Blue Sky On Mars

JavaWorld has an interesting article about Protege, An AI tool for the real world:

This article introduces Protégé, arguably the most successful open source knowledge-modeling platform. Using Protégé, developers and domain experts can build conceptual models and knowledge bases and access them via an easy-to-use Java API. The resulting models can implement decision-support systems, capture software requirements, populate databases, generate Java classes and UML diagrams, share and reuse domain models, and access the Semantic Web.

The tool itself appears to really be a rapid prototyping tool that lets you define your data and the relationships between the various parts of it. The more AI-like part of it comes from plug-ins, which includes a plug-in to access the Java Expert System Shell (JESS) and others. I’m going to download this sometime soon (hopefully) and kick the tires a bit.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of fresh blacktop.

Carlos points out a nice testing technique used by the Commons VFS folks:

What they developed was a test harness based on JUnit to test all the different implementations without having to rewrite all the tests for each implementation.

One set of unit tests will ensure that the FTP, SMB, JAR, etc. implementations all work correctly. We’re working on project with a very componentized architecture right now, and testing against the interfaces this way seems like a very useful idea. This won’t preclude doing white box test-first development of the implementations, though.

To the Democratic Party: Please, please, please put forth someone we can vote for. With all of the scary warmongering, privacy invasions, bad treatment of the environment, poor fiscal management, and the appearance of backroom deals with big business that we’ve seen these past 2.5 years, you’d think the Democrats could find someone to counter Bush. This is not the way to win the election:

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” [Rep. Dick] Gephardt said.

That statement is so fundamentally wrong (as numerous other bloggers have pointed out) that I can only assume that Gephardt didn’t mean it the way it came out. Unfortunately, the only way I can interpret it is that he wants to personally, single-handedly overturn Supreme Court rulings that he disagrees with. If that’s what he meant, he should probably take another look at this.

I think it’s time for me to start reading about the candidates the Democrats have lined up and see if there’s anyone there I can support.

What was the biggest thing in entertainment this past weekend? Could it be the long-anticipated, quite hyped Hulk? Hulk grossed more than $62 million to have the biggest June movie opening to date. But, this weekend, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix debuted in bookstores around the world. Scholastic reports that it sold 5 million copies on Saturday (including preorders). Even with the common 40% discount, that still marks a $90 million debut! This is probably the first weekend that a book has outgrossed a big, new movie release!

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring public libraries to use Internet filters is legal. For some portion of the population, public libraries are the only way to get access to the Net. It’s well-known that these filters prohibit access to quite a bit of non-pornographic information, so this law ensures that a portion of the web is simply unavailable to part of the population. That’s the real danger.

In The Missing Future, Eric Kidd laments the foreseen disappearance of small, independent software developers:

But this dream is nearly gone. It’s getting crushed between the awful power of Microsoft, and the onrushing juggernaut of open source. A 30-person company can’t compete with Microsoft. And a 30-person company will have a hard time competing with 300 open source contributors giving software away for free and making their living as in-house developers (though it can be done).

Assuming the notion of intellectual property and copyright doesn’t just go down the drain, I think there will continue to be a healthy market for small developers, made even healthier through open source.

Putting an appropriate fit-and-finish on software takes a lot of work, and very few open source projects successfully make a product that any random person can use. I don’t think that’s likely to change any time soon, because it usually doesn’t scratch a programmer’s itch to write good documentation and help pages, make things pretty, and support the tool after it’s released.

Some of the best open source software available comes in the form of libraries that help people produce software faster. These libraries can come to the aid of small, commercial software developers who can put them together and build on them in novel ways to produce complete, finished products. And it’s usually to the benefit of those developers to contribute their patches back to the library projects so that their changes can be improved upon and to make it easier to integrate future versions of the library.

Piccolo provides what the authors call a “zoomable user interface”. It looks like a nice, intuitive way to view large quantities of data. I may have a real world application for this in the work that I’m doing… Here’s the intro:

Welcome to Piccolo! It is a revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured graphical applications in Java, with striking features such as zooming and multiple representation. Piccolo is an extensive toolkits based on the Java2D API. And best of all, it is free and open source!

I had already tried JGoodies via the java.net CVS repository. But, now the official Looks and Forms builds are out, and under a BSD license! Most excellent stuff!

Nick Lothian wrote a nice comparison of three AOP frameworks: Nanning, JBoss4 AOP and AspectWerkz. He chose a very simple example and wrote it in all three systems to show a “side-by-side” comparison of the style that each one uses. Very handy for someone looking at these things.