I just got another check from Google for having Adsense ads on my web sites. Sweet - pays for all of my server and internet costs, and then some... I use up a fair amount of bandwidth because sometimes I often have several hundred copies of my free web books downloaded a day. I also get a surprising number of contributions from people via PayPal for my free web books. I am not sure, but if I stopped consulting and wrote full time, I could probably meet my living expenses by writing free web books(*) and accepting donations. (But, I enjoy consulting too much: I love solving problems). Anyway, I appreciate Google Adsense ads - give them a try yourself. (*) speaking of which, I have been working such long hours consulting the last 7 or 8 months, that I have not had too much time to write. I am now taking a 4 or 5 month break and only consulting about half time (for a pleasant change), so I will hopefully get some more open content material written. (But I am also trying to wrap up wor

Very few people add RDF (etc.) to their web sites, preferring to spend effort creating "stylish" looking web sites to creating web sites useful for both software agents and human readers. I am a little guilty of this myself: I have some RDF data on my main site, but it does not reflect the real semantics of my site. The problem is that when adding new information to a web site, ideally there would be some "standard" OWL ontology that perfectly reflected the subject matter for the new material and an authoring tool would both help "fill in the blanks" to create an instance and provide choices for XSLT to render this instance to HTML. Perhaps an extension to the Protégé system could do this. The problem is still that few people would want to think in terms of what is really knowledge engineering just to add material to web sites. What is needed is a set of tools that cover all of the bases here: authoring tools that allow fast selection of an appropri

I have been very critical of Greenspan, the Bush administration, etc. for not giving the straight poop to the American public on the danger of widening trade and budget deficits. Now that the election is over, we are finally seeing some honesty . A good quote from this article: "What he's [i.e., Greenspan] saying is that the nation's balance sheet is out of whack, and the family balance sheet is out of whack,'' Meese said. What I believe the real tragedy is: with a little more saving, some real reduction in spending (on a personal level, buying less crap; at the federal level, fewer expensive wars and social programs) everything would be OK for (probably) a long time.

I installed the latest release of Daisy this evening. It was a tough install (about 25 minutes to get the MySQL tables created, configure OpenJMS which is required, edit lots of config files, etc.). Anyway, the effort seems to be worth it! Like the Magnolia CMS system, when using a Firefox web browser, you can create/edit rich text HTML documents. However, Daisy also supports "attachment document" that are simply containers for OpenOffice.org, Word, etc. documents. Daisy uses the Lucene search engine and both Word documents and plain HTML documents that I created were almost instantly searchable. I like it! PS. I have been planning on integrating my next release of KBtextmaster with Plone . I think that I will also supply a plugin for Daisy. KBtextmaster is a standalone service with an XML-RPC interface (and written in Common Lisp, BTW). I am tentatively planning on making any patches to Plone and Daisy (for accessing KBtextmaster vi XMLRPC) public domain. I have

I had a short while to download and install Magnolia Content Management System . It is designed to allow non-technical people easily build and maintain web sites. So, this is a web site content management system, not a full blown content management system that handles many document types, etc. You can upload documents (e.g., OpenOffice.org documents) to Magnolia, but they appear as a named link on a web page. The install was very easy - by default, two Tomcat instances are run: one for the authoring system and one for the "public" system. Like the Apache Daisy content management, Magnolia seems like a Plone "want to be". For Java developers, the advantage of Magnolia and Daisy is that they are Java web applications (Plone is written in Python). Daisy has the advantage of supporting many file types (OpenOffice.org, Word, PDF, etc.) for indexing, search, etc.

Knowledge workers are software engineers, writers, business development people, architects, etc. - anyone who deals with organizing ideas and creates intellectual property (hopefully licensed under a Creative Commons copyright, open source software, etc. - but also proprietary intellectual property (*)). Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People says (in Business 2.0, December 2004 issue): The industrial age was about control, and the information age, or knowledge-worker age, is about release. Covey gets this right: in the new economy and new way of doing things, trust and flexibility is key. Think of the revolution in manufacturing processes through "just in time" delivery of material and sub-systems. The new knowledge economy, even acknowledging the dot-com meltdown, is also about flexibility in getting work done on schedule by pulling together human resources just as they are needed. There is no doubt in my mind that being able to tap into tal

Remember: Tax cuts are really tax deferrals to future generations . Too many people in our society lack the moral backbone to live within their earnings. Some people say "but, running a deficit is a good thing" . Well, of course running a moderate deficit is probably a good thing. Our current deficit limits are way out of whack however for what is in the best interests of our country. Now, when I say best interests of our country, I am talking about people - I no longer count most corporations because most large corporations have moved offshore to avoid their fair share of taxes. They are no longer American. I believe that in a free society that people should for the most part be free to make their own decisions and live their lives the way that they want to. However, this deeply immoral passing on economic desperation to future generations is sick and selfish behavior - not the legacy that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren. Anyone who is not part

OK, this might not be a good idea for several reasons, but I am going to toss out this idea anyway: for Semantic Web applications instead of modeling and defining application classes (e.g., with OWL, RDFS, etc.) design appropriate database tables and store meta-data, etc. directly in a relational database instead of in RDF. There are good Java tools for handling RDF, RDFS, OWL, etc. (e.g., Jena, Sesame). Still, the idea of storing meta-data for online documents, relationships between documents, etc. directly in a database solves a few problems that seem to be holding back progress with Semantic Web technologies: learning curve for RDF/RDFS/OWL, acquisition and learning curve for tools for storing RDF, learning curve for one of the several RDF query languages, etc. The next release of my KBtextmaster product will include an option for automatic RDF generation from documents and web pages. I think that also supporting extraction of meta-data to a relational database would be use

I am pleased with Apple for many reasons (*), so, Steve, this advice is free! Current online movie services are lame for a few reasons: They don't run on Macs! DRM limits movie watching to 24 hours So, following up deals with the music industry to allow Apple's music store (which I really enjoy, BTW), negotiate with the movie industry and support a movie store site that: Works with Macs! With DRM that allows watching a downloaded movie for a whole week Support two pricing structures: 99 cents for a low resolution movie (perhaps 450x250 pixels) and $2.50 for a higher resolution movie (perhaps 800x500 pixels). Support full screen mode with interpolation. (*) I wrote the free chess program distributed with very early Apple IIs and received fun notoriety for that. I am a slightly wealthier man today because I wrote a commercial Mac application in 1984. The last batch of Apple stock that I bought has gone from $15 to $55 per share. Thanks Apple!

When I must use EJBs, I use XDoclet comments, ant build targets, etc. to take most of the hassle out of using EJBs. The new EJB 3.0 specification that uses new features of JDK 1.5 (or 5) looks like a definite improvement. Still, like a lot of server side Java developers I usually do not need EJBs for my projects. If I can avoid even using a relational database, the use of Prevalyer makes server side back-end development fast and easy - if not, Hibernate is my tool of choice. I use IntelliJ for about 90% of my Java development. Future versions of IntelliJ will probably simplify using the new EJB 3.0 specification just as the current version greatly facilitates using JSPs, EJBs, etc. So, I might start using EJBs again - wait and see.

I do get tired of supporting multiple browsers when writing interactive web applications. Life would be simpler, especially when trying to write "sort of fat client applications" (e.g., Javascript+HTML like GMail) to have a single platform for client and server: only support Mozilla Firefox on the client side and tailor a development environment with appropriate tag libraries, etc. for dealing with Firefox (e.g., dynamic tree displays, standard Javascript utilities for verifying form input, etc.) Now, while I consider myself to be an excellent Java, Common Lisp, Python, and Prolog programmer, I am admitedly a little weak using Javascript. For Javascript gurus, my desire for a single standard web browser client probably seems a little lazy :-) There is a lot of push-back in industry for not supporting the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, but I would argue that installing Mozilla Firefox is a fairly light weight requirement for using a specific web application. I

Now that the election is over we can all get back to other important things like work, studying the economy (whoever does not keep a sharp eye on the economy is a fool!), etc. The New Republic magazine has a very useful summary of the Bush economic policy: There is a simple way to understand economic policy-making under George W. Bush: Whichever pressure group has the strongest and most direct stake in an issue gets its way. Wealthy individuals and business owners have received large tax cuts; farmers have gotten lavish assistance; and insurance and drug companies won enormous subsidies in the Medicare prescription-drug bill. When steel firms lobbied for tariffs, Bush granted them. When automakers and other manufacturers later lobbied Bush to reverse course, complaining that those tariffs had raised the cost of the steel they buy, he began to back down. If there's a single prominent case where Bush offended a powerful corporate interest--except to benefit an even more powerful

I enjoyed watching the Ruby Rails demo that is a 10 minute demo of building a web application using Ruby Rails. This demo was made by capturing a video as the demo creator smoothly went through the steps to build a web app. I have looked at a few Mac OS X demo-making to Quicktime movie products and I think that I will make my selection soon. I am motivated to do this for a few reasons. One of my customers is interested in ways to demo the web application that I developed for his company and creating a demo like the Ruby Rails demo seems like a good idea. As bandwidth gets cheaper, I have also thought of augmenting the free web books (on my main web site ) with free instructional videos.

I was thinking this morning that this is about my 20th aniversary of experimenting with hypertext technologies (which I view as any chunks of information with typed links): using the Grapher (DAGs) on my Xerox Lisp Machine in the early 1980s to visualize typed links between data; a commercial Smalltalk class library to do the same thing a few years later; Owl Guide hypertext authoring tool on the Mac; ordering and reading the Ted Nelson's Xanadu manefesto document; using a text-based browser to explore physics documents at CERN in the very early 1990s (my first exposure to HTTP protocol and HTML - thanks to Karl Weibe for that!), etc. In earlier history, some wealthy people had their own personal libraries to store and organize knowledge. Now the tools are better and usually support close to free access to information. As good as graphical user interfaces are for browsing the web, examining links between data sources, etc., I still think that the "killer application"

My friend Tom Munnecke (*) organized a Positive Media Workshop to take place in NYC next week. Tom believes (and puts his effort) in transforming the world in positive ways by sharing good ideas that work. Please do look at the linked web page - interesting and worth a look. While I agree that the news media business wallows in bad news to increase profits (and I would argue the obvious point of pushing political agendas highly beneficial to corporate owners) I am personally not so optimistic that the mega-size corporation owned news media can be transformed in a positive way. However I also hold out some hope that "person to person" and group related communication technologies like web blogs, wikis, communities built on interlinked web sites, etc. will continue to allow (**) a minority of people to connect in positive ways. My pessimism however is based in a belief that most people are happy enough with 15 second 'sound bite' news that is highly filtered: like