Gotze.eu

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  • Voicing one’s opnions

    Mark Fiore’s Animated Political Cartoons is not only hilariously funny, but also a wonderful piece of digital craftmanship. The Buzy Bush is a cool play with interactivity tools – notice how it makes the user play along, and then after a while takes over the controls to make a point.

  • Slippery patent?

    United States Patent 6,457,066 was issued on September 24, 2002. It says that Microsoft Corporation now owns the Simple object access protocol (SOAP).


    Dave Winer, in his Scripting News, sounds somewhat surprised about this, and says that that is not the SOAP we use today. “[H]ad Microsoft wanted to patent XML-based SOAP they would have needed to get me on board, and I never gave permission to do that.”


    I’m no expert on patents, and I am not sure what conclusions to draw from this patent, but as I see it, a patent is a patent. SOAP is owned by Microsoft. End of story. Base you policy making on this. If you want to promote open standards, don’t promote SOAP, because that is not an open standard.


     

  • Do they do it on purpose?

    GovTalk.gov.uk has announced eGIF 4.1:

    Version 4.1 of e-GIF Part Two is now up on GovTalk for a six week consultation period from Monday, 16th September to Friday, 25th October. Please post your comments directly on the site or, if you have difficulties doing so, email them to GovTalk (link to: mailto:govtalk.gov.uk)

    I had difficulties finding out how to post directly on the site, and found no trace of anyone else having done so. I wanted to alert someone about the bad email link, and found an contact email address in the Contact Us section. That mail bounced!

    Oh well.

    Nonetheless, the e-GIF 4.1 is required reading. I’ve copied some central sections and made a few comments …

    (more…)

  • Sharing feeds

    I’m providing yet another open feed here. It’s a list of all the news feeds I use in my new desktop aggregator, AmphetaDesk. The format is an XML dialect, namely OPML.

    You will also now find a new icon:
    Amphetadesk     in the menu, indicating that Amphetadesk users can import my OPML-file directly into their Amphetadesk.

  • The most important website in the world

    http://127.0.0.1

    I wrote most of this long ago, but don’t think I ever published it.

    The next generation of web tools and web services will all relate to one special site, http://127.0.0.1/. It is fortunately so that no single person or company owns this site. So, what is on that site? Well, you have to ask yourself that question, because it is your own machine, your desktop!


    127.0.0.1 is for some reason the IP-address of your PC (or Mac or whatever), localhost. Most of us doesn’t, however, ever see this address. At least not via the browser. Of course, it would also mostly just give an error page if we tried.

    But that is a pity. Think of all the good stuff you have on your harddisk (or network drive). Imagine this to be accessible, to yourself, via your browser. The World Wide Desk is a somewhat scary idea. There are of course lots of things that should never get out on the WWW, but WWD is different – it is your web.

    The DeskBlog
    Writing is good. It should be easy to write, also to write for the web. Desktop applications like MS Word suck. Web-based tools rule. This is the argument behind one of the most successful innovations in web applications, we have seen in recent years: The weblog. Normally, however, a weblog is something you write for others to read. The modern fear of exposure, as Richard Sennett calls it, is hereby challenged. Some people love it, but many are “afraid” of the exposure it implies. But what about a Desktop Weblog, the DeskBlog, then?

    Ideally, we get the best of both worlds. Harnessing the computation power at the desktop, and the interoperability and interactivity of the modern, semantic web. The total realisation of what “client-server people” have talked about for years.

    Dave Winer talks about Desktop Websites: In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don’t have to share it with anyone, it’s yours and yours alone. It would be fast!

    Internet 3.0
    The DeskBlog phenonemon is an example of what Winer calls Internet 3.0.

    Version 1 was the pre-Web Internet, the playground of techies and geeks and professors and programmers. Gopher, FTP, email, newsgroups.

    Version 2 was the Web, instant messaging and email. Broad adoption. You can buy movie tickets on the Web. Internet kiosks and cafes are everywhere. URLs on all business cards. Who needs the Yellow Pages when we have Yahoo?

    Internet 3.0 will realize the groupware vision of the late 80s which was really Doug Engelbart’s vision of the 60s and 70s. Shared writing spaces with good boundaries. Structures that link to each other but are capable of managing greater complexity than the page-oriented metaphor of the Web.


    Moore and Metcalfe in action


    In Internet Version 2, your desktop computer’s performance monitor got flatter and flatter as CPU performance travelled up Moore’s curve, but the architecture failed to take advantage of it (except from things like games). In Version 3.0, your CPU will start doing more work and your local hard disk will contain much of the information stored on centralised servers, that you have told you want. The ‘intelligent’ DeskBlog system will ‘know’ what you normally find important, and send a “bot” out and look for news on the web, or at friends’ DeskBlogs. Techies like Winer are creating opportunities for “average” users to write scripts that customise your desktop interface, and allows you to include your own creations in the user interface. “You won’t have to be an eyeball (sometimes it’s relaxing), your brain will be more active in Internet 3.0”, Winer writes.


    Desktop Websites are according to Winer technologically similar if not identical to modern, centralised webservers. The network effect that Metcalfe’s Law dictates will be proven right even for Version 3.0. The owners of a DeskBlog will be creating and consuming content in XML via webinterfaces, so the average user does not see the XML unless requested. The desktops can be set to co-ordinate internal and external resources with a minimum functionality “cloud” that links things together, in the background, using new syndication standards like RDF and RSS. For example, the communication channel can be optimised to flow content when you’re not using bandwidth, whether it is grabbing high-fidelity audio or video, or updating applications such as virus protection, or refreshing content through news feeders, etc.

    The possibilities are endless, once you start to imagine various scenarios. This is why broadband internet access is interesting. This is the basis for the semantic Two-Way Web. This is what the internet is all about!

    Scenarios for 127.0.0.1
    Right, let’s not get too carried away. Let’s look at some practical application scenarios:

    Integrated search
    There are some pretty good search tools out there on the web. Bring them to our desktops too! We really need them.

    Personalisation de luxe
    Big portals offer advanced personalisation services. Let the desktop help making these services even better.

    Automated translation service
    … is just one of the affiliate type of services we could start to use. These services are getting better and better on the web, so let’s also get them to the desktop.


    Tools
    Radio Userland is also a news aggregator, but first and foremost, a blogging tool. It’s quite popular, but proprietary.

    AmphetaDesk is a “free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator” that “obediently sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage”.

    I have just started using AmphetaDesk. It’s quite nice. It allows me to publish my OPML. I must play more with it 😉 (what is OPML?)

  • A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

    When I read the NY Times article Balancing Linux and Microsoft about Bruce Perens and his new initiative, Sincere Choice, which is a response to the recent Initiative for Software Choice, which Microsoft sponsors, I came to think of Jack Worthing’s closing words in “The Importance of Being Earnest – A Trivial Comedy for Serious People“, Oscar Wilde’s 1895-classic:



    “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”


    Microsoft = Earnest ? Hmm.


    The Initiative for Software Choice encourage governments to consider the following “neutral principles”:



    The rhetoric is strong. They almost shoot themselves in the foot a couple of times, for example here: “Governments are best served when they can select software from a broad range of products based on such considerations as value, total cost of ownership, feature set, performance and security.” Exactly! So, why put up long-term licencing deals, which by nature takes away the choice?


    The Global Software Choice Tracker on their site is useful, but a bit too selective.


    Sincere Choice sets up parallel principles:



    To spot the difference, one must read what they mean. For example, they write: “Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination. […] No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.” Naturally, this would not, I assume, apply to Microsoft-policy.


    Choice and exit must go hand in hand. Freedom is to be able to choose either, and to have a voice about the choice.


    I have invited Bruce Perens to Copenhagen for yet another conference, we’re setting up, on 30 October. I’m still looking for someone from “the other side”, so we can get a counter-part to Perens. Any candidates?

  • Architecturing eGov

    Phil Windley writes about Enterprise Architectures:


    … Perhaps, we should require agencies to have an enterprise architecture and to link funding to it in the same way that OMB has for Federal agencies?  The larger question is: how do we make the IT planning process useful and relevant?

    It is indeed a good question, the larger one. It is easy to plan, but not easy to implement even a good plan, and as they say in England, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

    The OMB-approach to FEA has been drawing some attention in Denmark, and I hope to visit OMB next month, when I’m in Washington, to learn more.

    On 30 September, we have arranged a conference to be held here in Copenhagen, on the theme of IT-architecture in government. As the organiser, I am very safisfied with the final programme, although I initially had some other plans (next time, Phil, Mark, Knut!). The programme includes 4 Danish stories and one foreign case, as well as two architecture analysts, Kim Bjørn Nielsen from Gartner Group and Brian Burke from META Group.

    On the analysts, I have a pretty good idea of what they’re going to say. Much the same, in many ways, but with different focuses. While Gartner emphasises the why’s, META will do the how’s. My agency is not (yet?) a client with any of these analysts. I’m not sure how much value-for-money we’d get from a membership – I’ve always found it somewhat absurd to pay $5000 for a report.

  • I live in Europe’s e-city no 1

    European E-Ciy Award also called The First European Benchmark Study for City Portals studied all European cities with more than 200.000 citizens with a benchmark catalogue including an amazing 1.078 single criteria (indeed, this is a German study). The resulting ranking:


    1. Copenhagen
    2. Berlin
    3. Stuttgart
    4. Bremen
    5. Hamburg
    6. Århus
    7. Köln
    8. Helsiniki
    9. Vienna
    10. Barcelona
    11. Odense


    Denmark’s only three large cities are among these 11 best ranked cities.


    As a citizen of Copenhagen, I must admit that I rarely visit the city’s website. I did however do so when I recently moved home, and wanted to register my new address in the civil register. That is indeed possible to do via Copenhagen’s website, but one here needs a special access code, which they send in a postal letter, to your registred address. I went to the website after I’d moved, so that little feature rendered the service useless for me, because even though the access code is a general code for all self-services, that was the first time I needed it, and hadn’t ordered it in advance. So much for life situations as a model …


    On interoperability of systems, my moving address also taught me how things can go wrong, when systems do not interoperate. Since I couldn’t use the online service, I went to the Civil Registration Office to register. Good, friendly sevice. No queues. Perfect service. I asked the kind civil servant who served me, by her screen, whether my new data was now “in the system”, so I could now order an access code for future use of the website. She said, “yes, sure, your data is in our system now”. Later that afternoon, I went to the municipality’s website and registred for an access code, which should now be sent to my new address.


    But no, I never got the code. Two weeks after, I talked with the person who’d moved into my old flat. He had a few letters for me. Among them a letter from the municipality …

  • Web services is an anti-authoritarian tool

    Dave Winer points to the BBC news story: China criticised for ban on Google. Critics are for example Reporters sans frontières. More news on the Googleban.


    Besides the democratic rights issues, which I actually feel strong for, I want to point to the fact that China’s Googleban effectively is useless unless they also ban a lot more sites. I don’t just mean the big Google-partners, Netscape and DMOZ and the likes, but also many other sites. Mine, for example. In my links collection, for example, I offer additional Googlesearches delivered via the Google api web service. The user thus never accesses (interacts with) google.com, since my server does that for the user. Unless I’m mistaken, it would be very difficult for anyone from, say, the Chinese authorities to “track” this kind of google traffic.

  • RSS .Net

    Registering and Discovering RSS Feeds in Microsoft Windows .NET Server UDDI Services by Karsten Januszewski from Microsoft seems interesting. Perhaps .Net can be used for something useful after all …