http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gt4544a/technique.html

I think i’m going to make a video production of pencil spinning technique and put it on DVD. I spent about 6 months creating scratch marks on my desk at home because nobody taught me how to do it.

I’m updating this original post, because I found that this quote was accidentally misattributed to myself. I was primarily interested in faceted classification for complex access control systems, and I agree that there is a total lack of actual open source or even widely discussed solutions to this problem space. The amount of “starter material” out there in the form of fuzzy-bear style tutorials is pretty lacking, so the hapless developer is left starting basically from scratch when developing ways to approach faceted classification problems.

“My complaint is that there is a lot of talk about facets, but little of any substance. Most of it won’t help you build your own faceted classification scheme. It amounts to saying the grass is greener on the other (faceted) side, but fails to give you a map explaining how to get there and what obstacles you’ll face along the way. And the academic literature doesn’t help much either. It’s too dense and I can’t recommend it to the practitioner (not the stuff I’ve seen).” – Christina Wodtke

So true.

• http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/002780.html

For good measure.

Boxesandarrows is a pretty great site for the budding IA.

This is an interesting article I found referenced from Drupal. My personal opinion is that it’s a good theoretical look at the possibilities behind metadata-based websites, and it highlights a lot of the major value behind it. Unfortunately, it kind of ducks the question of implementability, and a lot of the commercial vendors for ontological software also fail to show a realistic implementation case study.

I did find this PPT from a governmental org pretty interesting though, and they may have actually completed a functional system.

The Delphi Process describes a general process created by the Rand Corporation to achieve consensus among a distributed group of people with the following 4 features:

1 Anonymity

2 Iteration

3 Controlled feedback

4 Statistical aggregation of group response

Whoa, pretty cool.

http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html – A bunch of open source flash mx demos.

Pretty straightforward explanation (along with PHP code) for MPTT, a more efficient way to store hierarchy in RDBMS’s. Used in phpgacl.

So far, i have lived in many different area codes. This was an interesting throwback. Sorry, it’s geocities.

213, 323, 626, 410, 313, 214, 972, 940

http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/lamp.html

In loosely coupled systems, such as systems connected via web services, is there any reason to attempt to design pessimistic locking systems with transactions? Or is it better to work on optimistic locking systems that provide multiple shared copies of a resource, and resolve conflicts with an effective collaboration system run by humans?

From a practical point of view, i’ve worked on systems where transactions and locking are attempted to be enforced on client-server SOAP transmissions. With all the delays and problems of the internet, deadlocking and corruption were common occurences, and it certainly makes sense to me that people trying to work around this problem with complex WS algorithms are certainly expending a lot of time and effort chasing an impractical goal. An interesting series of blog entries.

http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/whycantlockingbe/view http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/why-pessimistic-transactions-arent-practical http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/archives/20040502seanmcgratharchive.html#108391726581259860