From my first experience with Fortran IV data blocks in the 60's to CouchDB I've seen a lot of methods to handle data. But for some reason, the appearance, in this day and age, is that the RDBMS is the 'only' suitable method for handling large volumes of data. If you've been through the mill and decided not to use an RDBMS I'd like to know what alternative method you've chosen, what benefits and drawbacks made you look for alternatives, why you chose an alternative method, and last but not least, how the choice is working out for you. Please include a short description of your primary development environment, how your decision has developed into a solution, and if there is one, what is the one thing about it that you could change if you could?

Lately I'm wanting a search tool geared toward the 'universal languages' such as mathematics and logic. I'd like to have a graphical interface that lets me construct mathematical formulas and logical expressions to use as search terms. This would require use of something like MathML or DLML with wild cards on the front end and the ability to compare like formulas and expressions on the back end. The goal would be to discover related materials in any and all fields of research. I believe that there are theoretical neighborhoods which share similar representations of ideas that are unidentified because the disciplines appear to be dissimilar. With all the sub specialization going on today in sciences there is a lot of fragmentation and topical myopia. What is missing IMHO is a science of generalism that can relate conceptual technology across disciplines. A tool like this could boost inter-disciplinary synergy and open new avenues of cross communication and possibly lead to new research in informatics.

[general whining]

[witticisms masquerading as intellect]

[FUD mongering]

[banality]

[invitation to wallow in banality and FUD]
Please comment.

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This weekend as I was digging for information about pacemaker lead extraction, and made one of those accidental, serendipitous discoveries that I found extremely interesting. The page I ended up on was http://snipurl.com.nyud.net/236gn [American Scientist Online]. This review article by J. Scott Turner on Mile Hansell's Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture had in interesting image, that of an amoebic 'test' which is a structure built by certain types of amoebas, that is similar to a snail's shell, in that the inner surface is secreted, while the outer surface is constructed from sand grains.

What I found fascinating is that this organism, despite having no nervous system, none the less manages to store, act on and pass on the information necessary to perform this tiny miracle of engineering. When humans think of intelligence it is represented by multi-cellular organisms possessing dedicated nervous systems. This picture suggested to me that there may be many alternative organic forms of intelligence of which we are, for the most part, completely unaware.

If an amoeba can store this kind of information, could it be that much of our inactive and unrecognized DNA contains information that our DNA has collected over the lifetime of our evolution, that we just are too self aware to access? It could well be that all life is 'self aware,' but that we are just too biased to recognize it.

Then again, perhaps there is a resource here that we can harness http://snipurl.com.nyud.net/236j3 [PCWorld] or http://snipurl.com.nyud.net/236io [New Scientist].

Your thoughts?

If that's true then why do so many of my submissions get rejected? I'm pretty sure Slashdot is powered by other people's submissions. Unless they mean that mine are used like guano in some kind of submission furnace.

I get 4.5 weeks of vacation a year. I guess I don't really need a fatter paycheck after all. My perspective on life has really changed now that I've used all that vacation two years running.

As a kid I can remember Cheeta's work in the dozen Tarzan movies made with Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller and actress Maureen O'Sullivan. Cheeta is now the recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest living non-human primate. Let's get Cheeta his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame!

From the site: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/GoCheeta/

"We, the undersigned members of the public, hereby declare our support for Cheeta the Chimpanzee to be honored in 2008 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

"A veteran of more than a dozen classic Hollywood feature films, Cheeta (AKA Jiggs) played opposite such stars as Maureen O'Sullivan, Johnny Weissmuller, Ronald Reagan and Rex Harrison to name just a few.

"Now retired and living in Palm Springs, the simian superstar not only holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest living, non-human primate, he is an accomplished artist. His expressionistic paintings have hung in the National Gallery in London as well as raised thousands of dollars for animal rights charities such as the Jane Goodall Institute.

"Fellow animal actors Rin Tin Tin and Lassie have stars on the Boulevard and many cartoon characters also share the star studded sidewalk. Bugs Bunny, Snow White, Woody Woodpecker, Kermit the Frog, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh and The Simpsons have all been honored. The Munchkins deservedly took one of the coveted spots this year. Even Japan's Godzilla shows up on the hallowed Walk of Fame.

"There have been six attempts to secure a star for Cheeta, the last four beginning in 2004. Each time, he has been turned down. We ask the honorable Mayor of Hollywood, Johnny Grant, and his Chamber of Commerce to please consider Cheeta when they choose the next batch of honorees in June 2008 for the 2009 nominations. Seven times lucky? We hope so.

"Cheeta is an inspiration to young and old alike. He represents all the chimpanzees that played Cheeta. His inclusion on the Hollywood Walk of Fame will not only give recognition to one of the international, animal megastars of all time, but focus attention on his fellow primates in the wilds of Africa who now face extinction.

"Please give Cheeta a star while he is still alive. Guaranteed to be a Tarzan yell heard around the world. Ungawa."

Be sure to see Cheeta in person: http://www.gocheeta.com/

According to Kurzweil your IT systems will be twice as powerful in 3 years. By 2013 or so we should be able to model a human brain in entirety on the world's most powerful machines. In time that power will hopefully trickle down to you and me. If you are like me, you write software, how are you going to use all that power? How are you going to produce all those features people need so rapidly?

If you've read my blog at all you'll know I'll tout the advance of the DSL and the dynamic language. I see these technologies on the JVM at a key inflection point between backwards compatibility and increased efficacy. They are transitional technologies at a key period in technological history.

The win in DSL, dynamic languages, and frameworks is always how succinctly you can get to your core thought or core idea. I don't really care about the ORM, the Ajax, the email most of the time. Most of the time there is a core idea I'm trying to work out.

In 24 months I need to be in the place where I can effectively divide the problems in front of me down into their key ideas. Keep the competing paradigms apart from each other. And then combine them at the right moments of confluence with a minimum of dissonance.

Get to the core thought, the core idea, ignore as much minutiae as possible, get the problem solved. Keep the idea clean. Keep the core thought from being tangled in a mess of details that have nothing to do with the answer you are after.

Advances in the way we create software will be key to the advance of the technologies of the future. If you are writing software today you will have to be prepared to leap a mighty chasm approaching us at break neck speed. That chasm will be paradoxically caused the increase of computational power available to us.

The problem of "traditional" programming that it is very procedural which can feel plodding at times. It takes forever to say anything meaningful. Yet before long we will have the ability to command computational power that could out strip our ability to speak into these systems with these sometimes unnecessarily verbose languages.

Consider that (in the video linked above) Kurzweil says that a scant 30 million bytes describes the whole of the human brain. The reason 30 million bytes could possibly hold the whole design for the human brain is that the brain's design is fractal and self organizing. A uniform underlying design is repeated with variation to create a whole. This is a similar goal to what we have in DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) code that means we express an idea and leverage that idea again and again.

In the case of our brains, that assembled whole adapts to inputs to form intelligent variation leading to astounding complexity and abilities. The subtle variation introduced by input creates the mote of a soul... or at the very least all the personality traits we recognize as a living person. If only we could write software that could reorganize itself like that.

Functional programming, rules engines, and dynamic languages promise to free us from those mind-killing details that we don't really care about anymore as application developers. But they don't really address the need to create adaptive systems or systems that are able to span across computational mediums.

I predict that there will have to be new programming languages that run in new ways that allow for fractal designs like the human brain. I happen to think these still need to be languages because they are still conversations between a creator and the created system. I dream about these systems acting like holograms or fractals in their nature.

If you cut a hologram in half you get two identical but smaller and fuzzier holograms. If you look at one part of a fractal you see the whole. I think human designed software can have the same quality. The idea isn't new I've heard the opposite idea called "dirt" and perhaps that's a good word but in my mind these form knots ... asymmetric distributions of thought where one idea unrelated to another must intersect in incongruent ways. Perhaps "dirt" is the antithesis of "fractal" or "crystal" design.

I say "fractal" or "crystal" because "modular" isn't strong enough. You can make modules all day long but if they don't allow for cleanly intersecting concerns then you don't haven't done much more than take a messy room and shovel it's contents into random boxes. You haven't actually organized things you've just cut down on the size of the mess you have to sift through.

Good code focuses on one concern at a time and tries to ignore details that are incidental. It should be that in daily programming activities we can use tools like AOP and DSL to focus on the foremost thought ignoring details of execution. Good code is reusable because it encapsulates one concern in a way that is clean enough and simple enough to be easily lifted out and reused.

That's good stuff because if you're like me you really get paid for some high level thought and some high level idea and not the millions of tiny details you have to move through to get there. Code is not "cool", technology is not "cool". Ideas are "cool" what you can do with technology is "cool". And when technology helps us get through to ideas faster that means more "cool" ...right?

So there must be a storm of new "cool" brewing on the horizon getting ready to blow us all away.

Where is the cool? Where is the awesome? I don't see it. Maybe I'm getting older and this is what happens to you you see hype for what it is and you don't see the cool anywhere anymore.

Truncation of words out side of their phonological boundries leads to linguistic degradation and syllabic morass. Please stop it. You scare my chickens.

When Fred started working the omelet line I was still bringing in my own little containers of eggbeaters. He used to tease me that his eggs weren't good enough. And I would always have to pry open a corner of the carton for him so the eggs would be ready to pour because the containers were so very difficult to open with gloves on. Then he surprised me one day with the news that the Nebraska Cafe had started carrying a new product, which was low cholesterol so I didn't have to bring my eggbeaters.

But every once in a while we would get to talking, you all know how much Fred loved to talk with people, and he would start to put real eggs in my omelet and I'd catch him with the ladle in his hand and we'd joke about it.

I began to notice that on those days, as I would catch him ladle in hand, that he would seem a little less lively than usual, and one day I asked him if he was getting enough sleep. He told me that he was staying up too late playing a computer game and that he had gotten stuck. Fred told me that he was playing "Oni-something-or-other" and as a character the game in 2004, he could not escape Nobunaga Oda at Mont-Saint-Michel.

Of course I had no idea what in the world he was talking about, but I Googled it and discovered that in the game, this was the character's second adventure at Mont-Saint-Michel, and that during the first, way back in 1582, he was supposed to have found the soil patch that was "soft and well-kept" and planted the seedling "Genma Plant" that this character had collected in his travels.

The character needed to do this because, when planted in the "soft and well-kept" earth, the "seedling Genma plant" would grow over the centuries to be tall enough, and strong enough, to allow him to leap over the edge of the wall into its waiting branches and enable him to climb down to safety, thereby escaping Nobunaga Oda.

So the next time I saw Fred, I let him know what he had to do. And sure enough, it worked and Fred was well on his way to his next adventure.

I can still remember seeing the happiness on his face, and the excitement in his eyes as he told me, "Hey Sean, it worked!"

Those moments with Fred are a gift that I will appreciate for the rest of my life. He had his own special way of nourishing our souls as he prepared us for filling our bellies. He was not afraid to extend the hand of friendship to anyone -- he cared not for what we did but found a way to appreciate each of us, just as we are.

So let us all open, somewhere deep in our hearts, that place which is "soft and well-kept" and there plant our memories of him, that they might continue to grow with us, as he would have wanted, a constant reminder to be good to each other.

And if I could tell him one more thing it would be just this -- "Thank you, God speed and good luck on your new adventure."

Stories from the omelet line January 25, 2008 on 3:35 am | About "U" | http://www.unmc.edu/blog/publicaffairs/?p=319/

One of the reasons I decided to go with Groovy and Grails was that I could run in J2EE environments and I could use Java API from the command line in my shell scripts. Take a look. First you've gotta get Groovy http://groovy.codehaus.org/ Then stick it in your path. Personally I put it in my home directory and put the bin folder for groovy in my path from my .profile. Now you can do this: hello.groovy

#!/usr/bin/env groovy
println "Hello World!"

Groovy is a neat language you can do curries and functional programming, typing is optional, and you can use it with Grails to generate up web apps really quick. The nifty thing is you can learn one set of API and carry them around with you. You don't have to relearn a bunch of new ways of doing things if you don't want to... or you can if you do want to. Groovy is neat stuff. Grails is getting good. Or you can just use Groovy as a way to dink around with Java API. For example if you have Java and Groovy that means you can play around with ldap from Groovy using the Java API like this:

#!/usr/bin/env groovy

import java.util.Hashtable
import javax.naming.*
import javax.naming.event.*
import javax.naming.directory.*

def ou = " System and Service Accounts"

// here, we're just reading in some parameters...
def stdin = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(System.in)
)
print "username: " // your username to access LDAP... not a real user
String username = stdin.readLine()
print "password: " // the password for that account...
String passwd = stdin.readLine()

// next we set up an environment for LDAP
Hashtable env = new Hashtable()
env.put(
Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
"com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory"
)
env.put(
Context.SECURITY_AUTHENTICATION,
"EXTERNAL"
)
/* // if only I had SSL working... *sigh* oh well...
env.put(
Context.SECURITY_PROTOCOL,
"ssl"
) //*/

// You'll want to put your server's name or IP here:
env.put(
Context.PROVIDER_URL,
"ldap://activedirectoryhost.mycompany.com:636/"
)

// Here, you'll want to set up your company's parameters for OU and DC...
env.put(
Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL,
"CN=" + username + ",OU=" + ou + ",DC=mycompany,DC=com"
) // username
env.put(
Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS,
passwd
) // and password

// Now we'll try and connect...
try {
def ctx = new InitialDirContext(env)
def attr = ctx.getAttributes("")
def srchInfo = new SearchControls()
// you'll want to use your own search base
def searchBase= "OU=company,DC=mycompany,DC=com"
// this is the magic search string sauce:
def searchFilter = "(&(objectClass=person))"
// we strong type the next var because it is
// used in a Java API that needs String[]
String[] objAttribs=[
"givenName",
"cn",
"sn",
"mail",
"mailNickname",
"userPrincipalName",
"displayName",
"manager",
"department",
"memberOf"
]
srchInfo.setSearchScope(SearchControls.SUBTREE_SCOPE)
srchInfo.setReturningAttributes(objAttribs)

// Now we get the results and loop through them...
NamingEnumeration dirObjects = ctx.search(searchBase,searchFilter,srchInfo)
def nodirObjects = 0
while (dirObjects != null && dirObjects.hasMoreElements()) {
def dirObject = dirObjects.next()
println("'" + dirObject.getName() + "':")
def attrs = dirObject.getAttributes()
for(name in objAttribs) {
println "\t * " + attrs.get(name)
}
nodirObjects++
}
ctx.close()
println("Number of entries identified: " + nodirObjects)
} catch (Exception e) {
println "Exception: " + e
}

I was driving to work today and the driver in front of me opened her window and tipped out a cereal bowl of milk. She had been eating cheerios and had finished and was spilling out on the road to splash and splatter my car the left over milk. I am utterly horrified... we were on the highway traveling at highway speeds!

Fry is not Farnsworth's great to-the-eleventy-ith grand uncle... Fry is Farnsworth's great to-the-twelfth-ith grand father. That's because due to a time travel accident Fry is his own grand-pa. I'm in shock.