Innovation, not just a better mousetap...

We all understand pretty well what "Invention" is, but "Innovation"? that is not as well defined, even by the dictionary.

Recently I read that innovation requires that the invention be adopted into wide usage. So just inventing a better way to do something is not innovation until it is put into use. And on the flip side, innovation does not necessarily require an 'invention', just a change to a better way of working (though maybe that is the 'invention'?)

Anyway, being aware that innovating requires working with other people's habits is an important insight. So when we suggest a new feature, procedure or approach, it won't happen unless we can effectively sell it in the face of people's habits.

Let's hear it for sales!

Nevertheless, it takes the insights about both the business and the people to craft innovative improvements. Each person innovates every time they make a change in their habits for the better, but getting others to follow, that's leadership.

Village Center

Hey, googlers, here is a challange:

My wife and I are attacted to the idea living within three blocks (walkable, no hillsides or limited access roads) of a village center.

I can describe them, but I am not sure how to search for them. In particular, I need to search for houses for sale within village center areas.

A village center will be a commercial "main street" (not a mall, malls are anathama to village centers) that is compact, say 5 blocks by 2 blocks. It will contain as many as possible of: library, post office, pharamacy, grocery store, coffee shop (not Starbucks -- we are too old for that harsh roast), hardware store (not Lowes or HomeDepot), and restaurants.

The perfect house will be built before 1940 and be within three blocks of one of these village centers.

The search is daunting, mostly because it is not (yet) automated.

What I would like to have is a mapping function that will plot village center areas, the balloon can list the stores in the area, and houses for sale that meet the nearness criterion. The balloon for the house can even include the agent's name and phone number -- what realtor could complain about that?

Then my search for the perfect home could be just a matter of panning around on the map.

Now if the parameters of village center and the distance from one were all customizable, then this would be a universal house finder tool.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll let you alone now and stop bothering you so you can get to work.

Thanks!

The Unix Command Compression & Encryption Algorithm

"Wow, you mean there is such a thing?", you gasp in all-too-late recognition.

"Now wait", say I.

While beginning my company's first use of (good-guy) old SCO unix in 1984, we noticed the extreme-ness of the command names could have been motivated by the desire to minimize typing in the face of 10 characters per second defining the bandwidth of the user interface, e.g. [ w cp dd df ed ex ln ls mt mv ps rm sh su vi, and ac ar as at bc cc ci co dc du ef ex gs id jw ld lp lz m4 nc nl nm od pr sg tr ud ul uz wc. But also there were commands, used just as often, that did not follow that pattern, e.g. grep more kill mail nice sort sync true. And what about basename?

That's where encryption came in. You see, we could tell that the goal was never to obscure reading the command, after all we were all assembly programmers skilled in mnemonics. This was more about obscuring the writing of commands. The cult of the unix power user. We were there, but we had pity on our more, normal, user community and never tried to make them believe that there was any sense behind the alphabet soup, just memorize.

What is the Game?

Life in them there hills is not what it used to be. The fabric of the old world order (given the last 6 thousand years of human history) is rotten and about to rend in wholesale tears.

There is a movement that is headed in a new direction, but its motives are suspect. The new globalism and free trade are to some the life raft to save their skins while the vast majority drown or are eaten by the sharks. However, that is only half of the story.

The really important part is the fact that a new world order is forming at the grass roots level, unseen (even to George Bush, Sr, who first proclaimed the New World Order in 1990.) This process is part of the major plan of God for mankind, we generally call it maturity and it is by common understanding a slow process.

When Baha'u'llah announced the Day of God in 1863, He created all things new. An event which occuring as it did in the darkest time around the whole world (even the Queen of England lost her beloved husband) brought with it the turning of mankind to its own process of maturity.

Today one of the issues that confronts the world is our use of stored energy, its collection, and usage. All of our current modes have been around since before 1863. And they all are flawed. And they are all making their flaws felt.

It is time for the intellegence, the smarts, of a newly matured society to get behind the reorganization of ancient knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to create new ways that are not distructive. These new processes will help advance our civilization and the plight of the lowest of mankind.

One small such bubble of creative energy seems to be embodied in the blog of Archimedes Submerbed (http://archimerged.wordpress.com/). Not for the scientifically faint of heart, here is the beginning of an energy source that is over the top, able to take us into the future, using the principle of moderation to make energy available without creating equal and opposite problems for the world.

Another PHP framework

Starting in late 2003, I began to formulate a web site framework in PHP for MCR, Inc in Mayfield Village, Ohio. MCR is (Marketing Communication Resource) a company who gets your information where you want it, ie. they have Xerox production laser printers, envelope sutffers, folders, they work with mail houses and send emails.

Part of their business is collecting, editing, and composing client data. This is where the web comes in. MCR also runs hundreds of concurent but separate customer jobs whose starting and ending dates are not related. The web had been used, in a copy and edit way, to create custom web sites for jobs that needed public facing web pages as well as internal data control facilities.

Because of the copy and edit process, features were strewn across the landscape with little hope of coming back together in a concerted way to enhance the "copy base". So the original goal of the framework was to clean up the "copy base" ideas in to a real framework that was reused rather than customized. The challenge was to take the concepts from the old PHP, the needs of the business and to create a new thing which would provide what was needed in a single place, where customization was performed because the shape of the job was different, not because a new feature was needed. That is to say customization equals configuration.

New tools make the jobs dumber

I make software tools for a very specialized industry, putting data on paper.

People (companies) want all kinds of things, we have lots of clients, hence we have lots of different programs to write.

The 'programmers' who deal with the "production" work of marshalling, composing, and printing the data are just kids, they could not write or understand the code in any of the tools they use: web servers, web site frameworks, databases, scripting languages, font makers, composers, printers. Yet they regularly use them all and pull off amazing things.

When I write a new tool, am I making those kids dumber? or enabling them to raise to loftier heights?

Clearly the level of abstraction and depth of understanding are inversely propotional when it comes to these kids. They soak up techniques for using the higher levels of abstractions, occasionally, learning a new trick with something one level down from where they are used to working and are generally totall unaware of any new potential levels of abstraction above them, which might be created to give them even more power.

This is a model of 'intellegence' described in the Baha'i Faith. Abdu'l-Baha, explains that although mankind is one, all men and women are equal in the sight of God, there are different degrees among people and further more there is limited awareness between these degree levels. People will gravitate to their own degree and stay there. This applies to many environments and capacities and is not a merit measure. But it does explain many things we see and struggle with in our daily lives.

So should I feel bad about kids who understand less complex computer issues than I? No, should I feel good that I understand more than they? No, also. We are of different degrees! But there should be a great compassion, humility, and exhiliration that can be felt by all in our interactions. They can learn from me forever, I can never understand my own limitations, and together we can do wonders.

What's LISP got to do with it?

One of the strengths of lisp is the fact the control structure uses the same syntax as the data structure -- a notion similar to the relationship between binary computer instructions and data (the same set of bits can be either one.)

If all non-lisp programmers continued to program in machine language, they would enjoy the same benefits as lisp programmers.

So, the question arises, "What would a Java-like language have to be like in order to enjoy this strength of lisp?"

First an analysis of this code/data relationship in lisp. There is a direct relationship between the written form of the language and its "stored program structure" that matches the relationship between the written form of data structures and their "stored data structure". This illusion is created by the reader, that translates both code and data into its internal format. It represents a universal abstraction because indeed the internal stored formats do not have to be what they appear, but it is true that the car of a program is just as well understood as the car of a list.

Now, consider, what is there in a language like Java and its data structures that can be in such an equivalence as lisp's code and data? Well, perhaps it would be easier to answer if we first removed the veil of compliation and viewed the languages as being interpreted, with no underlying bytecodes to make us wonder if bytecodes can be manipulated like numbers.

Done. What is left? When the text of the language creates "code", it is making classes. Well there are also interfaces, but let's leave that be for now. When the text of the language creates "data" it should also be able to make classes!