Life & Research Notes

I started a new promise service Rails app a few days ago, and I’m discovering all these wonderful new features in Rails 1.1, as well as some features I didn’t properly take advantage of in the previous version.

• There are many, many plugins, and some of them are awesome. I threw authentication together really fast with Rick Olson’s acts_as_authenticated. It feels easy and lightweight, and uses generators to create a nice starter scaffold. I think I’ll also use techno acts_as_attachment to handle user pictures.
• I looked at the Engine plugin system, and specifically LoginEngine, but the whole Engine approach just feels too heavy and fixed for my needs.
• Migrations are great. In addition to providing a simple schema/data versioning system, it is also just nice to take care of most of the database work without every touching sql.
• People will sign promises to make them active, as well as to bear witness. I’m planning to use polymorphic associations to leave room for other types of models (like contracts) to be signable later. Might even pull out the code into an acts_as_signable plugin…
• Since people can sign these signable items in different capacities (signee, witness, objector to start), this is a good place to also use the activerecord :through association.

Those are the notes for today. I’m sure I’ll have more as development of this thing progresses.

For my Comparative Media Studies final paper and presentation I focused on the design of social, programmable contract objects that I’ve touched on in a few previous entries. This paper covers all the ideas, and I think it satisfies my overall goal of nailing down an outline of the topics. Yet I’m slightly disappointed in how it reads. it feels slightly stiff and analytic. It is a bad style habit I unfortunately picked up writing analytic papers for undergrad philosophy classes, and that I still inadvertently fall back on occasionally. My goal for my next writing is to tone down the analysis and find more rhythm.

remixing_contracts.pdf

Last week Ben Wagner and I finished our work on an RDF toolkit for crawling, searching and querying RDF graphs. It’s in scheme, and uses a simple s-expression based query language that is inspired in part by SPARQL.

Download about_triplemint.pdf (120K) & triplemint.tgz (180K). Requires the 2006/04/14 snapshot of MIT Scheme as well as a copy of the W3C’s cwm.