schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

I'm attending RoCoCo Bar Camp in Montreal, which is about Wikis and "Meetings on Collaboration, Creativity and Self Management". This UnConference is run Open Space style and, being in Montreal, bilingually.

The OpenSpace way of generating agenda topics, small discussions, and return to a circle of all resonates well with the community-driven nature of how wikis grow and are cultivated. As one participant said, "we're building how we work together."

Okay, so others don't have to go through the hours I just spent trying to get a 15-minute install happen: I needed to get WordPress going on a Windows 2000 machine running Apache. I installed the latest stable PHP5 and MySQL, checked out that I could see my php.ini information in a web page, and then command-line queried MySQL to create a database and user for WordPress. But, after unzipping the WordPress files and customizing wp-config.php, and running wp-admin/install.php, I get the dreaded Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress message.

Well, I'll skip to the end. The key things:

• PHP5 doesn't come with automatic support for MySQL
• Edit your php.ini file, uncommenting so that you get
  extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll
• Also add or edit to get
  ;Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "c:/program files/PHP/"
• That last line is pointing to the top level of my PHP install directory, where I chose to put php_mysql.dll. I could also have created an ext directory there to put such things in.
• Put libmysql.dll in NT\System32 (probably anywhere in the Path will do)
• If you don't have php_mysql.dll and libmysql.dll, you can get them from snaps.php.net.

I've been enjoying being on Facebook lately. It does a clean, elegant, exciting job of putting together intersecting circles of people networks, on various scales. The key seems to be people-orientation, in whatever ways people form relationships. I pay attention to my identity, which is almost entirely made up of little communcations with other people channeled through my face and through the groups we form. It's like grooming behavior: we spend time looking through each other's fur, picking out interesting stuff... :-)

Facebook has a Status Updates feature, where I can post short msgs, all starting with, in my case, "Mark is...", as in "Mark is in short sleeves 1st time this year", and also see others' status updates. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was a pioneer in this. A perpetually recreated topic in the Grateful Dead forum was a Status Report topic, where all messages were one liners starting with the user's first name or nickname. It created an ongoing sense of touch, as does Facebook and its siblings.

The page layout of Facebook, with its rectangles of RSS feeds and polyarchically owned editable content frames, gives a sense of living mosaic that I haven't felt since the days of NCSA Mosaic.

I've had a recent interesting UI experience with providing an iNames login for a site: many, many error messages showing that people are typing search terms into it. Ie, they are using it as a search box!

One reason this may be so is that an OpenID (which includes URL-based IDs and iNames) login just asks you for your OpenID: there is no password field. When you authenticate, you enter your OpenID, and are taken to your Identity Provider (IP) (unless iName Single-Sign-On is taking place), where you provide your password. In OpenID, your IP is the only site to which you provide your password! So the site you're accessing (technically the Relying Party) asks only for your id, and not your password, and so displays a single text field in which to enter that ID.

However, I think people are used to a single field, especially at top of a window, being a search field, in which you enter search terms.

One proposed solution: intially display a Login button, and no text field. When that is clicked, a text field for entering your id slides open, you type your iName there, and click the Login button to get authenticated. If nothing has been entered in the text field it slides shut when the Login button is clicked. I'll see how well that works.

There's been a related discussion (cf Joannes Ernst's blog) on best practices for an OpenID enabled login design that also supports the username/password option. I wonder if the same issue will hit that design if the OpenID version of a login box is shown by default. No, people do not read the fine print!

The procedure for importing a MacOS X Mail mailbox into Mail is not as obvious as you might expect. I'm posting this entry to spare others the frustration I went through.

I have what must be a common scenario: I normally use an iMac, but was on the road for a week, so took my old iBook so I could use Mail. Now, having collected the messages I want to save to a mail folder/mailbox, I want to move that mailbox (NewMsgs.mbox) over to the iMac. Surprisingly, just copying the ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/NewMsgs.mbox folder from iBook to iMac, and restarting Mail, doesn't work: I get an empty NewMsgs mailbox there.

Next I try the File:Import Mailboxes:Import data from:Mail for Mac OS X menu selection, which provides the following dialog: .

Here's the rub: selecting a mailbox folder results in a No valid Mail for Mac OS X files were found error message. You must select a folder (any folder, located anywhere) containing the desired mailbox folder (yes, the dialog does say this). The error message is beside the point, even misleading: there are valid Mail for Mac OS X files in the mailbox folder, but Mail won't find them unless it starts looking from a parent folder.

Nancy White posts about needing an easy to use blog community. I think hers is a classic use case, with some key details including:

• inexpensive or free
• easy to use for non-techies
• individual blog for each user
• group blog aggregating individual blogs

Surprisingly enough, there's nothing out there that really fits the bill. Here at coachingplatform I'm working toward that, integrating the Blojsom weblog server with coachingplatform's user-centric, multi-topic workspaces. However, there's a ways to go, especially regarding usability, about which I learned a lot from a recent experience offering a multi-user private blog inside a coachingplatform topic for a group of teenagers.

What we'll be offering:

• a public blog for each user, to which you can post from inside coachingplatform or using your favorite blogging client (e.g., Netnewswire, the Performancing Firefox plugin, ...). This is pretty much ready to go.
• for each coachingplatform topic, a private multi-user topic blog, visible only to the participants of that topic. Any of them can post to it, and only they can see it. The use case for this is teams working or playing together, where they want to share with each other but not with the whole world
• for each topic, a public multi-user topic blog, so the team or group can publish to the world. An outstanding example of such a blog is WorldChanging. We would offer much more: all the collaboration tools (libraries, discussions, web pages, courses) that come with each coachingplatform topic.

That leaves aggregating individual blogs (there's been some debate about how well this works - Drupal/CivicSpace, which do this, tend to quickly become messy and confusing), and - did I mention this :-) - ease of use!

A recent wired.com article talked about glanceable information: "you can keep abreast of it with so little mental effort you're not even aware you're paying attention".

This is implemented in many video games, as well as in combat environments, through HUDs - Heads Up Displays, - which project information on your visual field or in the periphery of your center of attention. Such information can provide a sense of context, for example giving a high-altitude map view. It can also track the status of your provisions, fuel, life force, nearby friends and enemies, and other vital info. This is technology that is useful to apply to a situation room or command center, whether that be institutional or personal. In the latter case it could be part of a mosaic view of what is currently important to me, as well as who the key people are in that context. It somewhat parallels how the visual field works, with central focus bordered by sensitive periphery.

The flip side of this is that you also want an environment, with background active agencies, that follows your subtle gestures, nudges, acks, and nacks. This is especially important in situations where you are living with software agents which follow and anticipate your intentions: you'd want these to be highly responsive to your spare gestures, ultimately tied in to your mirror neurons, and acting as your mirror neurons, much like a close pet or companion. For example, such an interface seems necessary to make active subject maps, which contextually organize information relative to you and to others' subject maps, a realistic possibility.

Jamais Cascio writes in worldchanging.com:

The intent isn't to cut people off from their immediate physical experience, but to allow people to maintain non-physical contact with distant experiences -- the health of a sick relative, or weather forecasts, or traffic levels on one's blog.

This is one of the best summaries I've seen of what is opening up in regard to being able to stay in touch with ourselves and our world, as we are and as we could be, by overlaying our experiences of these  through the now much more available and useful technologies of augmented reality (annotating physical space), virtual worlds (living in shared spaces which intersect the real), and simulations (playing with complex interacting systems and what they produce). The comprehensive anticipatory design science envisaged by Buckminster Fuller now seems doable, so we can know the details of our environment, be able to share those and use them for driving shared simulations, and collectively engage in the politics of decision-making.

Such tools can exist in the context of an individual's web browser, but also in multi-screen immersive theaters, with the live presence of people interacting with themselves and manipulating the instruments of the reality-studios enacting their story. The latter could recall the long now of the all-night Javanese shadow puppet play, which mixes the current, the topical, the humorous, with the mythic and timeless.


Technorati Tags: worldchanging, augmented reality, simulation, virtual worlds, buckminster fuller, long now, shadow puppet

There's an alpha of Firefox 2.0 just out, and it includes New data storage layer for bookmarks and history (using SQLlite). Presumably this client-side SQL access has an API. This opens opportunites for client-side caching, user-context shadowing, appying subject maps, et al. I can envision a bit of client-side Javascript, to enrich the History, perhaps with some subtle user-interaction to gather more context, and then localhost Ruby and Rails to do the interesting stuff on behalf of the user.

My 13 year old son said, "Dad, I've dropped something into your public folder". What was there was a Google Video of Will Wright, developer of The Sims, at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference, showing an early version of his next game, Spore (there seems to be a more complete movie as well). This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen: he shows how a player can develop and evolve life forms, from simple multi-cellular to fish-like to climbing on land to developing societies and civilizations and planets - Powers of 10, next generation (he acknowledges the inspiration of that short movie). Worlds created by other people can be shared. This is all done by dragging together, assembling, and shaping procedurally active map and life-form components. I couldn't help thinking about the implications for virtual societies, for modelling, for scenario-planning, for intersecting real and virtual worlds, for language.

Complementing this is multi-touch display technology, screens sensitive to multiple simultaneous gestures by fingers, hands, elbows for that matter.

This is what we need for a Planetary Ecologists Collaborative Situation Room, where habitat partners can watch over and care for the earth, and for specific scenarios, threats, and opportunities.

I spent the weekend with Kurt Gödel, reading Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. It was Gödel, born 100 years ago in 1906, who proved the two Incompleteness Theorems, the first of which states that a formalized system capable of specifying arithmetic can be consistent, but will contain theorems which are true but which can be neither proved nor disproved within the system.

Furthermore, such a formalized system can not, within itself, prove its own consistency. To do that you have to go outside the system. This put Gödel (incompleteness) alongside Einstein (relativity) and Heisenberg (uncertainty) in architecting the scientific worldview of the 20th century.

Let's think about this again:

• you can express things arithmetically
• which you can show to be true metamathematically
• which cannot be proven/disproven arithmetically

So an arithmetic-capable system can be consistent, but not complete.

If this is a pattern, then we could restate it as:

• What is expressible in a system
• And is true in a metasystem
• May not be provable in the system

If we think about an autopoietic system - one which ongoingly generates itself, maintaining the structural coupling with its environment which is its identity - we could say that the system's call-by-future, the morphism giving rise to it, is a truth asserting functor from system1 to metasystem, following which the elements and rules of system2 are derived. There is structural coupling between the system and its metasystem (the environment of the system's existence), which is a living autopoiesis, giving rise to systemic forms. This coupling is tacit call-by-future - truth felt but not yet proven or manifested.

It may be that the following is another way to state this: syntax, and its consistency, is in fact driven by semantics. You can not actually exclude the mathematician from the arithmetic (as the Hilbert program to formalize mathematics had claimed). Or, as Gödel, who was philosophically a Platonist, might have said, without the mathematics experienced by mathematicians there is no existence to formalized mathematical systems. I myself would extend that to include Platonic form itself as only experienced in structural coupling of the human: it's real, but not independently so (just like us :-).

This is all in the interest of examining how such a process that we human beings engage in may be shared with our software, so it may care with us, be more expressive of context, system and metasystem, and be itself actively participant in creativity and truth making. I suspect such a formalization into software language cannot be made to breath without inherent human participation, built into the shared metasystem of the software.

This program is not about artificial but about symbiotic intelligence, and not so much about the semantic as about the symbiotic web.

Homage to Kurt Gödel for thinking and prompting such thoughts.

I just watched the Ruby on Rails video (take 2), showing how to use the Rails database-driven web application development platform using the Ruby language. The presenter keeps saying "Whups!" as he notices something wrong or missing after he reloads his web page (change a little thing, reload, see the change). He then makes a quick fix (adding a method, whatever), reloads and moves on.

This is as pervasive a methodology as Object-Oriented Programming, especially suitable with a dynamic language such as Ruby. You could also call this call-by-whups, to complement call-by-value, call-by-reference, and call-by-future (to which it is somewhat related: you deal with the function argument only when you really have to). Actually, the real cat's meow with this was Prograph, where you could start your program running without having written any code (which in Prograph was 100% pictorial), and, in the debugger, roll back (and you could visually see the rollback), add a method, and then go forward again, adding further code on the fly as you executed. Coding as rock n' roll!

I am a target for trackbacks: refer to me, and I should have my trackback counter incremented, and a link generaback to your entry. Here is a reference to a previous post I made in this blog. It should generate a trackback for that post/entry.

Desperate Pundit posted some Perl code

It's getting all giddy :-)

I setup w.bloggar (v4) on my NT workstation, and am now testing posting to the szpace category of this blog: whoopee, there's a dropdown listing all the categories!