[digital:meditation]

Deleted code doesn’t contain bugs, they say. I always felt kind of unsafe with the idea of actually and straightforward removing code while into refactoring smaller or larger parts of the systems – after all, same as it doesn’t contain bugs, deleted code also doesn’t contain business logic anymore which might not be what you want at times. Yet, trying to clean up parts of (the Java / Java EE based) components in our system, I have to some degree changed my mind about that.

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So, here it is. After being highly anticipated for quite a while, the instagram folks a few days ago finally launched an Android version of their imaging / photosharing app so far only available for Apples iOS platform. As I am pretty much into using my Android phone for imaging, too, I couldn’t help having a look.

And, to cut things short and starting out conclusion first: Though Instagram (on Android) is nice, I so far failed to completely get what its “sweet spot” is all about. I am not completely sure why, but possibly, in the end, this is also caused by false expectations caused by seeing Instagram images floating around for quite a while yet never having worked with the tool so far, at all. So, just to pin down a few points:

• First and foremost, my major misconception about this was that Instagram mainly is a camera / imaging app backed by a small photosharing site. After my first test-driving the platform, including posting few pictures, I came to the conclusion that it actually is exactly vice-versa: It’s a photosharing network accessible via a smartphone app that provides camera and some basic imaging functionalities as well. Generally, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I had something completely different in mind. So, by now, Instagram is not likely to have to compete with Autodesks Pixlr-O-Matic (my #1 imaging app on Android ever since), Magix’ Camera MX, smaller apps like FxCamera or LittlePhoto or paid ones like Vignette. No, it rather is likely to compete with the photo capturing and sharing facilities provided by apps like the official Twitter app, Snapbucket and, most specifically, Flickr. As stated, this is anything but bad, but of course it needs a bit reconsidering what use to make of it.
• Especially comparing to the official Flickr application, I am a bit surprised: Though not offering magnitudes of additional features, the Instagram app is in any possible way bulkier, heavier than the Flickr one: Download of the Instagram app is at least four times the size of the Flickr one. Other than while using the Flickr app, Instagram seems to seriously eat system resources on my phone, and, by now, it also happens to be the first imaging app I ever used that made it into the percentual battery consumption statistics so indeed it seems a wholly different kind of beast on the phone. So far I blame this to being the very first version they do for Android, so maybe this is likely to change in the future.
• With focussing on providing a social network backing the imaging stuff, it didn’t take me long to stumble across pages like this: “iPhone fanbois enraged by Instagram’s Android triumph”, which leaves me with a rather bad feeling about Instagram. So, is it actually Android folks now about to invade some sort of “elite” social network so far exclusively limited to iOS users? Well, I am sure by now there will be a wholly new load of users in and on Instagram, and so will be a whole new load of photos – some will be crap, some will be “good” in whichever way you might want to put it. But having all this tied to a special kind of device seems pointless, and from this point of view, I am glad to actually see there is an Android app. Which still, however, makes Instagram lag behind Flickr or the image sharing stuff in G+ or Twitter a bit (because in all of these platforms I am able to manage my timeline, pictures and all that using an ordinary desktop web browser, too, which is something Instagram either seems to missing or seems not to be all about, after all).
• In some ways, I am a bit reluctant to having even another social network. I mean, after all, what about it? I’m on twitter, I am in G+, I do have accounts in most of the social networks you might imagine (yes, including tumblr), and by now once in a while I see all these networks sort of “partitioning the WWW” into a bunch of more or less disjoint subsystems, knowing that users in one of these networks do have difficulties communicating with users in other networks without too much effort. Sure, I can cross-post from tumblr to twitter, from Instagram to twitter, from Flickr to twitter and all that, but in the end, in most of these situations it’s “monodirectional”, as feedback (if any) ain’t posted back to where the content came. Using Instagram is likely to add even another “insulated” world with rules of its own.

So, ultimately, I think the Instagram folks technically have done a decent job providing the first version for Android, and I am glad they did. As far as I am concerned, I possibly just have to find a meaningful thing to do with Instagram, or eventually consider that staying out of this also might be a valid option (same as I stepped out of other platforms, like Path, for the same reason). We’ll see.

I’ve already been writing about one of Toby Segarans books in the past. Remembering these days, I have been pretty enthusiastic regarding both his style of writing and his style of providing people with knowledge. It’s nice seeing this happen again also dealing with another book of his, “Programming the semantic web”.

At the moment, for various reasons, I am into refreshing some of my knowledge related to ontologies, RDF, inference, reasoning and most of the technologies and concepts related to what usually is referred to as “semantic web”. I was searching for a quick guide on things, ideally a “hands-on” one covering one of the technologies we’re already using. Considering this a “match” as far as the latter is concerned was just a couple of moments: Same as the “Collective Intelligence” book, the “Semantic Web” one provides an extensive amount of sample code implemented in Python, which is fine for us as we use both Python and Jython in a production environment and I’m quite familiar with both. So, feels like home from this point of view, even though “Semantic Web” is less “Python only” than its predecessor.

Asides this, in terms of being “hands-on”, the book is rather good as well. Also following the same style “Collective Intelligence” did, the “Semantic Web” book provides a vast load of step-by-step samples to try out all the concepts and approaches introduced throughout the course. Again, the authors provide a whole load of well-prepared sample data, mainly in .csv and .txt, on the books web site, and, again, I am amazed by the refreshingly pragmatic way of hacking things up to make them initially work, to give the reader something to play with, something to figure out how things go, and then eventually to dive deeper into what happens, extending and optimizing here and there. Python surely has a sweet spot here in its interactive mode, allowing for trying out all the examples almost immediately without having to bother with too big a stack of technology to be mastered before getting anything to run (which, unfortunately, seems the case once in a while in the Java+IDE+Application-Server – world). In some ways, despite enjoying solving “real-world” problems using Java, I quite often thoroughly admire the refreshingly straightforward approach to doing things in Python, and this book to me once again points out why Python is quite a good learning language, too: In case of most of the explanations, it doesn’t seem a long way to go from a more or less formal description of a problem to a working prototype implementation that can be used on a sample dataset, which is technically the definite strength of this book.

As far as the non-technical things go, it is obvious that Segaran and his co-authors do have a profound experience in explaining complex things in an easy, straightforward fashion. I am still astounded by the way they took from “structured”, schema-driven database design to modeling RDF triples, pointing out both why one might want to follow this path and how to do so in a step-by-step way. I have seen quite some explanations of what triple stores are about, and most of them are way more arcane, way worse. If this is something you suffer from, “Semantic Web Programming” is definitely up to set that right. And this is the style of things throughout the book: Concise, smart explanations of things, building upon each other, with each subchapter obviously being placed and structured in a way to be just the “logical next step” if you consciously read the chapters before. All the book seems just a continuous flow of information without any obvious breaks or loose ends. I guess this is quite a subjective point of view especially in terms of how one wants to dive into things (again), but at least to me this seems close to optimum.

Plus, there’s another good thing also massively making me remember the “Collective Intelligence” book: All along with the main issue of the book, you get plenty of chances to sharpen your (Python) coding skills, and you are subject to quick-and-dirty explanations of a bunch of technologies all along the way. No matter whether geocoding, graphviz, rdflib, networkx, dbpedia or freebase – reading this book provides one with a fair understanding of these things as a mere “by-product”, and, as I have to state, as a rather valuable by-product as most of these tools and services are just things thare are around, mostly free and ready to be used in order to solve problems, so this doesn’t just provide you with a clear understanding of what happens (theoretically) but also, again, with a set of tools to really solve these problems in day-to-day life. Ultimately, you even end up finding a framework like CherryPy described here in order to quickly serve dynamic content.

So, overally, this book doesn’t too much differ from the “Collective Intelligence” one in many ways and is same as highly recommended. No matter whether refreshing your knowledge or, I dare to say, are into learning these tricks all anew, Segaran et al will provide you with a profound and extensive introduction to the subject, leaving you both with lots of things to try yourself, with lots of ways how to apply what you learnt to real-world problems and, last but not least, eventually also will provide you with a whole load of new ideas of things that could, and possibly should, be done in your business applications. Very inspiring.

I remember very well my first contacts with Java EE technologies during my studies: More than a decade earlier, Java EE still was branded “Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition”, out in its early 1.4 version, and dealing with it for the first time left me rather stunned, facing a plethora of technical acronyms, APIs and technological and architectural concepts. Back these days, I would surely have paid money to have a really good introductory textbook, unfortunately, there were few (none?) at this time. By now, this has considerably changed.

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I have to admit that somehow, by now, sinewave.com.br starts to make me wonder… I already did put down my enthusiasm about Uppsala Solemne a bit earlier, but, no matter whether listening to latest releases of Ruido/MM, Sobre A Maquina, the incredible This Lonely Crowd and a bunch of others: Most of the recent Sinewave releases are exceptionally strong, not just from a netaudio / netlabel perspective, and definitely all the releases this label has issued so far are above average.

And the “Summertime” EP by Team.Radio is in no way an exception from that rule. Five songs, next to 38 minutes playing time, and a rather strong musical statement. Maybe “post rock” these days is a genre description just like any other, but in some way, it seems the girl and the four guys from Refice, Brazil, manage to actually do as you would expect dealing with post rock, leaving behind a bunch of genre boundaries and musical limitations, creating a moody and inspired acoustic experience in between, well, various kinds of progressive rock, jazz, “classic” rock (whatever that might be) and more recent shoegaze music. In some ways, this music seems dominated by various different influences: “Vegas”, the third track, brings reminiscences to German Element Of Crime. There are keyboard / organ passages slightly reminding me of Alan Parsons Project. There are ska’ish-early-Police guitar parts, there are some moments that might have grown out of listening to Pink Floyd or Rush even – yet, all these without being simple rip-offs or copies of the “might-be-originals”, and, given the band page does list some other names as influences, maybe these semblances are just incidentally.

And then, of course, there also are moments completely different. “Come on”, in example, which throughout its initial passages is massively “musique noir”, one really might think to see vocalist Marina sitting in front of a piano in a dark jazz club long past midnight. And there is the 13 minutes epos “Albatross”, maybe closest to what to be found as “post-rock” these days, and an impressive monument as such – at least, to me. There’s not much to add here, I guess. The musicians definitely know their stuff, songwriting is effective and inspiring throughout all these tracks and, even slightly reminding me of a lot of different bands, always sounded original and homogenous. Vocals do stand out a little in my opinion, though, as the band is really good at knowing what their vocalist is best at and how to make use of that most effectively. So, overally: Highly recommended. Waiting what this band will be up to, in the future. And kudos to Sinewave for another great release.

As pointed out in my last post, I am about to dive a little deeper into our prototypical, experimental usage of Apache CouchDB in an environment which is a bit off the typical “web application” use case yet seems not all too bad a thing to use a technology like CouchDB for. Meet the “transport engine”.

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