Been to so much recently, that I've hardly had time to keep up.

Waiting for Godot was on at to Royal Theatre. Looks impressive but is not a good venue. The acoustics are bad and the seats are uncomfortable. Still, it was Ian McCellan and Patrict Stewart on one bill, with Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup thrown in for good measure. What can I say, really. The cast made the occasion. The play was funny and engaging, even if it makes no sense. The set was wonderful. Seeing Mr X and Magneto at the same time, though, what more could you want? Well, apart from comfortable seats, that is.

Show of Hands. Yep, great. Barn storming, folkie-inspired, throw some politics in. They really filled the hall (Sage one which is famously hard to fill, being cold and antiseptic). Heard about them many times before, but as it happens, never seen them or heard any of their stuff. Good introduction, this was.

Swing Out Sister, finally — not my choice, not really my sort of thing, but I am a music junkie, and always willing to try anything. Besides which, they were fun in the 80s and compared to SAW were a relief. Live, they were great. The music is upbeat, engaging, entertaining. The band were fluent and the night really, erm, swung. They started off with two of their big hits (Surrender and another one I forgot the name of) which seemed curious; as well as these, they had a few stand-out songs, although even on the more pedestrian numbers, it was all very listenable and enjoyable. The encore was the inevitable Breakout — "when you've found a good thing make it last" — Swing Out Sister seem to have done this, and I'm glad.

Today, iplayer tells me "You have download 2.22 of content" with a checkbox saying "Do not show this message". Robbed of a unit the former looks messy, robbed of "again" the latter looks a bit "Do not press this button again".

Download times have come down a bit. Still — 4 hours now for a 60 min programme. I even managed to get something to play today; the frame rate appeared to be about 5/second.

What a flurry of posts? I went mad today and joined twitter and friendfeed both at the same time. Gosh, what a time waster this stuff all is.

Right, just got to twitter about posting on my blog.

Managed to download a file; it doesn't block so badly at 5pm. Can't get the file to play in any way, shape or form. There is, however, a solution. What you do is click on the "download to windows media player" link. This gives you a straight forward URL from which you can http download. This is actually better, in many ways. You can use what ever download manager you like, including a vaguely capable one. You don't have to guess which file is which as you did before. And as soon as some one has worked out how to pull the URLs out of the BBC's UI, we should be able to circumvent the entire process of going to their website.

So, perhaps it's not all doom and gloom after all.

Just been forced to "upgrade" to this, despite having no desire to. It's very impressive. It will only do a single download at a time and is current reporting 10 hours left for a 1 hour programme; the old BBC IPlayer would download in about real-time, certainly after 10pm in the evening. I did manage to download one programme in 5 mins, but sadly the file was only 32k at the end and it wouldn't play; really, really broken. And, of course, it's ditched my existing programmes despite promising to keep them.

Apparently, they have ditched P2P for IPlayer Desktop; good idea, if you ask me. Lower CPU load, no upload traffic generally good. But you have to upgrade your servers, guys. And, of course, the entire internet, to avoid the slowest link effect. Very poor indeed. The message boards would be floods of moans; lucky that the BBC had the foresight to close them down.

Ironically, they've gone high definition; it was announced on the website. Great idea; a week to download 5 mins, but looks great when you do.

Very poor; has to go down in history as one of the worst damn squib launches I've known. I wish I knew how to upgrade back to the old iplayer.

Did the update. RC1 is out which is a reasonable time. If I updated on the release day it would have taken for ever; last time, it took something like 2 hours. This time the whole process was over and done with in an hour. It's all been relatively painless. So far only two problems. Obviously my marble mouse configuration stopped working again, and I had to change all my HAL scripts; luckily, this is now better documented than before. A great relief because following through the myriad pieces of advice on how to do this every update was getting taxing. And, secondly, they've introduced something called "screen-profiles" which is colour schemes for screen; very nice, I'm sure, but when it seems to be kicked off when I start screen with an aliases, asking me lots of questions. Uninstalled it; problem gone.

And Jaunty? Well, it looks nice enough. Boot time is definately faster, although my windows box still beats Ubuntu (there is less on it, to be fair). Login screen looks very cool. Other than that, well, all ahead as normal.

People seem to be talking about my post on upper ontologies. Half of them are moaning about my blog software.

Look, the point is that the user interface is nice and simple for me. I just type stuff into a text editor, I can do it offline and it all works. No one else needs to use it if they don't want to!

Of course, it would be good to use something better, but not if I have to fiddle with any of the 100s of rubbish online editors that I've seen. And it's too hard to change now.

Bah, humbug.

When Peter Murray-Rust restarted blogging recently, I must admit that to having mixed feelings. His blog is very interesting, often insightful and entertaining. He is, however, rather prolific, making up a considerable chunk of my RSS inbox. This would be okay if he was dull, of course, as I'd just unsubscribe, but it's not true.

As a case in point, he recently talked about Ontological Wars; this lead me to the Upper Ontology page on wikipedia which I'd not read before. Mostly of this page is not about upper ontologies but two sides sniping at each other about why upper ontologies are or are not possible.

Since the whole idea of upper ontologies came into bio-ontologies, I have to admit to being deeply ambivalent about them; I can see the appeal, of course. There is a pleasure at fiddling about at the upper, most abstract levels of knowledge. Career-wise, upper ontologies are high-risk but think about the potential publication rate if every one uses your ontology; of course, the actual value might be small to each individual, but if you get a publication out of each; well, it's like writing Maniatis (famous for having a funky name, as well as the book), or BLAST (which gets cited by everyone).

The flip side is that, I think that there is rather little evidence that using a single common upper ontology actually aids the processes of ontology development, deployment or integration. It can help somewhat, but then people end up spend too much time thinking about the philosophy of upper ontologies, which ultimately can take a lot of time; take a look at the BFO mailing list if you want to see how I have fallen in to this trap. On the other end of the process, how much use is an upper ontology in terms of querying? For example, it might be good to know that the function of a test tube and the function of beta-galactosidase are actually instances of the same RealizableEntity, but does anyone ever query at this level of abstraction.

I think that the core problem here, is that upper ontologies tend to be built without evidence; rather illustrative examples are chosen and then used to derive general truths. An illustrative example of this approach is, for example, Barry Smith's paper on part of; the example is a circle half of which is red, half of which is white. Okay, but where is the evidence that this is a good example? Can we be sure that if we picked a different example, the conclusions would not have been different?

This, I think, covers the key problem. At the moment, are attempting to build upper ontologies from the top down; those people who are interested in upper ontologies tend not to apply them to large scale projects; those people building lower ontologies tend not to discuss the applicability of upper ontologies for fear of getting shot down in flames; see wikipedia if you like flame wars. What we need is an arbiter, some way of determining who is right, who is wrong; as a scientist, of course, I know how to do this; I do an experiment. You can argue philosophy all you like, but having not one illustrative example can never outdo having several hundred actual uses. We don't entirely know how to do these experiments yet, but that's partly because we are not trying. I once got told on the BFO mailing list (and I paraphrase): YOU can do controlled experiments if you like, but I'm too busy doing science for that.

In ontology building, we need to avoid arguments like "is it correct", "is it true" or "is it reality" and replace them with "does it work". And to do this, we need to take a small step back and ask: how do we know when our ontology works; and most importantly of all, how can we guess when its likely to work in the future. Only then can we choose with knowledge between the different upper ontologies or, indeed, none at all.

Enough philosophical ramblings; back to work.

I've been getting recurrent problems with the ssh service on cygwin. It was crashing with a wierd fork, malloc style error that I just had no chance of debugging. It's been causing me real grief. sshfs has stopped working, unison has had problems. But it's only been intermittent, so I never got around to fixing it.

Today, I did the google thing. And the cause? Think hard, have a guess, I promise you will be surprised.

My web cam drivers. Of course, I hid the critical information from you — I have attached a device from Logitech to my machine; I've ranted about logitech before, but this one takes the biscuit. They really do make some of the worse software known to man. I mean, how are you supposed to figure this one out? Hmmm, a key component of my secure networking is causing problems; what can it be? Perhaps, it's my webcam software.

Uninstalled their QuickCam disaster. The webcam still works. So far, no ssh problems at all.