Several Kneaver software products are now available via RSPHP our generic PHP extension. All API are object oriented.

Among the differences between c++ and php the order of destructors. Say you have

    $DB = new RSDBConnection;
    $DB->Open( $DSNName);
    $Cmd = $DB->MakeCmd( $SQLRequest);
    $Rec = $DB->Query( $Cmd);

$DB will be destroyed first, $Cmd after and then $Rec

while in c++ it would be just the opposite. So you have to make sure there are not issues hidden behind dismounting stuff in the wrong order.

Since KNVHTML can now be used directly from a php script comes the problem of performance. Instead of having an object allocated once for all in a session it is created on every page. It took 1 sec before. That was too long.

I reviewed some discussions about optimizing wordpress before: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2007/02/16/four-plus-one-ways-to-speed-up-the-performance-of-wordpress-with-caching/, and here http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/optimize-wordpress-page-loading-time-with-php-speedy-and-wp-super-cache.

• A few template compilation are now done on demand. This saved 20% of time.
• Instead of scanning and loading templates from html text files scattered in directories we build a cache file. It is fully transparent, the cache is rebuild automatically whenever a template is changed.
• The cache will save XML data as binary. Saving as binary saves a lot of text processing. So this of a new feature of RSXML and our Btrees: binary save. A side benefit. It will also be used in RPC marshalling between clients and KNVSrv servers adding also performance there.

Google will stop updating Google Desktop. See http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/ . I will miss it because I could see several advantage to this solution. It could index many types of files, it was possible to do a search on both Internet and you disk. Like this in one blink it is possible to see if anything new on the Interne could be more helpful than a past information, or the opposite avoid to search again something that was already validated.
Now replacement for Google Desktop. Not much I am not willing to use Microsoft Search. It is slow, returns bulk of data, it will not search many file types.
So use Kneaver ? Well Kneaver as a search engine itself and the aggregator offers interesting capabilities.

Listening to Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage. Suddenly the succession of terms Knowledge, Information, Wisdom catch my attention. I was concentrating on debugging so I though it was an illusion. No it’s correct. Very early mention of DIKW in About DIKW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW) in Franck Zappa

Packard Goose, Joe’s Garage Acts 1-3

Listen to Mary’s (Girl in the bus) vision at 2.56 or read at http://frankzappa.lyrics.info/packardgoose.html

Now I know why this was so familar to me. I surely heard it many times, years before starting Kneaver.

Tonight is my first tentative to run Kneaver directly with MySQL as database engine, and PHP as the script front end. This is the first step before being able to use Kneaver directly, inproc from WordPress.
What started as an idea late this afternoon is not taking shape. Just switching from a very simple VBScript file to it’s equivalent in PHP 5, changing the connection string. This took 10 minutes and already here it goes: It Works !

This is really a benefit of having a long experience in porting software and making it modular from start. It works in 10 minutes just by a few lines added, a recompilation of one or two dlls and we have native integration to MySQL and PHP. No ODBC, COM involved. I try to compile it and run it on Linux tomorrow first thing.

This will not be the final setup because running Kneaver inproc is not going to be very efficient. Just after the next step is to use the object broker and run it as a service like a database. Connections will be persistent and the cache mechanisme build into it will make it very efficient to use it as a WordPress Addin.

In my search of productivity I am looking for solutions to help me stayed focused and keep track of how much time is dedicated to most important objectives. I describe here my requirements and me experiences.

It is a recurring question and I learned that there are no perfect solutions. Being my own boss and with so many aspects I can’t do just with timing my time at work or consider time spent on tiwtter as a pure loss. Even while walking in the countryside my mind keep working on issues and it is very common that ideas pop out my mind on the return faster than it would have staying in front my computer trying to evade the tentation to check news. What is the most productive time ?

For example I regularly remove from my desk applications like rss reader ( I use sharpreader), tweetdeck or even MS Outlook. So today I started Tweetdeck again and lurked to what other says.  Suddently i am attracted by a tweet from @crid :

Instant Boss. Ce petit soft gratuit qui ne ressemble à rien est encore en train de sauver ma journée de travail http://appsapps.info/instantboss.php

My translation: Little software not great looking is saving my day.

Good I like this, let’s try. So I went, I tried, I write.

The really good thing is that it’s not taking space or too much attention. Small footprints. It starts from a postulate that you split your day in regular period of attention and distraction. Fair enough but nothing so regular. I tried for a few hours and realized it would be complex to tune it really to my rythm.

Distraction is part of human nature and I explained before it may end up in saving time. What is important is to keep it under some limits. See The Attention Span Myth.  

That reminds me of a very simple tool I used for years and trained several people to use including my kids. Le minuteur (The timer) : this one is my favorite. I even bought a couple of them to bring them with me to our South India subsidiary. http://www.tati.fr/cuisine-ustensiles/la-preparation/balance-minuteur-doseur/minuteur-de-cuisine/35273.html . Costs 3 € = USD 4.

When planning tasks and specially at the level of a day it is important to have an objective idea of real time span for them. So using a timer next to you whatever you are doing (and this is a big benefit on software) you can estimate and measure. Say how long it takes to read the subject of your essay for an exam : 5 minutes, or 15 ? Wind up completely the timer and start. When you are finished see how long it takes.

Now that we gathered a typical duration for a set of tasks our estimation is really better. Instead of packing the day and being deceived by how little we can do we are more realistic.

So my typical time control software should have a learning mode based on a set of 100 typical tasks I do. One of them would “write a blog entry”, takes 2 hours. When I start the software i wish to say what I want to do today and it fetches automatically time estimates. It will then may be tell me if I am distracting or forgot to tell when i am done. Since there is a learning stage I could also tell which tools I will typically use and may be automatically hide those distracting me.

Las time I used a time control solution it was TimeRescue. This is a much more ambitious thing. I used it as an experiment after another blogger wrote about it. May be here http://blog.ernestsemerda.com/2010/04/03/3-great-tools-fine-tune-productivity/ . With Kneaver I am really interested in all experiments about using computers to achieve our goals. Still I am not for Total Recall type of things. See here http://guido.appenzeller.net/wordpress/ . So RescueTime was ending up considering that using Internet Explorer while debugging code was a distraction. You have to tune it but here you get into the issue when you have different type of activities. You would need to have a profile for each and what about multitasking. Very often we will have a window on a long job and another to check our mail. Too automated, to systematic, not enough understanding of my goals, my purpose. 

I had the same problem with Xobni for example. Not being able to make a difference with private sphere and professionnal is leading to absurdities. When I click on a mail sent by me I would expect the recipient to be displayed, not me. Again the issue is that all these software don’t know me, they have no background and are just piece of code leveraging a single idea. hence the need to have somewhere a set of informations on our basic commitments, our interests.

Before writing this I checked what other tools are on the market. I found TimeDoctor.

It strickes me that time control and boss/employee relationships are so often concomittent. In the case of TimeDoctor it is definitely engaged in this niche fine but Instant Boss is for a single user. So at some stage I need to behave as if I was my own boss delegating to my computer the role of controlling me.

I didn’t try TimeDoctor but by reading the web site I felt it was not made for my case. TimeDoctor is more to monitor employees work and keep track of how much time is spent on target or not. I like the idea of definition targets first and not preventing distractions.

If you got his way be careful that in some countries legislation may prevent you to spy your employees. Say if the screen shot shows private data you violated their privacy and this is even more risky. I think this idea is leading to microcontrol and ending to loose more time reviewing how the others spend their time then what working in a team is really about : delegating and allowing you to do your own job. Controlling others time is really leading us 100 years back to Theory X style of management.

If you are interested in time management and can read french I recommend [Time Coach]. It’s a combined mail based learning program with personalized interaction followed by a newsletter. And it’s free. I wishes a time management control starts with some of the ideas found here.

So end of the day ? I couldn’t find the perfect solution. I wish I can find something that assist me in some occasions, helps me keep track of some activities as discreetly as possible, linked to my tasks management and daily planning. Ability to relate tasks to objectives and goals, ability to label them as important and urgent, repeating. It will preferably use Kneaver API to gain knowledge of what I do and what it is related to. I am afraid I got one more item on my todo list.

I was so unhappy with outlook management of recurrent tasks I wrote a new scheduler I called KNVPlanner. 

Several routines must be restarted every now and then. The more you become precise and add tasks, the more specific you become, the most impossible it is to deal with them all. Let say that if at any time you reached some balance between busy and free time as soon as you add one more you are done. The only solution is to re-plan completely by allowing relaxing some routines. Also if we miss too often a schedule and don’t measure any possible impact it means as well that the task can be rescheduled with no arm. My ultime goal was to make sure that routines are done while keeping as much as possible free time and flexibility. So what I needed really was a de-scheduler.

Due to limited time I didn’t reuse outlook tasks records. I could have Kneaver toolbox has all capability to do it. I just started a plain new database and a little coding for a planner object and a web page to display the list of tasks and mark them as completed.

Outside from periodicity adjustments I added extra features like :

• Collecting actual frequencies and durations and suggesting reasonable schedule based on measures.
• Ordering tasks by duration on a given period. Very often we look for a small task to fit in a time hole. Waiting for a phone call in 10 minutes what can I do in 5 minutes.
• I distinguish tasks totally manual requiring focused attention for the duration (like wiring a blog post) from tasks that will require waiting periods (like a backup for example).
• Tasks are chunked as much as possible so that they can be placed in small slots and imply no waiting periods.
• Some tasks are a really long task made piece by piece like reviewing a customer database. This means you must have a an extra information to track what is already done. Other tasks implies a counter (send 3 proposal per week) so it is not only period but also a count of action you want to measure over time.
• Benefit of using a web based component is that it will naturally live accros multiple device and OS.

I am finished with this small program and will try it for a while. I am very interested to see the impact of being able to deconstruct a plan. I have been hesitating to do this program a long time because I thought that personnal planing was too off track from PKM. Maybe I was wrong.

My Cat Scanning the View

The title looks like a potpourri. It’s normal.

When my cat is allowed to go out in the morning, the first thing it does is to scan the neighbourhoods from the terrace. It stands on a small pillar and turns its head, slowly and zooms on the propitious spots. Mouse, lizards, cats are on the radar. Trees and high grass are hiding them. It takes 30 seconds and here it goes. It jumps into the garden to get a close eye on something.

I have about the same attitude when I check my mail or the RSS aggregator in the morning, a mug of coffee in my hand, looking to cat on the terrace.

The first thing that pops to my eyes and tries to capture my attention is spam. Obviously those behind this plague know that orders, banks, credit cards are high on our agenda. For this reason scanning the Inbox is usually very deceptive and useless. So the very first task is to run the spam filter(s). What the spam filter does (after obvious steps) is to take a suspicious look into the contents, scanning for outrageous hints. Any deceiving term would flag it as spam. Scarcity of terms in our field of business and abundance of engaging term (free, money) are impacting as well. The point is that scanning to remove spam is similar but different in the fact that we look for exaggerated proliferation or out of subject terms instead of informative messages.

It becomes more and more the same with RSS. RSS are not cluttered by spam but with 3 million and counting bloggers it is over abundant. Twitter started a new era and we get now from our friendfeed a continuous flow of messages about all and everything. I was not going to spend time looking for a pearl in this sea.

We have a nice tool in Kneaver which takes a text and evaluates it against our personal knowledge. Basically a natural language parser will take it, identify terms available in the corpus, compute their frequency. Up to here pretty common. Now what is less common is that we compute some sort of distance between the terms in the text but also in the corpus. For this we use graph distances and semantic vectors. What we are really looking at are texts mostly residing in our Knowledge Frontier. They are the most likely to bring us something new but still in the focus. This is really similar to the cat approach. Is this grey color likely to be a cat, if yes I should see another hint nearby: something moving or another grey patch.

Now we are testing an RSS valuator filter base on this feature. What you get is exactly the original feed but some styles are added so that your RSS newsreader will display it in colors depending on the foreseen interest. It is now easy for the relax reader to spot the most interesting news. Nice feature and very personal.

However what you will not get are the hidden pearls. The interesting piece of news, totally out of context, lost in the stream of professionally oriented streams. To illustrate this when I reviewed my daily delivery of news from Guy Kawasaki (I follow him for informations and hints in the perspective of his books) , filtered by Kneaaver, I could see, lost like a bottle in ocean, a piece about Chris Ware. I like his work and so do my son but this piece was completely outside of my job interest. Kneaver couldn’t catch it, I could. We, human, remain better than software. We can adapt at once any procedure and incorporate extraneous exceptions on the fly. Yes but without Kneaver raising the visibility of interesting pieces, I wouldn’t have the spare time to look for an out of band piece.

Wow! the cat was stung by a wasp while I was writing. She’s young and need also to enhance her scanning procedure.

Location: http://eric-blue.com/

I came across this blog while looking for combined use of Wiki and MindMaps. Kneaver combines naturally both as being alternative displays of the same body of Knowledge. Presentations is yet another.

Back to Eric Blue. Eric had a post about visual Wiki. This is the link: http://eric-blue.com/2009/05/12/the-visual-wiki-a-new-metaphor-for-knowledge-access-and-management/. It was conference from John Hosking  (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~john) about Visual Wiki. IMO the video is a not very conclusive. May be the most interesting is the mention of thinkbase (see it directly at http://thinkbase.cs.auckland.ac.nz/)

Eric has a goal of building his own Personal Memex from open source components. I fully agree with him on the necessity of graphical capabilities. Alas Kneaver is not open source so I can’t help otherwise Eric would be able to continue his mindmap directly on Kneaver

 Back on the question of open source and how much technology can be projected client side. This is a very complex issue since most path leads to dead ends.

• Anything based on Flash uses a proprietary software not uniformly supported (iPhone). Howver his mind map is running with Flash and freemind browser and it works.
• Anything on java is likely to causes issues as well. Either browser not running java or performance. Thinkbase on top of java is hard to start (even with Chrome). We experienced this also in another project. The graphic was neat, interactive and all but most visitors just didn’t see that an applet was present
• HTML5 canevas has also a caveat: Internet Explorer don’t support it and still it is 70% of the market.
• SVG had limited support via a plugins supported by Adobe. Adobe don’t support it anymore (normal in between they have flash and there are svg viewers based on Flash). 
• No client technology. Just plain jpeg files.

Today we support SVG, jpeg (server side computed, will work everywhere including cell phones) and mm (can be visualized with Freemind viewer). Youcan swicth from one technology to another.

The truth is there are plenty of software for mind mapping (http://www.mind-mapping.org/full-list.php) but a lack of standardization. Most of them operates like powerpoint. You work on a single map at a time and end up wondering where is the best place to store your notes. This is one of the barriers we break. Maps are only a view among others of your thoughts.

Now what is the most exiting part of his blog is the Personal Memex. Taking the idea from Vannevar Bush and to start pick and add building blocks as they appear on the market. That’s very inspirational. http://eric-blue.com/my-projects/personal-memex/

It’s like a shopping list, we are waiting to see what the cook prepared with the ingredients.

• Core – Mediawiki (Content Management System, Wiki)
• Document Management
• MindMap
• Semantic capability
• Search
• Bookmark
• webpage capture
• Timeline browsing, faceted browsing
• Multimedia integration

You can also see the requirements

• Capability to act as a “bit-bucket”. That’s really our KneaverTray and the Kneaver pipeline or Knowledge hose.
• Ability to store “Notes”. Ok again.
• Timeline access. goes back to facet browsing and mental frames.
• Navigation beyond traditional hierarchy. for me it is the same as above.
• Comprehensive search
• Ability to store meta-data. I would add meta-linking.
• Ability to import, export and share. I would share as much as possible or import and subscribe to stay current.
• Integration with mind maps. I would add Powerpoints, texts, databases.

What is missing IMO:

• Automated discovery system that will connect things together. My input is a text, a mindmap, a document but I want the system to automatically understand where it stands.
• Continuation prompts: inductors are a generalization of pending wikilinks. This is a cumulative knowledge database and I want to be able to continue from any pending links, find them and kneave them together.
• I need to be able to turn seamlessly some part of existing knowledge into meta data. For a recipe I need the ingredients, the time it takes for preparation and then a body of text or a video. Now go back to every recipe and check this is available.

Eric Blue’s blog is very active. Since 2004 several posts per month. Real good work and plenty of interesting contents. I wish I have the occasion to return to read it often.

Location: http://apsblog.com

This post is starting a new category. In the process of building Knowledge Management Software, methodology is a major issue. I am continuously reading and exploring the web. Trying not to reinvent the wheel. I think that it can be valuable to link to existing blogs that I discovered during this process and say how I feel they contribute to the goal. This could be either in Methology or in Technology.

I discovered this blog while writing my post about Knowledge Capture. So my first page was http://apsblog.com/site/knowledge-capture/knowledge-capture-exploring-the-knowledge . There is a whole category dedicated to Knowledge capture with several list, questions that will help to get to the point quickly. There are so many places investigating the process of collecting knowledge and specifically loose workflow strategies.

I understood this is the view of consultants with underlying expertise in medical environment but most of the advices are reusable in many fields.

I like that along side with Knowledge Capture, Learning is also a category. For me that’s like standing on both legs.  There are some post about Learning 2.0 although it stays somehow theoretical for me. I would like to find some actual stories of experiments on this.

Like many of us interested in Knowledge Management and Technology there is a mention of Douglas Engelbart. This is like a dauting signal for me. Douglas Engelbart was also on the track of the Memex see “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, . I am wondering if this the goal, the limit or a dead end.