Podcasting

New Media shocks itself! :-)

... and in less momentus news...

comments are now enabled.

Landing on Titan

and beaming back data is simply amazing - I think its hard to quantify just how much of a stunning impressive achievement this is. 25 years of total effort and everything had to go according to plan - plus or minus some workarounds: like having to change the entry trajectory of the probe remotely to deal with the doppler shift.

Make hacking around with computer code and networks seem a rather humble occupation!

BPEL & Agents

The interest in using languages such as BPEL for longer running interactions certainly seems to be growing judging by stories like this one - Jim Clune at sys-con (linked from the SOA blog). This kind of interaction has been one of the goals of Agent technology research for a long time - example of these kind of long running interactions can be found in many places including the FIPA Agent specifications. Hopefully people in the research field can actually inform the development of things like BPEL for this purpose rather than have new wheel's invented.

Damn

I really needed those 2.68 microseconds.

Large-scale deployment of Web Services

Interesting article on Mike Lehmann which picks out the management of policies and service level agreements as important challenges - something which hopefully gels very well with work in the agents and distributed AI field.

Webcam mania

And this is off topic - but it is truely one of the wonders of the web when thousands of people forget failed to secure their webcams and you can just use google to find them. It only took a few hours for people to helpfully make lists so you can find your own cam to steer in snowy Japan...

UPDATE: One of my favourites.

Maybe it's time to switch jobs!

Consultancy for Service Oriented Architectures is the business according to Zapthink.

Scope and content

Part of the reason for starting this blog was that I was forever sending emails with web snippets to people (and hopefully this is more efficient) but the other was as a motivation for commentary on interesting issues that come up in our research field: hence a brief intro is probably in order -- the official story can be found on my work webpages but in brief I work on distributed artificial intelligence, agent technology, web services and the semantic web and in particular on open systems of deployed automous systems.

A good deal of that is pretty academic but I'm also involved in a number of things more focused on deployment and take-up namely opennet, agentlink and coordinate the @lis technology net project which carries out technology demonstrations in Latin Amercia.

I'm also definitely not the first blogger in the research area - several others have much longer and more distinguished records, above all: Peter McBurney,
David Pallman (with a piece on agents). It's also great to see articles from back as far as 1998 Information week on Agents (did that all happen...?) + good info sites on agents - see UMBC Agent News, Agentlink and multiagent.com.

There are also lots of long running blogs for Web Services (Loosely coupled, Mike Lehmann, Chris Weyer, Rebeca Dias, SOA) , the Semantic Web (including the semantic web blog demo and those on a great list by Dave Becket) and the web in general (I won't start on those).

There are probably also a couple of million sites on development and software engineering out there (I won't start on those either!).

Damit i'm a communist...

Bill Gates at CNET news (but well, possibly not a real communist - apparently a modern day sort of communist), maybe i should put the new flag up on the site.

Things that you believe but cannot prove...

As picked up on slashdot, the edge has an excellent collection of responses to its question of the year "what do you believe that you cannot prove?"... I especially like: Nesse (on the advantage of blind belief), Schank (on irrational choices), Rovelli (stating that time des not exist), Bering (on the paradox of knowing what it feels like to be dead), Gershenfeld (on the difficulty of proving progress), and Bruce Sterling's simple We're headed for climatic mayhem.

Then there is a nice one for self analysis - do we do this? + some more technical ones to subscribe to: Gilbert and McCarthy.

Lastly at least a couple to diasgree with (sorry guys)!: Feinberg and Dennet...

Gets my vote

But what to do in newton week?

The point of this blog...

Actually, ABC/Time do have a point - i got a lot out a whole bunch of blog sites last year (this, this and a whole army of US election commenary sites for example) . Not that i'm going to produce anything mildly useful here - but at least it seems that blogs are an excellent electronic version of walking down the street muttering to yourself - a must have for a harassed academic...


A second reason after preparing for academic senility is that there's actually a fair bit of interesting stuff to write about: a kind of a twilight zone between software/hardware/internet research (where we live and containing some of the stuff that might one day work) and the Internet / Systems people use today - and the twilight zone is suprisingly small. The next 10 years or so of Internet development could well be just as interesting as the last 10 (too criptic? - some random things of interest: GOM, EPIC, Alphaville and a bunch of interesting technology trends like Web Services, Agents, Grid and the Semantic Web starting to come of age).

It would be nice to think some of it could be predicted here - but more likely you'll just see bemused commentary as it happens. Anyway, maybe the blog experiment will die in a couple of months or U might manage to say something sufficiently offensive to generate a DOS attack on blogspot.


I don't expect anybody to read - but if you do; last one out please switch off the light...

Quick painless first post

Just to make sure it's not looked back upon with too much nostalgia. ABC news just call bloggers the people of the year '04 - so it seems safe to start one now: no danger they'll be the people of the year again in '05.