[lug] The deal with applets / notifications / panels / indicators / systray.....

[Bruce Long]

Hi Rob,
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

It sounds like you are recommending against using a *pre-existing*
 framework
because it may not be tailored to your specific case.

Perhaps the pre-existing frameworks you have tried are simply not good
enough?
I can certainly see that point. You have a specific problem to solve and if
the framework
you use doesn't do what you need it to do it becomes a problem.

Modeling languages such as OWL that model properties can require a huge
amount of work to
solve even a simple problem. However, modeling language that model states
of systems are
much easier to work with because the real world has state while
'properties' are an overlay on top
of state.

It's likely that the model you have created is actually modeling state, not
properties. at least in most cases.
I find that people model things like "Jazz" vs "Blues" in a property-like
fashion because the state model
of genre distinctions seems intractable.

So the problem I see with a custom, domain-specific modeling framework is
that when you need
the model to be able to make distinctions based on music genre or on
concepts like 'brick and mortar"
you're suddenly out of the domain and out of your domain of expertise.
Nevertheless, you'll need
that concept modeled to solve the problem -- whether you model it via a
complex 'if/then/else' structure
or as a formal model.

Also, a general purpose system can do things like keep data collection
separate from the decision making
process. This helps because if there are several ways to come to a
conclusion one guy can model how to
obtain the data while another works on how to make the decision once the
data is in place. (OWL can do this
but you're stuck with the "objects have properties" paradigm when you
really need the "systems have state" paradigm.)

RE: wiki-like decentralized models, what keeps technology from reaching
critical mass, like with Wikipedia? Here are some things I believe I have
accounted for:

   - People want to know the technology they choose will be around long
   after the founding entities are gone.
   - People want to know that there will be interoperability, even in the
   future.
   - People want the easiest to use technology that isn't missing any
   must-have functionality.
   - For some people, a certain emotional structure must be in place. This
   is one thing Microsoft is missing.
   - People want to feel that they can make a real (vs token) contribution.
   - Some folks want to join a club, other want to avoid clubs. MySpace and
   iPxxx are clubs. FB and Andriod can be joined in either emotional mode.

Proteus was a pain to create. If there had been a better solution I would
have gone with it.


On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Rob Nagler <nagler at bivio.biz> wrote:

> Hi Bruce,
>
> > How would you do it without a framework?
>
> It depends on what you mean by framework.  When we built CAL54, we did
> it to model the problem "What's happening in Boulder?"  We didn't have
> a framework, we had a programming language and a general application
> framework.  Yet, we knew we had a problem: indexing temporal data from
> websites.  There are three steps:
>
> 1. Identify websites with calendars
> 2. Describing the calendar programmatically
> 3. Canonicalizing new paradigms
>
> We haven't figured out a way to do (1) fully automatically.  We have
> some ideas, but there is the problem of identifying exactly where
> "here" is for a website and making sure the data is not spam.  Many
> sites publish calendars, but you don't want them.  You want "here" to
> be bricks-and-mortar.  Non-trivial.
>
> We have a lot of experience with (2) for various applications.  When I
> first approached people on solving the problem, they said you couldn't
> do it.  I said I could, and we do, now.  For (2) we have a modeling
> language, but it only evolved out of this specific problem, and not
> from our general "canonicalize website data" tools.  The modeling
> language evolved with our understanding of the data, not the other way
> around.  It's such a good modeling language that we had high school
> kids coding with it this summer.  However, it is not a generic model,
> and it maps to what we know about (3).
>
> The last step (3) is very interesting, because you would think that
> the concept of calendars is well known.  There is even quite a verbose
> standard for calendars.  Yet, consider the problem of movies.  You
> want to describe them as having a "run" of days (repeating event) with
> an end date, but you do not want to show each event as a separate
> entry or one single entry.  Rather, you want to display times a movie
> is being shown on a particular day, or perhaps, the list of movies
> being shown today at a specific theater.  Go to movies.google.com, and
> you'll see what I mean.  There are other paradigms that come up as you
> gather data, such as, it may say "blues", but you would want to
> include that as "jazz" in a small place like Boulder.
>
> IOW, we are still evolving the modeling language for CAL54, and it
> involves direct experience.  We could have, alternatively, said, "This
> is a calendaring problem.  Let's start building a solution that does
> calendaring."  Or, we might have put in GIS into modeling language,
> because that's an important feature of an events calendar.  We didn't
> do this, because our experience tells us that doing so is putting the
> cart before the horse.  We don't know the problem we are solving until
> we solve it.  Some people call this emergent design, but I just call
> it, "cut twice, users measure", since there is no cost to cutting
> software, and there's a huge cost to measuring something of which you
> don't know the dimensionality.
>
> > tools. Imagine if we could get lots of folks as did Wikipedia. Call me
>
> Yes, that's what we all imagine.  That's what we imagined with CAL54,
> for example.  Turns out that attracting users, even if you have useful
> models, is a rather tricky business.  Nobody can explain
> satisfactorily why Facebook is about to IPO for $+75B and MySpace is
> about to go bankrupt.  Furthermore, how did Facebook become the
> "passport" that Microsoft and OpenID tried to be?  The specific
> details matter, and frameworks create distance from those details.
>
> Rob
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-- 
Give me immortality or give me death!
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