Trickiness in picking right PostgreSQL schema for timestamp data coming from around the world (varying Time Zones), and how/when to convert it. (more)

see esp clean water

Discussion Forum software. Discourse is an open source Internet forum software application founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron.[2] Discourse received funding from First Round Capital and Greylock.[3] From a usability perspective, Discourse breaks with existing forum software by including features recently popularized by large social networks, such as infinite scrolling, live updates, expanding links, and drag and drop attachments.[4] However, the stated goals of the project are social rather than technical, to improve online discussion quality through improved forum software. The application is written in JavaScript and Ruby On Rails,[5] and is released under the GNU General Public License version 2. PostgreSQL is the supported database management system. It also uses EmberJs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software) (more)

An argument is an attempt to provide a compelling, rigorous demonstration of the truth of a conclusion, based on the truth of any number of premises. If the argument is valid, the premises together entail or imply the conclusion... The difference between an argument and an explanation should be clear. On the one hand, the function or purpose of an argument is to convince people who might be doubting the conclusion. On the other hand, the function or purpose of an explanation is to give the cause of some phenomenon which we observe, or are willing to assume actually occurs. To put it even more briefly, the purpose of an argument is to persuade, while the purpose of an explanation is to explain. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument (more)

DJ Adams: Monday morning thoughts: local http servers and containerisation. One of my all time tech heroes Jon Udell wrote regularly for Byte (more)

aka Middle-Man, Curation (more)

Jon Udell: OData is grease to cut data friction. Back in 2007 I talked with Pablo Castro about Astoria, which I described as a way of making data readable and writeable by means of a RESTful interface. The technology has continued to move forward, and I’m now a heavy user of one of its implementations: the Azure table store. Yesterday at PDC we announced the proposed standardization of this approach as OData, which InfoQ nicely summarizes here. (more)

Jon Udell: Weaving the annotated web. The set of URL-addressable resources has two key properties: it’s infinite, and it’s interconnected (more)

Jon Udell: A virtuous cycle for analytics. Suppose you’re a member of a team that runs a public web service. You need to help both internal and external users make sense of all the data that’s recorded as it runs (more)

Joe Gregorio: Looking back on five years of web components. Over 5 years ago I wrote "No more JS frameworks" (JavaScript) and just recently Jon Udell asked for an update. (more)

Jon Udell: Searching across silos, circa 2018. I just needed an easier way to search for words that might be on our blog, or in our docs, or in our GitHub repos, or in our Google storage. So I made a web page that accepts a search term, runs a bunch of site-specific searches, and opens each into a new tab. (search engine) (more)

Jon Udell: OData for collaborative sense-making. The other day, Pablo Castro wrote an excellent post explaining how developers can implement aspects of the modular OData spec, and outlining some benefits that accrue from each. One of the aspects is query, (more)

Jon Udell: Highlighting passages doesn’t aid my memory, but speaking them does. The annotation software I help build at Hypothesis is ideal for personal note-taking. Close to half of all Hypothesis annotations are private notes, so clearly lots of people use it that way. (more)

Jon Udell: Query like it’s 2022. Monday will be my first day as community lead for Steampipe, a young open source project that normalizes APIs by way of Postgresql foreign data wrappers. (more)

Jon Udell: Renaming Hypothesis tags. Those of us in the small minority of consistent taggers care a lot about the tag namespaces we’re creating. We tag in order to classify resources, we want to be able to classify them consistently, but we also want to morph our tag namespaces to reflect our own changing intuitions about how to classify and also to adapt to evolving social conventions. (more)

Jon Udell: How SQL can unify access to APIs. In the original proposal for the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee wrote: A generic tool could perhaps be made to allow any database which uses a commercial DBMS to be displayed as a hypertext view (more)

Jon Udell: Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation”. Hypothesis can unify a set of annotations across a family of representations of the “same” work. (more)

Jon Udell: Web components used in the ClinGen app. A few years back I watched Joe Gregorio’s 2015 OSCON talk and was deeply impressed by the core message: “Stop using JS frameworks, start writing reusable, orthogonally-composable units of HTML+CSS+JS.” Earlier this year I asked Joe to reflect on what he’s since learned about applying the newish suite of web standards known collectively as web components. He replied with a blog post that convinced me to try following in his footsteps. (2019-09-17-GregorioLookingBackOnFiveYearsOfWebComponents) (more)

Jon Udell: Notes for an annotation SDK. While helping Hypothesis find its way to ed-tech it was my great privilege to explore ways of adapting annotation to other domains including bioscience, journalism, and scholarly publishing. Working across these domains showed me that annotation isn’t just an app you do or don’t adopt. It’s also a service you’d like to be available in every document workflow that connects people to selections in documents. (more)

Network-centric warfare, also called network-centric operations[1] or net-centric warfare, is a military doctrine or theory of war that seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the robust computer networking of well informed geographically dispersed forces. It is based on ideas of marshal of USSR Nikolai Ogarkov, set out by him in early 1980s.[2] It was pioneered by the United States Department of Defense in the 1990s.... Network centric warfare can trace its immediate origins to 1996 when Admiral William Owens introduced the concept of a 'system of systems' in a paper published by the Institute for National Security Studies.... Network centric warfare is criticized by proponents of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW (FourGW)) doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare (more)