Posts from June 2003

When Too Much Objectivity Is Not Enough

Well, I have just finished my first (real) assignment for this study period, a 500-word
essay on the subject Objectivity is Impossible. For those of you who have
never actually tried; writing an essay in 500 words is really hard! It’s very
short indeed, and covering a topic like objectivity is quite difficult to do in so few
words. I’m not totally happy with it, but at 570 words I can’t exactly go "fleshing
it out&quot, so I am going to have to live with it. It really doesn’t feel like you have
any time to develop an argument (or even define objectivity properly!) in so few words tho.

Oh well, we get to expand this into a 1000-word essay a little later in the study period
I think, so perhaps I will be happier with that version. We’ll see if I can’t revise it at
all tomorrow to make it a little tighter anyway 🙂

Dano = AvantBlog-friendly

Slight update on my post about AvantBlog working now – it appears that only blogs which have been converted to the new Dano system are working, if you are still running an older version, then you will need to upgrade before you can use AvantBlog apparently. If anyone finds out anything to the contrary to this, please let me know!

Too Much Wisdom

As measured in teeth anyway, apparently. I was at the dentist today and she tells me I am going to need to get all 4 of my wisdom teeth taken out. I was given 3 options as far as the actual surgical procedure goes;

  1. General anaesthetic – go to a hospital for the operation, pretty expensive
  2. IV Anaesthetic – apparently they can have an anaesthetist come to their surgery thing and dope me up, it’s somewhere between general and local
  3. Local only – they just stick a needle in me at their local surgery and rip the things out (hopefully!) – cheapest, but highest potential for great pain.

So what’s the verdict people? Anyone else out there had their wisdom teeth taken out? What sort of anaesthetic did you have? Would you reccommend it? I’m all ears, and need to make a decision soon, so please throw me your ideas 🙂

AvantBlog Having Problems

Thanks to changes in the Blogger.com API, AvantBlog appears to be failing to post on all blogs now. I plan on re-writing the Blogger API code that I have available for download which will be used to upgrade AvantBlog and hopefully bring it up to speed with the recent changes.

In the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to find out when it’s available and working properly again.

Thanks to those who have emailed me to let me know that it wasn’t working 🙂

webpad 3.0 Under Development

I don’t know what the heck prompted me to actually start this project now, but I have started coding/planning on version 3.0 of webpad. The first release will be webpad 3.0 Personal Edition, which will only have a single user function, and will require manual modification of a configuration file for the username/password and other options. Following that, I will also release a separate, more powerful version, which for now I am calling webpad Pro 3.0. This version will include multi-user support, a complete administration and installation interface, and will be targetted towards power-users and businesses.

webpad Personal Edition will remain free for everyone to download and use, but webpad Pro will attract a small licensing fee which is yet to be finalised. I will also be slightly changing the balance of features in each version, so you will find that some features you would like to be available may only be in the Pro version, although I will keep as much as I can in the Personal Edition.

Sophie’s World

Well, as part of REA11, I am reading
Sophie’s World, which so far is ok, even if it’s a little dry. I’d much rather be reading this than a text book any day.
One interesting question I’d like to ask though, is "why hasn’t Sophie called the police to report the stalker/harrasser
who clearly knows where she lives, and too much about her lifestyle/patterns to be comfortable???"

The book is a fiction story intended to teach the reader about the history of philosophy, so far covering Ancient Greek
philosophers and heading towards the modern way of thinking (‘rationalism’). I must say that I didn’t expect to be doing a
unit about philosophy, but it could be a lot worse than it has been so far 🙂

I’m looking forward to when the theory catched up to ‘current thinking,’ since obviously that’s a bit more in-context
for us to look at.

AIfIA Translations Project

Was talking with Peter, the organizer of the AIfIA Translations Project and it looks like they are into beta mode. It’s a great project which aims to identify key texts in the IA field and translate them to as many languages as possible.

So far, there’s some;

  • Spanish
  • Dutch
  • Portugese
  • Italian
  • French
  • Japanese, and
  • Danish

which I think is pretty impressive. You can even get a large portion of the actual website in your preferred language once you go to the translations page (selection on the left).

Is Open Source Software Development Objective?

I’m reading some of the notes for REA11 and I am coming across the idea that objective
people "don’t care about the answer as long as it is accurate". This got me
thinking — is open source software development the same sort of thing but for the s/w world?

Theoretically, OS development isn’t influenced by the normal external factors such as
budjet, time constraints, resources or even the intent to make profit (thus introducing
useless gimicks like the Office Assistant). Since these influences are not present, does
that mean that the development of this software will objectively pursue the path of the
best possible production, meeting only the requirements of the software and nothing else?

In my experience; no. Although none of the normal, commercial biases or influences are
present, the people involved will inevitably bring their own biases etc, and if none are
found, then some will surely be created somewhere along the line.