Re: [ba-ohs-talk] What are we trying to accomplish?
Mark Szpakowski wrote: (01)
> On Thursday, May 23, 2002, at 07:36 AM, Murray Altheim wrote:
>
>> This is why I'm not trying to develop an OHS, just some functional
>> tools for authors. The "synthesis" that is occurring right now is
>> happening at the code level, not the design level, such that I can
>> fairly easily incorporate other projects (like XML parsers, HTML
>> markup cleaners, node visualizers, etc.) into my project, as part
>> of my design.
>
> Low-level lego bricks, but not robolab/mindstorms designs. I think that
> while positioning for larger syntheses and co-designs, working in a
> loosely coupled fashion, with hooks into identifiable nodes, will
> promote bottom-up interoperability. (02)
Yes, but if you've every played with Mindstorms or Robolab you'd know
that it's a pretty poor system to work with, that the various hacker
alternatives (leJOS, etc.) are enormously more powerful and hook
the Lego RCX hardware into much more interesting and expandable
development frameworks, such that you can even program them in
higher level languages like Java and C (I wrote an editor for the
latter in Java). The low level bricks are actually getting to be
pretty high level bricks in their own right, witness xindice.jar,
which provides an entire native XML database. The bottom-up
interoperability happens across the various APIs being developed
within each domain, such as SAX, DOM, XMLDB, etc. (03)
> For example, if this mailing-list provides (ie, pushes at us) e-mail
> messages with purple numbers exposed, these purple numbers will serve as
> hooks into the identified and archived nodes (REST-visible). Our various
> tools, client-side to begin with, can then grab these and impose our own
> organizations on them.
>
> This seemed like something eekim and John Sechrest were working on: cf
> http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/ba-ohs-talk/0203/msg00042.html#nid04:
>
>> * From: Eugene Eric Kim <eekim@eekim.com>
>> * Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 16:15:56 -0800 (PST)
>>
>> On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, John Sechrest wrote: (01)
>>
>> > Please go into majordomo's config.
>> > And in it set the "Footer" to be a reference to the list:
>> >
>> > http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/ba-ohs-talk/0203/dates.html (02)
>>
>> Good idea. (03)
>>
>> We can hack majordomo to include this information in an X- mail header
>> too. (04) (04)
Yes, each of these components adds into the pot another flavour,
but we're still missing something along what you were referring
to as a Mindstorms-level design methodology (though hopefully a
much better and more flexible methodology than Mindstorms). That
was really the problem with Mindstorms: not flexible enough,
closed, and no API. A design methodology needs to solve those
problems to succeed. (05)
Murray (06)
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK (07)
In the evening
The rice leaves in the garden
Rustle in the autumn wind
That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (08)