Counting without, er, numbers

Does anyone else think it’s ironic that in Formulaire de mathématiques (Peano et al.: 1895)¹ used the natural numbers to number the axioms which define the natural number system?

Yes, I know what Bertrand Russell thought of those axioms (that they don’t, in fact, characterize the natural numbers), but I also know that Russell was very taken with Peano at a conference in Paris some years later and saw him in a new light. It also seems that Peano did think the axioms characterise the natural numbers. I tend to agree with Russell, but I still find it slightly astonishing that the axioms were numbered. Talk about bootstraps!

¹NB. I don’t have an original copy of FDM to hand; I only have secondary sources that quote it. If they are misquoting, then this post is bunk and those secondary sources slide a little lower in my estimation. If you have a copy of FDM, why not photograph it and put it online for the world to see? These issues need clearing up; foundational maths is still a mess, and the history of foundational maths is even worse.

How many humanities scholars does it take to change a professional paradigm?

There are some tech-savvy humanities scholars, there are some who try to grok modern IT but don’t quite manage, and there are some who wish information technology had never progressed beyond the invention of the book (for the extremists, even the printing press was a step too far: bound manuscripts are the height of IT for these folks*). I recently had a conversation with an eminent Cambridge humanities professor who said to me, in the context of a longer conversation about information management, “It’s like when Windows [by which he meant Word] will run on Microsoft [by which he meant a PC running Windows] but won’t work on a Mac [by which he meant... who knows? Word and Windows will both run on Macs].”

This sort of comment bothers me for three reasons. One is that it is baldly nonsensical: one must interpret it - with little guidance except one’s own background knowledge and a few of the antagonist’s preceding slip-ups - in order to make sense of it. Another is that it shows a lack of concern about accuracy; a dangerous lack of concern, in fact, for someone who has responsibility for one of Cambridge’s extensive, unique, and breathtakingly expensive digital datasets (furthermore, the scholarly accuracy of the input to the system matters little if your data is being corrupted by both its storage and its delivery mechanisms, which it was being). The third reason, which is the one of greatest personal concern to me, is that somebody like this - and he really is a brilliant scholar - might not be able to use Interpreader. Without people like that using Interpreader, or something like it, the paradigm of keeping annotations private and interpretations informal will remain among at least some of the best (in a traditional sense) scholars. That is not what I want.

My usability hat just swivelled itself onto my head a little more firmly.

* I’ve nothing against bound manuscripts per se, but they are not an efficient means of mass-communication.

Grep the web from the web

I like grep. Grep lets you search within files, using regular expressions. Usually, you can even use wildcards to specify which files grep should search within. This means that when you ask grep to find something, you can give it just about as much information as you know, reducing the chances that it will spend a long time looking in the wrong place(s) or that it will return the wrong result(s).

But why can’t I do this on the web? Well, maybe it is possible, but I haven’t yet found a web site that offers to search the web in a way that lets me use wildcards while specifying which URLs to search at and that lets me use regular expression syntax to specify what to search for. (If you know of such a site, please post it here.)

In the absence of such a site, I’d like to propose creating one. So I’ve registered www.greptheweb.com and I’d like the community’s help to build a site to put there.

The site should, I think:

• Have a front page with a form that has two fields:
  • Where to search. Here users can enter URLs with Perl regex syntax.
  • What to search for. Here users can specify strings they’re looking for, also using Perl’s regex syntax.
  • User’s should perhaps be assisted in entering their queries by means of a RegexBuddy-style helper, maybe implemented with AJAX techniques.
• Have a help or FAQ page.
• Have results pages that are dynamically generated with GET requests. These would be returned in response to a form submission, but would also be generated in response to a direct request, e.g. from a bookmark.

The back end of the site is the hardest part, of course. Web search engines are difficult to implement well. Scaling is an issue. I’ve never built a search engine; I’ve never written a grep-like program. Still, I have some ideas about how the back end should work.

• It could just use the Alexa Web Search’s “grep the web” service, templating the results in HTML and returning them to the user; or
• It could be built from scratch. If the latter, then:
• It should, to begin with, index pages in a simplistic fashion. That is, it should include a robot that can find pages with straightforward URLs like http://www.python.org . Eventually the robot should be made sophisticated enough to find all publicly-accessible web pages.

So, SPK, is Symfony still doing it for you?

For the most part, yes.

It’s not flawless, but so far, for my purposes, it beats or equals the other web frameworks I’ve tried out, except possibly web2py, which I’m just starting to get to grips with. I won’t go into much detail here (I’m busy!) but here are symfony’s most noteworthy pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

• Uses latest major release of PHP, meaning it should be deployable with just about any hosting service.
• End-to-end documentation (from download to deployment), with additional tutorials for newbies.
• Fairly comprehensive API.
• Mature enough to have addressed all the normal requirements: authentication, caching, admin generation, etc.
• Last but certainly not least: a forum and IRC channel full of very helpful people who respond quickly.

Cons:

• Uses PHP, so some of the syntax is less easy to read than Python or Ruby code would be (PHP’s a double-edged sword; see the “pro” above).
• A handful of parts of the documentation aren’t up-to-date, notably in the Askeet tutorial (the documentation is still more comprehensive and up-to-date than that of most recent open-source web frameworks, however).
• The sync script for deployment behaves weirdly on Vista (though this can be overcome by using cygwin - more on how to do this here).