Zach Copley

There were two presentations. The first was given by Jon Seidel, the creator of 4MyPasswords.com!, a service designed to be a secure, websessible central repository for passwords and other secret bits of data.

Jon developed it partly to scratch an itch — as a way to always have access to a password manager from any computer — and partly as a way to learn Rails.

He demoed the application and walked us through the evolution of its development. Then he gave sort of a laundry list of the things he likes and doesn’t like about Rails.

Some of the things he likes about Rails: the overall framework, code generation (scripts), database migrations (which he especially enjoys as he hates being a DBA), having a built-in Web server while developing, the tools, documentations, and some of the libraries — he mentioned ActionMailer as being really cool.

Dislikes: pluralizations, a lot of the conventions, and in general he seems a bit skeptical of some of the hyped features of Rails. For example, he doesn’t find Rails to be as intuitive as it’s supposed to be.

It also sounded like he has had a lot of trouble with his PC-based tools and development environment. The IDE he used, RadRails, frustrated him a lot. It’s broken in a bunch of ways and he’s received little or no support for it. Several attendees of the Meetup had good suggestions for alternative tools to try.

His final verdict, however, is that Rails is awesome and he loves it.

I’m sure for some people 4MyPasswords.com! will be just the ticket, but I’m far too paranoid to trust a hosted service with that kind of information, even though I’m sure Jon is an upstanding guy. During the Q&A for his presentation, I asked whether he had posted any sort of privacy policy. He had not. I’m glad to see he’s added one.

My own paranoia aside, 4MyPasswords.com! is a nice little Rails app, and I’m glad I got a chance to hear the story behind it. One of the cool things about the East Bay Ruby Meetup is there’s a nice mixture of experienced Rails developers, people just getting started (like me) and everything in between.

OWL

Next up was Tom Atwood, the CEO of DATA-GRID, a startup in Oakland developing a DBMS based on the W3C’s Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard. My understanding is that it’s a database optimized for handling ontologies, which could replace current DBMS systems in some (or all, I think they hope) circumstances. He gave a whizz-bang PowerPoint presentation, which I found a little hard to follow, but the technology looks neat. Part of the presentation was a mock-up of a futuristic sports news site covering the Tour de France in real time with lots of annotated video feeds. Tom made the point that video data is getting really complex now (heavily annotated) and meshes well with OWL.

It sounds like the OWL DBMS is a huge system, “analogous to Oracle 10g.” The schemas for it will be in OWL, although it wasn’t clear whether they will be developed using OWL or some higher-level intermediate language or tool. Identifiers for records (keys) will work across the Web, instead of only being local to a single database. They’ve developed something called ActiveOWL to “replace” ActiveRecord. I’m assuming it’s an object-to-ontology-mapping (OOM?) layer that will sit in for ActiveRecord. DATA-GRID is looking for Rails developers to test OWL DBMS and ActiveOWL, and perhaps build applications that can take special advantage of an ontological DBMS. Maybe this is my imagination, but I felt like Tom was hinting that applications with user-defined ontologies — tagged stuff ala flickr and del.icio.us — might benefit from having an OWL DBMS backend. Web 2.0-style mashups are apparently a good candidate for some reason as well. (Perhaps because the feeds they are comprised of already have a considerable amount of semantic structure?) It will be interesting to see more of the nuts and bolts of ActiveOWL, and hear more about what they have in mind.

What the special advantages of an ontological database are, I’m not clear on. I guess the bet is the future will be all about “The Semantic Web.” If application data and Web content will be organized in an heavily ontological way, then it makes sense to have a persistence layer to put it in that understands ontologies, instead of shoehorning ontological data into relational DBMSs. The problem would be similar to what we have today with persistence in object-oriented languages and applications. Ideally, at least it seems to me, we would store objects in object-oriented databases (ODBMSs), but for various reasons they haven’t caught on much (yet), and instead objects generally get flattened into relational databases.

It also sounded like for ontologically-organized data, OWL DBMS can be faster than relational databases. Tom mentioned that the NSA is testing OWL DBMS with huge datasets and has had some favorable results.

This is most unsettling and crazy idea I’ve heard in a good while. I found this very well-done animated presentation by Neil Adams, who seems to be some sort of amateur scientist as well as a professional animator, and influential comic book artist. He claims the Earth has doubled in size at least twice, and seems to base this in large part on his animated analysis of tectonic plate movements over time. He also has a big website with lots of fun animated movies to watch, and writes essays, such as “The case against pangea.” Can there be anything to this?

Oh, and BTW, the extinction of the dinosaurs (video clip) was due to the expansion of the earth, too.

I usually have no interest in Slate, the online magazine created by Microsoft and later sold to The Washington Post. The articles mostly contain mediocre analysis of whatever the editors deem to be the issues of the day. It’s sort of like an online Newsweek. And surprise, surprise, (probably I’m the last person to know this) a quick check at CJR shows The Washington Post also owns Newsweek. I consider Newsweek and Time essentially propaganda rags primarily designed to tell people what to think. But I’m digressing. Occasionally, everyone starts talking about some Slate article and it bubbles up to my attention. This time it’s a hit piece on WikiTravel, the free, online, community-authored travel guide.

The article is called, “Can Wiki Travel? Touring Thailand with only the Internet as my guide,” by Tim Wu — A pun, and a call to can Wikitravel, because Wu complains that relying on Wikitravel for advice for his last Thailand vacation was “very nearly a disaster.”

The bugs up his bum seem to boil down to this paragraph from the article:

My plan for this trip to Thailand was based on a somewhat corny vision: I wanted to climb a limestone cliff with my bare hands and look out at the ocean below, while pursuing a mind empty of stray thoughts. That meant I had three basic questions: Where can I find rock climbing in Thailand? What kind of people go there? And where can I stay? On all three questions, Wikitravel failed to deliver—in part because it’s still new but also because, ironically, Wikitravel fails to capitalize on the full potential of the Web.

He complains there’s not enough detail in Wikitravel. Specifically, he wants to know where to go to avoid “naked German package tourists.” Well, Wikitravel intends to be a travel guide to the entire planet, in every language. That level of detail is going to take some time to develop. Wikitravel has only been around for a few years.

At first it seems like he acknowledges that fact in the above paragraph from the article (“….Wikitravel failed to deliver—in part because it’s still new….”), but later he blames the user-generated content model itself.

But the more serious problem was accommodation listings. This may be the Achilles’ heel of Wikitravel’s all-volunteer model. It’s no fun visiting and ranking dozens of grimy hostels and boring hotels, especially when you’re on vacation. Consequently, listings were sparse.

Where’s the justification for that statement? Consequently, huh? I guess he took a big poll of Wikitravellers and found they’re all lazy bums. He also goes on and on about how his trip was saved by another online travel site that “unlike Wikitravel is a professionally written site.” He seems to be making the case that, really, travel guide writing should be left to the pros…

Hey, wait a sec. What else does CJR say The Washington Post owns? I’ll be! They own Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, a major publisher of travel guides (“Travel Experts for 50 Years”), which, incidentally, has its own website for dispensing travel advice.

Okay, I’m going to assume Tim Wu simply wasn’t aware of that fact, considering he missed the boat on so many other things. Still, I think it’s the responsibility of the editors of Slate to disclose this kind of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, Slate seems to have the same brand of shoddy journalistic ethics as Newsweek.

Neutral vs. biased information

The other major complaint Wu has is Wikitravel tries to keep its travel information “fair,” meaning written from a neutral point of view (like Wikipedia), and therefore the advice is not dishy enough. He wants to know candid personal opinions and read about individuals’ travel experiences.

If Wikitravel contained that kind of commentary, along with real photos of places people have stayed, it would be twice as useful as it is today.

Here he has a point. Opinionated advice, anecdotes, photos, and travel journals are very useful. But he goes too far when he claims that biased advice is better, and Wikitravel’s articles are useless because they aren’t biased. There’s room for both neutral consensus content (how to get in, get around, what the major attractions are, what the local customs are, etc.) as well as individual opinion and experiences. In fact, the two types of information complement each other nicely.

If Wu had done a little more traveling around Wikitravel itself he might have noticed that the Wikitravellers are quite aware of the need for both kinds of information. There is a new adjunct to the main Wikitravel site called Extra (currently in public beta) for sharing opinions, pictures, travel stories, etc. It’s probably going to take awhile before there’s a lot of that Wu can use… stuff about Patong, Phuket being “[a] truly ugly tapestry of the surreal, debauched and depraved,” but that’s exactly the kind of thing Extra is for.

A gripe from me

However, I’m still not sure that Wu’s being completely up-front about his reasons for writing this article. He claims to be a true believer in the Wiki-style consensus content model.

As a confessed Wikipedia addict, sometime contributor, and true believer, I loved the idea.

Oh yeah, well if there’s not enough detail about Thailand, why don’t you fix it, Mr. Wu? Not enough hotel listings for you? How about adding the hotels you stayed in to Wikitravel’s Thailand entries? How do you expect Wikitravel to ever have more listings?

Update #1

Some readers of my blog have pointed out in order not to look like a hypocrite, I should disclose the fact that I’m good friends with the founders and operators of Wikitravel. Something that is obvious if you look at the rest of my blog, and why I didn’t explicitly state so in the first place. However, I have no financial stake in Wikitravel, or any ties to the company that owns Wikitravel, Internet Brands, Inc. My interest in Wikitravel’s success and my motives for defending it are based in my belief that it’s a worthwhile project. I use and contribute to it myself. Like Wikipedia, Wikitravel is a success story for the wiki-based open content model.

Update #2

I am a little bit surprised by the net’s response to Slate’s article. The amount of vitriol flung at Wikitravel seems unjustified to me. Most of the blog posts about it seem to fall into the me too category. I guess Slate is as good at shaping opinion as Newsweek. Or perhaps this is just another case of “No good deed goes unpunished” (a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable world-wide travel guide).

Copley Coffee Can, originally uploaded by zcopley.

Also see: Copley Coffee Can w/French Press

Stupid farmers market. I meant to just ask the orchid lady if she had any of her special secret coconut-husk based orchid medium, but I accidentally fell under the diabolical spell of these two wicked little orchids. I don’t buy phalaenopsis (one on the left) because I’m snobby, but this one was on steroids or something and, well, I dunno. It made me buy it. Then I got this orangey epidendrum, too. It’s about ready for a repot. It will live outside. Those suckers can grow to be six feet tall.