n000000: nfoWare Notes Job Jar & Diary

Status	Date	Description







	2017-05-31	n170601: I've got it, do something with it !
	2013-11-10	I have noticed, in thinking about the Miser Project, that there is a big difference between strings in some code and texts in some language. This has implications for Literate UpDown and it also has implications for how symbols are allowed to be written in programming languages. The problem has to do with combining forms and their distinctness. This gets into intentional uses and I need to find a way to cope with that or simply rule it out. If I could rule it out without reverting to (simple) alphabetic languages only, I would BiDi is an issue too. One way to handle this in Miser is with the idea of never making a decision that cannot be reversed in an upward-compatible manner. For down-level, I guess versioning is the only way to at least know there is a problem. More thinking is required here.
	2005-12-28	I've started using the term "document engineering" and it refers to some of these folio structures and conventions that I have been evolving in the time since this particular job jar was begun. The best example is at http://NuovoDoc.com/products right now, where I finally created a bridge between professional-appearance forms and the document-engineering forms. I really like that, whatever structures might be used for them. These are going to show up as TROSTing patterns, because it is about that, although nfoWare's commitment to confirmable experience is about that too. But I think TROSTing is the central place to deal with that, even though I can carry pattlets here too.
	2005-12-28	Review these items and scoop as many items to relevant folio job jars as possible. This list is unmanageable.
	2005-12-26	Notebook #49.35-36 have some observations and thoughts about document processing and its topics, the need for long-lived documents and how preservation is to be achieved, etc.
	2004-03-14	Look at a way to properly identify material that is under the GDPL, being a derivative of Wikipedia material. This is a general condition for forms of open documentation, including the Commons case. This plays into the situating of data as property, and giving people some perspective on that as well as tools for playing nice. Don't forget the work done on the license for DMware, which applies broadly to software, documentation, and literary works. [dh:2005-12-24 Also, there is now the ODMlicensing perspective, though here I think AFL 2.1 is the primary license and BSD template licenses are used only to be GPL 2.0 compatible. For text, web pages, etc., it will always be Creative Commons Attribution.
	2004-03-14	I need to capture some of my notes posted to Wikipedia. Writing there is great practice for pacing to a broad audience and it is great training. I have also offered some ideas about algorithms and, indirectly, mathematics that can be used here. I also want to capture what I provided because it could disappear in an editing there, and I want a record for my own reuse.
	2004-03-13	I must dig into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for citations in Wikipedia and also for ideas about how to work citations myself, especially to versioned material and fragments/annealings therein. [dh:2005-12-28 This can be dealt with in patterns too.]
	2004-03-13	In my Wikipedia notes on algorithms, I have been thinking about adding material on emergent behavior, as in interactive systems. There is also the important fact that an algorithm does not have to resemble the problem it solves. The most powerful algorithms don't. There is something to contend with here. I was thinking of cellular automata, the simple ways that some screen savers produce visually appealing patterns, and so on. [dh:2005-12-28 This is being handled in part by "What Computers Know" and "What Programmers Know" over in TROSTing. But there is room for a flavor of that under the nfoWare "Situating Computation" theme.]
	2004-03-13	I want to honor what Doug Englebart means by Bootstrapping too and reflect that and acknowledge the connection with that way of thinking. I notice two things right off: the journey does not resemble the result, and the result may not be in the artifact as much as who we are being in the matter of augmentation and how that is expressed in the artifact. I am also mindful of Kierkegaard's door and Wittgenstein's ladder.
	2004-03-13	I have started using the term "bootspiral" for the problem of bootstrapping a spiral development and having a round of the spiral end up raising the base as if a bootstrap wasn't needed, now that we can kick down that ladder. Because it is our intention to provide historical accountability for how we got where we are (so we could do it again, more quickly, where needed), so tracks will be left. And it will all be clear. A note is needed about that, so I can refer to it in other material.
	2004-03-09	It looks like there is enough material to begin experimenting with a Wiki here, and also adding ways to annotate and comment on active pages. I don't have any active pages yet, but I could spiral that up in parallel. I need to think about this a lot more, but there is material in discussion on Blue Oxen and also caught in my blog that makes me think it is nearly time to work on this. In April I get to start thinking about a project to do as part of my M.Sc in IT dissertation, and something around collaboration support would be useful. If I could tie it into Software Engineering, I would like it even more.
	2004-03-06	I had this insight while on the rowing machine. The pull-down menus for things like configuration options and other selections should have links for help on the very item. There should be no need to do something special to get context-sensitive help. That should also work. Likewise, dialog boxes should provide easy ways to get expanded information about what the choices are about and the consequences of choices. There is more about offering someone the choice of exercising an option, and also ways to undo it, etc. This may depend on the path to the explanation, but as long as the choice is consistent with the context, it should be offered. I also was thinking about how to mayble have a little icon to signify the presence of help on a menu item too. So it is clear that the item is not being selected. There are some important human factors to this. Also ways to have it work portably between different toolcrafts.
	2004-03-03	This week in my Computer Networking course, we are looking at more routing, optimization, and other activities. These topics are good for Situating Java. The heuristic quality, and the need for simulations, statistics, and analysis is fascinating. This can also be illustrated with games, and it would be good to have a tie-in to play, multiplayer gaming, and basic gaming (like chess). I also had an insight about reasoning with graphs, since we see the graph (and chess board) and the computational procedures we use work at a different/lower level than that. That may be even more important to illustrate and appreciate.
	2004-02-23	This diary, and the Orcmid's Lair Blog are accumulating entries way faster than I am disposing of any. Part of it is that I am arranging to be driven by my class schedule, which goes on until March 31. But if I keep getting my homework done early, I can also use time at the end of each class week (Tuesday and Wednesday) to forward this work and take actions on older items that are easy and helpful to expand on. I will create a structure for that. The key thing might be to start working the projects section.
	2004-02-23	I had been thinking, in the last day or so, that it might be all right to attribute some things to languages or expressions of/in language (I'm doing it now!) that have meaning be in the expression rather than in the participation of the observer/listener/speaker, etc. There is something worth recreating about this, though I have no idea what my thinking was. This note is a place to remind myself that I need to recreate that thinking.
	2004-02-23	I ran into another case of opaqueness (see 2003-12-19 note here). It was in a Gilb requirements-analysis table that AnderBill created that made no sense to me. We talked about that. It is a great example that the only difference between mystery language and somethinig that I comprehend at once is familiarity and practice (and probably being open and interested). There is something to do with this around the metrics conversation tied to confirmable experience and coherence and meaning, evocativeness of language, etc.
	2004-02-23	Theory versus Practice: There is some important work here to separate the difference between theoretical entities (including the ones in stories) and practice in the world. AnderBill sent me a great Dr. Dobb's quote on the subject. I am running into theoreticians who thing that theory is practice (or put differently, that they are talking about the world with their formal theories). This is something to pursue for Situating Data and Situating Computation. I need to capture something about that, so we can hook more to it.
	2004-02-20	I was thinking about experience too, and experience versus phenomena (if there is any versus there), and then confirmable experience, creating experiences, (the Experience Music Project right here in Seattle), and then situating. There are more notes here, and I also see a connection to the scale of human experience and existence. But I can't have all of this under nfoWare. Some of it belongs in Orcmid's Lair and themes and beyond. Make a note here and also provide a hospitable connection in Orcmid's Lair.
	2004-02-20	I was thinking about art, Michelangelo's David, the use of perspective, and the availability of the unfinished "slave" statues for what they reveal about artistic creation, the emergence of art in the interaction and process. I looked at art[ing] as what artists do. Then I was looking at our artistic experiences as spectators and how that works in theater and in all art. Then I got into flow and thinking about not knowing what the artists experience was, say in making a cave painting, since we have no common conceptual framework even, that we can be sure of. Then I got off onto experience and experiencing our experience and what Bill Anderson reminds me of, be present to our lived experience. This all at 6am while my restless mind is waking and the rest of me wants to sleep more until the 7:30 am alarm clock.
	2004-02-18	The small matter of confirmation of asserted propositions (and readings as propositions) is an important empirical concern. We will not step over that.
	2004-02-18	I was thinking about the problems of reading statements in their propositional (or predicate logic) forms, and I was thinking about the problem of derivations using applicative expressions as propositions. This had me then think about the propositional reading (since nothing to do with constants actually changes anything), and that one form of propositional reading of something interesting is to translate it into a propositional form (i.e., using the constant connectives) for the forms propositional reading as a reading of the original (but "reduced."). This is a promising view and I need to reflect it here in logic and under Miser where I work up to having Miser systems derive assertions about Miser.
	2004-02-18	Make a P2P folder. I didn't want to start this so soon, but things are moving and I need a place to collect material and notes even if I don't develop the topics.
	2004-02-18	Make a WS folder for the foundation Web Services. Move the WS-Inspection paper here.
	2004-02-18	Make an XML folder for the XML foundation. I also put a specification here that I was afraid of losing on MSDN. Move it to WS when we get a chance.
	2004-02-15	An interesting document-processing project is to carry versions and difference files of the IETF RFC catalog. And then to have a tool that scrapes the index.txt files into a database view, with changes and additions searchable and reviewable. This should provide ways to make quick links to replacement RFCs, etc., and also to go get the RFC. This makes a nice little information-processing tool and demonstration of a number of Situating Data principles. Something about Information Architecture too. [dh:2013-05-08 This would be an useful variation of the search tool that is part of the CS01 course on Udacity. It might be tied to addbib (ab here) in some way.]
	2004-02-15	I am having difficulty with clean Telnet and response capture presentation. Using 4NT and Edit doesn't seem like a good idea -- I think these may introduce code set abberations. I need something better than the JTA plug-in to jEdit. This looks like a project to provide a transmission and capture utility that works with ports/sockets and is pluggable (reminds me of the EZCPR technique for TSRs based on CP/M 3.0). I need something working, and I can refactor it further, later. This becomes an illustration of how to bootstrap to engineered results, perhaps. [dh:2007-08-31 There are also the ODMA and the DMA plug-in models as possible variants.]
	2004-02-13	Look at creating project structures over on Miser-theory that support some of the discussion here and for Situating Computation. Not so urgent as in Orcmid's Lair, but not to be overlooked. Also update of template structure and such. I can make notes on logic over there too.
	2004-02-13	Document computational completeness and what I have in mind about that. Do this over on Miser perhaps. Also, I ran into computational completeness in something else, so I should find out what that was.
	2004-02-13	Figure out where there are sources of Telnet implementation, and come up with a depiction that makes sockets make sense. This hasn't happened yet in [Kurose2003].
	2004-02-13	Make a FrontPage template for the notes pages that I will be creating here.
	2004-02-08	I just used eBay to make a purchase, and I created a PayPal account to use for payment. This was an interesting experience. I am not sure how it plays, but I think there is something here about data, money, the way accounts work, and so on. It might not be an nfoWare topic, but it is worth pointing out in conjunction with commerce and eCommerce consideration.
	2004-02-08	I am working on updating information on the Centrale LAN and the various technologies. This is not directly relevant here either, except that I will watch for data aspects. There are security issues (under trust) and also issues about communication technology, layering of abstraction and protocols. I will see what I can find in that.
	2004-02-05	I have mentioned dependencies on material in Orcmid's Lair in earlier entries here. I am beginning my sixth on-line module toward my M.Sc in IT today and I need to clean up Orcmid's Lair over there too (including having notes and projects there be over there). So I am going to do that now, and be fully prepared and engaged in my Computer Communications course before I return. I expect that more will arise during the course and there will be mild flurries of progress.
	2004-02-01	It occurred to me that this business about media recording-life is related to software engineering principles, and also ISO 9000 ones with regard to risk management and preserving an account of the basis for decisions, not just what the decision is, and the assumptions about operational conditions that should then be verified regularly. There is something here about accountability and trust and managing risk. I don't know where more should be said about this, but someplace. Data and Accountability and the like.
	2004-02-01	I am wondering about risk management (reading CACM 47, 2 (February 2004), 61-65) around media for data. It would seem that, at the beginning of a project, one needs to record data on the intended media very early and use this as an early warning condition on the deterioration of recorded media that is created when a system is in production. Then there are lots of conditions to keep data on (including tracking batches of new media, etc.). And finding out what vendors do to establish the retention life of their media, etc.
	2004-01-30	I made many notes while traveling. I need to move them here and/or to notes items.
	2004-01-30	I found a possible way to reach Peter van Cuylenberg and find out from him where there is public information on the ideas about system coherence that he promoted at Xerox Corporation. Follow up on this.
	2004-01-18	The well-known formulation of strings and of nested strings, and how one does escaping is a very useful topic. Especially in regard to use for various purposes, and how one describes/presents strings. Then there are nested strings to be dealt with, in the Algol 60 sense of nested strings.
	2004-01-18	I also need to distinguish media and the nature of a medium. This also deals with layers of subordinate attention (whether or not awareness) and provides an opening for digital macroscoping.
	2004-01-18	It occured to me that streams are of anything, but it is common to think of them as of bits, bytes, or whatnot. There is also the matter of having them be bounded and knowing what the boundaries are.
	2004-01-18	I am not sure what there is to say about "information" and whether I need a separate section from meaning/ to address it. Certainly information in the information-theoretical sense may arise. I am not sure how or when it will be necessary to address that. For now, I have no separate section on the topic.
	2004-01-18	I ran into a paper in mathematical logic that didn't view properly. It was a web page and apparently has font dependencies that I don't have on my machine. I want to find out what that is, find the font and talk about it, in discussion of characters, text, etc. I need to mention fonts as part of the character and text and print stuff.
	2004-01-18	Recent work in physiology and the brain suggests that our visualizations and conceptualizations tend to be tied to spatial awareness and physical (body) actions. It occurred to me that dreams are like that, and even when I was working on a symbolic problem (just getting immersed in programming), when I would talk in my sleep it would be about things like being on the drum of the computer working some problem, having to wait for the drum to come around, etc. Symbolic execution is, in some sense, visualized as/via physical phenomena. It gave new meaning to me of expressions like "spinning my wheels," "running around in circles" when applied to mental activity. (Even the notion of "activity.") I wonder how this connects to some people finding comfort working with abstractions (ahah: "working", "comfort"), and others insisting that there be something real or that it makes no sense not for their to be objectively-real something being discussed. I have Lackoff and Núñez on Where Mathematics Comes From, and it will be interesting to see how much they go there. How abstractions (arithmetic and beyond) are passed around and handed down and acquired in each generation will be interesting to explore, if they go there.
	2004-01-18	The other thing that came up, thinking about counting, is that there needs to be something about logic and language (oh no, two more sections, but I will need them) and of course the three 'Rs. OK, it looks like a reasonable thing to do. Although I want to provide a surface contact with this, I also want to be able to have a grounded system and ensure that even my informal statements are consistent with it. I can see that most of the connection with scholarship around logic and language will be by citation. That means I will have bibliographies over here, so I need to coordinate that pretty quickly. Hmm, and here come the feuding lexicographers again .. drat. OK, need to spiral this in a successful way.
	2004-01-18	I am in an interesting discussion about logic on the phi-logic list and I started thinking about sytems that allow us to count without having much beside counting -- no formal arithmetic and certainly no mathematics. That got me thinking about the business of counting cattle with knots in a string, offering the string as a promise of cattle, trust issues around the honoring of promisory symbols (data), and so on.
	2004-01-16	Should I tie toolcraft into Situating Computation (Situated Computing) and Situating Data, or is it done well enough for now? I guess the question is, what mention should I give to those three in regard to toolcraft?
	2004-01-16	Oh oh, I wonder about Situating Proof and a note I sent to David Corfield today. This comes up for me because a strange theorem-prover output was offered in response to a deeper question on the FOM list. Inference systems and such may well be part of Situating Data coverage. Certainly if we get to models and modeling. Hmm, yet-another-section-to-add?
	2004-01-16	My attention was just brought back to Ian Hacking, author of The Social Construction of What? I suppose that does come up in terms of meaning and the interpretation of data and the supposed carrying of meaning, information, knowledge, etc. Not sure what to do with that except Meaning is a place for it. In the same exploration, I found that I have mis-remembered Polanyi for a long time and I need to revisit that. I also didn't realize how much Polanyi also observed about tacit knowledge and tacit background in a discipline.
	2004-01-16	I have been spending a fair amount of time, this week, fussing with mathematical topics, like when the same mathematical object necessarily corresponds to two different concepts and what constitutes a "proof" of Church's thesis, what the standing of the empty set is if any, and what First-Order-Logic has to say about set theory and not. This is, to some degree, situating mathematics or, for my purposes, Situating Computation. I don't want to go there for Situating Data, but it will show up with regard to problems of identifying non-canonical things and such. But way later. Meanwhile, I think I do need to spiff up some place (such as Notes on the Miser Project and citations in the Orcmid's Lair bibliographies) to be able to refer to those from here. The bibliography cases come up first.
	2004-01-16	Bill Anderson and I are running into more problems about coherence and the failure of email clients, for example, to have specified, confirmable behavior. A lot of what goes on is kept transparent and it just works, and when it doesn't work the breakdown and the degree of inscrutability are pronounced. It occurs to me that there are aspects of trust, confirmable experience, coherence, and toolcraft all wrapped up in this. And software engineering. I am not sure how to get this all handled. It would seem that the first thing to do is even be able to describe the situation, and then look for appropriate tools.
	2004-01-15	In the certificate experiments, I found a problem where signed messages sent as attachments in other messages don't arrive in a way where the signed-message attachment can be verified. There are variations that remain to be tested with regard to S/MIME sending a clear text with messages and not. Also, how the attachment gets added to a message may matter, and whether or not the container is signed may matter. All cases to tie down that I am not going to look at right now. The message thread is in my MS Outlook 2000 folder for Confirmable Experience, under TextFlow-2004-01-15-... .
	2004-01-15	Reproducibility and Trust Experiments. Bill Anderson and I are doing some trust experiments and compiling a draft on code signing and use of PKI in signing of eMail. This is an amazingly-inscrutable area and it is certainly about data (both the signing of data and the use of data to make signatures and to convey certificates). These tie to eMail, text, toolcraft and trust topics for *nfoWare. I am still gathering material. We also need to look at what shows up in a Praxis101 Technical Report and what gets gathered for Situating Data* and, finally, where the scientific data and information about replication of our experiments can be retained.
	2004-01-12	Propogation: There is something about how data and electronic "information" is propogated that creates a problem. Bill Anderson and I are looking at convenient ways for Bill to send me material to be published here. One of the first problems we have is sending text where there are no "hard" line breaks inside of paragraphs. That way I can edit the material into HTML without having to reflow the paragraphs. But what we notice is that under various conditions an e-mail that is composed without in-paragraph line breaks will arrive with such line breaks. How is one to know about that? Who says what the rules are for this, and where did they say it? This coherence problem and the related confirmable experience challenges seems quite different than discussing a breakdown with my garage mechanic. I don't know where to account for this.
	2004-01-10	Hmm, I had these paper-tape read-punch units in my basement for a while. How did that happen? Did I do that with Ben Barlow? This would have been around the time that I started to learn to build Heathkits so that I could make my own computer. Hmm, bread-board systems and such. I wonder what there is of that any longer, now that Heathkit is gone and even wire-wrap is not exactly current technology, that I know of.
	2004-01-10	Oh my, accessibility for *nfoWare*. Now there's a serious spiral. I really don't care about WAP and PDAs and such, but accessibility is an issue. And, where does the first spiral fit?
	2004-01-10	Coming back to printers, there is the use of impact printers to make Braille and Braille peripherals, there is also the use of printers to make music and the old radio-next-to-the-computer audio approach.
	2004-01-10	The technology that I am aware of is as it developed in the US, from tabulating equipment and teletext through the mainframe computer and their peripheral equipments. The story may be coherent, but it will be incomplete. I need to be accountable about that.
	2004-01-10	When we get to printing it will be interesting to look at the impact printers, dot-matrix (remember on the 026 and 029 card punch?) and the 402 and 407, plus the printer for the tops of punched cards.
	2004-01-10	The File Computer reminded me of the early airline reservation systems, such as at Northwest Airlines, where the reservation terminals were on a kind of WAN token ring using leased lines. The pattern persists, of course. I wonder what is available for diagrams, old photographs, and so on.
	2004-01-10	Paper tape reminded me of the use of paper tape in telephone metering systems and long-distance calling systems, and then the processing of that data into/out-of Univac File Computer Systems.
	2004-01-10	Then of course there are punched cards and their first usages, the electromechanical Remington Rand devices, the early IBM tabulator equipment and the respective key punches.
	2004-01-10	While relaxing at the end of the yoga, I was reminded of the first data entry devices: Unitypers, Friden flexowriters, and teletype devices of one sort or another. This reminded me of paper tape (as per Simple Simon and Bob Deveril's first Datatron 205 program). Also, I am wondering of the evolution of codes around TTY and also computer paper-tape usage, baudot, and so on. It would be nice to have photographs of the terminals in use, especially the Unityper, and also the first IBM (pre-selectric?) terminal.
	2004-01-10	I just completed a Yoga session and the DVD is still playing the audio loop on the root menu. Talk about situating music carried as digital audio. It is a nice tune, with a thunderclap at the end, being mostly guitar and percussion and what might be a harp. An interesting notion of structural language at a number of levels.
	2004-01-10	Spiraling up, spiraling in, and spiraling down are notions that I should say more about. It fits into the bootstrapping notion and the reproducibility part of confirmable experience. Also, being able to preserve, port, reuse, etc.
	2004-01-10	An interesting problem for nfoWare as documents is creation of an index to the published "editions." That will take toolcraft, text processing software, perhaps, and some interactive support too. Something to spiral up and then spiral in.
	2004-01-10	Bring back the Jack Dennis material on reproducibility as one of the inspirations of confirmable experience. This is a big deal. [2004-02-19: It is Earl Van Horn, not Jack. I should definitely do this, too.]
	2004-01-10	The style guide for *nfoWare* needs to point out that *nfoWare* is always shown in bold italics. This is a hint to create a style guide here.
	2004-01-10	I was thinking that, when pages of the eBooks are created on the *nfoWare* site, I need to be careful to ground cross-references to expanded material on nfoWare and elsewhere. For *nfoWare*, I want to be able to link to specific pages with the understanding that those are the ones as of the time of the reference. I do need to employ that technique before I get much written. This goes on an early spiral.
	2004-01-10	I am not sure where to put HTML, as opposed to XML. In some sense, the Web is very important to bring into *Situating Data* pretty early. Web servers are also important as a foundation for demonstrating the XML "stack" and ability to get to Web Services easily, understanding HTTP as an important protocol, etc. This has a tie-in to the Unicode spiral concerning how to identify formats (because of MIME types, content-encodings in HTTP, URIs, etc.).
	2004-01-10	I'm thinking that one of the hardest confirmable experiences is learning how to do something like make a system disk or partition and organize a hard drive. Or burn an E-Prom. These days, that extends to recording a CD-ROM, etc. There are ways to do that. And layers and seams to understand in how to take one worked case and make another. I'm reminded of the utilities that were built by Ward Christensen (the one in Chicago who worked for IBM) who was the Peter Norton of CP/M-80. And there was Tarbell and someone else before that. (I am thinking of the guy who wrote about psychic energy drain and the Magnificent Money Machine. There's a lot more from the 8008/8080 era, including Jobs and Gates and friends.) Then there is Peter Norton's early books on the PC and how it works. I wonder if there is anything like that left anywhere that people could find it. Building your first application in debug is an interesting notion. Can it even be done any more? Is debug (the 16-bit one or normal boot-up one) still available? Do we need our own? Can we use Knuth tools? Oh. Another "hardware" platform. Interesting. I am now brought back to the Dennett "Computer Microscope" situation.
	2004-01-10	I am looking at how to separate the different platform technologies for sampleWare, nfoWare tools, exercise, and so on. Java and .NET (Mono) provide a particular level that should be stable for 10 years or more, going forward. So these are useful ways to develop tools and present fundamental utilities, with the idea that they will be portable to whatever the future brings in terms of standard programming languages. The use of virtual machines also provides some important preservation qualities, it is to be supposed. At the same time, we need to look a that underlying platform, and the Intel PC is an obvious case. For that level we need console-mode applications and an understanding of the situation of that. The treatment of underlying platform is important for Situating (and debunking) Java anyhow. It would seem that the language is C and there is still the problem of situating C and C++. For console mode this isn't too bad and it is also non-trivial. Based on this musing, I don't think that is too bad. We will stay within Posix and the Standard C Library and see what we can do at that level. My thinking is to stay at CUA text-terminal mode at that level and simply not get into GUI at all. There can be something (not here) about why and when to use assembler or something equivalent to that. Until I looked at the bootstrap problem, I didn't think I would need to look at GNU/Linux, but I may. At least the console-mode tools should be compilable to work either way: GNU/Linux and MS-DOS, Win32 console modes in most cases. To get started, I simply need to qualify everything in terms of libraries that have been confirmed and application builds that have been carried out and confirmed.
	2004-01-10	The Unicode spiral is support for two places I want to go: Situating XML and Situating Java. Both of these are asserted to rely on Unicode and this is an important foundation for each treatment, and provision of fundamental tools for inspecting Unicode material, creating Unicode material, and understanding transformations and conversions at some level. It is also good enough for considering (or having hooks for) issues of text conversion, media translation, and so on. Having textual data carry or be accompanied by definitive metadata about its encoding becomes important. I digress ...
	2004-01-10	We need a little arithmetic and numbering because collation, comparison, and most of all, addressing and sequencing show up when we look at streams and storage, including recording on media of various forms. We want just enough without a full-bore situating of computation. That's the tension to deal with.
	2004-01-10	For the foundation of other treatments, I want to get to Unicode under Situating Data. This means I will pursue glyphs, characters, codes, and Unicode. There is room for quite a lot just to deal with that. Keyboards, for example. Just looking at key switches provides some fruitful topics (capacitative, membrane, chicklet, then the hitory, the typewriter equivalent, etc.). This becomes a foundation for discussion of text and text processing, which is a quite nice place to be. Marks on paper becomes important. These discussions have to be delimited somehow on the Unicode spiral of Situating Data.
	2004-01-10	The initial situation of data needs to be described, in a couple of extensional, seemingly-lower-level view. This is bits, bytes, streams and storage, it would seem.
	2004-01-10	I am thinking about the problem of being able to understand what the basic ground-up structure of a PC is, not because it is the only computer but it is one of the most public, open commodity platforms for data and computing. It goes down to the POST and the ROM BIOS and the Intel-compatible chip. What's transparent about that? How can one consider or portray the processes that start there and build the platform that is basis of the user's experience? Is it all proprietary or is it visible? Is it only GNU/Linux that provides a basis for bootstrapping and illustrating how that works and happens? If so, that is rather remarkable and the IP wars are far more critical. Whose data is it? becomes a critical question, as does Whose computer is it? For artifacts it is easier, although there are similar questions. Why are these questions not of such great concern for automobiles and telephones? Is there really a difference or is it because of the business models that we have embraced? How can I account for this in Situating Data (because it is certainly part of the situation) without having to go all the way into it?
	2004-01-09	There is something to be said for being able to do it by hand and then to automate. Most of what we have on nfoWare is presently "manual" (with the help of web servers, FTP, FrontPage 2000, and a bunch more invisible technology under that). That is to say, the content is mostly developed by hand, except for some use of special FrontPage extensions for inclusion of material. But nothing very active is happening with these pages (er, well, except that it all works with browsers). That is, there is no scripting and no content processing/generation on the server, and most of the text is here because someone typed every word of it at a keyboard and it is included explicitly in the HTML that carries the content. Sheesh. [dh:2013-03-11 This is also worth pointing out with regard to development of certain techniques in introductory projects on nfoWare. This is also worthwhile for TROST.]
	2004-01-09	I need to hook up Doug Englebart's materials and the OHS papers to this discussion. It is a source of requirements statements at least. This means I will need to deal with citations, bibliographic references, and the preservation of sources pretty quickly.
	2004-01-07	Put musings about bits as a note page.
	2004-01-07	Do a note on all the ways that "nfo" is usable and some of the different techniques around using it: As in InfoInterface, in .nfo files, in MIME types (text/nfo, xml/nfo), in file names and accession numbers (nfo40100.zip or nf040100.zip to be strapped into a single decade or not). Acknowledge that we are unclear about "information" at this point.
	2004-01-07	Add musings about the glossary and the kind of project to be developed around it.
	2004-01-07	Create a "Musing about data" note too. I have this image of the Startrek Next Generation character of that name, lost in space or wherever one goes when being transported.
	2004-01-07	Create a project/note about finding signs/symbols for bits and for the notion of bit, and also collect images (including the ones for on-off that I just captured). I wonder what would be a tune that represents bits (other than bit-by-bit in the putting-it-together Sondheim tune, but that is not such a bad idea, actually). So, also, to the "tune of bit."
	2004-01-06	Bring up *the feuding lexicographers problem*. This is relevant to collaboration and social systems. It may apply to Englebart's OHS ideas, and it applies to ways that we coordinate here, to the extend that nfoWare houses ( a network of) collaborative projects. [dh:2005-12-28 I think there is something here around folksonomy and tagging systems too, since these are all about differing taxonomical and, more to the point, ontological structures. I should check into David Weinberger's work more carefully.]
	2004-01-06	The site-page anchor blocks are an example of something about identification versus location and they can be an illustration of that. They are also an illustration of data/content hackery. Even if I come up with a scheme that actually works in some profound conceptual way, I need to keep around examples of how I am doing it now, for contrast. The business about links from images via include pages and how they are relativized by FrontPage is an example of a coherence problem and of a commercial hack (it would seem).
	2004-01-06	*Why nfoWare?* Lest I forget, how was the name chosen, what was the original idea for the domain, and then what happened that caused this to be expanded? Also, include something on nfoWare as artifacts: documents, articles, books, as well as software. There might be physical artifacts of a different kind as well, so one might speculate on that as a thought problem.
	2004-01-06	There also need to be notes on the standard content structure of notes themselves, the use of bibliographic references, and so on. How sub-notes are identified and used is important, and also some things about preservation of referenced material. I need to deal with intellectual property in that context.
	2004-01-06	There can be notes on the construction structure of notes. There is a parallel with librarianship (!) here, and where Information Science got its name. Hmm (!??) . It's like the lower Dewey-numbers are for books about books and libraries. Somerhing to look into. dh:2004-01-06: I am very anxious for the renovations of the West Seattle library to be completed.) I also know how to get to the major regional libraries by bus and can't wait for my senior-citizen fare privileges by this time next month.
	2004-01-06	Reserve N000002 for something like anchor site information, but related to notes and hierarchies and networks of notes!
	2004-01-06	Add N000099 on Notes Organization. This is the page that will provide a description of the organization of notes in some topical structure.
	2004-01-06	*Data in Standards*: An interesting expression. I was thinking about how one situation of data is in respect to standards (e.g., ASCII, the standard for recording numbers, the standard for recording dates and times, that sort of thing). There's also data in logic (in the sense of the OWL stuff and the RDF Semantics work). There are many different ways to take "Standards" and I have already lost the thought that had me start this entry.
	2004-01-06	*Database Engineering: This deals with labels for things, labels as metadata, and so on. I definitely do not want to be immersed in this before being able to start Situating XML*, but it is going to come up. I was thinking about the relational model and the idea of an acceptable minimum of base relations from which all other relationships are derivable by turning a kind of crank. This is related to certain ideas of completeness, as in "computational completeness," and that is worth looking at. Also, the temporal aspect that Codd and friends have worked on lately is worth looking at to see if it provides something that fits ideas of collaboratories, content management, versioning of material, and also change over time. There is a way of looking at this as pertaining to conceptual integrity, so conceptual models need to be appreciated too.
	2004-01-06	*Web Leveling:* An example of Hacking is around Web Leveling. Oddly enough, I apply a lot of discipline to the plumbing of web leveling, so I can relate it to data (or content) engineering and the management of that. This is an interesting case. What I have immediately in mind is the confirmable experience of managing the content of a web site, where the site is essentially passive (for now). I notice that I can't go long without addressing data in collaboration. I want to stay away from the semantic web, but it will show up in Situating XML, so what's the difference? This grows out of data engineering.
	2004-01-06	*Engineering versus Hacking*: I have been hacking as a way to construct web sites. It doesn't scale very well. One aspect of my hackery is that I have been doing it manually. This is a source of examples and materials as I bring it into more-powerful organizations and make confirmable experiences of it. This is a good place to put down a marker and also look at some project structure to introduce.
	2004-01-06	Situating Computation: I am out to see how far I can get without this one, which is right up there with Situating Cognition. I just don't want to get much into that if I can help it, here, even though I am going to have software on the site, have exercises that involve software, and so on, I don't want to get very far into this. I might not be able to help myself. Meanwhile, I was thinking about geometric data and data that is used to relate to physical entities and processes, and the processing of that data. Somehow I don't want to have to have all of this mushed together, yet I do want to acknowledge how they are not independent and it is an important aspect of how we apply data.
	2004-01-06	We need notes on tools - ones used, ones needed to work with the site, ones needed to author for the site [it looks like projects is a nice next step here, so it could be identified there]. [Also FAQ, now that I think about it.]
	2004-01-06	Data Engineering: I can grock Data Engineering as part of Situating Data. It's not the reach that Information Architecture is. I can equate this to what we do when we design data. And it has more to it, like a lifecycle and a discipline, but not the same (though related to) software engineering. I like the prospect of this. It also provides some places to look and to research. There is also data-driven design (that is, go from the data, the results, etc., as the Jackson Structured Design method encouraged). This is not databases, it is not about metadata yet (maybe), though it might be about knowing what data one has and managing the lifecycle of it and of records, handling versioning, and so on. Even the ANSI tape label standard is a resource here, and there are other standards. In fact, I can see many elements of software engineering structures being adapted for this part. I am not yet clear on how to keep this something that can be explored without digging too deeply into Situating Computation.
	2003-12-19	I have to think more about data. I notice that UML is a great example of how the content of language is not in the inscriptions. The UML diagrams and the technique have almost no semantics at all. That UML is a formal scheme with no formal content is striking. However, we operate in data and text languages the same way. So the insight is that it is nothing new, rather than there is some defect of UML. UML is a great example of language acts. I think this is because UML is proposed to be descriptive. [dh:2004-01-06 I think this goes under situating data in *nfoWare*, so I have moved this note here from the construction diary.]

done	2013-11-08	get going on n131101 at once, rather than keep producing material for here. Move relevant notes to there as soon as n131101a is available.
to nfoWorks 2013-05-08	2004-02-23	Create an MD5 page/note and provide for discussion of cryptographic hashing. This is toolcraft and also a beginning on crypto -- that is, what does the MD5 hash make difficult, and what are the trust points. This is a starter on work AnderBill and I are doing on "What does a Digital Signature Assert?" The toolcraft issues are interesting, with regard to console-session applications. This also comes up in the case of WinDump (matching with tcpdump) and WinPcap (matching similar things in the Unix world). Obviously, an item to break down and take on in parts. [dh:2013-05-08 This is supplanted in nfoWorks.org.]
to nfoWorks 2013-05-08	2004-02-23	AnderBill and I had a great call. I need to start on the MD5 signatures and also building up the self-signing of archived material, as mentioned in N040201. To do: Capture the sources and materials on the network-analysis software that I downloaded from polito.it. The site went down over the weekend and I realized that I didn't have any way to replicate that experience, identify what I got where, and so on. I will need to do that. This may involve the intellectual-property replication or simply mirroring what I found and what I used so that I can demonstrate it whether or not that site goes away, changes, or whatever. It is moderately urgent to capture what I need, and then to hook it in [dh:2013-05-08 This has a tie-in to nfoWorks.org and work on security primitives. I also think there is a Personal Cloud aspect to this.].
to nfoWorks 2013-03-11	2004-01-10	I keep wanting to bring back the Jack Dennis work on references in virtual processes, and what I thought I had accomplished with it. It may need to be used to make mirrored-referencing work properly with different locations of the material.
to nfoWorks 2013-03-11	2004-01-10	With regard to cross-references and such, there is also the interesting challenge about using a (potentially-dated) mirror and needing to have some way to link to the genuine image of the material. I can get some of this from the ODMA site where I worked on this a little. This needs to be spiraled too. There is something to be done with the identification of link types and also having this work on/from a mirror [dh:2013-03-11 This is about adding a level of indirection and having some way to do redirects at the right time. There are other nfoWare topics that can benefit from this, but that might not be the best place to go deep. I must remember that nfoWorks is later and that may off-load some things that are too deep and complex here.]
done 2007-08-31	2004-02-20	I would like notes pages to link to their catalog entries, so that a note encountered anywhere provides a connection to the assortment of all notes that the visited note is part of. [dh:2007-08-31 The current notes formats and templates work for this, as done first on TROSTing.org and now across all sites as they are repaved.
done 2007-08-31	2004-02-23	In working on toolcraft, the notes on the topics will be better filed in the toolcraft section. At the same time, I might have a kind of master or holder note in this section that provides a navigation aid to the ones that are placed closer to their subject. The catalog will have them all, but sometimes it is useful to find a placeholder that might be hooked from a FAQ and becomes a good starting point. This applies for pointing at projects too, as well as from projects (and FAQ which get pointed to and from, etc.). I thought there was something profound here, but it is just about making different colors of spaghetti, perhaps. [dh:2007-08-31 I don't think this applies any more. The toolcraft section has its own catalog. There is a need for cross-referencing, but we will see how it works out.].
done 2007-08-31	2005-12-24	I need to differentiate between info, notes, dev, and toolcraft. I think the information about installing Visual C++ 2005 Express and other tools is definitely about Toolcraft and I could put it there. I am of two minds about that versus having it be part of the downloadable part of dev. I am inclined to go with Toolcraft for now, and using T-notes, which can eventually be tied to specific dependencies via centrale M-notes and strumenti S-notes on Orcmid's Lair. [dh:2007-08-31 The toolcraft structure is it. This allows citation from other places where it is applied, but it is in toolcraft as support for general fluency.]
done 2005-12-27	2005-12-24	Create a notes tree that works like the toolcraft tree and is for analysis, especially for work that supports OpenFormula. That will go here and be refactored elsewhere as appropriate.
done 2005-12-26	2005-12-24	Add a construction zone to this section and reconcile the format with the latest, following the version included for Toolcraft.
done 2005-12-26	2005-12-24	Create a construction zone under toolcraft and set up the structure for a T-series of notes and goodies. We will use the usual accession numbering and a calendar-oriented nesting of folders.
done	2004-02-20	Stop repeating the title from the title block at the beginning of notes articles.
done	2004-02-20	Correct the bottom "You are here" blocks to use nfoWare typography too!
done	2004-02-20	Correct trust\index.htm so the link to Trust and Trustworthy Computing is not cloaked, all uses of nfoWare are in consistent typography, and there is a link from "Trust Spiral" to N040201 on Bootstrapping Confirmable Experience.
done	2004-02-20	Correct toolcraft\index.htm so that the nfoWare occurrences are consistent (like that one) and the weird line break in tool(craft)s [before the s] is resolved.
done eventually	2004-01-30	Oh oh, I will continue jet-lag if I keep staying up late, like this. Stop it and get on a normal schedule. Set the alarm for the morning and get up when it goes off. [dh:2004-02-23: Odd note. OK, I kept waking up at 3am for a while, but I stopped getting up early, bringing my time of arising around to 7:30am. At some point, I stopped noticing, and I was back in my routine. I think it was accomplished by 2004-02-05 when my next on-line class started.]
done	2004-01-18	I am going to be off-line for up to 10 days, so this is a good time to create a checkpoint. I will do that and send out a note to Bill Kent and Bill Anderson that I have done that.
done	2004-01-16	Include in toolcraft the problem of tacit knowledge and that we are also going to look at how that shows up and gets in the way.
done	2004-01-16	Check treatment of "Meaning" to include the meaning of life, what's it all about and how we attribute meaning and where we find it. Mention Polany somewhere.
done	2004-01-10	Add data as models to the list. ~~I didn't go so far as~~ "data and theories" thought that is interesting. Maybe "data and stories, "data and explanation", hmm, OK, I did put that all in.
done	2004-01-10	Add more to the data index about data as property and (controlled) information and knowledge
done	2004-01-09	Go back and expand the thought in N040100 to encompass replication and reuse. I need to watch the scope creep, but this does cover the ground I have in mind, also inspired by an exchange with Bill Anderson on a little problem with expiring Verisign certificates used in SSL certificates for servers.
done	2004-01-09	Proof-read N040100 and add thought I have about porting and preservation also.
done	2004-01-07	Find a note page that I like and customize it for here. -- I took a recent one from Miser-Theory and hacked it up some more.
0.00 draft begun	2004-01-06	Bootstrapping Confirmable Experience: How do we do that? I need a note on this topic that describes what is wanted, what the end state is, and how do we get there when the very tools and materials I want to rely on have not been created yet?