Potlach Feast

damn… err, i repeat. damn…

I’ve just finished assembling a pair of modified Decware Radial 1 speakers. Cutting to the chase these sound absolutely stunning and come close to trumping my Infinity P-FR’s in almost every way.

As these original Radials came unassembled with upgraded speakers, Jensen capacitors, Audioquest Indigo internal wire, etc, I took the liberty of continuing the upgrade to 1.5’s by adding new bases, cones, passives etc. (thank you Zygi!). After fixing various issues with the veneer, I decided to turn my attention to seal the inside of the speakers with black hole pads that I obtained from speakercity a while back for a different project.

(If anyone is curious, you can do both speakers, top and bottom gaskets, etc. in 6 sheets. – highly recommended).

I sit here slack-jawed as I can’t believe the detail and range I’m hearing from these speakers. When I hear folks talk like this, I usually role my eyes and move on, but the imaging, depth and bass (yes, i said it… bass!) that is coming out of these speakers is absolutely astounding. I need to experiment a bit more with different resistors and weighting the passives, but I’m absolutely floored by what I’m hearing.

I have a crummy room for audio, but these speakers seem incredibly forgiving of this sin. And when I open my eyes I absolutely amazed at how such small speakers can produce such a large, accurate soundstage.

ok… enough of the rants, back to the music…

For a long time I’ve been thinking how useful it would be to give PURLS to people as a key part for managing evolving social networks. And now that the new purl work we’re doing at Zepheira (which is downright scary-good due to in part a rock solid engineering team and the use of NetKernel as a key underlying technology) will include support for identification of non-document resources, this will soon be possible.

Recently, Brian has been reflecting on his building of some very cool FOAF tools. And now whats even cooler is that it looks like Brian is on the case …

This exercise has also inspired me to make some progress on my goal to create some good tools to lower the bar to FOAF usage. I am going to leverage the PURLS work that we are doing for the OCLC. This will allow us to create permanent, resolvable names for ourselves that transcend where we currently hang our hats*. This will allow the networks to be more resilient. As many links as I am finding, there have been a ton of broken links (presumably people who have moved on) that would have enriched the result set even further!

I suspect he’ll have a production ready system in place by sometime tomorrow

15 years ago, I was involved in series of discussions at the IETF regarding technical standards related to identifying resources in decentralized environments. Acronyms such as “URI”, “URN”, “URL”, “URC” (and occasionally the phrase “you are kidding?!”) where constantly thrown around with much heated debate regarding requirements, protocols, semantics and capabilities for each of these technologies. URLs (Uniform Resource Locators … the global identifiers that start with ‘http:’, ‘mailto:’, ‘ftp:’, etc) were increasingly becoming prevalent as people found the immediate feedback of merging “clickability” and global “addressability” an attractive one. The others standards, however, were not so lucky.

At that time, the library community was starting to focus on issues related to cataloging and managing Web resources. Relaxing link integrity (404 file not found) and making it easier for people to create these URLs was one of the reasons the Web had succeeded where other hyperlinking systems had failed. This relaxation, however, caused problems for effective cataloging, managing and relating of resources. Spending time, effort and money to do this only to find the resource is no longer available because it had been moved, etc. was a serious issue to individuals in the library community focused on describing and providing effective access to relevant digital resources.

A solution to this problem was developed by OCLC; PURLs – Persistent URLs. PURLs provided a level of indirection that allows the underlying Web addresses of resources to change over time without negatively affecting systems that depend on them. Persistence is not an technological issue as much as one of social and organizational commitment. The PURL software provided the simple technological solution, and made it available for others to use, but it was OCLC running the purl.org service that provided the organizational commitment that helped make it possible for others to create and share persistent identifiers.

OCLC has been running the purl.org services for more than 12 years; there are very few services I can think of that can make such a claim. The Library community has in many ways been ahead of the general curve for managing data. A barrier for weaving these ideas, however, into various other non-library applications is that the code behind this service has largely been the same for the past 12 years as well. I’m quite pleased to note, however, that this is in the process of changing. More specifically, the following press release explains whats going on.

DUBLIN, Ohio, July 11, 2007—OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and Zepheira, LLC announced today that they will work together to rearchitect OCLC’s Persistent URL (PURL) service to more effectively support the management of a “Web of data.”

This re-architecture will not only make it easier for folks to embed PURLs within existing applications, it will also be updated to reflect the current understanding of Web architecture as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This new software will provide the ability to permanently identify networked information resources, such as Web documents, as well as non-networked resources such as people, organizations, concepts and scientific data. This capability will represent an important step forward in the adoption of a machine-processable “Web of data” enabled by the Semantic Web.

One of the most important principles for Zepheira is that developments towards a Semantic Web can be carefully tuned and scaled to meet the immediate needs of businesses, while valuable experience from solving enterprise needs can bring focus to Semantic Web efforts. I’m pleased to see this work underway and very much look forward to what capabilities the new PURL work will help enable in the next 12 years (and beyond).

Over the past several years, I’ve occasionally used the phrase “recombinant data” when talking about the Semantic Web. Recently at the Semantic Technologies 2007 conference I attempted to give this term a definition during one of my talks:

the ability to rapidly recombine, reform, re-factor and reuse data from different applications to address a particular task, need or objective

- Eric Miller, President Zepheira “The Business of Recombinant Data”

It’s not quite right, but close…

Passing this definition though a syllabic minimization filter yields: “when it comes to data – write once, use often”.

The talk went on to demonstrate the benefit of recombinant data by using various practical tools the Simile folks have been developing to solve specific use-cases. And from there connecting these examples back to real-world problems that enterprises are grappling with in terms of more efficient, flexible means of supporting data integration and ultimately effective business intelligence. And while I’m admitedly bias in my assessment, it seemed to go over extremely well. Re-echoing the point once again that showing rather than telling helps people understand the power of recombinant data.

Several folks have asked me privately about Zepheira … more specifically what we do, how to pronounce it and where the name came. The following is a poor attempt to minimize future inquiries

Ok, first, what is it… the home page captures some of this:

Zepheira provides solutions to integrate, navigate and manage data across personal, group and enterprise boundaries to save time and money. Our team are experts in applying Semantic Web standards and knowledge management technologies to address your specific data integration challenges.

Not quite a full answer, but close. For those interested in more details, Zepheira’s services page may be additionally useful.

Secondly… how to pronounce it:

zepheira : ze-fear’-a

see… that wasn’t so hard

And finally, where did the name come from…

Naming things in general is difficult- companies even more so.

I’m fortunate enough to be part of a team of industry leaders who have come together to help provide effective solutions to address various data integration, collaboration and knowledge exchange challenges. During the discussion on what to call ourselves, we found ourselves discussing a wide range of inter-related topics including philosophy, values, experiences, lessons learned and future goals. James Lipton’s Inside the Actors Studio questions, care of Bernard Pivot, we found equally insightful In the process of sharing our individual views on various subjects we collectively recognized that while each of us are respected industry leaders in various areas, we also shared a deep passion for the arts. We found that everyones ‘hobby’ was incredibly artistic in nature – pottery, woodworking, sculpting, music, poetry, martial arts, weaving / fabric, photography, etc.

I own only one piece of “serious” art (something I paid money for). It’s a painting from an Armenian artist named Vakhtang. My wife and I stumbled upon this piece independently in Sausalito and it holds a special place in our hearts. I walk past it everyday and everyday I pause briefly to breath it in. It’s a bit of a daily ritual of mine; viewing this piece makes me pause, reflect and subsequently feel a bit better about life, the universe and everything.

The painting is called ‘Zepheira’.

It was one of those ‘ah ha!’ moments that we as a team had and it came together instantly: “Zepheira, ‘The Art of Data’”. It simply felt right.

I recently acquired a 1948 Martin “60″ outboard which hasn’t been run in over 30 years. I’m slowly breathing life back into this following Art Dekalbs’s 5 Point plan for old outboards which I’ve found quite helpful. It doesn’t quite look as nice as the original magazine ad, but I hope to get close its late 40’s condition as the original detailed manuals were included and parts, decals, etc. are still readily available.

The initial tear-down has been messy, but encouraging. It’s a very simple, but elegantly designed 7.2 hp, 2 cylinder engine. From looking under the hood, I can see why these Martins have quite the cult following.

I’ve been wanting something to go with my boat ‘high treason’ which is designed to be sailed, rowed or motored. It’s too early to tell if I can get this Martin working, but Alex and I are optimistic that we can. Our goal is that in the next couple months to be puttering over the water in style.

It seems like only yesterday that Stu Weibel, Thom Hickey and myself split a 500 bd/ft haul of 8/4 hard maple. Upon deeper reflection, however, I guess it was more like eight years ago. go figure… Well, two moves, two jobs, and one (and a half) kids later, I’ve finally used the last of it and completed my workbench.

The legs and benchtop are made from the 8/4 hard maple, the carcus is baltic birch and the front doors, drawers and trim are lyptus.

Scott Landis’s the workbench book (which in my personal library along with Nakashima, etc. is cross cataloged under ’spiritualy moving’ and ‘woodworking porn’) was a big inpiration. The front vise is a Jorgenson and for the end vise I opted for the less traditional Veritas twin screw. In the end I went with the Veritas brass bench dogs as well rather then the traditional square dogs due to ease of use and personal preference.

The most (technically) difficult part in putting this together by far was installing the tail vise. The twin screw design is a very good one, but the instructions are … errr … just lacking enough in detail that your pretty much assured to screw things up at least once. The most (mentally) difficult part was drilling the bench dog holes. It took a while to convince myself that drilling into a table top on purpose was a good thing to do.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I do a considerable amount of hand planing, scraping and carving. To do this now on a good bench, its hard to imagine being without one. I can quickly see this becoming my favorite tool in my shop.

Over the weekend, in an end-of-the-year cleaning frenzy to free up some much needed space, I stumbled upon my old stash of laser supplies. 30-ish years ago my father and I built a helium neon laser for a grade school science project (in the 70’s I was really into lasers and holograms). After about 60 minutes of trying to get everything back in working order I came to the conclusion it just wasn’t going to happen. And while it felt good to sling solder again, I ultimately had to come to grips with letting most of my stash go. What I couldn’t part with however were the Hughes Helium-Neon laser tubes that made this project possible. After thinking a bit about how to store these for another 30 years, I decided to go a different route. As a christmas present to myself, I built a simple stand to proudly display these tubes. And while most people that see them offer an odd glance or two, to me they are a reminder of a simple truth that often times the best way to understand something is simply to build it.

The legs are 2.25″ diameter cherry with 1.5″ maple shelves and maple cross supports. The black cones and spikes are from partsexpress.

The design is more complex than it needed to be, but the adjustablity and leveling I find extreamly effective. The ‘floating’ aspect of the design is asthetic, modular and allows the shelves to expand / contract (as maple will in the climate I’m in).

There are various modifications I expect to do to make this more useful and minimize the problems inherent in this floating design. (FWIW, I don’t think I’d do another one like this.) In the meantime, however, I’m pleased with the result.

Additional (albiet poor) pictures are available for those interested. Caveat emptor… I know far more about wood than photography.

I’m a jazz fan. The combination of vinyl, low watt tube amplifcation, high efficency speakers and jazz works for me. Spinning some Miles Davis in particular I really enjoy.

Ok… enough on that. A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes combining some of the tools that we’re building in the Simile project together to show the value of accessing data that is “behind” web pages and viewing this data in new and interesting ways. The Miles Davis discography timeline is a quick example of this (as well as a painful reminder of all of the Miles Davis albums I don’t have!).

For the unfortunate souls who don’t know who Miles Davis was, the BBC sums it up nicely…

“American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. He was in at the birth of hard bop, ‘cool’ jazz, modal jazz and jazz/rock fusion. For much of his life he struggled with racial prejudice and drug addiction. An icon of the modern age.” – BBC Artist Profile of Miles Davis.

The Miles Davis discography data (rdf/xml) and corresponding scraper that extracts the data from the BBC site are available for those interested in learning more. The Timeline tool is another excellent creation from David Huynh and provided by the Simile project.