Aside from the other potential flaws in that argument, the idea of software as something that can be mass-produced, dropping off the end of a production line like a car comes round now and again. I think that drawing this analogy with production lines as it stands is flawed, but by changing perspective slightly we can make it work.

Simply consider software as the factory, not the product.

Now, each release of a software solution can be what it is (at least, based on my reading and my personal experiences);  a custom job tuned to maximise the efficiency and quality of producing the real product – the information and functions that the software provides for its users. Every time a button is clicked and does something at least as good as what was expected, a unit of product has rolled off the production line. If something bad happens then that unit of product was defective and we can use that to improve our production line. The users of software don’t generally care about the software, they care about what it does. The software itself is just a platform – the sales, factory and fulfilment departments rolled into one.

The reasons why we can’t mass produce all software easily are perhaps a little easier to see under this analogy. We achieve cheaper and higher volume production as we invest more in the factory. Some parts of the factory – maybe some of the machines, the conveyor belts, the security controls, and so on – can be bought in as off the shelf components, but how we make those components work together efficiently and effectively to achieve our goals is a challenge requiring creativity, invention and innovation. This challenge must be met not just when we build a factory, but also when we change something, potentially upsetting that careful balance of efficiency that was there before.

So back to the original argument. The idea of mass production and production lines saw large scale success in the automobile industry, breaking the big, complex task of creating a car into many small, relatively simple pieces so that identical copies of a given car could be churned out in huge numbers. Mass-producing the design, decomposition, construction, testing and other myriad jobs required to produce a production line may be unrealistic for some time to come.

As always, your views most welcome.

As you might expect, there was a lot of reading involved, and a great deal of writing, re-writing, editing, and all that other good stuff that comes with trying to put together a 25-page document with proper referencing. Since New Year, I’ve also started prepping for the final taught module I’ll be taking which starts in February.

There hasn’t been much time for blogging in amongst all that, so the posts are a even more sparse than usual! The project submission deadline is September, so I hope that life will return to something like normal following that. Until then, I expect things will be a bit pressured!

A huge number of research papers are locked away behind paywalls. Sites like Google Scholar can show you what’s out there, but you’ll only be able to see abstracts for most of it. To get at the good stuff, you’ll be paying tens of poinds Sterling. That doesn’t sound like much, but to do a reasonably rigorous literature search you’d need to access lots of them. I’ve probably read a few dozen papers now that are related to my project, and many that weren’t – which would have been annoying if I’d paid for them individually. I expect there must be ways to pay for bulk access, but there are also many different sources you might need to get that access with too.

It seems like a shame this information needs to be locked away but of course it’s additional revenue for some organisation – hopefully the money goes back into supporting research and researchers.

The breadth and depth of research going on out there on every conceivable topic is astonishing. Getting access to all that stuff is a definite plus.

The next job now is the background report. This document will summarise what I learned during my literature search in the context of my project and needs to be less than twenty pages long (not counting paraphernalia like covers, tables, references and appendices). I’ve prepared a new git repository for the work, but I’ll be hosting a git server on my EC2 instance this time. Whilst having my git repository on Dropbox was convenient and gave me a backup, it wasn’t the easiest thing to clone if I need to pull a copy down for some opportunistic work. The setup was pretty straightforward with gitosis and we’ll see how it pans out.

Best get cracking then!

I was in Manchester on Tuesday, meeting my project supervisor and one of the guys who runs the taught module associated with the project. There don’t seem to be any problems, and it helped to clarify some of the vagueness I referred to previously.

So, the website content needed to include a statement of the project aims and objectives, a summary of the progress to date, the project plan (significantly cut down from the previous detailed exposition) and a summary of the literature search so far – bringing together what I’d already done, about a week’s work so far. I also decided to take a middle road between the simplistic html-in-a-zip approach and an all-singing-all-dancing one. I’m not going to get any more marks for going nuts on this thing, so I just took the aspects that mitigate risks or save time – for example, using a custom tag library to template out the elements that would otherwise need to be duplicated, thus saving time especially when they needed to be changed. I also decided not to compromise on the HTML/CSS separation, again in the interests of making changes to stylistic aspects as simple as possible.

All three elements of the project to date save data in a text-based format: the summary is written in LaTeX; the plan saves an XML document; and the website of course is a structure made up of HTML, CSS and JSP files. This means that all three play nicely with a version control system, and I decided to give Git a whirl at the outset. In a nutshell, I’ve been making small changes, then storing those changes along with messages as part of a ‘commit’ process. These messages can be extracted, providing a kind of timeline of what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks much better than I would have done in my own notes. I can take those timestamped messages and push them into the website during the build process, then use a simple renderer to print them out on the site when certain links are clicked. Seemed like a good way to augment the ‘summary to date’ deliverable.

I’ve also spent a few hours updating and tidying up this blog as I’ve linked appropriate posts into the site as another way of tracking progress and my hosting provider took it down over the weekend, as well as a nasty surprise with my original EC2 instance… maybe good for another post.

Yep, COMP61032 ‘Optimization for Learning, Planning and Problem Solving‘ has appeared in my field of vision and it looks a bit hardcore. It’s part of the ‘Learning from Data’ theme – I guess optimisation is a natural partner to machine learning approaches, owing to the need to chew up a whole lot of information as quickly as possible.

Why is it tempting? Lots of algorithms and computational complexity going on – it’s one of those modules that’s shouting “Bet you can’t pass me”. More than that though, it’s modules with that computational theory slant that have shown me moments of catch-your-breath clarity in the way that messy practicality distils to elegant mathematical beauty. It’s a great sense of satisfaction when you persevere and get to see it.

So – Ontology engineering, or Optimisation? Hey, I warned you it was geeky.

The objectives set for the website are a little… what’s the word… vague? See what you think:

A multipage website summarizing the work so far.
- Objectives
- Deliverables
- Plan
- Literature

That’s it as far as I can tell. Exactly how will the delivered work be assessed? Your guess is probably about as good as mine. Having looked at the discussion forum for the module (the full-timers did this in the first half of the year – I’ve been told I set my own deadlines when it comes to the project stuff as I’m not a full-time student) it seems that the marking scheme was quite severe with many complaints about low marks and little evident explanation, so I’ll make some enquiries before I start work on the content proper.

Back in April, I asked how the website deliverable should be ‘handed in’ and was told that a zip with some files in it would be fine.

Screw that.

I mean, seriously – the world has moved on. To be even vaguely interesting, I’m thinking about reusing relevant content from this blog, and some of the tooling I’m using like Ganttproject saves XML data that’s crying out for some transformation and JavaScript magic.  I have my own domain name and there’s an opportunity here to learn some stuff about infrastructure (and I am doing this MSc. to learn stuff in the first place), so I’ve been setting up a server. Again, checking back on the forums, some of the other students went the same route and there’s no evidence of it harming their chances. I think hosting the project website as a subdomain of crossedstreams.com makes sense – I already own the domain name and subdomains are a simple matter of extra DNS records, which is dead easy to set up with my provider, getNetPortal.

I shan’t be hosting my site on getNetPortal though. As I spend most of my professional life working on the Java EE platform, Java is the obvious choice. Why not use a different language for the experience? Whilst I’ve got the time to learn a bit about hosting a public-facing website, I’m not sure I’ll have the time to learn a new way of creating websites that I’ll be happy with… not to mention that there’s a toolset and delivery pipeline that varies from platform to platform. Playing about with Erlang or some such will have to wait for another day.

GetNetPortal do host Java web applications, but it’s a shared Tomcat environment with a bunch of limitations as well as apparently risks to other people’s app availability if I deploy more than three times in a day. So where else can I go? Other specialised hosting companies are out there, but they’re not exactly cheap…

So I’ve provisioned myself a server on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon provide a bunch of images themselves and one of them happens to be a Linux-based 64bit Tomcat 7 server. Time between me finding the image I wanted and having a working server available? About five minutes. No matter how you cut it, that’s pretty awesome. To be honest, the biggest challenge was choosing an image – there’s a huge number to choose from and I tried a couple of other images that weren’t as well set up before settling on the Amazon-provided one. The best thing – EC2 is pay-as-you-go, at dirt cheap rates for low utilisation.

For those of you who haven’t seen EC2, here’s a couple of screenshots that might help explain what it’s all about. First up, let’s take a look at the application server I provisioned.

AWS Management Console with my instances

Checking my bill tonight, I can see an itemised account of exactly what I’ve been billed for. Being able to see this level of detail should let me stay in control of what I’m spending.

Amazon Web Services - Billing

The rest of my time has been spent having a look around my new server, setting up Tomcat (to host a placeholder app in the root context) and iptables (to route traffic from the privileged ports 80 and 443 out to the ports Tomcat is listening on – 8080 and 8443 – thus avoiding the need to install a dedicated webserver or run Tomcat with root privileges), setting up some self-signed SSL certificates (I’ll need those so that I can bring up apps that require logon – without SSL, those usernames and passwords would be floating around the internetz in clear, negating the point of their existence) and finally scripting up the setup process in case I need to set this stuff up again.

Now, I can tick off the project tasks around setting up hosting nice and early. Quite a productive weekend!

There were some big problems.

Ubuntu 11.04

The new Unity interface, whilst it’s very pretty, is totally unfamiliar and feels rather like a toy. The menus I used to start applications from are gone, the taskbar I used to see what was running and place shortcuts on is gone. Now to start a program there’s a glossy, full screen… thing… it’s a bit like a menu… but takes up the whole screen with big Fisher-Price icons. To see what’s running at a glance… I can’t. The idea where the title bar of a window with the window buttons and menus isn’t attached to the window and appears at the top of the screen… seriously? I hear that this idea is nicked from Apple – but it really doesn’t work for me.

I guess the idea is that you type the name of the application instead of finding it in the menus. Nicked from Windows 7, I think. If I want to find and launch applications by typing their names, I use the command line – I’m not sure I get how search instead of menus is a step forward.

Then there was the speed, or rather, the total lack thereof. Using my computer went from effortless to wading through treacle. In snowshoes. I notice performance tips and tweaks guides for 11.04 starting to appear out there, so it’s not just me. The poor performance was the dealbreaker.

Fedora 15

I downloaded Fedora 15, having previously been a user of that distro. I know that 15 ships with Gnome 3, but I didn’t realise it would be so similar to Unity, with all the same bizarre UI quirks. On the bright side, it was a lot snappier… but all in, still not really usable.

Mint

So yesterday, I pulled Linux Mint 11 off the shelf and I’m happy to say that it is a joy to use. Menus, task bars, windows that work properly, fast, easy to set up. Back to business as usual. If you’re not loving the Gnome 3/Unity thing, I can recommend Mint (so far, based on 24h usage… mileage may vary!)

Serious or Casual?

With my immediate problems addressed, the direction that Gnome and Unity are taking for Linux is interesting. Are we seeing the Linux windowing systems fragment into serious and casual usecases? I can see how the new UI might be familiar and easy for someone who is used to their tablet or their smartphone. Maybe it’s also good angle for relatively small screen devices like netbooks and tablets – certainly the apparent ‘every pixel is precious’ mindset doesn’t make much sense on a big widescreen monitor.

I expect that broadening the appeal of an operating system is a good thing, and perhaps Ubuntu and Fedora are setting their stalls out as ‘for the casual user’. If that’s so, then thank goodness for distros like Mint that give folks who use their computers to do work the power of old(er) school Linux without the pain.

One aspect of the coursework that was unusual was that it is all to be handed in together at the end, rather than week by week. If I’m honest it’d probably have been a little easier if I’d done the coursework in step with the lecture days – I actually fell a little behind because of various commitments.

Then there was the essay. A 3,000 word essay on the state of the art of text mining and my views for the future of the field.

I’ve not written an essay for at least 15 years now, and getting started was a real challenge. Text mining and Semantic Web maybe? Sentiment analysis is the future? I was pulling my hair out, trying to find an angle that I could argue cleanly though, citing academic research and the like. I’ve been screwing up outlines on bits of paper about a week now!

That said, when I headed into Manchester yesterday and sat in my lectures, I had something of an epiphany. I guess the problem was that I feel the field has huge untapped potential, and I struggle to argue through a point of view I care about when I can’t see the current approaches panning out. I’m going to take a bit of a risk, and write an essay that (constructively) criticises some aspects of text mining today, proposing and arguing through a slightly different approach.

We’ll see how it goes – the last few bits of paper have so far avoided a one-way ticket to the bin. Hopefully I can produce a well-argued, reasonably interesting essay that I’ll get some marks for!