Kingsley Idehen's Typepad

WinFS validates Unified Storage Vision

I have been following the PDC event and information outflows with very keen interest. The newly published document from Microsoft re. WinFS is certainly interesting reading, especially as it articulates a vision that validates our Virtuoso universal server (as far as data storage goes). The excerpt below pretty much sums this up:

Every year, as new hard disks get bigger and faster, applications catch up by producing more data. Hard disks are commonly used to store personal information: correspondence, personal contacts, and work documents. These items are currently treated as separate entities, yet they are interrelated on some level; and it's no surprise that e-mail comes from your personal contacts list and influences the work that you should be doing and hence determines the documents that you'll create. When you have a large number of items, it is important to have a flexible and efficient mechanism to search for particular items based on their properties and content. Up until now, storage mechanisms like Outlook®, the Windows® Contact List, or Windows Media® Player media library used unrelated technologies for the storage of items and the mechanism to search for them. Well, those days are over, thanks to Microsoft® Windows code-named "Longhorn."

The fact of the matter is that the problems articulated in this article exist today, but I struggle with the belief that in today's "Internet time" organizations are simply going to sit back and wait until 2006 and beyond (when mid 2004 is even too late) for a possible solution.

The Longhorn generic storage subsystem, code-named "WinFS," can store data of all types and use one mechanism to access it. This is a huge change in an OS that has relied on multiple, incompatible storage for data including the registry, event log messages, contact information, and e-mail, or simply used multiple flat files for data such as images and audio. Since WinFS is implemented using database technologies, you get an efficient and flexible mechanism to query for data items, the ability to replicate data to stores on other machines, and facilities to handle backups and restores.

So Microsoft now gets it, and it is strategic. Cool!

On our part we need to get the message out more aggressively, especially as Virtuoso already delivers on this vision by combining WebDAV, SQL, XQuery, XPath, XSLT-T, XML Schama, SQLX, Free Text Indexing, SMTP Agent Storage Drivers/Sinks and the lower layers of the Web Services protocoal stack as part of a single server solution (that we call a Universal Server). More importantly Virtuoso delivers this across Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Linux today (see the live demos).

Read the full article.

HOWTO: Apache-PHP-ODBC on Mac OS X

There is a new HOWTO document that addresses an area of frequent confusion on Mac OS X, which is how do you build PHP with an ODBC data access layer binding (iODBC variant) using Mac OS X Frameworks as opposed to Darwin Shared Libraries.

This document basically brings clarity to both the Frameworks and Darwin Shared library approaches.

Google reportedly exploring IPO

Google are certainly a good example of innovation done properly (for the most part), and I think watershed would be an understatement if they actual innovate on the IPO front also - as hinted in the piece below:

Google reportedly exploring IPO The Web search giant could go public early next year using an unusual electronic bidding and placement system, according to a published report. [via CNET News.com - Front Door]

Using SQL-XML Based RSS Feeds to Syndicate Documentation, Tutorials, and Demos

I have embellished a number of weblogs that I oversee (Personal, Virtuoso, and UDA) as part of an OpenLink technology "dog-fooding" effort. We now have SQL-XML based RSS 2.0 feeds that make an array of content available for RSS Aggregators as well as ad hoc XQuery and XPath queries over HTTP/WebDAV.

Feed	Description
Virtuoso Documentation	Product documentation available as a collection RSS feeds per chapter with a feed catalog in an OPML file.
Data Access Driver Suite Documentation  (Multi-Tier and Single-Tier)	RSS feeds and OPML file based feed catalogs for both the Multi-Tier and Single-Tier Drivers.
Virtuoso Tutorials & Online Demos	Online tutorials and live demos cataloged in an OPML file with an RSS feed for each tutorial/demo.
Animated HOWTOs	RSS Feeds for viewable features and functionality walk-throughs covering UDA and Virtuoso.

An Email User Interface to Web Services

By Bryce Curtis and Jim Hsu, IBM developerWorks

Many portable devices let mobile users send and receive e-mail over a wireless network. These portable devices include Short Message Service (SMS)-enabled devices, two-way pagers, cellular phones with e-mail service, and portable networked laptops or Personal Data Assistants (PDA) with e-mail.

Although these devices can send and receive e-mail messages, they cannot yet access and run Web applications and Web services. The Web application client is the predominant browser. However, as these portable devices become increasingly popular, using their e-mail capabilities to access the growing number of Web services and Web applications becomes increasingly beneficial. In this article, we detail an e-mail user interface that can interact with a Web application in a similar manner to that of a Web browser. In the architecture we propose, the HTML model combines with e-mail technology by routing incoming e-mails to a Web application server.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/wi-email/

What's Up with Feedster?

I have been trying to get Feedster to index my blog correctly and no matter what I do I get the same result -- neither my main blog nor any of my other non Radio Userland blogs ever get presented on the search results page.

Strangely enough, when there is a reference to my blog the urls are broken because they actually point to articles from my internal blog (which is part of a private net behind a firewall). Now, I do actually blog behind my corporate or home firewall (depending on my location at time of blogging), and I when I blog the actual typing and editing occurs within a single Blog Editor (typically using Zempt, w.bloggar, or Newzcrawler). My blog posts are propagated (conditionally using upstream rules via the Virtuoso Blog Engine) to many surrogate blogs such as the ones listed above which may or may not be Virtuoso based, they just need to support Blog Post APIs such as Moveable Type, Meta-Weblog, or Blogger.

Anyway, I need to know if there is something about this my blog that is tripping up Feedster.

RSS: The Best Of All Possible Worlds

RSS: The Best Of All Possible Worlds

The thing that most surprised me today in the SoftEdge panel on Social Software was the reaction to RSS. I should be clear that I am an RSS true believer. It seems to me that metadata as a byproduct of social software engines (be it blogging or social networking or whatever) is not only enviable, it is inevitable. RSS and FOAF and other yet-to-be-determined social software data protocols will become standards because it simply makes good sense for them to be standardized. Anyone paying attention to the unbelievable development and adoption curve of wireless can appreciate the immense value driven by standards -- and, in particular, standards that are truly standard. So it came as a bit of a shock to me that when I questioned the panelists on the implications of RSS and the Semantic Web, they were less sold on the inevitability of it all.

When asked the question of whether the proliferation of RSS and FOAF might make it possible for reader technology to be the next killer application in knowledge management, I got very strong reactions from both Reid Hoffman and Meg Hourihan. Reid stated that he did not believe that RSS was sufficiently robust to provide significant value an any level. Meg followed up with a general indictment of the semantic web, which she views merely as a geek utopia. I will admit that I'm a fan of Candide (particularly at the hands of Bernstein), but I hardly view myself as Panglos. One need look no further than, for example, the tools that Oddpost has incorporated into its web email client to allow an integrated email and blog experience. Better yet, through a relatively simple web service, Oddpost can deliver an RSS feed of a particular Google News search so that you can keep track of keywords that are of interest to you without having to visit Google repeatedly to find out if your company or candidate or favorite band has been mentioned in today's news. The same is true of watch lists on Technorati. Rather than periodically check to see if someone has linked to your blog, Technorati will do the work for you and deliver the info to your inbox only when there is information to be delivered. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg but the demonstrate the nascent power of RSS and related standards. I'll have to wait for another panel to have that argument with Reid and Meg.

[via VentureBlog]

The Nigerian SCO Connection

I am a Nigerian reminiscing as my country that turns 43 today (as a post-colonial independent nation).

October the 1st is an emotional day for many Nigerians, especially those of us in the Diaspora. Our country remains a paradox as the excerpts below attest:

The more popular view of Nigerians as a result of the proliferation of 419 scams (the mangled by-product of misdirected intellectual prowess and the boundless depths of greed -- which applies to perpetrators and victims alike).

The Nigerian SCO Connection "I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP ..." [via Be Blogging]

Funny! But many a truth is told in jest (I think that's how the quote goes); this one is pretty damned poignant.

Unbeknownst to many, there are other views of Nigeria (unfortunately these aren't the norm).

The call for optimism by our president (he doesn't support or condone the 419 nonsense):

 

President Olusegun Obasanjo urged Nigerians to change their ways and be optimistic about the future as Nigeria marks its 43rd Independence anniversary.  Read on

[via Odili.net � this site desperately needs RSS!]

 

There is an increasing pool of key high-tech players of Nigerian decent (and nationality) making constructive impact on the high-tech industry (making it less lonely for myself and other Nigerians in the high-tech arena):

 

Dare Obasanjo is a member of Microsoft's WebData team, which among other things develops the components within the System.Xml and System.Data namespace of the .NET Framework, Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML), and Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC). More of Dare's writings on XML can be found on his Extreme XML column on MSDN.

 

Uche Ogbuji is a consultant and co-founder of Fourthought Inc., a consulting firm specializing in XML solutions for enterprise knowledge management applications. Fourthought develops 4Suite, the open source platform for XML middleware. Mr. Ogbuji is a Computer Engineer and writer born in Nigeria, living and working in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Website: http://www.fourthought.com/

 

Philip Emeagwali, a computer scientist, is one of the fathers of the Internet and a trailblazer in petroleum extraction," as quoted by CNN. 

 

Philip leaves all Nigerians with this important message on this special day (key excerpt below):

"Our investments in education and technology will be our legacy to our children. They are investments that will bring the best out of the next generation of Nigerians and enable us to reach our potential as individuals, as communities, as a nation."

Happy Birthday dear motherland!

AfricaNigeriaxml