pydoit

So "doit" is a build tool written in Python, designed to be more general in scope than make. The documentation speaks of workflow. It looks like an attractive tool.

And speaking of attraction, it seems to me that there are natural "semantic attractors" when it comes to the many tools written for the same domain. What you'd really want to do is to boil things down to a semantic core and then map out how each tool expresses things in its own unique way. Factor out the commonality, as it were.

So the build tool domain would be an interesting domain to do that in, especially given its patent usefulness in building tools.

Random user generator

Randomuser.me gives you a random user profile - "Lorem ipsum for people". (See how this ties back to the contact management thing?)

So here's a semantic pole for ya: people. They just keep coming up all over the place. And they often share a lot of things with one another. So why don't we have a range of tools like this one, for people, for companies, etc.?

Sort of a semantic toolbox kinda thing.

Contact management

A recurring problem for everybody who deals with people. Which is ... everybody. [musings] [hnn]

Seems to me that part of the problem is that not every application of contact management requires a full-on heavy-artillery solution. So - as with many, many other domains - there is a kind of sliding scale of complexity that could be modeled using a set of mapped semantic domains.

I really think this concept is going to pay off once I have it clear in my head.

PyEphem

Astronomical calculations in Python. Very slick.

Mathematics/computer algebra

So SFTP under Perl requires Net::SSH::Perl, which in turn relies on Math::Pari, which interfaces to PARI [wiki], a computer algebra system that implements a lot of number theory algorithms.  PARI is a library that is normally accessed through GP/PARI, a scripting language specifically written for it.

Here's the thing.  Math::Pari doesn't install on Windows (nothing I tried tonight installed on Windows) and, reading into it, the implementer of Math::Pari seems like a real ... ahem, doesn't seem to play well with others.  Math::Pari will only install if you have built PARI on your own machine; it requires the build directory to build the Perl.  Period.  Unfortunately, it doesn't react at all well to the current version.  Like, "Perl dies" levels of poor reactions.

I'd like to wrap PARI a little better.  Maybe Inline::GP or something, I don't know, but there is most definitely room for improvement.

But that aside, I ran across Sage again.  Sage is essentially an open-source mathematics Swiss Army chainsaw.  What it is, is Mathematica re-implemented on open-source, and it includes PARI, SymPy, and a boatload of other open-source tools of that nature.

There's a whole comparison list here.

There, my friend, is a domain crying out.

Bookkeeply

Bookkeeping for freelancers.  Definitely a target application.

Two posts on security

Security seems like it could be a good domain.  Schneier, and HNN.

LDAP

I tangled briefly with LDAP once before.  How relevant is LDAP these days?  I always thought it was a pretty slick alternative to the RDBMS.  Anyway, here's a "gentle introduction".

Domain: networking

So lately I've been delving into programming my router. I lend bandwidth to a neighbor, but they tend to watch Netflix when I want to watch Netflix on the Wii, and the Wii is not a happy camper when it comes to sharing bandwidth.

I run DD-WRT on my router, one of several open-source router firmware products out there these days. That means my router is a Unix box. That means that - given that it runs iptables - technically, I could make it do nearly anything, from logging bandwidth to choking it by specific MAC or even by MAC-and-port combination. Or at least I could do that if I truly understood iptables and networking, which, when you get down to brass tacks, I don't.

For example, there is a dandy little embryonic shell script wrtbwmon.sh that munges your iptables to log bandwidth by MAC address. (Here is a forum post by its author as he was trying to get it working, and here's his announcement on the DD-WRT forum.) It's slick, but as I have a much more capable Unix machine sitting right next to my router, what I'd really like to do is have that machine grab stats on a regular basis, more or less keeping the router running as a ganglion.

OK, so link dump out of the way, here's why I find this relevant to semantics. Note that I said up there that if I understood networking I could make iptables do some cool stuff. What does it really mean to understand networking? Clearly, it means to have a mental model of the network and the router and all the utilities used to work with the network, how packets get handled by iptables, and so on. I have a vague idea of all these, and given patience I can usually manage to get networks running or fix them, but I can hardly call that understanding (although, when you think about it, the notion of a "vague idea" is already pretty intriguing from the standpoint of modeling - after all, if you could give a computer system a "vague idea" you'd already be 90% of the way to intelligence; arguably, vagueness of ideas is the most human ability there is...)

So the domain of networking would have these concepts in some kind of Lexicon (borrowing from my Hoftstadter days), along with utility calls for diagnostics, and a library of C code snippets for writing your own special-case utilities. That sort of thing. I really do have some notion of where I'm going; I wish I could characterize it better.

Futurist strategy

Here's a neat BoingBoing post of all things, presenting more or less "how to be a futurist". It would be interesting to boil these down into usable tools.

Target domain: software maintenance

OK, so this is probably kind of a fluff post, but I want to be able to model the software maintenance process to the point that I can jump in and analyze a given open-source project, then contribute to it. That's it. Thanks for listening.

Target domain: testing

Unit tests. Something. Testing is probably related to workflow. Yes, I know this is overly terse.

Target domain: Windows 7 gadgets

A StackOverflow overview. tl;dr: they're HTML/CSS/Javascript and run in built-in IE in the Desktop.

Target app: Drag-and-drop Faxaway.com fax sender. That would rock!

Target domain: Telephony

Twilio [representative link] provides telephony as a service, with the ability to write applications that handle incoming calls and SMSs in ways I'm sure I don't yet fully understand. (Add Faxaway.com for incoming and outgoing faxes and I think you've got all the telephone-network-based forms of communication covered...)

Anyway, I need to do a little Twilio work for a side venture I've got going on, so I'll need to spend some time with it - the question I'm now asking myself is: how difficult would it be to put together a domain for Twilio apps? What exactly does that even mean? I want to spend some time thinking about that, because writing app domains feels like an important direction for Decl. The final output language could be anything, after all - including PHP or what have you - so this is kinda like Web programming, except different.

So. Marker in the sand here.

Target domain: dates and times

Time.

Target domain: Android apps

I mean, come on - this is the perfect target domain.

Tutorials.

Target domain: machine learning

OK, OK, I think I've already highlighted this as a target domain, but ... there have been a lot of new textbooks [here and more or less here] and other information [here on decision trees, whole blog is interesting] posted recently and frankly it would be nice to work through one or more of them and Do Things Right.

So: target domain, machine learning.

Domain: crowdsourcing strategies

Here's an interesting paper on the efficacy of a number of different crowdsourcing strategies (using Mechanical Turk). Which leads to the concept of "programming for crowds". If I can program a company, then I can surely program a crowdsourcing application, right?

Think about it.

Target domain: project management

OK, OK, this is another clogged space. Still - I'd like to look closely at the semantics. Unfuddle.com is yet another target app. They make money, so ... I could, too, presumably. Why not? The key is to be able to iterate faster than other humans, and making your specific software a fungible expression of a fixed semantic domain is definitely the way to go.

Target domain: music

Kinda Hofstadterian, given, but:

• HNN thread about abcjs, a Javascript music typesetter/player using the ABC notation
• Google code page for abcjs
• A list of ABC notation pages
• ABC notation home
• The standard (a page that is surprisingly difficult to find)
• Tutorials
• An interesting-looking paper on evolution of guitar themes. Too bad it's behind the ACM paywall.