User:Jukeboksi/Blog/Archive/June2003

30.6.2003

Hmmm... Really important questions by 66.163.X.X and a constructive approach which the usual inhabitants of our funny garden have been missing for some while. I have some practical, real world issues to take care of today, but I will most certainly try to address the issues introduced or highlighted by 66.193.X.X today.

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28.6.2003

My own machine is very likely being so rooted by an unknown party. This does not neccessarily affect consumerium, unless my shell passwd to the host running the wiki has been exposed. Anyway the situation is not good.

I took care that there is a current (28.6.2003) mysqldump in several safe places now. I should arrange for this to be done automatically every once in a while.

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27.6.2003

Still disorientated and not doing anything worth mentioning.... sorry about that. I'll try and get my head together that I can do something useful to advance the project.

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26.6.2003

Hmmm... This is the strangest thing. After feeling sad, lonely and disorientated for the whole day then suddenly my mood improved dramatically. Suddenly I felt warmth and a sense of direction. I wonder what caused this... Well I'm not going to do any work today still and I know that it's genrally a foolish thing to report psychological occourrences to the net, but something tells me I should share this with you. Juxo 19:22 Jun 26, 2003 (EEST)

And I have food, yummy :)

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25.6.2003

Hum-hum. It seems we have 221 unique red links with at least two pointers to them. I agree with our Über-Troll that we shouldn't rush into defining terms too early, but I'll go through the unambiguous ones and put at least short definitions.

_{Hmm.. URL-syntax like http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Features&days=30&limit=500 produces Recent Changes on articles that are linked from Features. Handy.}

want a secret ? go on an article. look at the bottom of the page. Click on related changes. There you have it ;-) Don't repeat. That is a secret.

Ok. Let's keep it a secret. I'll do my part by brushing my teeth and going to sleep

sweet dreams. I'll do the same

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24.6.2003

• Getting the Features properly named, sorted, their interdependencies, feasibility and usefullness evaluated is one of the top priorities. Last few days I've been mostly harvesting the net for useful links and resources. Here's one: ONELOOK dictionary - if you're looking for a dictionary or a translation, try this one

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23.6.2003

Today I'm still finishing maintenance on my machines and I have to do some laundry too so it's a bit slow today.

Here are some links that fit together:

• http://oscar-osgi.sourceforge.net/ - GPL OSGi implementation (2.0 compliant)
• http://www.osgi.org/ - Open Services Gateway initiative (currently at v3.0)
• http://www.possio.com/ - wireless access points, with inbuilt OSGi server + BT+Wlan and/or Ethernet+USB connectivity. Expensive, versatile.

I'm wondering about the relationship between EURONICE (over 17000 terms) and UNSPSC (16384 terms). Both describe products and product groups. Google gives zero hits when searching for both... I'm on it. Oh yes... I found a topic map that was automatically built from UNSPSC it's in XTM-format. Must get some tools to look at it. You can find it here if you want to take a look.

I'm borderlining on IOD: It seems that UN has more then one classification scheme for products. You can browse Inventory of Classifications at UNSD's site... look at CPC (Central Product Classification)... it's way overlapping with UNSPSC. Way to go UN.

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22.6.2003

I'm in a train to my ADSL now, but I won't get to do any work for a while because I have to do some serious maintenance on my GNU/Linux box. Midsummer was nice and relaxing. Not as warm as I had hoped for but still ok weather.

Private System maintenance still in progress... looks like it's going to take all the day. This does not affect consumerium.org in any way

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19.6.2003

Today I sent an e-mail to gnu@gnu.org to inquire if they have knowledge on previous experiences on licensing XML DTDs, Schemas and XSLT under GPL, because the sensibility of this is a big questionmark, or is it...

If we have GPL Schema and someone modifies it without notifying us (which they are allowed to do) and makes a document following the altered grammar and tries to input it into the system. The software checks it's validity against the Schema it has and determines it is not compliant and the document is not processed, because the software doesn't know how to process it.

Ok. That's it 142.177.X.X, you're the trolliest troll I've ever met. It was nice to inform us that we are not fully complying with GFDL at the moment, but otherwise I'd say that you're just making me even more confused by mixing rantings about content licensing issues and software licensing issues.

Instructional capital regarding the content related issues mentioned in what we are supposed to be doing and in what order is something I've been trying to work out for over 2 years and I hope I'm nearing a solution and I need to relax now, so I'm off to an undisclosed location to enjoy the midsummer festival and I hope to spend some time not thinking about consumerium and wish that my subconsious solves it for me.

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18.6.2003

Nothing much happened today. I spent most of the day thinking about The Consumerium Exchange, which is once again coming up soon ;)

I'm off to celebrate midsommer festival tomorrow or friday at last, but I'll propably take my iBook with me so I can make some edits too. I'm in a need of a vacation from this stuff, but on the other hand it's just starting all to come together in my mind so I can't leave this alone. Going to sleep now...ZZZZ

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17.6.2003

Special Thanks to User:Stephen Gilbert informing us about Greenscan project and vice-versa.

And the theme of today is:

If you want to know what this is about search the net for "cuecat" _{(registered trademark of http://www.digitalconvergence.com/ )}

Now I'm off the link harvest the Greenscan project pages.

Harvesting done. Enjoy. I put them in User:Juxo/Scratchpad because I just don't have the time to write proper articles on these. Maybe the articles should be written into Wikipedia. Let's give some back to the community, the 'pedia has given us so much resources. Juxo 15:09 Jun 17, 2003 (EEST)

I still keep thinking about the licenses, because if I had hastily started developing the actual software under GPL it would have lead to serious trouble (no way of verifying that the clients (or even worse: servers) aren't modified to do something they shouldn't). I still think it's safe to make the XML (ConsuML as the working draft name is at the moment) available under GPL... if someone adds something to the grammar that isn't supported by the processing software for some reason, then they get an error message, or the elements and attributes that are not recognised are ignored in the processing.

Coming up soon The Consumerium Exchange... But before I take that on I'm going to have a shower, eat, try to relax and maybe see some friends.

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16.6.2003

Today I'm off to Wikipedia and Google to see if I can get some relevant articles started.

I started w:List of company registers and plan on working on it regularly and I hope you contribute too since finding these using the ordinary search tools is not easy due to the widely varying naming policy of the register/office/agency/organisation handling these and I suppose one could see some national advantage in having these services difficult to find using the internet.

Other significant finding today is OHMI. The databases they offer advance our effort greatly, if we can just negotiate unlimited access to them (Daily updated mirrors would do just nicely).

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15.6.2003

Today I'll see if I can scribble down something sensible about developing XML, to aid the Sourceforge project get on it's way once it's started. Maybe I should surf a little to assess what grammars we should include in our interoperability goals.

I just read the morning paper and the situation here in Finland is that all the three major mobile carriers are offering similar GPRS-deals: 100MB of GPRS data / month for under 20?, so it's likely that, at least here, Consumerium service deployment using XHTML UI over GPRS is quickly coming feasible. Finland is on the forefront of mobile technology adaption so the price and service competition is fierce in here, but I believe this case is similar to how sub 50$ fixed ADSL services spread from the US to rest of the developed countries.

gotta run now... switching to GPRS so the "flooding" will slow now ;)

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14.6.2003 Did you know that there are approximatelly 48.179 different stocks listed in stock exchanges of the planet? Now you know. I'm going to get something to eat now.

I'm doing mostly browsing today and some editing in w:, seems we have accumulated some info that is not in the 'pedia so it's time to give back to the community we can thank for great software and vast information sources.

I'll try and avoid this senseless copy-paste-linking frenzy that's infested so many traditional sites ("Hey, look this site uses at least three of the same words as us, let's add a link to our links-page!").

Here's something that might turn into a precious gem from w:Economy of Earth if people just worked on it.

That's it... totally IOD for today.

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13.6.2003

I'm in the process of looking for a job since my last job was only a 6 month contract and now I basically have no source of income and I've noticed that when being totally broke my brain doesn't work well at all. It's a total bummer not to be able to buy some food or a cup of coffee or whatever when going about your business. If you want to hire me you know how you can contact me. Preferably I'm looking for something that allows me to take a peek at consumerium throughout the day and maybe make a minor edit or two to be honest.

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12.6.2003

Yes! I'm writing this over Bluetooth+GPRS-connection. It's not fast and there seems to be some reliability problems, but it's freedom to contribute whenever I have my laptop and phone with me :)

We're celebrating LÄSPÄ (actually LÄSPÄ of 2002, which didn't get celebrated so we're doing it now) today, so I won't be working much on cium today and I'm leaving my ADSL for w:Helsinki, but I have my 3650 with me so you can expect updates daily.

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11.6.2003

I started

• Consumerium:Village pump - New questions about how we should go about doing things in Consumerium goes here or if it's a question of a permanent sort then put it in Consumerium:FAQ

• Consumerium:Conventions is a page started because we seem to be in a state of lot of incoherence and once we reach consensus about some terminology or procedures it goes here and everything conflicting with it on other pages will be ruthlessly edited/axed.

• Polls - selfexplanatory

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10.6.2003

I lost my old phone or it got stolen so now I scraped up all the money I could get and bought a Nokia 3650 and got an GPRS-connection that should be operational tomorrow and after that I'm free to roam and work on cium at the same time. My initial reaction to the phone is good. Bluetooth+GPRS+camera allows me to draw a scetch on paper, take a photo and then put it on the net. A little simpler then using GIMP to do the same ;) As I suspected the people behind the codec is Hantro, an w:Oulu, w:Finland based company. I saw some of their codecs at a fair in 2000 and they were very impressive, even as low as 100kbps streams were just sheer magic. After that I haven't heard or seen any of this company in the public, but they rule when it comes to codecs.

I installed some programs (packages are suffixed sis) mostly written in Cplusplus and I have to say I'm going to have to take a crash-course in C++ development since the programs perform really nicely and it seems to be the primary choice of language to implement Consumer Agent

I know I haven't been as active as possible lately, but this could change for the better now that I can connect whenever I need to (just as soon as they get my connection operational)

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6.6.2003

Today I contacted Prof. U.B. Lindström and asked if he would like to contribute to the project. He is retired and to my understanding a normative authority in the field of organic farming, ecology, development and globalisation issues. Let's hope he has some time for us.

Also sent some email to http://adbusters.org to get us included on their links page and also contacted someone who might be able to help us in determining ownerships of US companies.

Going to sleep now...

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5.6.2003

Baracoda Pencil is just what we need to get the UI Consumerium deserves. Great stuff by http://www.baracoda.com . Best regards to them!

http://archive.org doesn't have us indexed, but is that a bad or a good thing? I don't know. Stupid silly mistakes are forgotten, excpecially with little SQL, but on the other hand we can't track the development from the Archive later on and it's kind of annoying not to be in the archive.org.

I just looked up the log and ia_archiver has been to the site on 6 different occasions starting from February so it's even stranger that we're not showing up in http://archive.org and, no, our robots.txt doesn't prohibit it from crawling. Go figure. Juxo 19:42 Jun 5, 2003 (EEST)

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4.6.2003

I've noticed we don't have anything on Bluetooth. w:Bluetooth is not good and has errors. Since adaptation of Bluetooth is so crucial to our project we should have a special page just for tracking Bluetooth news.... things like Apple has integrated both WiFi and Bluetooth in their high-end PowerBook models and Sony's high-end DVs have also integrated Bluetooth.

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3.6.2003 the URLs are a pain. Can you get Wikipedia-like URLs working?

http://consumerium.org/wiki/glossary for instance should just go to the wiki-editable glossary, and

They're not a pain, they're just not like on 'pedia. It can be done with mod_rewrite (Apache module) and I'll get on it tomorrow or the day after that

http://consumerium.org/glossary should go to an approved or known/older version. Maybe 48 hours after it appears as the wiki version, it becomes the standard version, unless it changes again.

This I don't follow. I've been thinking of setting up some static pages like "Executive Summary" and "Press releases", but there's much to wiki before this type of html-pages are a priority.

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2.6.2003

Something interesting going on at http://www1.ean-ucc.org/gdd/ (GDD == EAN.UCC Global Data Dictionary) I've just glanced at it and I'm not really sure what it really is but it's got a bunch of XML Schemas that make up maybe more then half of the markup needed for Consumerium. Keep an eye on this one, because EAN.UCC, is like big, in the area of identifying things.

Just wrote an article to http://indymedia.org . Propably a bad time due to the G8-summit going on at the moment. Also started crafting a new front page, with tables and some sort of hierarchy. This is not going to be an easy one, but the current front page is not good.

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1.6.2003

Today I heard on BBC World service that you can get the best profit margins in which continent? Surprise (or is it?)... Africa(!).