Executable Abstractions 2004/2

Bees and Ants

By way of Mark Baker, I found Bees and Ants; I couldn't help but observe the parallel between the 2 ways of communicating described therein and the 2 fundamental ways of finding information:

Testing Comments

Leo 4.1

Release 4.1 of Leo is now available.

Eastern Standard

Cory Doctorow is doing a reading of his new Eastern Standard Tribe...of all places, out west! ;-)

C'mon Cory, how about an east coast reading? Say, at the Border's in Boston?

I haven't had a chance to read EST yet (just got immersed in The Golden Compass, which looks like it'll keep me busy for a bit), but I sure enjoyed Down and Out. EST is in the queue.

Password Safe 2.0

I have been using a little program called Password Safe for a few years now; it's the kind of utility that is so fundamental and foundational that you don't normally think about it much, but if I had to go back to being without it, whoa.

If you're like me, you accumulate new accounts and their associated passwords at a pretty good clip. Even if it were only a few dozen accounts in total, good security practices suggest that you use unique passwords on each account. And, that you not use some systematic scheme for remembering the passwords, because, well, if someone knew one password, they could possibly figure out all of your passwords. Of course these kinds of practices makes it impossible to recall your passwords when you need them.

This is where a utility like Password Safe comes in. It's just a simple little gui on top of a little file-based database for keeping an inventory of all of your accounts and passwords. So, you really just need to remember a single master password, which gets you access to your secure db.

There are other similar utilities out there I am sure, but the greatness of PWSafe lies in a) it uses a rock-solid encryption algorithm from one of today's foremost security experts to keep its data secure; and b) its user exp is well done - you just double click on an account in a displayed list, and it copies the associated password to the clipboard; then, paste into the password field in whatever sign-on context you have for the account; finally, close pwsafe. When pwsafe exits, it clears the clipboard. So, your password is never even displayed.

Anyway, v2.0 was just released. The most important new feature, besides an updated UI, is the ability to group accounts in a tree-like display. This is a major improvement for organizing and finding accounts quickly.

BTW, it was the most excellent Cryptonomicon that first led me to PWSafe; it (PWSafe) was originally developed by Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Systems, who Neal Stephenson references in an appendix on encryption algorithms.

Get Password Safe 2.0

Get Cryptonomicon

Will the real python book please stand up?

As I have been progressively spending more off-hours time with Python, my blogroll has seen an increasing allocation to python-centric feeds, and my desktop bookshelf (well, more like a pile) has begun to increase in python content. Glancing away from my display just now, I see two pillars, Learning Python and Python Cookbook. But it has felt like something was missing...

Earlier this evening, I was moved to go rummage in the basement for an old Peter Kreeft book. While searching, I happened upon two other Python classics! Now my book-pile is complete. ;-)

Chronology Taxonomy

Jarrett House North reported a bit about Dave Winer's recent visit to Microsoft.

One thing that particularly caught my attention was something Dave was reported to have said in response to a question: "I think there are three ways of managing and finding information--chronology, which is blogs, search, and taxonomy..."

I agree essentially, though I'd like to generalize that just a bit more, and propose that there are two ways of finding information:

with taxonomy being one mechanism for structural navigation, and chronology being a particular kind of taxonomy.

Blogs indeed are primarily chronological in nature; that is their 'natural' taxonomy, if you will. Chronology as a particular taxonomy looks like this (at least in the context of blogs):

YYYY / MM / DD / PermalinkGUID

Most blogging engines also allow additional taxonomies to be applied as a means of helping consumers find information. These are often called 'categories'; unfortunately, most engines I've seen have limited these personal taxonomies to very simple one- or at most two-level structures.

Now that I have a solid blogging platform in place that allows for some experimentation, I hope to explore further over the coming months this intersection of taxonomies, outlines, and blogs.

Outline Blogging

The PyDS Meme Spreads

Good to see a new PyDS site in the blogosphere!

ETCon Blues

This year is the third in a row that sees me missing the one conf I should most like to be at - ETCon. The one consolation this year is that Doug Kaye's IT Conversations is bringing the keynotes to us! Excellent!

I'll get out there one of these years. Of course, I think an East Coast ETCon would be smashingly successful, what would it take to get one jump-started?

Free Kind of Science

Via Boing Boing: "Stephen Wolfram has made the complete text of his New Kind of Science (a 1000+-page treatise on the way that virtually everything in the universe can be explained with cellular automata), which he self-published a couple years back with some of the squillions of dollars he's earned on his seminal Mathematica software program, available for free on the Internet."

Available here.

Protege 2.0

Release 2.0 of Protege 2000 is out. Protege is an excellent ontology editor.

Go get it.

New Project

MDA-driven Conversations

Model-driven development is heating up, and OMG's MDA in particular is prompting some new dialogue.

Witness these two recent entries to the conversation:

- Martin Fowler

- Steve Cooke (from Microsoft)

I will comment on these shortly, once I have a chance to review them.

ActiveRenderer

Marc Barrot has just released 2.0 of his ActiveRenderer web outlining product. Check it out, especially the newly exposed API.