Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
Since June 2005 there has been a standard Java API for reading from and writing to a content repository. What changes for open-source document management, and why repository portability weighs more than any single product.
Read moreHow a schema-based cognitive architecture turns into a concurrency problem: parallel threads, activation energy and resource allocation among competing units, from Selfridge's Pandemonium to C++ implementations.
Read moreShipping training material offline on a CD-ROM forces a format decision: a proprietary authoring tool tied to one platform, or XHTML/CSS files read locally by a browser. The second path outlives the vendor.
Read moreAt the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, an ATmega8 board is going around, aimed at people who are not engineers: published schematics, the AVR toolchain hidden behind setup() and loop(), a parts cost under thirty euros. Technical notes by Stefano Noferi.
Read moreThe directive of 19 December 2003 requires Italian public bodies to assess open source software and open data formats. Technical notes on how a Province portal is built today on a free stack.
Read moregit keeps a project's history as a graph of immutable objects, each named by its own SHA-1. What that changes for integrity, branches and distributed work, and where the weak point sits.
Read morepapiNet and ebXML (ISO/TS 15000) give B2B exchanges in the paper supply chain a shared vocabulary. Technical notes on schemas, messaging and transport, from the point of view of someone building portals for the sector.
Read moreAs of a few days ago there is an association of Zope and Plone users in Italy. I note why a Python-based server stack needs local coordination, and which technical knots make it hard to sustain without a structured community.
Read moreAn industrial research project on a CMS can prototype on one Open Source stack and ship the definitive platform on another. When the two phases diverge, the verifiable legacy is the analysis and the modular design, more than the prototype's code.
Read moreAbove ITK and VTK there is a missing layer: software a clinician can actually open and use. 3D Slicer occupies that layer, and the NA-MIC grant of September 2004 has just changed how it is built.
Read moreSince 2002 MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms has been replicating a small group of computer-controlled machines — roughly 20,000 dollars of equipment — outside the campus, in Costa Rica, India, Norway and Boston. Technical notes on the model, the software and the limits, as of mid-2004.
Read moreThe proposed European directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions reopens a question that Article 52 of the European Patent Convention had already bounded. A technical reading of the text, the Parliament's amendments, and what is at stake for those who write software.
Read moreCentralising authentication on OpenLDAP does not remove the credential problem: it moves it from the local password to the channel and the directory's configuration. A technical note on slapd, syncrepl, SASL/TLS and the places where security is actually decided.
Read moreTechnical notes on what keeps a high-traffic music portal standing in 2004: server farm, load balancing, the CMS, and the community services (chat, forum, webmail) that produce most of the requests.
Read moreSubversion 1.0 (23 February 2004) treats a commit as a transaction and versions directories. Technical notes on the Berkeley DB backend, the mod_dav_svn transport over WebDAV/DeltaV, and branches built as copies.
Read moreWhat it takes to connect a Python application to a card payment gateway that ships SDKs only for ASP, PHP and Java: a server-side encrypted handshake, a shared secret, HTTP GET transport, and the card number that never touches the shop.
Read moreThe state of WEKA in mid-2003: the ARFF format, the bundled classifiers (J48, NaiveBayes, SMO), and why in quantitative clinical research the validation protocol weighs more than the individual algorithm.
Read moreTechnical notes on a master-slave architecture for a learned society's membership data: an authoritative LDAP directory on site, encrypted replication to a web front-end in hosting, an open-source stack.
Read moreFreeBSD ships kernel, userland and documentation in one source tree under the BSD licence. A technical note on the practical consequences of that model versus assembling a Linux distribution, as of the 4.8 release.
Read moreNotes after a day spent discussing open source in public administration: the problem is not how much a licence costs, but who holds the data formats, the code, and the continuity of the service.
Read more
