for Aiken, where lack of money and poor materials had left Babbage's dream incomplete, he would have much more success.
Later, those brass wheels, along with a set of books that had been given to him by the grandson of Babbage, would occupy a prominent spot in Aiken's office. In an interview with I. Bernard Cohen '37, PhD '47, Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science Emeritus, Aiken pointed to Babbage's books and said, "There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book."
[The Harvard University Gazette. Howard Aiken: Makin' a Computer Wonder By Cassie Furguson]
The International System of Units (SI) [72 page pdf Brochure] is maintained by the Bureau International des Poids et Measures at it's headquarters in Sevres near Paris, France. The Metric System as it is often known has a long history; supposedly invented in 1670 by Gabriel Mouton, a French clergyman, It was adopted by France in 1795 and by the United States in 1866. The system gained international status with the signing of The Convention of the Meter in Paris on 20th May 1875. The U.S. was one of the original seventeen signatory nations and is the only industrialized nation that still does not use the system.
more >>Today Vannevar Bush (rhymes with achiever) is often remembered for his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think in which he describes a hypothetical machine called a Memex. This machine contained a large indexed store of information and allowed a user to navigate through the store using a system similar to hypertext links. At the time of writing his essay Bush knew more about the state of technology development in the US than almost any other person. During the war, he was Roosevelt's chief adviser on military research. He was responsible for many war time research projects including Radar, the Atomic Bomb, and the development of early Computers. If anyone should ever have been capable of predicting the future it was Vannevar Bush in 1945. He is an almost unprecedented test case for the art of prediction. Unlike almost anyone else before or since Bush was actually in possession of ALL the facts - as only the head of technology research in a country at war could be.
more >>This is the first of an occasional series of reviews I intend to write to illustrate some important general traits of ontologies. In each review I will dissect an ontology and examine why it succeeded or failed. In this essay I mention concepts that are defined in my previous essay. Judging the likely success of an ontology. This first review covers an ontology called the Common Basic Specification (CBS) that was designed in the late 1980s to bring much needed standardization and rationalization to the fragmented information management processes of the British National Health Service (NHS). It persisted in various forms until the late 1990's when it was finally abandoned. This is my explanation of why it failed.
more >>The debate about the promised value of the Semantic Web seems to me to be missing a dispassionate examination of the success, or otherwise, of existing ontology based solutions. Clay Shirky is obviously right when he states that a single monolithic ontology will never work. His critics are equally right when they claim the Semantic web will only work if it is a melange of multiple interoperable Ontologies. What is missing from the debate is a more detailed explanation of what ontologies are good at, how they interoperate, and why systems based on ontologies succeed or fail. From my perspective as a systems designer this last point is the most significant. Debates about theory are nice, but examples of real solutions are more instructive. This essay will begin to examine this question by attempting to define the anatomy of an ontology. I will use this structure in later essays to examine the reasons for success and failure of individual ontologies.
more >>When the history of early software development is written it will be a travesty. Few historians will have the ability, and even fewer the inclination, to learn long dead programming languages. History will be derived from the documentation not the source code. Alan Turings perplexed, hand written annotation "How did this happen?" on a cutting of Autocode taped into his note book will remain a mystery.
What kind of bug would stump Alan Turing? Was it merely a typo that took a few hours to find? a simple mistake maybe? Or did the discipline of the machine expose a fundamental misconception and thereby teach him a lesson? The only way to know would be to learn Autocode.
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