#jiscopenbib #jiscxyz
I have a three dimensional-vector of my state – the axes are Busy/Happy/Tired. They are somewhat but not completely orthogonal. So today is 9/11/10 (I mark out of 10). If the B goes above 10 then we call the fire-brigade to stop the smoke. Blogging normal requires B<9. So a brief update.
The next few months will be momentous – we really are changing the world, but we are also seeing the forces that represent the digital gold-rush as strong as ever. That’s why the OKF is critical. The emergence of crowdsourcing/citizen activities are so heartening.
Quixote is zooming along. We are going to be getting students soon. Students are our hope for the future. Universities are too conservative and we need students to generate new ways of doing things. Why do we need lectures in QM calculations? It’s an outdated approach. Of course we need inspired interpreters by they don’t have to lecture.
Bibliography. Ben O’Steen met with Ben White and Neil Wilson of the BL. I also joined Neil. Neil can see the opportunities for the BL Open Bibliography and there are so many things we can do. We talked about involving citiziens – there’s so much talent outside the academic system.
Then off to the Imperial War Museum (yes, you heard that right). We’re putting together a proposal for creating an electronic volunteer community. Their volunteers who catalogue and map War memorials are based on paper and they really want to go electronic and semantic. And that’s exactly where the OKF can help (in case you don’t realise it much of the OKF strength is based on making things happen with software). I call it Liberation Software. So if anyone is interested in metadata for heritage sites, etc. get in touch.
CML. Quixote has given me so much energy that I’m making good progress with CML for compchem. We’ve been partway down that road already but there is still a lot of code to write and that’s what does for the B-vector. But the parser/semantic/dictionary framework is now becoming robust.
And we get encouragement from strange places. Henry Rzepa mailed today about SVG. In 1998 I thought SVG would sweep the world. 12 years later it’s in excellent undramatic health. http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php. . So it’s a great pointer for CML . And who knows, even chemical/MIME might become honest
As Piet Hein said (Quoted with gratitude if not permission from Wikiquotes)
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
(l