Solstice

It's the shortest day!

I'm ambivalent about Christmas, don't think I've ever partaken of any of the other rituals of the season. But I sure do celebrate the winter solstice, in spirit if not in much action (I plan to get a few beers later). I can explain best by quoting a late friend of mine :

"Nights are drawing in." - Geoff Beswick of Priestcliffe (every year soon after 21st June)

I'm pretty sure I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder in the clinical sense. But I'm a late riser, short days (with the associated unpleasant weather) really do impact my mood, however indirectly. So here, I'll claim the quote :

"Nights are drawing out!"

Postcraft

#:postcraft is an application of #:transmissions which I put while figuring out #:transmissions. It's a static site builder, you're looking at its product. Right now it's a crufty, fragile, seriously over-engineered and breathtakingly inefficient static site builder. But that's not a problem. Things should be coupled loosely enough that I can incrementally improve all this with minimal breakage along the way. Should be.

The fact that I've messed up the CSS somewhere but have no idea where suggests there is a problem.

I'm only using HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS for presentation, but it's all a bit of a lump right now. I need to tease out the bits that are actually in use, relocate and organise them in a way that I can work on them in isolation.

Ew. The current filesystem setup really is a shambles.

Ok, the root of this site when published locally is :

/home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/public/home
...
ls
css  entries  fonts  index.html  js  media  static

In index.html is :

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/fonts.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/grid-columns.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" />

Hmmm. I put the danny.ayers.name material under .../postcraft/ because it's been acting as test data. This might be a good time to move it somewhere more production-like. Ok, new repo : https://github.com/danja/danny.ayers.name

As a static site builder #:postcraft currently :

copies a bunch of stuff from A -> B
walks dirs transforming markdown -> html
templates the individual entry pages
templates index.html

I'd better remind myself of the #:postcraft #:transmission and the manifest I'm using for danny.ayers.name. Might as well make copies for future ref. It seems I'm using https://danny.ayers.name/static/ as the base for material that should be published verbatim. The word static isn't quite right, but I guess it fits ok with not-quite-right conventions.

There's a bit of chicken & egg here, the documentation for #:transmissions will be published using #:transmissions. Short version :

A #:transmissions application is defined by its -
- transmissions, the topology of the processing pipelines
- configuration, the settings for the nodes in the pipelines, which are processors

The #:postcraft application has :

transmissions.ttl
config.ttl
about.md - the applications should mostly be self-documenting in the Turtle files (together with the processor signatures), but I've included these for out-of-band info, notes-to-self. I'll probably add an about.ttl later, hints for the machines.

When a #:transmissions application is invoked, a target may be provided for instance-specific data. In this case, there's a manifest.ttl on the filesystem with the necessary for building the danny.ayers.name site.

manifest.ttl

I've a huge amount of refactoring & tweaking to do around #:transmissions. Here the separation of concerns between config & manifest isn't very clean, vocab clunky. But I'm happy to call this fundamental structure done for now. There are a bunch of new features I plan to implement in the near future. But I've got to be careful about priorities (this is what I need #:farelo, kind-of project management tooling, also in-progress).

Dogwalk... ...where was I?

Oh yeah, sources & destinations of things. First, I want another set of copies of those files. I should be more systematic and use for-purpose version control better. Showing my age here, I predate VCS. But simply making a copy of the application dir and calling it postcraft-previous works pragmatically.

trans is simply symlinked to a run.js, partial prep for something I dare put on the $PATH. postcraft the application here appears in #:transmissions' source tree (it doesn't have to, I'm following a strategy of minimising ties to the filesystem as I go along, but there's no rush to move it). The target is given as a relative path, where to look for a manifest.ttl.

I've slipped into my own little convention for locating repos on these Ubuntu machines :

 /home/danny/github-danny
 /home/danny/github-other

So most of the time when I'm coding I use ~/github-danny as a temporary home.

Now how am I expressing the paths in config.ttl?

t:copyStatic a trm:ServiceConfig ;
    trm:key t:staticCopy ;
    trm:source "content-static" ;
    trm:destination "public/home/static" .

And where does that wind up using when it's run?

Ok, I need that about.md note-to-self, give it a little tweak :

cd ~/github-danny/transmissions

./trans postcraft ../postcraft/danny.ayers.name | grep content-static

Ah. On my to-do list is swapping the hacky logger that's in #:transmissions now for a proper one, and have the thing support a --verbose flag. Not a biggy, I can force the log level to debug inside whichever processor is doing the copy. Ok, here it is in

### static dirs
:cp10 a :FileCopy ;
    trm:configKey :staticCopy .

I've only just added support for processors (implemented as ES modules) outside of the #:transmissions source tree, so this'll be:

src/processors/fs/FileCopy.js

Pop in logger.setLogLevel("debug"), rerun the application+grep,

Copying directory from /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/content-static to /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/public/home/static

It said that twice. Odd, but not a worry for today.

Grr. Some jobs I need to do before it goes dark. I'll just check what happens when I tweak the path :

t:copyStatic a trm:ServiceConfig ;
    trm:key t:staticCopy ;
    trm:source "content-static" ;
    trm:destination "../../danny.ayers.name/static" .

./trans postcraft ../postcraft/danny.ayers.name | grep content-static

...
Copying directory: /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/content-static to /home/danny/github-danny/danny.ayers.name/static

Good-o, just as I'd hoped.

So now I'll just flip the path back, type p on my local machine - a script which will run the above, then push the result up to the server. Next I ssh into the server, another little script :

cd /home/github-danny
./pull-all.sh

And this here should be live.

Break time.

Stream

I'll push this out now, pre-pre-draft. Note blog title (#:todo italicize - "Rawer"). Taking me ages to get things down, break for more immediate dopamine-shot generating activities for a while...

On the BBC Radio 4 news this morning it mentioned that UK water bills were going to be significantly increased. This is despite the recipient companies having displayed an egregious lack of concern over water supplies to consumers and appalling disregard for the environment. The following stream of consciousness is lumpy like British rivers.

There's a lot I need to write up. There's also a lot of stuff I need to do. The two are deeply intertwingled. The latter is much better at holding my attention, the former I can keep in my head until I get around to it. But I just had a trip to the UK, family-related, that totally disrupted my mental waterways. Time for an unstructured dump.

In chat this morning with #:ClaudioB, he mentioned the Model Context Protocol. I'd just started looking at this before I got called away, but not before ~~I'd~~ we'd (#:ClaudeAI & I) done a first pass at an RDF mapping : Model Context Protocol Ontology. This is very relevant to something I've been working on, #:LingueFranche, see below.

KIA Intelligence Agency

A heterogenous community of autonomous agents.

This isn't really a thing yet. But it's where I'm heading with all the other things (jeez, there is a lot I need to write up).

For convenience, near future, a testbed/playground using XMPP-based MUC. I did have ejabberd running on my server before, but I'm now in the process of setting up Prosody in a Docker container, in which other stuff will live. Docker for repeatability, Prosody because it has a bit less baggage.

Semantic Hashtags

I should explain the #:SemanticHashtag syntax, which also relates to #:LingueFranche. I can't remember whether or not I got as far as spec'ing this out yet, but it's an easy one in principle. Just a small extension of the familiar folksonomic #hashtag. Rather that it having global scope (as on Twitter etc), it's localised.

A context (in this case the domain https://hyperdata.it) MAY assert it's in use (eg. via a HTML meta tag). In which case further disambiguation SHOULD be made available in that context. This MAY be expressed using a dereferenceable IRI, linked from the #:tag.

In practice, I'm including them in the markdown I write. At some point I'll put a #:processor in the rendering pipeline to link them to something useful. At minimum, a list of the pages here in which the term is used. It's something that can be progressively enhanced.

My Infrastructure

#:ClaudioB also asked earlier about what I do for hosting. Currently I use s/linode/Akamai. I have maybe their cheapest Linux virtual host (physically in London Docklands somewhere), 2GB RAM, some kind of minimal CPU cover. From here it looks like bare metal, I run Ubuntu on that. On top, main thing is nginx for static Web, proxying to other local services as appropriate. letsencrypt for certs. I do most things via ssh in a terminal. The bandwidth is great, performance adequate for much (cough) regular stuff. When I started using them a few years back they were about the cheapest that seemed to get good reviews for such a setup.

On home LAN I've got a couple of desktops and a laptop, a couple of oddities I'm in the process of resurrecting and an Android phone (with Termux, which is awesome). Oh yeah, and my mother's (very) old iPhone, which I've yet to play with. First one I've owned (I did have a little Apple laptop for a while, years ago, but $s and familiarity mean I'm all-Ubuntu now). Oh yeah, I've also a handful of ESP32 microcontroller-based things I've made that are WiFi/HTTP-aware, when switched on and behaving themselves.

My AI budget is limited, pay-fors at the moment are Claude Pro and the HuggingFace

Documentation

[11:49, 19/12/2024] Claudio Baldassarre: btw how did you produce the documentation? [11:49, 19/12/2024] Claudio Baldassarre: and who do you have the web hosting with?

Lingue Franche

SigMod

Not that SIGMOD

Mari gave me a lift into town earlier for a Dr's appt. We arrived early so waited in the car for a while. Phones out.

Among the more recent of the 1987 Chrome tabs I had open ¹ was DSPy. It'd buzzed my radar on some previous occasion, when I only did the most cursory of skims. Today it reappeared from a different direction so I had a better look. A line in the page made me laugh out loud.

I'm sure you're familiar with :

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

- Phil Karlton (Martin Fowler has backstory & variants)

I've struggled a lot with naming in my #:transmissions pipeliney-thing subproject. The fine line between getting the correct term semantically but without using a term that is so heavily overloaded as to confuse. A good example was Service, which I started with for a particular kind of unit of code. It worked ok for these fairly independent little nodejs chunks that act as processing nodes in the ~~s/pipeline/graph~~ Transmission. But although these things might be implemented as eg. microservices, that term brought the potential implication that some remote-calling protocol (like HTTP) had to be involved (they are identified with URIs, another layer of misdirection). Going in the other direction, Function was another candidate. The shape is y = f(x). But that's rather a no-no in a language where it's already a reserved word, not to mention that most won't be pure functions, hell to pay from the Church.

These things appear in the current and only implementation of #:transmissions as a single function wrapped in a class inside an EcmaScript module. But they have a single object as input, a single transformed object as output (not really, but ok as first approx, the rest is tangential). Their purpose (first approx) is to process a message. Name I settled on Process.

I've been working on #:transmissions for about a year now. The initial motivation was that I had a variety of things to build, they all shared (at a suitable level of abstraction) the same pipeliney structure. I roughed something out, first just for a static site generator. In the process bringing LLMs into my workflow, serendipity kicked in. It turned out to be fairly optimal for what you can get in an LLM's context window. The Transmission at the planning level, and individual Processes are all at a level of complexity that the LLM can handle comfortably. It's also humanly-checkable, programming best practices, testable etc. The structural, nuts & bolts bits of #:transmissions do go beyond. I have actually had to think about things myself there (boo!). Still not nailed down enough to proclaim a v1.0.0, still loads in flux.

Going back to the naming. So a Process has an input (message) and output (message) as well as internal behaviour. To be able to collaborate with the LLM on these things (and for any future use) there needs to be some #:LingueFranche to describe these things. A quasi-formal language, perhaps. I started with a comment block in the code (so it'd work with JSDoc), since going much more RDF (because WWW). I've still not got the details ironed out, but early on I settled on a name for these descriptions of process modules, things in a space not quite Contracts, but different from OO/service Interfaces : Signature.

Imagine my delight on finding this line in the DSPy docs :

For every AI component in your system, you specify input/output behavior as a signature and select a module to assign a strategy for invoking your LM.

Yeah, I laughed out loud. The context is only slightly different (major overlaps), but I love that I, and the folks behind this had converged on pretty much the same vocab.

On Android Chrome, click on the Tabs icon (starts as a number, turns into a :D on day one), then click on the (#:todo find Unicode for) 3-dot colon settings icon. This offers Select Tabs. Then you can Select All. It then tells you how many tabs you have open (here, 1991 ²), which you can then Save. ↩
Tell me you're ADHD without telling me you're ADHD ↩

Any Port

...in a storm.

I spent a couple of hours last night trying to get comms going so external net machines could see hosts on my home LAN. Too tired, I should have stopped after an hour... Come back to this later.

Claude tells me I have to reserve an IP on the router here with the local machine's MAC address.

Router - I remember this. Default login is