Ninjas already did it, too!!

Howcome noone told me about Project Ninja when I wrote my Masters Thesis? I know I've read that SEDA paper before I started, but I didn't know they had already so much that was similar to what I built, when I did it.

So not only Simpsons did it already, but some Berkeley Ninjas too.

Survey on web content adaptation

The May 05 edition of IEEE DSOnline includes a very interesting survey on research within System architectures for Web content adaptation services.

In the article, Web content adaptation means transcoding, filtering or personalizing Web content somewhere between the content provider and the receiver.

Basically, transcoding brings content from one format to another when the receiving device does not support the original format, or network or computing resources require a smaller format.

Personalization means using metadata to enhance the content, increase relevance or remove unwanted content, and may include transcoding.

The authors present three different architectural choices; client-side, server-side and (inter-)mediary-adaptation, and discusses the weaknesses and strenghts of the different approaches, as well pointing out "missing links" in the area.

I especially found it interesting that they pointed out how state-ful personalization is very hard for mediators. Their argument is that in a mediator network, a client-server session is not expected to use the same mediator twice, and hence keeping transaction traces demands some shared storage, which brings us back to the centralized solution again. Or, we could take the WAIF-approach, and make sure mediators keep state, and that clients use the same mediator every time.

In sum, the article provides a fine overview of one of the facets of the WAIF project, and many links to WAIF-related stuff. Hereby recommended.

The Simpsons already did it

Remember that Southpark episode where they couldn't come up with any pranks that The Simpsons hadn't already done? Surprise or not; life in the academia is also like that. I am currently in the process of googling, reading, browsing and googling some more on "Related work". So alot of my postings will be about that.

Here's one guy in Brisbane, Marlon Dumas, that seems to have some ideas in common with me. One of his finacial sources is a project that seems to capture some of my very central ideas is: Personalized, Adaptive, and Semantics-driven Selection and Composition of Web Services (PASS). I'll dig more into that later. It's time for the Star Wars premiere!

First post

So I finally got a blog then. I thought I'd try to use it to get my volatile thoughts collected somehow. An alternative short-term memory, since my built-in memory seems unable to save all my hunches and ideas.

Hopefully, I will remember to update the blog when I get new ideas. I stopped using post-it-notes to remember stuff because I forgot to check my notes..