An experimental future

Categorization

2012-01-29T02:19:00.000-08:00

Over the recent time, the association known as the Technate, has successfully organized it's first regular inter-organizational online meeting. As our timezones differ, organizing multiple organizations from around the world to meet online in real time is more difficult than it appears. None the less, the meeting was successfully held in the classic professional style that EOS has adopted for it's own meetings, combining with the practices of other Technate member organizations has resulted in a fairly organized experience, following an agenda and with a beginning and an end, which is key to making the meeting a productive one.

One of the ideas that was prominently presented on the meetings is the desire to get organized by structuring the Technate somehow. The decision to set up a board was discussed, along with the decision to start setting up functional sequences. Some discussion was made in favor of these and some against, until ultimately it was decided to set up a message board where the different sides could put up their arguments and discuss. In this blog, I wish to point out a lesson already learned by EOS, which is not yet properly documented elsewhere and is not the kind of thing to show up in discussion on a forum.

The problem is the desire to set up empty categories. It's a lesson we have learned on multiple fronts, from the structure of the old EOS website (known as NET at the time), to the layout of the RBEF's forum right down to completely practical things like the proposed organizational scheme for the now defunct Project Umbrella.

People like to plan, we do this because it's fun. It is not difficult for people within an organization to find the motivation to start planning ahead, while implementation may be a different story altogether, it seems extremely right to discuss ideas on how things shall be. This is why people like to read marketing catalogs, imagining how they would restructure their kitchen and make grand financial plans only to change them again tomorrow. And we don't like to hear that this may be a bad thing.

The problem with this is that other people respond poorly towards being managed and either being themselves or having their work pigeonholed into categories. It is also not necessarily productive to have things categorized in a specific way. We have learned trough past experiences that setting up brilliantly structured empty space for contributions to be made into can leave many of them empty and that this appearance of emptiness demotivates people from contributing or being productive.

I would ask everybody to accept this lesson and try to avoid making the same mistake. It is not simply an issue of setting up categories and changing them later when and if they prove inefficient, the very state of having categories set up in advance harms the community's productivity.

Now I am not saying that organization of content is wrong or irrelevant, but no matter how brilliant, it is wrong to expect other people to just drop by and conform to a structure that you have defined arbitrarily:

Be minimalistic about your categorization! If you don't know at this point how to categorize something, make a single category and then seperate it once there is already content to separate. Avoid making empty categories!
Don't plan highly involved formal structure in advance! In fact, unless it is explicitly required at that point, don't plan it at all. I believe this is one of the primary reasons Project Umbrella did not work out -- people saw the elaborate organizational scheme and ran the other way. EOS's own articles on groups, areas and sectors are a problem in similar ways.
Make systemic solutions! Don't plan how to categorize people, plan the means by which people will categorize themselves, if and when they feel it has become necessary.

And by this recognize that we all like to set up categories in advance. It feels right, but it can be counterproductive. Remember our goals!

LP,
Jure

Traditional medicine

2012-01-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

People involved in recent discussion of traditional eastern medicine, have asked me, why do I choose a scientific approach. Me, personally. Is it because it is the only thing I know of? Not really. Is it because it was taught to me in school? No I don't care for what a system may impose on me. Is it because it's what the president recommends on television? No, I hate both of those things. Is it because I was poisoned with it from a young age? No, actually I was taught about traditional medicine before I started going to school.

What proponents of traditional eastern medicine perhaps do not realize, is that even us Westerners have traditional medicine of our own, which is passed down by generations trough our grandparents and taught to us before we are old enough to think of questioning it. Chamomile tea anyone? And yet when really in need, we first think to choose modern medicine. Why?

I will try to tell a story -- a true one, which may be easiest to relate to, because it seemed completely reasonable to a 12 year-old without much prior knowledge to make him biased towards a certain philosophy.

When I was young I was growing up with my grandmother, who was as all typical grandmothers a master of herbalism, botany and gossip. Every day she would teach me something new and interesting about plants, herbs and medicinal plants that I didn't know to think of before.

As I grew older I learned that sometimes, my grandmother would come by conclusions regarding what plants, herbs and medicinal plants do, based on inconsistent situations -- I would begin to see where she had concluded unreasonably, because she drew a pattern between two inconsistent situations. As I tried out things the way she had come by the conclusions, I upgraded her methodology to one which was more self-consistent: I would make sure that when I preformed an experiment I would only change one parameter at a time to see how it influenced the result. This, I later learned, was called the scientific method.

I have this excellent example of a favored plant: Sempervivum Tectorum, which is traditionally known to cure ear infections and ward off lightning, as taught by my grandmother. I had always loved the plant due to it's ease of cultivation. Coincidentally a neighbor was doing a thesis on the plant and determined that the plant sometimes lives in symbiosis with a fungi in it's leaves, which produces an antibiotic -- no doubt useful against ear infections; however this fungi while clearly visible by the length of the plant's leaves, was not necessarily present. Traditional medicine knew nothing of this distinction and the plant was no doubt used for ear infection even when it had no chance of being helpful. (As for it's lightning warding properties, it turns out that historically this was only applicable to straw roofs, where it is severely unlikely that the plant's presence would in any way influence a straw roof's combustibility or resistance to lightning, there is presently no way to test that as there are no more straw roofs to be found in the country.)

As time got by my grandmother, the master of gossip that she was, saw that my conclusions were as worthy of consideration as the other gossip that she had come by and grew to depend on it. Then one day, I remember, I had learned that my conclusion that because the runoff from potted plants was chemically unhealthy for humans, that it was thus also unhealthy for plants was backwards, as the nutrients contained in the runoff are beneficial to the plant and thus my recommendation to my grandmother had to be changed. My grandmother asked me if hadn't I previously stated the opposite? I answered: "I was wrong." As I learn more I find that: I was wrong. I openly admit that, yet does that mean that my recommendation is unreliable? She never stated what she thought of it, but she did continue to rely on my conclusions. And although I can be wrong, if I take everything I do know into account via a scientific method, and provide a recommendation based on that, it's still the best one we have.

As I look back I had hoped that I had converted my grandmother's witchcraft into science... Only to find later in my life that the process of developing new drugs is also known as witchcraft in the industry, due to the point that nobody really knows how to come by a cure that hasn't been invented yet, and they simply mix ingredients until they come up with something that cures the disease and doesn't kill the patient (of course it is a bit more sophisticated than that, my understanding is on the level of a research reactor control software developer, I am not a chemist).

I understand that the 15 year long process for drug development enforced by the system has been developed trough some sort of bloody trial and error in an attempt to leave behind as few dead as possible. A process that I understand is quite tedious to a researcher who is sure he had come up with a cure to a deadly disease and is being asked to hold onto it for 15 years until they can figure out if it's safe (and somehow pull out of the sky the funding for the equipment required to get it trough the process? Researchers are not normally good at funding issues). And a process which is called "short" by proponents of traditional medicine which had supposedly evolved over hundreds of years. Yet their request that skipping this particular process for whatever they come up with is somehow better for everybody is hardly convincing?! Don't you agree?

Why don't we play it safe in both cases? Why can't we have self-consistent methodology for traditional medicine as well? Why can't we see that sometimes traditional medicine is wrong? How is just believing the gossip, that produced traditional medicine blindly, reasonable? Is it because if we did the right thing with traditional medicine, what we would end up with is modern medicine? Like I did?

Think about that.

Occupy 2011

2011-10-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

A quick report from the recent Occupy event in Slovenia.

Although the event itself was somehow ironic in being an political activity using centralist institutions (Facebook, Twitter) to passively protest against the political system and centralist institutions (the 1%); and thus perhaps clearly dysfunctional in attaining the goals to which it was aimed towards, many different groups attended from revolutionary syndicalists with megaphones, trough the Zeitgeist movement and Anonymous representatives, to guys jumping around with free hugs signs and people for the humane treatment of animals (for whatever reason).

The point that one of the promotional slogans "No political party represents us anymore" was not understood as a call against representative democracy, but rather as a statement of fact in the current Slovenian political paradigm, may have had something to do with the popularity of the event in Slovenia. Whether this is a temporary political situation, or an indication of systemic problems of representative democracy starting to show trough, is debatable.

Attendance was massive (around 4000 people crowded up the main city square in Ljubljana) and varied in age groups. There were many groups we were not previously acquainted with. The event reached the result of reminding us all that we are not alone in our efforts to make the world a better place by making systemic changes.

General media coverage appeared to be rather poor, with some media only reporting on the actions of exceedingly rare violent individuals on the otherwise peaceful and positive-spirited event. Some left wing magazines made ample note of the event though, calling it the "October revolution" only substituting the red for purple.

Even though most people seem to have been more interested in crowding around the people with the biggest sound amplifiers than adopting any of the progressive approaches adopted elsewhere, the event helped us renew our motivation to keep working. Perhaps later events of the type will encourage some groups to get better organized and yield more productive results like cooperation towards a goal.

LP,
Jure

Public understanding

2011-09-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed many of the recent blogs by my colleague at EOS, Andrew Wallace, have been rather critical of people. Although I tend to avoid this form of public expression out of my respect for humanity, an example has been brought to my attention which provides an opportunity for interesting discussion.

This is Robert and as you can see from the picture he is a Scientist. Ever since he was a kid he wanted to be one, until the Internet provided him with a sufficiently gullible audience, to accept him as a certified nutritionist. On his blog he tells you the source of all disease is in the sourness of food, justifies this by defining the all of human cellular metabolism as an interaction between Hydrogen and Baking powder. His theories have circled the globe and nobody who has passed his Science around suspects there is anything wrong with his reasoning. After all, we all know that incorrect feeding habits are the source of all our health problems, right?

What is wrong here?

Let's look at history. Looking at the example of Scurvy, it appears that people feel a persistent need throughout history, to dumb down dietary problems beyond recognition. The Wikipedia article on Scurvy goes to describe how the cause of Scurvy as a dietary deficiency of then-unknown vitamin C was relatively well understood since antiquity, yet in the 18th century the British navy opted not to help it's people survive, in favor of a simpler explanation: that it was fresh vegetables or acids or even morale that cured Scurvy, which unfortunately for most sailors who afterwards died of Scurvy, was not the case.

...it was not until 1747 that James Lind formally proved that scurvy could be treated and prevented by supplementing the diet with citrus fruit such as limes or lemons, though not by other acids, in one of the earliest European clinical trials. This solution was not adopted by the Royal Navy until the 1790s, and the idea that any acid would suffice continued in Britain into the late 19th century...

Although a simple display of stupidity in a technical person's eye, the reasons why people opt for these incorrect explanations is no trivial matter. In an article that I and Raffael Kéménczy are co-authoring, myself covering the biology-themed problems and solutions and Raffael covering the social problematics; we will touch on some of the examples of such issues, analyze the data, the possible explanations and present some solutions. It is our understanding that these misconceptions present an important lesson, a failure in the scientific community to transfer knowledge into domestic use; and represents an important problem to be overcome in the quest to provide the highest quality of life for everyone, whilst maintaining personal freedom for all.

LP,
Jure

Cyberhorticulture

2011-07-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

One of my hobbies the purpose of which is primarily to disconnect from the world of problems, is the creation of random pieces of art. As the skills I care to indulge in primarily cover technology and raising potted plants, any successful combination of all three suits my love of perfection.

These points however random are not entirely unrelated to the topic of Sustainability. Environmental sustainability is one of the more prominent aspects of it and in my attempts to create something meaningful out of combining horticulture with technology appear to exclusively produce systems with more closed nutrient cycles or better efficiency than plants as such normally provide.

Although the results of my work are somewhat embarrassingly trivial in function and appearance, they still might be noteworthy simply because they have actually been built and furthermore, do not require any particularly special skills or equipment to produce -- although I do have a little scientific and expert backing on the subjects, these are hobbies and I am an amateur learning along the way.

My first attempt at applying technology to horticulture was met with the realization that biological organisms are far superior in many areas to whatever advantage a mechanical implement I can easily build would provide -- for example hydroponics is a good mix of technology with horticulture, however the tubing and pump systems are a very poor delivery system compared to a mychorrizal network, furthermore there is nothing in hydroponics that actually produces nutrients -- they have to be extracted from oil and added to the cycling solution. As technology is more a method than the mechanical implements people usually envision when thinking of the word, the attempt was not a complete waste of time -- if I had not considered applying some artificial method to feed a plant nutrients more efficiently I would never have considered using mycorrhiza. A little bit of research later, I produced the near-perfect solar-powered nutrient-regenerating hybrid: A potted plant with clover, a touch of Rhizobium bacterium culture and some mychorriza inoculate in the same pot. The clover grows nodules to host the bacteria, which fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into fertilizer, which is transported via the mychorriza to the target plant. The entire process is powered entirely by compounds produced by the target plant and the clover, therefore by photosynthesis. It is however not perfect because it only provides nitrogen, no phosphate or other minerals. Fortunately my target plant seems quite happy with the nitrogen provided and is blooming all over the place even though it is provided only with plain water.

In my second attempt I have tried to cover a different area as well as arrive at a result which appears more dramatic. Using up some quartz crystal from my previous short-lived fascination with the electrical properties of the crystals of this common mineral, I had successfully and purely by inspiration arrived at a solution to the age-old problem of day and night. It turns out (as also proven by the very successful attempts of my colleague Andrew Wallace to grow plants in a hydroponic setting during the 24-hour daylight days in Umeå) that most plants do not mind having no nights (this in fact is not the case with some desert plants which have a special carbon-fixing mechanism to avoid having to breathe during the day when humidity might be lost -- however this is irrelevant to us because decorative and edible plants are nearly all not of this group). I had hijacked a decorative garden solar light, replaced the battery with something better, positioned the solar cells so they receive maximum exposure and attached it's white LED to the base of the crystal, which is planted in the middle of the pot. During the day, the plant receives normal daylight and solar cells charge the battery, at night the circuit switches on the LED which feeds the plant over night. It turns out, white LEDs (based on the orange-blue technology, rather than the RGB ones) cover the spectrum for photosynthesis quite well -- in case you have wondered how this can be when common grow lights are usually green, it turns out that plants are worst at using the green part of the spectrum, however if you have a light source with a broad spectrum of emission and cannot produce light from both ends of the spectrum (like LEDs can), a broad green (which is right in the middle of the two desired frequencies) covers both photosynthetic pigments better than other colored broad frequency sources of light. Using a green LED would thus be a blunder (LEDs are very narrow-frequency, especially the RGB ones) and blue/red or white LED grow lights as such should be much much more efficient than other grow lights.

On my future attempt I am contemplating two options, one is to create a bigger version of my 24-hour plant. One of the main criticisms I have received on my last attempt was that the single LED is probably not sufficient to affect anything. I have found some tape-attached LEDs in a local shop as well as meaner solar cells on Conrad, using some sticks and ties I plan to attach the LED tape either in a few loops or in a spiral around a taller plant (probably corn). the additional LEDs will probably require more solar cells and batteries and I will thus have to create the circuit myself (to handle more current and/or voltage).

However what I really want is to create a plant which is geared towards indoor use. My love of horticulture is encountering problems with my roommates who cannot understand that growing plants inevitably involves humidity and dirt. I can get away with it outdoors, however it would probably be considered completely unacceptable indoors -- as I do wish to have plants near to where I sleep I am thus looking towards making that perfect indoor plant -- with no inputs and no outputs. I don't have to say why such a pod would be interesting to people working in sustainability! A plastic pot and another transparent plastic pot over it -- sealed with silicone. If the batch is prepared with all the necessary nutrients and preloaded with all the relevant bacteria to recycle wastes produced by the plant (compost bacteria) it should be theoretically possible to maintain the sealed environment forever (or at least until the plant dies of old age). As photosynthesis tends to produce water in vapor form which cannot be immediately reused by the plant, two Peltier elements at the base of the pot should be able to provide the cool surface on which water can condense -- as this would also cool the container, a control circuit would use the opposite element to maintain temperature and should it still go off balance for external factors, it may use both elements to get the temperature back to proper levels. Unfortunately, Peltier elements require a lot of power and thus would require up to 12 solar modules, which is about 100 € of solar cells and also makes the unit cumbersome and completely impractical, so I am contemplating just using a power socket instead -- it is for indoor use after all.

While interesting, both ideas would require me to have some knowledge in electronics which I currently lack -- so this might take a while. Or I may end up producing something completely different.

Until then, there will still be my software development which is preformed during the work week. As a teaser: I am preparing a web-based community platform for bragging about your productivity and promoting the use of Energy Accounting. However until it is out of the Alpha stage, I will not provide any links.

LP,
Jure

Web 3.0

2010-12-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

As Web 2.0 has been used as a bit of a buzzword used to mean almost anything from shiny graphics to website login-related technology, I thought I'd explain Web 3.0 a bit.

To understand Web 3.0 one must first understand the web 1.0 and 2.0. I assume everybody understands the Internet is a vast array of interconnected computers, the Web as such was not intended to directly represent this, instead the interconnectedness of the Web is describing the way websites link to one-another and you can come from one to the next without knowing their addresses beforehand. Furthermore the "versions" of the Web (1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) refer to different approaches to transfered content over the Internet; I will attempt to explain these.

First, meet Web 1.0.

Web 1.0, called simply the Web at the time, was the simple 1995 way of publishing content online, Geocities and the like if anyone can recall. Every person was free to make a website and show it to everybody else. If people wanted to respond in some way they had to make their own webpage and post their content there, again publishing this to everybody else. Content transfer was one-way, everybody was master of his own webpage and everybody else were just spectators.

As this proved too boring in the long run (people without technical skills didn't bother to make websites and so the Internet became reminiscent of a TV with 16 channels), Web 2.0 evolved:

This brave new Web 2.0 featured interactive websites where all users could post their own content. Just imagine the two red boxes above to be W ikipedia and Youtube, or Facebook. The Web suddenly stopped being a Web of Pages and became a Web of People, as content could travel freely from user to website to user in all directions. Each website grew with the community of people who frequent it to communicate with the others in the community.

As admirable as this level of information sharing might be, it has caused many of these websites to become closed communities, for example Wikipedia editors discourage linking to other, non-wikimedia wikis in articles and Facebook is completely closed to outside linking unless the visitor is also a member (out of "concern for your privacy", note the sarcasm).

The Web is no longer a Web. To fix this, Web 3.0 has been proposed:

This new Web 3.0 is an upgrade on Web 2.0. It implements protocols intended for websites to share information with eachother automatically, in effect linking the various communities into one large global Internet community. RSS is a classic example of a Web 3.0 technology, moderately useless to the visitor directly, but when integrated into other websites, enables live news feeds collected from multiple sites automatically, sharing news, content, pictures between communities instantly.

Web 3.0 is better, but it is not yet currently widespread. People have been working on Web 3.0 technologies for many years now and there are just as many concerns about it's safety as there was about Web 2.0 when the mainstream was Web 1.0. Progress is slow. If you want to help support Web 3.0 technology and own webservers, consider this:

The main attribute of Web 3.0 is sharing machine-readable content. Due to security, fairness and bandwidth concerns, the general consensus is the client machine should be the one requesting the content, which would be possible if the client's browsers would collect data from the different websites automatically using AJAX. Unfortunately cross-site scripting security concerns have blocked this! If your webserver offers content that you wish to share freely in true Web spirit, you should add "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" to your server headers ("Origin" refers to the location of the script that uses the data).

The commands to do this with the Apache web server are...

a2enmod headers

...to enable the Headers module in Apache, which allows you to add custom headers, and then add...

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

...to your apache configuration file (/etc/apache2/apache2.conf). Restart Apache when done.

Website changes

2010-11-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

Although much has been planned, progress is slow. The primary changes to report have been on the website.

We have been working on integrating our efforts more closely with our fellow organizations, beginning with RBOSE, which provide an excellent wiki as well as host an IRC and Mumble server for meetings. The idea is to pool resources on quality services where provided, avoid creating new resources where insufficient time and manpower is available to maintain them and still maintain a suitable level of independence in case something fails. In utilizing these criteria, XML based software appears ideal, allowing the sharing of content between sites without making them vulnerable to single-point failure. We have thus (as you might have already noticed) integrated our member blogs with our website and our facebook page using RSS. Further such integration with our fellow communities is planned (assuming SeqAdm receives suitable approval on this), making the EOS website alive and vibrant with interesting and constantly fresh content (much like for example this RBOSE page).

We have also been working with our colleagues at SeqRel to improve the usability of our website for new visitors. Article categories have been reimplemented (previously removed when re-branding from NET to EOS, for simplicity's sake) and the three links on the front page now lead directly to them, giving you a much better idea what we're all about. Multiple other minor changes have been implemented all over the site and we intend to keep on trying to make the site friendly, pretty and usable for our visitors.

Changes

2010-09-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

A while ago, the organization formerly known as NET has undergone significant changes. We have changed the name of the organization to better suit the times: European Organization for Sustainability or EOS. Recently, talks have begun with newer Zeitgeist offshoots RBEF, RBOSE and AOSDT, to come together to form an association of sorts. This association shares many similarities with EOS' Technate idea, therefore I consider this a re-branding of the Technate in order to, just like the case with the NET to EOS transition, better suit the modern day reality. And while most of us probably envisioned the Technate quite differently a few years ago, it has become obvious trough recent experience in other nonprofit organizations, that in building a new, better and more liberate society, interaction, cooperation and adaptation to other groups and other people is key. So far, things are looking really good and I am very optimistic about the future.

In the course of these events we have also been working on perhaps a far more down-to-earth area. In trying to adapt the theoretical findings within EOS to everyday life usage, we have decided to try using one of the existing alternative economics models with one of the nonprofit organizations we have formed. We have opted to use time banking as a community using it already exists and it is thus easier for us to introduce this as an idea to partners in commerce -- as it is not entirely our idea which would take some explaining, a different entity handling it makes it gain credibility, people may also already be familiar with it from other sources, as in Slovenia, the people running the time bank are all academics and even a well known politician is president. When trying to set up the use of time banking with the organization however, we ran into problems, we were not sure if it was in fact possible for an organization, being a formal entity, to use time banking with the system they had running. So we met up with them in person, after speaking with their president it became clear that the solution would not be so simple. They have thought about the issue before and currently, due to legal restrictions involving taxes, allowing a formal entity to use the time bank would be very problematic. They have opted to seek to serve their existing user base and proove their work untaxable, but this also means that they will not be able to and will not make time banking a true economic system, it will instead simply remain a web-based system for fair exchange of personal favors.

I, obviously, cannot accept that. While on the meeting, we got to understand that the majority of the law we have, that is intended to keep monetary economy fair, is hardwired to the monetary economy as the only possible economy. There is no room in existing law for alternative economics. And while I have personally always believed that politics, is not something I would see as affecting me or see a need for me to involve myself into it, I do recognize that if we want a smooth transition from the current system to a more sustainable one, we must change existing law to support alternative economics as an option. And the only way I see how to do this now, is to try to make public opinion weigh towards it: Keep people informed of the advantages of alternative economics and the downsides of being bound to an economic model which is going to fail them (and has been doing so very evidently for a long time now), then suggest changes to the law to make them happen.

I do not think the researchers at EOS are suitable for this particular task, so I will look elsewhere. Many offshots of the old Technocracy movement, such as for example the Zeitgeist movements are still working primarily on keeping people informed, so I assume they would be the right address for this information.

New Principles and Classes interface

2010-05-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

First post since November 2009... not to say nothing has been happening during this time!

Although the majority of my activities of late have focused on work within our initial Proto-Techante in offering lectures on how to make websites and helping with the IT aspect of another local initiative of a more general ecological nature, I have also recently started re-writing the Principles and Classes database from 2008 to use a more a more streamlined interface as well as much cleaner code!

The new interface features a neat, professional looking interface for viewing the Principles, Classes and Tags entered into the database. The primary motivation for rewriting it was to provide a usable wiki data exporter, to be used with the Mediawiki External Data plugin. The new database uses the existing MySQL backend, but exports the data to a generic XML format and then uses a system of plugins to convert this into the output formats, where the choice of plugin depends solely on the filename extension specified in the URL.

This allows not only a much easier separation between data retrieval and output formatting in code, hence greately simplifying the addition of extra export formats, but also makes it easy to integrate the database into external viewers on the internet. In this case, the system integrates neatly with our wiki, allowing us to enter the standards into the database and then very easily present them to an audience in the appropriate context, without any additional work other than adding a simple string like "{{PCS|2-20100426-120332}}".

I have also added a recursive exporter that provides more data, appropriately nested, intended for the case where the complete text is needed on one page, such as for example when one is to print out the data entered and submit it to a government institution as may be required by law. Although this interface is hypothetically exploitable because it is recursive, this should not be possible durring normal use and would be hard to do without writing special software specifically to exploit this fault. Even then PHP has mechanisms to prevent damage. Thus I am leaving this fault unhandeled. I also plan to write a few additional plugins to allow export to other viewers, as needed, such as RSS (which is viewable as a live feed in other websites).

On a side note, I am also continuing work on the Senzor package to include an AJAX-based graph renderer, naturally intended to overcome the page-refresh requirement and the high CPU usage associated with re-rendering the graph from XML each time.

Development

2009-11-10T18:26:00.000-08:00

Recently we (NET) have stepped up development in multiple areas. Inspired by the activity and cooperation within the Sequence of Relations, our department, the Sequence of Administration has opted to adopt a similar model. Our office hours have been defined as 16:00 to 18:00 CET, each Sunday and during this time we are actively working on our tasks.

I have also been in contact with Raffael Kemenczy from our Sequence of Relations and Mark Ciotola, author of the Energy Input Labeling project. Together we have determined that the time is ripe for more active development of an Energy Accounting prototype (dubbed Project ENACT). Although the Sequence of Administration did not iron out all the quirks in the theoretical framework for nesting Energy Accounting system within monetary systems, I have decided to start work on the practical implementation of the ENACT support software.

The requirements for implementing ENACT currently include characterizing the energy flows, which we found can be accomplished via more widespread use of the Energy Input Labeling technology. The Energy Input Labels indicate the amount of energy added into a product at each step of the production process, allowing for progressive, but ultimately relatively accurate determination of total Energy Input required to produce a certain product. This information is then vital to determining the total production capacity of an ENACT system and determining the Energy Cost of individual products.

By making the Energy Input Labeling software accessible to the general public in the form of open-source, standards compatible software, we hope to accelerate it's adoption. In tandem with actively recommeding the software to the organizations we at NET already cooperate with, this will no doubt create a userbase capable of forming an ENACT system.

The progress of the ENACT support software, namely the Energy Input Labeling framework, can be followed in real-time here. The software is fully compatible with the XMLoverHTTP technology.

The masterplan

2009-08-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Click on the diagram to see the full view.

Being somewhat overwhelmed on the amount of interdependent ideas I had, I decided to put them all on a diagram in order to keep a better overview of what needs to be done when. Each box displays a project I intend to finish, each bubble represents contributions I expect from the outside.

Arrow colors are supposed to help you understand the diagram, although basically, each arrow represents a dependency that needs to be fulfilled in order to be able to complete the project it is pointing to. Ideally, all dependencies would have to be fulfilled before I start working on the project that depends on them, to avoid doubling up work every time something changes fundamentally in the project fulfilling the dependency, however it appears this will not be possible (because of circular dependencies), so some compromises will have to be made.

The descriptions of the projects are as follows:

Project Senzor: Interfacing real life industrial hardware with XMLoverHTTP and implementing it's regulation in the package.
Internet XML proxy: Sortof like an XML firewall, which publishes certain XML data directly from the protected LAN, while preventing access to other XML data published within this LAN.
GUI XML browser - web based: Graphical User Interface for browsing XML files for common users.
Internet Spreadsheet: A web-based application that allows users to create spreadsheet documents, which's cells can link to other XML data over the Internet.
XHTML data output examples: Simple XHTML documents generated dynamically based on XML data published elsewhere.
Framework for creation of XML forms: Likely something based on XForms, a framework that allows easy and fast design of internet forms which provide feedback in XML.
Accounting software: Energy accounting software, bundled with accounting software for non-profit organizations.
Automatic interorganizational communication: A framework which allows standard business transactions to be preformed automatically (without unnecessary paperwork) as well as bringing together all information published by an organization using XMLoverHTTP and publishing it, or retrieving this information from other organizations using the same software.

The overall idea is to:

Develop all software in frameworks to avoid doubling up any work.
Approach users of software by offering software packages comparable with what is currently on the market.
Introduce the XMLoverHTTP concept, allow users to be creative with it and hence generate usable content.
End up with the possibility to create large-scale control loops* such as would be required for a fully integrated prototechnate.

* = An example of such a control loop would be, say you want to use your air conditioning only when there is surplus electrictiy in the power grid. Ecologically, this would be a smart move, and it wouldn't prevent you from ever using your air conditioning either. This system once complete and in widespread use, would allow you to do this quite easily.

I will reiterate that most of the technologies required to implement what is presented in the diagram already exist at the moment and that the designs are quite down to earth.

Currently, I have practical work done in project Senzor and are learning the necesary technologies I will need to create the other bits.

As a side note, I have also published my Accountability system within a Technate article, there was no peer review, which is likely attributable to the holiday time. Still I assume the article was of some use and might generate discussion.

Coding and design

2009-07-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

I have managed to arrange for a chance to present the XMLoverHTTP project in a short presentation at work, hopefully it will generate some interest in the properties of the technology.

While I have been slowly making progress on the code of the project itself (invested relatively little time in it these past few weeks due to inevitable circumstances) I have also taken some time aside to think about designing some of the accompanying applications.

Specifically, when I was coding up a quick website project, I realized that while I have spent a lot of time programming complex back-end programs that are ultimately required to produce data that machines can process, I should also have spent some time to implement trivial front-end applications that display the data harvested in this way. The technology (XML) and why it is so interesting is much easier to explain once you have a simple example to show how everything just works.

Creating the aforementioned website has also shown me, again, the value of creating frameworks and how they can save a lot of time in subsequent programming. So I was looking to design a framework that would serve to create the kind of simple user interfaces that I'll need to make in order to create the XML-based accounting software I am ultimately aiming for. My current idea is creating a framework that allows the creation of XML+XSLT based "Internet Spreasheets", which's cells can be linked to XML data available on the Internet if necesary and the results can be either displayed as the spreadsheet itself, or read directly in XML, for processing in other similar spreadsheets or other XML-based webpages. The cell math equasions would be XPath based for processing in XSLT and I have also been looking to the xsltforms project to simplify communication between the client and the server to directly usable XML.

The aim of these procedings is to create software that people can be comfortable enough working with, to get used to the idea of making calculations based on direct sources of accurate data rather than of one-time copied averages or approximates in instantly outdated books and such. Once a network of such data exchanges exist I persume having this data on the Internet will seem much more interesting.

As a side effect I think the back-end projects I was working on before will be able to use some of the functionality created here (for example feedback from XForms can be used as input controls for manual hardware regulation). And although I am somewhat confused as to what my priorities should be (there appears to be insufficient time, no matter how I look at this), I will always keep working on something.

As a side note, I have also moved my Senzor project to a Mercurial CVS, since due to certain network restrictions in effect I have been syncing the code using an USB key, this should proove quite valuable.

Progress

2009-07-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

More meetings are scheduled to occur on Friday (3. 7. 2009 in Izola; meeting with Raffael of NET), during the weekend (4. or 5. 7. 2009 in Maribor; ZM meeting) and Tuesday (7. 7. 2009 in Ljubljana; meeting with Gorazd of BrainBox Community). I am not sure if I will manage to take part in the weekend one, but everything has been arranged for the other two.

At the same time, I am continuing development (learning along the way) required to complete the XMLoverHTTP project. I have spent time programming a batch of hobbyist applications, which purposefully included an asynchronous pipe mechanism, which I intend to use in XMLoverHTTP, to overcome the problem of pushing commands from a web-based interface (PHP; with very limited permissions) to a hardware control program (Assembly; running with root permissions for hardware I/O).

I am noticing a difference in pace between the social and technical aspects of the progress we need to do and I fear that they may represent a problem on the long run. In simpler terms, we have been having a lot of meetings with people, a lot of discussion taking place, a lot of knowledge being exchanged in a short amount of time; on the other hand the software development, hardware repairs and construction projects have been naturally progressing at a substantially slower pace, and they cannot go any faster due to purely practical reasons. I fear that in expecting results from the practical projects, we will soon have nothing more to talk about and interest in the movements will fall. These differences in pace may even lead people to believe that we are "all talk and no work".

Regardless I hope for the best and intend to keep bussy.

Meetings

2009-06-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

Recently I and Igor had had a number of meetings with Zeitgeist Movement Slovenia and a meeting with a Slovenian group of local exchange users, and I have continued my work on the XMLoverHTTP coding project.

The meetings with the ZM Slovenia group tell us that ZM Slovenia is growing and that we may have a number of motivated people setting up organizations working there. They are also quite open to cooperation, while of course they are not ready for many of the complex solutions we, NET, have already developed. They prefer doing things at their own pace, as they grow. This information is useful to us as it tells us that any solutions we want to offer to other organizations have to be made appropriately simple to use.

On the meeting of the Slovenian local exchange users, me and Igor had the chance to present the concept of Energy Accounting, together with the solutions we have developed. At the meeting everybody had a chance to present their ideas and everybody listened to our presentation with much interest. Igor and I agreed afterwards that the presentation did in fact go very well. One of the attendees saw the possibility of using Energy Credits as the currency in a LETS system, in order to help keep pricing fair. Another one saw putting value into energy input instead of arbitrary determination of current currencies possibly more fair when considering work contributions. All in all the meeting was very interesting and productive. Although one of them refered to the Energy Accounting system as a "technotopia", I believe it would be possible to convince them that this system is in fact very possible and very real, by the next meeting, by providing some prototype of the accounting software to be used to manage an Energy Accounting system, which makes the task trivial. Of course more work is required on the Energy Input Labeling front, as this is also key to making this seem credible and making it work.

I have also been working on the XMLoverHTTP proof of concept coding project. I am currently implementing multichannel input support (both at the data gathering layer and at the user interface layer). My current goal is to speed up development to get to the point of implementation of the XML POST system, to allow XMLoverHTTP feedback / push data upload, as it is a requirement for the accounting software subproject mentioned above.

The prototechnate

2009-05-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

During the AGM and after it, I and Igor of NET have been working on a promising model to use to integrate a system of Energy Accounting with the current monetary system, in effect laying the formal foundation for an organization-based prototechnate.

The idea can be summarized as an attempt to create an umbrella organization, in which different non-profit organizations take membership. In exchange for paying an universal membership fee, they receive Energy Credits, using which they can get services from the other organizations within the prototechnate. The membership fee is defined by, and is used entirely to cover the financial expenses encountered by the other organizations within the prototechnate in order to provide the aforementioned services. As in any Energy Accounting scheme, the total amount of Energy Credits available depends on the production capacity of the organizations providing services within the prototechnate.

While the system appears functional in a small group of organization, further computer simulation will be required to design more complex systems and see how they behave. There was some discussion of connecting the simulation to XMLoverHTTP data to utilize real life data and also interfacing the simulation with a MMORPG in order to better simulate the human factor, but all this is still in the distant future. For now, proper documentation of the idea is key, this is currently a work in progress.

As a side note, the content I have prepared for the AGM and have not yet published here yet is available here. It is a graph of CPU temperatures accumulated and presented using the XMLoverHTTP technology. As the data pool increases you may note the steady temperature increase due to the onset of summer.

Preparations for AGM

2009-05-11T18:06:00.001-07:00

In the last few days I have been preparing material for my contribution to this year's Network of European Technocrats AGM in Umeå, Sweden. Since I am counting on appropriate timing of showing the various content elements, I will refrain from including any links to what I have prepared right now. Sufficive to say, the presentation is about my XML over HTTP project.

Since Zeitgeist Movement Slovenia is preparing an interesting meeting of their own on the 21st, which is close on the calendar to NET's AGM, everything seems to have picked up the pace recently, suddenly there are many meetings, idea exchanges, etc. Hopefully everything will work out as planned.

Social progress protests in Ljubljana

2009-04-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

I have joined in the protests organized by various local organizations interested in social progress. This follows my interest in the Slovenian Zeitgeist Movement as well as my wider philosophical views.

I have been informed of the gathering via the Slovenian Zeitgeist Movement's mailing list. After glancing at the organizers' website and post I quickly assumed that there will be 5 people at the gathering, but at the same time knew that they were promoting something me and my friend have been working on for a long time and hence is worth supporting.

I was however positively surprised: The protest ended up quite massive with over 900 people participating, international groups participating from countries from Germany to Serbia as well as many Slovenian groups, primarily anarcho-communist groups, as well as WW2 veterans, left political party activist branches and various cultural and interest groups.

The background here is that in Slovenia the movement for social change has begun during WW2, when the self-organized resistance movement, also known as the partisans, emerged. From the very beginning this social change was designed to reach beyond simply defeating the axis forces, but ensure a fair social system. A system that capitalism is not, even by the criteria defined back then. Movements for social progress thus extrapolate upon work already done in this area historically. This is obviously a good thing as history happens to be a science.

The media coverage was poor and while I am not one for conspiracy theories, after comparing actual events and footage made, with the resulting news coverage of over 7 different media houses, I must admit the censorship was very harsh and interestingly unified. The tendencies amongst the Slovenian media today seems to be a bit of westernized revisionist history, where you try to make everything into a compromise, even if it is to suit the interests of a group of people who's intention it is to destroy everything they cannot own and control.

At the end of the day the protest was a great success... And beyond simply showing support for an idea, it was also very useful in helping the various organizations working in these areas to network. I expect interesting aftermath, when we manage to get in touch with everybody and start cooperating.

Embeded system

2009-04-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

Browsing trough a price list for a different purpose I managed to find a real life example of just the kind of embedded XML-over-HTTP provider I wrote of in my article. The Conrad Linux Control II Application Kit.

It's the kind of Linux component you would typically find under the hood of your average working network router, next to the modem chip. 16 MB of flash memory, 8 MB of RAM, and most importantly a serial, USB and network connection. The software, being Linux, offers a fully functional web server, amongst other things. Being 5V devices and draining just 300 mA of current, they use about 1,5 W, making it possible to fuel them with something as costless as solar cells. They come in circuit board form as well as in nifty packages such as seen on the picture. This is indeed just over 8 by 5 by 2 cm in size, which IMHO is tiny!

This device is more than enough to interface a data source of choice (may require USB, Serial connection or Ethernet based A/D converter) with XML-over-HTTP and connect it to the Internet to be available anywhere, or secured with the usual cheap network equipment we are all familiar with (a router, a VPN, a dailup, anything). Offers all the advantages mentioned in the article.

The bugger costs just over 230 € and while this makes it about as expensive as any low cost desktop missing a few components and thus sort of unsuitable for home use, I immagine in industrial use where other concerns are more relevant (vibration resistance, durability, size, power supply) they are quite a good deal.

I'd love to program a real life application using XML-over-HTTP with these.

Slovenian Zeitgeist meeting

2009-04-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

I have joined in on this week's Slovenian Zeitgeist Movement meeting, in hopes to learn more about them. They seem to be an interesting bunch with varied expertise and a technocratic vision. This is somehow different from what I had expected, but in a good way.

The general consensus was to try to reach younger people (students) with a gentle reminder of the system in which they live in and various technical solutions to their problems. They will be producing leaflets and leaving them in waiting rooms and other places where bored people hang out at. It was also decided not to go for rigid geographical grouping, but rather feature a map with members marked, where people can decide for themselves what they consider to be "local".

As previously mentioned, I have committed to helping them on the technical side. I will be helping them adapt their Plone based website to the common ZM design.

Weather reporting

2009-03-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

As an example practical application of "XML over HTTP" that would look good enough to an end-user... and motivated by the point that my friend was saying he was going to convert one of his old laptops into a digital picture frame... I was working on a "XML over HTTP" application for weather reports.

The weather reports come in XML over HTTP, the idea was that the application chooses an appropriate pretty picture for the weather foretasted for tomorrow, combines it with a little overlay using SVG and outputs a picture that is set as a Windows desktop wallpaper by a third application (I'm thinking Active Desktop or something more secure). This means that when using the application, your desktop wallpaper is a pretty picture that matches the weather that is going to be tomorrow and has all the info on the side in case the picture doesn't mean much to you.

The problem currently was that the weather report comes with 8 levels of cloudiness plus 16 types of weather, which sums up to 128 distinct weather states, which I didn't want to end up finding pictures for. Right now the data structure is made so that the 16 weather states have pictures they default to when separate cloudiness pictures aren't set. This however makes the application dull and boring, when there are not enough pictures entered.

Ultimately in order to make this application work out, it'd have to be a community effort, where a website would allow visitors to enter picture URLs and associate them with different weather states or link them to weather transitions (the application could pick out a picture depending on what weather today is turning into what weather tommorow, for an added sense of realism). The server would then allow the user to pick, or randomly select out a suitable image from the pool and use it for that user's wallpaper. The problem with this scenario is that of course, the weather reports are for Slovenia, and finding a suitably sized community of picture authors is somewhat unlikely.

Still this is an interesting project, I will prepare the code and try to make it as universal as possible, then leave it up to the end-users if they want to make it live or not. The current code is able to interpret a weather forecast and output a picture using SVG. I will still have to add rendering into a format you can display in Windows, and the overlay box with the details.

Human Resource Managment

2009-03-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Thomasz (from NET) and I have been discussing creating some computerized interface for Human Resource Management during the last weekly NET meeting. And while the current interface (the user addition thingy for Joomla, which is essentially a forum member registration and login tool) exists, it is not very practical in that when a new organization comes work with us, we can't immediately produce a list of things we could do for them as a team of experts.

If a similar situation arised at my job, I would have defenitely used a database to solve it. Databases are uniquely suited for this type of problem: Enter your people into a table, fill out the data you can and do your best to keep it up to date either trough convenience or automation. Then when somebody asks you a question, pull up a query and tell them.

Doing something like this for any group of people larger than six, without a database, would be a major nightmare: How can you give someone an answer you are honestly sure of, when they present you with a set of complex criteria and you have 50 people to consider and compare? Obviously however, a database is not good at subjective comparisons either, so the key to setting up a database you can use, is setting up the fields so that comparing them using logic functions or using simple math, gives you the answers you'll need.

So I have rememberd the Semantic Wiki extension I have set up into our wiki purely out of curiosity. The last that I was working with it, I realized it produced database-like functionality: If you give your properties in your articles their values, then you are able to query your wiki for the data and end up with a value, list or table. I thought that was really cool and still do. For this particular situation, we will be using this functionality to experiment with different fields (table columns, in databasespeak) and seeing how they work out for the output we need.

Once we have a good idea of what to pick, we will decide what to implement it in. At that time I will likely be discussing with Igor. I am looking at the idea of keeping Semantic Wiki underneath since it so conveniently produces "XML over HTTP" output, which would work neatly with you-know-what. But then again it is also very complicated, especially considering the point that we won't need this flexibility once we are all set and that reimplementing "XML over HTTP" output using PHP is childs play.

We will see.

Article done

2009-03-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

The article I was writing, Technocratic information exchange is now 'complete'. Actually section 7.3 is still not finalized since the software package on which it is based is not yet complete.

Accepting peer review on the subject here. Still have to prepare a presentation for it... but these are things I can do simultaneously.

Writing article

2009-03-21T16:03:00.001-07:00

I am currently working on an article regarding my XML over HTTP project mentioned here. It is taking shape on the NET article writing wiki here. I have named it "Technocratic information exchange".

I think I have managed to describe the concept much better in the article and I have also managed to include comprehensive diagrams and references that I have not had an equal chance of including during my blogging and forum posting on the issue.

The article is not yet finished... Part 5, describing how my software development fits into all of this, is not yet written and I usually write the introduction and conclusion last... as well as of course the abstract. But those do not take much effort it is the creative stuff that is hardest to write.

I intend to have a presentation of the content offered in the article during this year's NET AGM (Annual General Meeting), on May 15-17th in Umea, Sweeden, where I will of course also include all the progress that I have made on the project in the time being. Get in touch with NET if you also wish to attend!

Publicizing XML over HTTP

2009-03-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I have started investigating the options of obtaining XML over HTTP data from devices managed by the government, which produce data that is already made publicly available in other formats.

I have been looking at atmospheric quality control sensors on two locations and traffic counting and categorization sensors in Ljubljana as well as statistical data offered by the Slovenian Eurostat equivalent. If this data was made available using XML over HTTP, it should be easy for third-parties to produce a wide variety of usable webpages with live data, from WAP-based traffic reports to national energy output analisyses.

I have sent out a number of emails to different government and maintenence addresses in a quest for information. I had hoped to accumulate enough information in order to prepare a project I could do for them with a complete solution that offers XML over HTTP. I have recieved some responses so far, so here is what I got:
* The statistical office of Slovenia reports that they are aware of the value of offering XML over HTTP and are planning to implement this in the next version of their website. All we can thus do for now is wait and see.
* The municipality of Ljubljana reports that data from their atmospheric quality control sensors is collected and made avaliable on their website (as we already knew) and in a standard format over FTP which can be made available for educational purposes upon agreement. FTP access can be scripted, thus the data could be made available using XML over HTTP.
* The maintainer of the traffic counting and categorization system reports that the devices call home using a GSM communicator, meaning the data is likely gathered on another system via some kind of automated mechanism. Further investigation would be needed to figure out if an XML over HTTP access point could be created without incuring any additional costs.

I have also recieved a hint from Thomasz of NET on how to properly address government institutions. I plan to contact them in the name of NET with the framework for a project ready to enable XML over HTTP access as well as demonstrate practical implementation of a third-party XML data presentation program.

Senzor update 2

2009-03-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have been working some more on the project to create an example program for industrial application that utilizes XML over HTTP. The program's data output now works flawlessly for 1 channel which includes outputting the data into a SVG-based graph. I have also set up the appropriate mechanisms to ensure that the XML to SVG processing is done client side when supported (Firefox, Opera, etc) and server side when not (Internet Explorer).

In the future I will work on making the user interface as convenient and pretty as it can be, working on expanding the hardware I/O software to read from all 16 channels and look for a way to implement feedback.

RSS - continued 5

2009-03-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

I updated the XSLTaggregator code to properly handle RFC 822 dates, for sources that omit the weekday.

RSS - continued 4

2009-03-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

I have made a few minor adjustments to the XSLTaggregator program. Apparently I got part of the RSS 2.0 standard wrong, RSS 2.0 tags have no namespace. Corrected this and the validation now succeeds. This also makes the RSS feed viewable in Internet Explorer 7.

The source code ZIP is automatically updated with the latest code of course and I have also updated the websites that offer these combined feeds, including the one that offers the NET Blogs feed.

EDIT: I also got the idea to set up a combined RSS feed for all Zeitgeist Movement blogs. I don't know if the idea will work out but I will try. Posted about it on the Zeitgeist Movement forums. Also set up a common website for all XSLTaggregator installations I intend to set up.

Biogas update 2

2009-03-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd also mentioned that the car modification company, mentioned in an earlier blog, has replied to my email and summarily answered that the conversion costs approx 1150 € plus taxes and that cars could be converted to run on methane too.

This basically means that the technology is all there and there is nothing more to ponder about in that respect.

RSS - continued 3

2009-03-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

The XSLTaggregator program has been updated to include a properly functioning sorting algorithm. While this is not actually necessary as any properly designed RSS tool should be able to display the entries in the proper order anyway, this improvement is designed for all the improperly designed RSS tools. ;) The order of choice is latest-first, so the same as typical blogs.

I would like to, again, thank the helpful people who helped me:
* Combine the for-each loops that check all items in all documents into a single one
* Properly sort by date in XSLT 1.0

The code is available on the existing link published in the last blog post.

Also, apparently the other members of NET have agreed to set up blogs for the purpse, which is great as it means my code will actually be used in at least one place.

RSS - continued 2

2009-02-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

The source code for the XSLT based RSS aggregator is now complete released under GPL (v3) at:
http://dustwolf.ctrl-alt-del.si/downloads/XSLTaggregator_src.zip

There is hopefully sufficient documentation included with the files. Some very basic technical skills required to get it doing what you'd want it to do, but it's all very clean and flexible. It is officially faster than Planet too (benchmarked on my Celeron 300 MHz).

If there will be any modifications to the code, they will always be published under that link.

RSS - continued

2009-02-27T19:59:00.000-08:00

I have gotten some time and wrote the XSLT-based RSS feed aggregator. The software offers a lot more standards compatible output, which however ironically not even the official validators comply with, due to those silly Atom wars.

If you ask me, Atom is unsuitable and RSS 2.0 is completely acceptable. This statement is based on RSS's compatibility with RDF extensions, which are a key feature for full XSLT compatibility. If you ask others Atom is the future and RSS 2.0 is awkward. What really suprizes me is that the W3C would side with the Atom proponents, considering the point that RSS 2.0 is more compatible with their remaining standards that they still support.

I will release the XSLT source code under GPL for the aggregator shortly, it just needs some basic documentation and some PHP code to go with that can be used to reconfigure the feed aggregator dynamically. As it is right now, the software allows you to write an XML file with the desired links and other information and the software will automatically fetch the data and produce the combined feed. It should be trivial to produce PHP code that can generate XML output to be used with the software, especially considering the point that I already have code that does exactly this. I consider this PHP code part of the package and will finnish it tommorow and include it.

RSS

2009-02-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

One of the ideas I was pursuing recently was the idea of setting up a number of blogs, for the currently active Network of European Technocrats (NET) members, in which we would describe what we are doing. This is the concept behind this blog as well.

The idea is to show other NET members and our visitors the point that we are in fact, working on things, even when we are not discussing anything together. The idea was that the blogs RSS feeds would be combined to produce a single RSS news feed that could easily be read or displayed on a website.

A few days ago, I set up a test feed aggregator and fellow NET member Igor, set up a sample component in the NET website which parses it's output into a set of links, in style with the other components. We are currently discussing how to proceed.

I had hoped that I would be properly prepared with examples, to show the potentials of this technology, but as could be expected, I did not prepare enough. A NET website themed full blog content output is something I would need. Preparing this as an example to show functionality is a little impractical for me as I do not have access to the tools that would make this job trivial. I'm also still a little uncomfortable with Joomla's interface.

If I get a little time for these things I will instead try to create an XSLT+PHP based feed aggregator and do my best to produce standards compatible output, since the popular blogging sites do not and I have to fix this somehow.

Self-management

2009-02-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

This year is the 30th anniversary of Edvard Kardelj's death, which gives me a unique opportunity to study the history of my country and learn about this man, who was apparently just as important as Tito, that I have almost never heard of before.

Political issues aside, his work extends into the more philosophical area of ensuring actual freedom for everybody (taking it further from the abstract concept of our current "democracy by proxy" approach), as a progressive upgrade to democracy, summing it up to a philosophy called "samouprava" which was translated into "worker's self-management", which shares many common points with the theory we are working on at the Network of European Technocrats and the Zeitgeist Movement today.

I find it very interesting that someone from my nation's not-so-distant past was already working on a philosophy similar to the one we are working on now, and has worked on implementing it his entire life. Albeit it could be said that he did not succeed, I think that is a matter of perspective as to me, working towards a goal, is sometimes as good as achieving it, so long as there is someone to pick up where you left off after you are no longer able to continue.

Unfortunately for this man, nobody did pick up where he left off... there are a few statues of him around town, but I haven't learned anything about him at school for one, nor has anyone else I know. Luckily, his work survives in the form of speeches and books, and I may be able to find some of those in the local libraries. Hopefully we will be able to derive some usable information from them, something we can use to continue his work today.

Biogas update

2009-02-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

Upon reading into the issue somewhat I have learned that car-gas adaptations typically use liquefied Propane/Butane which, having a boiling point of -0.5 ˚C and -30 ˚C are much easier to store in liquid form than biogas / Methane, which has a boiling point of -160 ˚C. The Propane/Butane mix is also a bit denser as liquids than Methane which is all bad news for any plan to run a car on biogas.

Fortunately however, it turns out that Methane burns hotter and as such gives more energy per kg. The figures, are that Propane/Butane gives off 49,2 to 49,9 (depending on the mix) kJ per gram (or MJ/kg), whereas Methane gives off 54 kJ per gram, obviously more.

To convert these values together with density this means...

As gas Propane/Butane gives off 91,3 to 122 MJ energy per m³, and Methane 38,7 MJ per m³. As a liquid Propane/Butane gives off 25,33 to 29,52 GJ per m³, where Methane gives off 22,41 GJ per m³. So keeping Methane as a gas for fuel on a car wouldn't work out very well, but as a liquid it could work. That being said however, it is true that given that you can find a place for a suitable container on a car, biogas does provide more punch per kg of fuel than gasoline, unlike Propane/Butane.

Having done this little bit of amateur research I find that I don't have a clue about chemistry and will have to find someone who does if I intend to continue this project.

Senzor update

2009-02-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

The project I wrote of before that aims to get industrial control hardware to utilize / output XML over HTTP is called "Senzor", due to a general lack of imagination on my part.

The program is designed to run under Linux and I am using an old 300 MHz Celeron for the task. The physical hardware I/O is done by an industrial RTX-03A 12-bit A/D D/A card.

I am making the hardware control component in Assembly and the user interface in PHP with XSLT. The Assembly part is divided in several components, such as hardware I/O, pooling, averaging, etc; today I am writing the component that outputs the XML file.

Web 2.0

2009-02-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Me and a bunch of other people from the Zeitgeist Movement IRC server, have been thinking of compiling a set of Web 2.0 type programs to allow the distributed community across the many different websites to work together as one, without necessarily having people wander across different websites reading everything and sharing links where the topics matched.

We have been trying to learn about the existing technologies available in the field already to attain maximum compatibility, and just prepare some kind of guide that would make it trivial for people to link up into our network. Naturally thus we are looking at XML, RDF and XSLT (google them if unfamiliar).

Mainfram, a person I know from the Zeitgeist Movement is currently working on a way to interface together different forums. I have suggested doing this in a way that works with SIOC, in order to take advantage of the existing work put into it by other people as well as maintain compatibility in the future. It's all looking very interesting thus far.

This idea has vague connections to my idea to link industrial hardware into the Internet. XML over HTTP being the data format of choice, the output is compatible with the other XML-based applications including the ones mentioned above. Using XSLT engines it becomes possible to combine and convert the data and by combining this with the existing dynamic web page generation software, such as PHP, there are no more limits on what can be done this way and how user-friendly it can become.

I am currently thinking of making a CMS for generating XSLT-based data converters for XML in PHP. This could be big, like Facebook big.

Given all these possibilities, I am eager to continue my work, however I will have to balance my wish to prove this technology in the many areas of possibility, with the need to finish the basics first. As in order to do this, I have to both explore my options in order to know how I am going to implement existing functionality already present in other industrial software, AND have to deal with the low level details of implementation, I would really appreciate having anyone else on my team!

Veganism, etc

2009-02-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Just a little upset by the whole concept of veganism and how it's always (almost literately) forced down your throat whenever people talk of health or righteousness... which is not surprising now that I come to think of it.

Anyway, wrote a little scientific rant about the whole thing and set my mind to write an article about it... The truth is, it's a personal decision that, if you make it, is essentially bad for your health (albeit arguably better for the animals). Not to say mine, about my preference of meat (which is based on my personal beliefs) is actually any healthier, but still.

Interesting that with that kind of technology, which is in our reach at the moment, you could make people carnivores as well... with the proper microbial gut flora, eating raw meat would not be toxic, etc. But then this then becomes an almost moral / psychological issue.

Biogas

2009-02-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting ideas that I have been working on in my mind quite recently was the idea of using an algae growing photobioreactor together with a biogas generator to produce free methane and the oxygen required to burn it, using sunlight.

The point of the concept is to have a sustainable source of a fossil-type fuel, which is convenient for transport and use. The whole idea has already been extensively discussed on the Network of European Technocrats Forum. The necessary steps, before we even start dreaming of a large-scale implementation were the feasibility studies to see how useful the system would be, theoretically.

The results of a quick preliminary feasibility study, using the information available on the Internet was not good: "A theoretical algae biogas system capable of generating as much energy as a standard N4 nuclear power plant would thus have to have 500 square kilometers of photobioreactor surface." This great disappointment is likely because the figures for photosynthesis efficiency are in fact much lower than the biology geeks would have you believe: around 8%. However we did not give up, it is likely the figures will move in favor of the technology when more accurate experimental data is obtained, since the current data was based on biological and technological systems that do not come together as efficiently as we suspect an algea biogas system would.

While I have continued work in the many other areas I am also interested in, Mansel Ismay from the Network of European Technocrats has started working for a company interested in oilgae. The projects are related in that we both use algae, so we could share some data. An important distinction is that in oilgae, not all of the algae biomass is used to produce the fuel, rather just a slime that a few algae species secreet in order to stick together. From the biotechnological perspective this difference is quite significant as optimization studies being done will likely not target growing the most algae possible, rather they will likely target the exact circumstances under which their species of algae secreets the most slime. Therefore their data may not be directly usable, yet I guess at least they are growing algae.

In case you were wondering, a biogas generator is capable of converting any biomass into Methane and CO2, this process is theoretically a lot more direct than the oilgae approach and may proove to be more efficient. The reason why oilgae projects are going for the somewhat cumbersome option of producing biodiesel instead is because they believe that biodiesel will be easier to adopt, as little or no modification is required on existing vehicles in order to use it.

Biogas is similar in that aspect, but not identical. As a first and most obvious point, biogas is a gas, whereas biodiesel is an oily fluid. Yet a quick review of local history prooves that vehicles have been and can be quite easily converted to run on gas. Most recently I have even managed to spot a local company that makes these modifications to cars. Their current solution appears to be centered around liquified gas of a different type. I am not sure if the technology could be used to accept any other type of gas, but I intend to find out. A requirement to liquify gas after producing it is just another figure to be taken into account when calculating total process efficiency... if the figure becomes or drops under 0%, we will know the technology cannot be used to this end.

But we just won't know until we do the math and hence I am still very interested in researching the technology.

LP,
Jure

First entry

2009-02-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Hello readers,

Although I do keep a number of other blogs around different services, as appropriate for each area (art, kernel programming, Slovenian tech support), I found I still needed to cover a specific area of my life.

Specifically this would be the philosophical direction of where my life is going right now, my leftist roots and my subsequent work in the non-profit organization called Network of European Technocrats. The network of integrated programming / hacking solutions that have been inspired by it and so forth.

Being the design perfectionist that I am, everything I have made is somehow related to the ideas previously explored and works with them. My creative spirit guides me trough new technologies with my either simplistic or typically over-elaborate solutions. It is my intention to keep this blog up to date with my programming / learning progress, so that others may share in the benefits... as a form of progress documentation, a helpful reference for those seeking to understand the software I make and/or theory I write.

To help put things into perspective, here is some background information:

A long time ago I realized that many of the decisions in life are ambiguous and any choice is valid. Instead of making the decisions myself, I have decided to leave them to another person and thus combine my philosophical neutrality with my desire to express loyalty. This person, who shall be known as Ice, is a revolutionary socialist. Remember this perspective in life is not wrong by itself, it is ambiguous, taking another principle for your guide in life would change nothing, as in the end it is your ability to believe in something that makes you a better person or worse in the eyes of the community you chose to identify with. I was quickly able to search trough my past and find my leftist roots that were there all along. Ice is a hard working, good person, with wishes and goals like any other person. While trying to reach the goals he spoke of I have never lost my ability to view a situation objectively and find the best possible solution. This may sometimes have not been in accordance with his short-term desires, yet I have been successfully pursuing all the long-term goals he had in mind, and I have been doing that ever since.

Currently, I am involved with the Network of European Technocrats, as I believe working with the other skilled experts there greatly increases the probability of being able to change something for the better for every person in the world in the future. I currently hold a Director position with the organization, though I made it clear on multiple occasions that all I really wish to do for them is productively contribute in a way that they deem useful. The advantages of working with them are showing already, as they have covered many areas that need to be taken care of, which in effect means that I can focus on the more technical of solutions required in the world today, which is an area I am very skilled at.

Recently I had focused on the quite specific areas of XML over HTTP as a communication facility and Assembly for efficient hardware control. I have also been working on various other areas, such as providing an IRC server for the Zeitgeist Movement. Then there is also the point that I work as a programmer (amongst other things) in a company that deals with biotechnology, and have quite some experience writing control software. It is highly typical of me to be working on several very different areas at the same time.

While at one point talking on the aforementioned IRC server, I had realized that by bridging the gap between Industrial hardware control and XML over HTTP, may help significantly improve overal industrial efficiency on the long run. The idea is to provide an automatic interface between infrastructure machinery data sources (powerplants, etc) and the Internet. Typically information is transfered manually between the two areas, e.g.: 1. Researcher makes a survey of the state of machinery, 2. Researcher writes a report and publishes it, 3. People on the Internet gather the information and transform it into feedback. This is slow and leads to a situation in which the people capable of providing usable feedback do not have direct access to the data they require in order to provide it. My solution aims to overcome this bottleneck, by providing people with a single simple step to them publishing the data directly on the internet and thus greatly reducing the effect of their lack of time to do some charity of this sort.

The solution seems trivial to implement. Of course I do not dream that my 1 program will change the world, it may however work as a working example I can show. If the effect of the synergy between low level and Internet technologies prooves attractive to commerce, the idea will likely quickly spread and thus will change the world.

I will keep you up to date with my progress.