Hello again.

First off, I think Nartificial is "retooling" the Personal Brain version 2.
It's just a hunch, but I base it on the fact that we made a serious stink
about having User Interface features REMOVED. That seemed to have shocked
Anna (and maybe a few other people there at Narty). If they are smart, they
are retooling it, anyway. You just don't take user functionality away.

Second, I'm not getting all the messages. I've seen replies to messages that
never made it to my inbox. Anyone else having this problem?

Third, I'd like to say that a co-worker of mine has become greatly
interested in the Personal Brain recently. He'd seen it before, and aside
from the way it easily handled URLs, he saw no use for it. Especially not at
$50. However, since seeing the basic process flow that I mapped out in a
Brain for a data massager program, he's become very interested. Frankly, $50
isn't that EXPENSIVE for a good flow/process charter. However, Narty KEEPS
persuading people to not USE their product since their is no EFFECTIVE
exporting/importing. We REALLY need the capability to get data into and out
of it to other formats.

I'm not too worried about Narty shutting down the forum. I am actually
surprised it took them so long. Between the problems and what not, it should
have been done a while back. I HOPE they put up a new one, or sponsor (and
provide links to) another place though. Independent is fine, but we need to
make sure the user community knows we are here, after all.

I would think it not very useful to go Brain to CSV. CSV needs to be fixed
in # of columns/format to be effective in feeding things like data tables
and spreadsheets. But a Brain to XML would be effective. Just odd
thoughts...

Has anyone worked on ways to RE Import these things from XML back to Brain?
This will be needed if you got to XML, and would FINALLY provide for
splitting and copying parts of the Brain into another Brain I would think.
Export the source, edit it down to what you want to import, and import it.
And if you could EXPORT a brain, then we could manually SYNCH brains between
locations. Although Synching should be along in a few years, if Narty really
goes through with putting the Personal Brain onto Palms.

-Darkstar

I share with you work to define an import/export standard for TheBrain
and other tools for organizing thoughts.  The ideas here may also lead
to a "style guide" for using TheBrain and possibly other tools.  Andrius
Kulikauskas
***********************************

I have a new idea for how we can identify and define, for practical
purposes, the basic kinds of structural constraints that we rely on to
organize our thoughts.  The idea is that each structural constraint
works by defining, in its own way, what it means for thoughts to be
"similar" or "different".  These structural constraints are crucial for
doing meaningful transfers of aggregates of thoughts from one software
tool to another.

I should first put this in context of what we've done so far.  I started
with the idea of Kestas Augutis (which also Roy Roebuck had) that our
minds rely on three different structures for organizing thoughts:
sequences, hierarchies, networks.  Computers allow us to use these three
structures in a balanced way, so that we can choose these different ways
of organizing our thoughts so as to promote different kinds of
thinking.  In September 1999, I wrote a paper "Developing Import/Export
Standards for Aggregates of Notes" summarizing work at the Minciu Sodas
laboratory on how to define these three structures from a human point of
view.  An important result was that visualizations involve restructuring
one of these three structures (S, H, N) with another, yielding six
visualization types: chronicle (S to H), evolution (H to S), catalog (H
to N), atlas (N to H), canon (S to N), tour (N to S).  This paper is at:

http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/formatkinds/990917shn.html

In order to come up with a usable import/export format as soon as
possible, in response to the pragmatic perspective of Saulius
Maskeliunas, we then started an investigation, "Linking Locally is
Thinking Globally", sponsored by TheBrain, to see what kinds of
structural links are used by existing software and standards.  A cursory
view has suggested structures such as: Ordered Hierarchy, Unordered
Hierarchy, Radial Hierarchy, and Directed Network and Nondirected
Network.  However, we need to make a more concerted effort to find more
structural link types.  Also, some of these structural constraints
actually require pairs of links, for example, to code an ordered
hierarchy we need to know, given a branch, not only who its parent
branch is, but also which sibling does it come after in the ordering.
We need to have a way of reasoning, whether an ordered hierarchy is just
one link type (ordered hierarchy), or two link types (ordered sequence)
and (hierarchy).

So I am glad to have come up with a new way of thinking about these
structural link types.  The idea is that the purpose of the structure is
to give us a way of thinking about the sense in which two thoughts are
the same.  An example is the method by which I put together results for
our Thoughtful Wishing usage matrix
http://www.ms.lt/thoughtfulwishing.html of tools wished for by people
who enjoy thinking.  I had two or three dozen categories that I wanted
to relate, collapse, refine.  So I placed them on a sheet (using
Microsoft Paint) and worked to arrange them so that related ideas were
next to each other.  This gave me a diagram that I could think about how
to structure and purify.  What was I doing here?  Was the
two-dimensional constraint relevant?  Not really, not at this point.
Most relevant was the concept that categories adjacent to each other
were very closely related, whereas categories far away from each other
were related only by way of intermediary categories.  In other words, a
nondirected network (a network with bidirectional links, which TheBrain
calls "jumps") is what I was really using, even though I did not draw
them.  Thinking about this, I concluded that, in general, this is
arguably the whole purpose of nondirected networks, that thoughts are
equal to the degree that they are adjacent. So thoughts are equal to
themselves, thoughts that are adjacent are almost equal, and the more
thoughts in between, the less they are equal.  A strange, but I think,
very useful way of looking at "equality" - that structural link types
extend the meaning of equality in very different ways.  In other words,
equality is a structural concept, not a semantic concept, and perhaps
the only structural concepts are extensions of equality.

With this in mind, I give a preliminary list of structural constraints
that I know from practice.  This can serve as a "style guide" for using
TheBrain and other tools for thinking.  I invite your critique and,
especially, additions.


TREE = UNORDERED HIERARCHY
Sometimes I want to accumulate my thoughts over time regarding a topic
(an idea, category, problem...), so that I could later go over those
thoughts and see how they relate, and what kinds of issues come up, and
sort those thoughts into these issues, making for new subtopics, and so
on.  Here thoughts are different to the extent that they do or may
belong to different topics.

Comment:
Here and elsewhere, what is important is our global "intent" as authors,
not the actual structure, which may end up clashing with our intent.  So
our intent to structure our thoughts into a tree will naturally lead as
well to "forests", and possibly to "multiple hierarchies", or even
network type structures where a topic may be the subtopic of several
different topics.  What matters here is whether (or not) the author
intends the links to form a tree.

Comment:
There is no structural constraint "ordered hierarchy" or "radial
hierarchy".  A radial hierarchy (such as the branches extending from the
root of the tree in MindManager, www.mindmanager.com) involves two very
different kinds of relationships.  One is that thoughts are organized in
a tree, as described above.  Another is that we can think of the
branches as being adjacent to each other, or even to branches within
other branches, depending on how the tree is layed out.  This adjacency
has the same purpose as the nondirected network described above.  So
arranging the thoughts with respect to these two different bases (by
topic, and by adjacency-relatedness) makes for a creative tension, part
of what the MindManager website refers to as using both the "left-brain"
(by topic) and the "right-brain" (by relatedness).  Similarly, I think
that when we have an ordered hierarchy, then we are using both a
hierarchy and a sequence, as described below.

OPEN SEQUENCE
I think there are at least two kinds of sequences.
One I call an open sequence, which is used for listing priorities.  I
call it open because priorities can be reshuffled, and new priorities
can be inserted, and we can still think of it as the same sequence.
Maybe more important is that there is no concept of the end of the
sequence.  Each priority can be thought of as a filter, so that we have
a stack of filters.  We may think of the first priority as a null
filter, which says that we do not have to do anything.  Subsequent
priorities are interesting only to the extent that they are different
from all of the preceding priorities, for otherwise they do not have any
effect, do not require any response.  Thoughts are equal to the extent
that they extend the preceding thoughts in the same way.

CLOSED SEQUENCE
I call a closed sequence of thoughts one which has a definite beginning
and a definite end.  This is used for documenting reasoning, where each
thought follows from the preceding thoughts.  Presumably there must be a
single chain of thoughts connecting the beginning and the end, because
otherwise we would have to keep a separate record of what they are.
This means that there can be no "gaps" between thoughts.  Instead,
thoughts can be refined, over time, into subsequences of thoughts.  As
this happens, the tree structure can be used to identify the
subsequences of narrower thoughts with the broader thoughts that they
broke down.  (This gives rise to a chronicle: a sequence restructured
with a hierarchy).  I imagine that here subsequences of thoughts are
equal to the extent that they are interchangeable.

NONDIRECTED NETWORK
As described above, in a non-directional network (where the links are
bi-directional), thoughts are different to the degree that they are not
adjacent.

Comment:
The nondirected network should, I imagine, be implemented with pairs of
directed links.  There may be - unintended - cases where the link ends
up one-directional.

DIRECTED NETWORK, NO CYCLES ALLOWED
Sometimes thoughts are organized so that there is a link from A to B
whenever B depends on A (or B requires A).  This lets us see which
concepts are more fundamental, for example, the concept of "divorce"
requires the concept of "marriage", but not the other way around, so
"marriage" is more fundamental.  Or more complex molecules require
simpler ones.  Or, as in architect Christopher Alexander's theory of
patterns, certain patterns are layed down first, and they are required
by other patterns that refine them.  We have a lattice in which cycles
are not allowed, or at least, not intended to be allowed.  This
structure is for evolving complexity, and cycles would disrupt the
evolution of this complexity.  We use this structure to figure out the
underlying vocabulary of concepts or words or patterns, from which
"sentences" are generated.  Thoughts are equal to the extent that the
thoughts they require are the same.

DIRECTED NETWORK, CYCLES ALLOWED
Allowing for cycles makes for a qualitatively different kind of
structure, which by which we follow the movement of our attention.  For
example, we may have a network of questions (and possibly answers), each
question leading to other questions, possibly resulting in cycles.
Hyperlinks are another example where our attention moves from thought
(or document) to thought.  We can think of each link as a
transformation, and a cycle as consisting of "energy-conserving"
transformations.  Thoughts are equal to the extent that they occur on
the same cycles, that is, they can be readily transformed into each
other.

Comment:
Given the structure defined above, I doubt that there is any need for a
separate structure for cycles - which are quite rare for organizing
thoughts, and many cases where they do appear (like the water cycle -
"clouds-rivers-ocean", or Socratic questioning) are in the spirit of the
structure above.

THOUGHTS & FINITE STRUCTURAL TEMPLATES
Aside from the structures above, which can grow (like crystals), there
are many finite structures that one can impose on thoughts.  Or we may
simply have isolated thoughts.  In these cases the thoughts are all
different, but equal to the extent that they participate within the
template.

*************************************************
SUMMARY OF WAYS OF EXTENDING EQUALITY
I appreciate your help in identifying more types of structure that you
use to organize your thoughts.  This line of thinking has yielded the
following (which I associate with earlier work on visualizations from
the paper I mentioned):

CLOSED SEQUENCE
for: reasoning
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
they belong to subsequences that are interchangeable.
visualization: chronicle (sequence restructured with hierarchy)

OPEN SEQUENCE
for: priorities
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
they extend the preceding thoughts in the same way.
visualization: canon (sequence restructured with network)

TREE, HIERARCHY
for: relevance
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
they belong to the same, but not different topics.
visualization: catalog (hierarchy restructured with network)

DIRECTED NETWORK, NO CYCLES ALLOWED
for: requirements
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
the thoughts they require are the same.
visualization: evolution (hierarchy restructured with sequence)

DIRECTED NETWORK, CYCLES ALLOWED
for: attention
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
they occur on the same cycles.
visualization: tour (network restructured with sequence)

NONDIRECTED NETWORK
for: adjacency, relatedness
Thoughts are equal to the extent that:
they are adjacent to each other.
visualization: atlas (network restructured with hierarchy)
*************************************************

CONCLUSIONS
One conclusion is that the notion of "extending equality" is helpful to
distinguish between what aspects are structural (formal, syntactic...)
and what are semantic.  The idea suggested is that equality (and the
extension of equality to various kinds of similarity) is a purely
structural concept (and the only structural concept).

Another conclusion is that a tool for thinking is successful (as an aid
for thinking) to the extent that it allows us to switch back and forth
between different kinds of structures.  For example, MindManager,
www.mindmanager.com, lets us switch back and forth between thinking
about the TREE structure, and thinking about the NONDIRECTED NETWORK
given by the layout of the branches, which is adjacent to which.
Likewise, TheBrain, www.thebrain.com, is - I believe - helpful as an aid
for thinking, to the extent that we switch back and forth between
thinking about the DIRECTED NETWORK (WITH CYCLES) given by the
parent-child relationship, and the NONDIRECTED NETWORK given by the jump
relationship.

I should temper the above statement to say that both tools can actually
be used to think the other structure as well.  For example, branches in
MindManager can be ordered by priority (OPEN SEQUENCE), or the
parent-child relationship in TheBrain may be thought of as a TREE.
This, however, just emphasizes the point that in doing import/export
between tools, the person performing the transformation should be aware
of the structure that the author of the thoughts had in mind.  Such
transformations are, first of all, a problem of modeling, and only then,
converting.

The associations with the visualizations suggest to me that we will not
find more than the six kinds of structures above.  So I very much
welcome your evidence to show me wrong, or ideas to point me right, both
large and small.  This will make for an elegant and useful modeling
standard for the import/export of aggregates of thoughts between tools
for organizing thoughts.

Andrius Kulikauskas
Director
Minciu Sodas Laboratory
http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
ms@...

Hello, all,

I sent the first version of the converter Brain->CSV Andrius first.
He is one of the authors and the director of "Minciu sodas" virtual
laboratory. Let he approves (or not) first.

Of course, this version is mostly for testing and demo purposes. It
lacks graphical user interface, thorough testing, documentation.
Isn't convenient for inexperienced user. I didn't pay much attention
to the program's efficiency, so the efficiency probably would be not
good for large brains. The application is not compiled to PC or
other machines native code.

However, it works. At least it worked in my PC on the brains I have.
These brains are for testing and they are small - some 100 thoughts.

It would be nice if somebody of you sent me a real and relatively
large brain - at least 1000 thoughts. I'd use it to test the converter.

Processing RTF files can be done via special JAVA Swing library
classes that are included in Java Software Development Kit 1.2.2.
There is even a special package:

	 javax.swing.text.rtf

However, these classes are poorly documented (Sun says that these
classes are written not by Sun programmers). I didn't have
much time to study these classes without good documentation, so I did
a quick workaround using one example I found in the internet. It
works, but surely it isn't efficient.

The converter allows line breaks in thoughts' contents (notes).
Notepad treates the resulting CSV-file's line breaks OK. Excel 97
imported the CSV file well, even line breaks in content cells do
well. However, Excel 2000, Word 2000 and Wordpad treat line breaks
in the contents of the thoughts wrongly.

----------
Good news:

while browsing the internet for the CSV-related subjects, I found
some sites which offer CSV/XML and vice versa conversion utilities.
E.g., see

http://www.pjm.com/twoset/twoset_conversion_utilities.html

It seems that CSV format is rather widely used, e.g., as an
intermediate format of data for databases and Excel.


Regards

Raimundas

Besides that they have cut  the discuss board, the channel to its users.

And also for the way they intend to charge SiteBrain, paying according to the number of thoughts
you use. Limitation should not be a good start for its users and its like Windows would
charge you according to the number of folders and documents you create.

Another discontentament issued is that the Personal Brain is not a crossplataform application. Any
sane man would you like to access your data anywhere, like also in Solaris, Mac or Linux. The
world is not just windows!!!

For all these reasons you are obligated to move towards another  direction, ask for something else,
for something  fair and opened.

And the answer maybe relies in application which I am developing for Solaris and Linux primarily,
and it is called "Intelligence".

It is focused in wholeness, because if you do that, it is easy to find out incoherences, and it is
called "Intelligence" cause it is the movement of wholeness. All the application uses the
David Bohm  and Krishnamurti insights  from  such as "The wholeness and the Implicate order"
and the "Ending of Time".

For more information  about them see, featured by Mistic Fire:
http://sites.uol.com.br/zoat/NIKrishnamurti.html
http://sites.uol.com.br/zoat/NIBohm.html

Ground is the source of everything even wholeness where is  the point of departure. From there
everything begins to unfold or enfold. Relationships are important but which is more important it
not to ose the focus on wholeness. That is where the diference relies, instead of  just have
a view provided for some gathered thoughts.

"It is to focus in wholeness and process than analysis and its constituents
 elements. If you focus in wholeness it is easier to find incoherence"

                                                                 David Bohm

What-is, It is the point of departure. It is always a phenomenon ocurring in the
present. It is the fact. Ocurring externally or within consciousness at the moment
of inquiry. It can be thought, a sensation, perception. The present moment of
what-is becomes in next moment what-was and thus ceases to be true. What-is is true.
The true leads to truth. What-is, is constantly in movement. The mind may be
unable to follow the movement of what-is, and depart from it by clinging to the past
or escaping into the future.
Thus, what-is becomes the point of departure, but also is the necessary point of return if
one wishes to understant truth.
                                                             Hillary Rodrigues from the book about
                                                             Philosophy of Krishnamurti

Best Regards

-- 
Roberto Luiz M. Nogueira
OSS Support
Ericsson Telecom. Ltda.
Phone: 0 xx 11 6224-8268

Andrius,

Interesting you bring up ECCO Pro.  I've used it for almost 6 years
(amazingly) and still do.  It was the best of the PIM class and in
some ways still is.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, I'll try to be brief.  It had
your typical calendar and contact list.  But its most-used feature
(by me at least) is the notepads, which lets you build outlines of
notes, hyperlinks, graphics or links to OLE objects in other
programs.  The power of the whole thing is that you can categorize
your data any way you want by creating additional data columns.  If
you think of creating notes in Excel, and then using additional cells
on the right of the notes to categorize your data (say, by which
client it's related to, or todo due date).

But the reason I was writing this is to say that I don't think an
import/export feature between ECCO Pro and Personal Brain would work,
as the data is organized in very different fashions.  Personal
Brain's data within a link is totally free-flowing, while ECCO's is
structured (by outline level).

So while I'd love to see ECCO's life extended, I don't think this is
the way to do it.

Maybe if the court remedy to Microsoft's monopoly said that they
could no longer bundle Outlook with Office, ECCO would again be on
the top of the charts!

Good thought about working with other PIMs.

Stew

>I hate to be so negative, but what's the point?

Good question - and one to which I don't know the answer...

>They're either going
>to ignore us or they are going to use our ideas to improve their
>profit margin without even a nod in our direction.

Ignoring us (or any other customer feedback would be bad).

Improving the product as we require should be of benefit to all of us -
as a developer I'm well aware how easy it is to lose touch with what
users require as opposed to what we can do because its clever (right now
I'm in the midst of something that we're trying to balance between the
two)

>I'm much more
>interested in ways to make better use of the features that already
>exist.

Brings us back to vCards and vEvents (and similar mechanisms).

The Brain will relate files to thoughts and will fire up the assoicated
application.

For an address book you need (as a minimum) a single vCard editor
(create a blank .vcf as a template). Additional tools for searching and
printing just the vCards would also be useful.

For a diary you need a vEvent editor, plus - ideally - a helper app to
do alarms/reminders etc and to give you chronological views. Where this
falls down is going from the diary to the thought in the brain.

A To-Do list is the same as a diary.

Other problems could similarly be addressed with a appropriate helpers
- but the helpers would be significantly better if they could (at the
very least) cause the brain to focus on a particular thought.

Murph

I hate to be so negative, but what's the point? They're either going
to ignore us or they are going to use our ideas to improve their
profit margin without even a nod in our direction. I'm much more
interested in ways to make better use of the features that already
exist. That way I get to feel like I'm getting more of my money's
worth and I don't help make some venture capitalist richer than he
already is. Let them make their own bloody money.

Steve F.

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "JTC Murphy" <jm@r...> wrote:
> >--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@m...>
wrote:
> >  So we can
> >> discuss that here: what kind of discussion would be useful?
> >>
> >
> >Well, there are several threads that I remembered in some minutes:
> >1) personalbrain : what future
>
> I have a slightly radical view - there have been lots and lots of
> suggestions for adding function to the brain (e.g. named links and
> unidirectional links) but to be honest creeping featurism is not
> necessarily the best way to go - the brain as it stands works well
for a
> lot of people and it /almost/ works for a bunch more.
>
> First off I thing it needs to be programmable - or at least
automatable
> i.e. one should be able to use an external application to
write/create
> and read the data.
>
> Second off you need to be able to choose to display ordered data in
a
> meaningful context - yes it provides a new means of looking at data
but
> there are frequently times when you need to start from an ordered
point
> of view - that one can go from there in a sequence of leaps is
where the
> benefits appear.
>
> Third off, the most frequent complaint is that one can't handle
address
> and diary information - whilst I don't /in general/ advocate adding
> features I think that one could make a very good case for adding
direct
> support of vCard and vCalendar files into the application (i.e.
create a
> vCard type thought or a vCalendar type thought). This would give
> theBrain a generic diary and address book capability filling out the
> most gaping hole in its capacity as a PIM.
>
> Now in theory one could, by dint of a bit of hard work (time, if
only
> one had more time) provide that vCard and vCal support by helper
apps -
> but I can't help thinking that integrated would, in this case, be
> better.
>
> That should generate a bit of comment?
>
> Have fun,
>
> Murph

Thank you all for  the replies and help.

I'm finishing the first version of the converter.
I'll post the results in a few hours.


Raimundas Vaitkevitcius

Hello from Carlsbad, California!

Please note: I've added the following to the welcome message (it has
always been part of the group description for
personalbrain@egroups.com)

"All letters and materials are
understood to belong to the PUBLIC DOMAIN,
whenever they do not explicitly state otherwise!"

This gives you and all the right to save and organize the posts that
we contribute.  The purpose is that our posts may have a life of
their
own, regardless of the fate of this particular group.

I welcome you to put together this material into web pages.  This
will
make our material more useful and, I think, influential to TheBrain,
LLC. The Minciu Sodas laboratory acts as a "lobby for thinkers".

If you would be interested in organizing web pages, and especially,
if
you would like to do this in conjunction with our laboratory, please
let me know.  I am putting together a proposal that TheBrain sponsor
more work at our laboratory.  I think Minciu Sodas can play an
effective role in helping develop a chief asset - enthusiastiac and
helpful users.  In particular, I would like to argue that the
Personal
Brain (allowing creating and editing thoughts) is a very important
asset, a key driver of ideas for TheBrain technology, even though the
main profits I presume come from WebBrain, SiteBrain navigational
technologies.  TheBrain should continue develop the Personal Brain -
perhaps not so much develop the technology, but rather help clarify
and support the usefulness (with import/export, etc.).  So I am
working in this direction, and your help means a lot.  I invite you
to
  share your own directions.

Andrius Kulikauskas
Moderator
http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html


--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "Steve Franklin" <sfranklin@e...>
wrote:

> This is the second time all old posts have been destroyed or, at
> least, rendered unavailable, once with the Australian group and now
> the "official" group. Does anybody really expect serious posters to
> continue to write postings with no assurance they will be saved
even
> for a year or so, rendering them worse than ephemeral? personally,
I
> am quite fed up with the entire Natrificial scene. If they didn't
> have the best software available, I would have been gone a long
time
> ago.
>
> Steve F.

Ben

>your data from the proprietary format of company who is certainly
>uninterested in (and arguably hostile toward) their customers,

A bit harsh methinks - although possibly justified (I think its a
growth problem but then I do tend to favour a more positive viewpoint)

>Disclaimer: ThoughtStream is still in development, and in many ways
is
>not really ready for mass consumption.  Any assistance is
appreciated.

Love to - though I not sure what help I can be (mostly a matter of too
little time - my days are filled with working and being a parent...)

Have fun, Murph

>--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@m...> wrote:
>  So we can
>> discuss that here: what kind of discussion would be useful?
>>
>
>Well, there are several threads that I remembered in some minutes:
>1) personalbrain : what future

I have a slightly radical view - there have been lots and lots of
suggestions for adding function to the brain (e.g. named links and
unidirectional links) but to be honest creeping featurism is not
necessarily the best way to go - the brain as it stands works well for a
lot of people and it /almost/ works for a bunch more.

First off I thing it needs to be programmable - or at least automatable
i.e. one should be able to use an external application to write/create
and read the data.

Second off you need to be able to choose to display ordered data in a
meaningful context - yes it provides a new means of looking at data but
there are frequently times when you need to start from an ordered point
of view - that one can go from there in a sequence of leaps is where the
benefits appear.

Third off, the most frequent complaint is that one can't handle address
and diary information - whilst I don't /in general/ advocate adding
features I think that one could make a very good case for adding direct
support of vCard and vCalendar files into the application (i.e. create a
vCard type thought or a vCalendar type thought). This would give
theBrain a generic diary and address book capability filling out the
most gaping hole in its capacity as a PIM.

Now in theory one could, by dint of a bit of hard work (time, if only
one had more time) provide that vCard and vCal support by helper apps -
but I can't help thinking that integrated would, in this case, be
better.

That should generate a bit of comment?

Have fun,

Murph

On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 10:59:24AM +0300, Raimundas Vaitkevicius wrote:
> Maybe somebody knows such programs or procedures? Especially written in
> Java. Useful would be also a program which convertes many RTF-files (for
> instance, all in one folder) to their plain text equivalents at once, in
> one run.

I've attached a Python script to convert RTF files to plain text (it's
only been tested with the files produced by the Brain; dunno if it works
in general - the algorithm used is pretty simpleminded).

-Ben
--
Ben Darnell              ben@...
http://thoughtstream.org
Finger bgdarnel@... for PGP/GPG key 1024D/1F06E509

#!/usr/bin/env python
# unrtf 0.1
# Copyright (C) 1999 Ben Darnell
# unrtf is distributed under the GNU GPL.

import re

# this works for rtf files produced by the brain, which is all
# i really care about
def unrtf(input, output):
     data=input.read()
     if data[-1]=='\000':
         data=data[:-1]
     data=re.sub('\r?\n', '', data)
     data=re.sub(r'\\par ', '\n', data)
     data=re.sub(r'\{\\fonttbl.*\}', '', data)
     # FIXME: this should allow escaped braces
     data=re.sub(r'[\{\}]', '', data)
     data=re.sub(r'^[\{\}]', '', data, 'MULTILINE')
     data=re.sub(r"\\[a-z\*']+[-0-9]* ?", '', data)
     output.write(data)

if __name__=='__main__':
     import sys, getopt

     inplace=0

     try:
         optlist, args=getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "hio:",
                                     ["output=", "help", "in-place"])
         outfilename=None
         for opt, arg in optlist:
             if opt in ("-o", "--output"):
                 outfilename=arg
             elif opt in ("-h", "--help"):
                 raise getopt.error
             elif opt in ("-i", "--in-place"):
                 inplace=1
         if outfilename is not None and inplace:
             raise getopt.error
     except getopt.error:
         print "usage: %s [-h] [-o output]|[-i] [input]"%sys.argv[0]
         raise SystemExit

     if not inplace:
         if (outfilename is None):
             outfile=sys.stdout
         else:
             outfile=open(outfilename, "wt")


     if len(args)==0:
         unrtf(sys.stdin, outfile)
     else:
         for filename in args:
             infile=open(filename, "rt")
             if inplace:
                 outfile=open(filename[:-3]+"txt", "wt")
             unrtf(infile, outfile)
             if inplace:
                 outfile.close()
             infile.close()

Hello,

as many of you know, we (mostly Andrius Kulikauskas and me) are
investigating
a possibility and usability of a thoughts' converter from TheBrain
(Personal) to the csv format (and vice versa). The programming is done in
Java (because BrainSDK - Software Development Kit - is in Java). Work
continues, but I want to share with you my first impressions and results.

First of all, it seems that TheBrain always uses at least one file for one
thought (if it has content). A quote from their manual:

"A thought can represent virtually anything: a concept, a project, a
person, a subject, a document, a web page, a spreadsheet, a
file, a shortcut, a game, an application... whatever you can think of."

In any case, it is at least one file. Such universality can be good in many
situations, but this doesn't seem convenient if you only need to keep and
organize some collection (maybe large) of thoughts which are just pieces of
text (paragraphs).

It seems better to use thoughts' notes to keep a thought's content in.
However, a thought's note is also implemented as a separate RTF-format
file.
In addition, BrainSDK doesn't support any operations with thought's notes
(at least I didn't find any such a support). Extraction of a thought's
content out of its RTF-file requires additional programming.

Maybe somebody knows such programs or procedures? Especially written in
Java. Useful would be also a program which convertes many RTF-files (for
instance, all in one folder) to their plain text equivalents at once, in
one run.

My impression is (I started investigating TheBrain quite recently) that
TheBrain, while being good and useful for some problems, doesn't suit very
well to represent a large collection of simple thoughts (possibly with
simple links) which are expressed as text paragraphs. As it was said many
times earlier, other thoughts' organizing tools, converters between them
and
export/import formats/standards are necessary.


Raimundas
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
----
Raimundas Vaitkevitcius              e-m: Raimundas_Vaitkevicius@...
programmer and educator
Vytautas Magnus University
Department of Psychology
Kaunas, Lithuania

http://www.vdu.lt/staff/informatics/Vaitkev.htm

On Sun, Jul 23, 2000 at 09:09:16PM +0100, JTC Murphy wrote:
> <snip>XML's advantages over CSV</snip>

I agree.

> Best plan would have to be Brain <-> XML and then XML <-> whatever.
>
> In an ideal world the XML schema would be a universal standard...

ThoughtStream uses an XML schema which supports a superset of the
Brain's functionality (it's not as general as full-blown Topic Maps yet,
but it's rather close).  This schema is also supported by Lucid
(www.memes.net), although only for export.  Thanks to Matt Bardeen's
reverse-engineering work, I know enough about the Brain's file format to
make a brain-to-xml converter (and vice versa, although the xml-to-brain
conversion may entail some data loss).  If you're interested in freeing
your data from the proprietary format of company who is certainly
uninterested in (and arguably hostile toward) their customers, let me know;
I'll work on it if there's enough demand.

Disclaimer: ThoughtStream is still in development, and in many ways is
not really ready for mass consumption.  Any assistance is appreciated.

-Ben
--
Ben Darnell              ben@...
http://thoughtstream.org
Finger bgdarnel@... for PGP/GPG key 1024D/1F06E509

>I have written earlier about how TheBrain is sponsoring work at our
>laboratory to develop an import/export standard for software for
>organizing thoughts.

Here and now the place to start just about has to be XML.

A schema for brain (type) data should be relatively easy to construct
since thoughts are not really that complex - there are a couple of
issues about how best to hold the list of links (eg several list of
different link types of a single list of typed links).

Assuming that one can walk through the brain data in a linear fashion
export becomes almost trivial.

Import is a tad more interesting as one will be loading links to other
objects that haven't been loaded yet - but I would guess that there's a
pattern for resolving this particular issue.

CSV is another matter entirely - it works very well for data with a
well defined, fixed structure i.e. where you can cram everything into a
single record type. After that it goes downhill fairly rapidly - the
import wizard in Access (for example) falls down rather badly if there
are a varying number of fields in each row. Having said that it is, as
you rightly note, a widely understood format.

Best plan would have to be Brain <-> XML and then XML <-> whatever.

In an ideal world the XML schema would be a universal standard...

Have fun, Murph

Hi,

I can't say I'm a long time user of theBrain but the main use I see in it is
the quick linking mechanism and that one sees the 'object' move depending on
which currently linked 'objects' are in view.

I think it could be very usefull for programming but for that to be
functional in my view I'd have to be able to import programms into it in
some way or another. so I could resequence/re-use certain 'objects' and then
ofcourse output it to a platform the code could actually run on... Or
(wishfull thinking?) have an interpreter capable of reading a brain-program
but perhaps now I'm insulting some people who know stuf about modeling
languages and such.

rgds

C

------Original Message------
From: "Steve Franklin" <sfranklin@...>
To: personalbrain@egroups.com
Sent: July 22, 2000 7:46:24 AM GMT
Subject: [personalbrain] Re: Hello!


--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "Paul Haggard" <darkstar@h...>
wrote:
> Hello one and all!
>
> So, has any one found new uses for the Personal Brain?
>
> -Darkstar

I still use it mostly to store links to websites. I did figure out
how to plug in specific locations at Active Worlds and have them open
with the AW browser but it's too tedious to be of any practical
value, except perhaps if you have a link to your "cyber-house" on
your webpage, but the reader still needs the AW plugin. I'm still
using the one-big-Brain model. At some point I think I need to start
creating specialized Brains for specific needs. Any ideas on what
areas might be better served with such specialized gizmos? I know
that some people were interested in using specialized Brains to write
programs, though I never did figure out the dynamics of that.

Steve F.


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--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "Paul Haggard" <darkstar@h...>
wrote:
> Hello one and all!
>
> So, has any one found new uses for the Personal Brain?
>
> -Darkstar

I still use it mostly to store links to websites. I did figure out
how to plug in specific locations at Active Worlds and have them open
with the AW browser but it's too tedious to be of any practical
value, except perhaps if you have a link to your "cyber-house" on
your webpage, but the reader still needs the AW plugin. I'm still
using the one-big-Brain model. At some point I think I need to start
creating specialized Brains for specific needs. Any ideas on what
areas might be better served with such specialized gizmos? I know
that some people were interested in using specialized Brains to write
programs, though I never did figure out the dynamics of that.

Steve F.

Hello one and all!

So, has any one found new uses for the Personal Brain?

-Darkstar

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "JTC Murphy" <jm@r...> wrote:
>
> >> "I'm sure we could build something nicer with a brain
> >> navigation system..."
> >
> >I think I made that very suggestion near the end. As usual, got no
> >reaction either way from anybody.
>
> I certainly did so at some point too.
>
> >  Bunch of dorks if you ask me....;o)
>
> They're distinctly not good at talking to their customers - which is
> unfortunate. Company was obviously not grown very well.
>
> Pity, 'cos as you say, the products are good.
>
> Murph

The sad thing is people in the group really cared about the product.
They spent a lot of time and effort participating and then, whoosh!
it was gone...again. One almost wonders if Natrificial nka The Brain
LLC didn't just hang the product out there in hopes it would be
swallowed up by Microsoft like WebTV was. Like Cyndi Lauper
says, "Money changes everything."

Steve F.

>> "I'm sure we could build something nicer with a brain
>> navigation system..."
>
>I think I made that very suggestion near the end. As usual, got no
>reaction either way from anybody.

I certainly did so at some point too.

>  Bunch of dorks if you ask me....;o)

They're distinctly not good at talking to their customers - which is
unfortunate. Company was obviously not grown very well.

Pity, 'cos as you say, the products are good.

Murph

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@m...> wrote:
> Hi,...snip...
>
> I am curious:
>
> 1) What tools might you like to be able to switch back and forth
between
> TheBrain?
> 2) Who might help, for free or for pay, to design converters
between a
> spreadsheet format and TheBrain, or other tools ?
> 3) Who might pay for such a converter, or for help to move data
from one
> environment to another?
> 4) I am looking for "usage patterns" - actual or desired - where one
> would want to work with one software tool for a while, and
then "switch
> modes" and use another software tool (or the same tool but in a
> different way), and then back and forth.  Some examples involving
> TheBrain:
>
> - Switch between accumulating thoughts with TheBrain, and then
printing
> some of them out on a paper (or poster) to stare at the paper, mark
up
> on paper, and generate new ideas.  Then enter those new ideas back
into
> TheBrain, and so on.
>
...snip...
> Andrius Kulikauskas
> Minciu Sodas Laboratory
> http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
> ms@m...
> +370 (2) 60-67-38

I would still like to use The Brain to navigate among locations in VR
space. I managed to figure out how to do this using the source code
of a "satellite" mapping utility for the Active Worlds browser at
http://awmap.vevo.com/cgi-bin/tport/-02484-02511?334,146 but it's
just too complicated and time consuming to be practical. It takes
entirely too much time for The Brain to open the application and then
bring up the appropriate location. Of course one can use the
native "teleport" function in Active Worlds, but it lacks the well
known advantages of The Brain's linking system.

Steve F.

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, "JTC Murphy" <jm@r...> wrote:
> >>> Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@m...> 19/07/00 01:00:38 >>>
> >
...snip...> Last, and probably least, I'll bet there was someone in
the building
> who kept thinking "I'm sure we could build something nicer with a
brain
> navigation system..."
>
> Have fun,
>
> Murph

I think I made that very suggestion near the end. As usual, got no
reaction either way from anybody. Bunch of dorks if you ask me....;o)

Steve F.

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, mjahr@f... wrote:
> Hi,
>
> big deal of Natrificial Marketing, uh?
> Has someone kept the old discussion pieces as offline copy? Some
good
> ideas have been kept there...
>
> rgds

This is the second time all old posts have been destroyed or, at
least, rendered unavailable, once with the Australian group and now
the "official" group. Does anybody really expect serious posters to
continue to write postings with no assurance they will be saved even
for a year or so, rendering them worse than ephemeral? personally, I
am quite fed up with the entire Natrificial scene. If they didn't
have the best software available, I would have been gone a long time
ago.

Steve F.

Hi,

I have written earlier about how TheBrain is sponsoring work at our
laboratory to develop an import/export standard for software for
organizing thoughts.

My conclusion is that it would be most practical to use a spreadsheet
format (such as .CSV, which means in practice, we could manipulate the
data in a spreadsheet such as Excel, and then send it back, or to a
different application).
Raimundas Vaitkevicius, an investigator at our laboratory, is developing
a public domain converter between TheBrain and (.CSV).

I am curious:

1) What tools might you like to be able to switch back and forth between
TheBrain?
2) Who might help, for free or for pay, to design converters between a
spreadsheet format and TheBrain, or other tools ?
3) Who might pay for such a converter, or for help to move data from one
environment to another?
4) I am looking for "usage patterns" - actual or desired - where one
would want to work with one software tool for a while, and then "switch
modes" and use another software tool (or the same tool but in a
different way), and then back and forth.  Some examples involving
TheBrain:

- Switch between accumulating thoughts with TheBrain, and then printing
some of them out on a paper (or poster) to stare at the paper, mark up
on paper, and generate new ideas.  Then enter those new ideas back into
TheBrain, and so on.

- If TheBrain is getting too large, (for example to send across the
Internet reasonably), then to be able to have another environment (like
a spreadsheet format) where it can be teased apart into several pieces,
each of which can be converted back into TheBrain.

- Switch between an environment to accumulate isolated assertions, and
then using TheBrain to create a dictionary of concepts inherent in those
assertions, in other words, to map many assertions to many concepts.  I
think this would be helpful for trying to understand the point of view
of another, what key concepts that person relies on.

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas Laboratory
http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
ms@...
+370 (2) 60-67-38

My goal with this discussion group is that we, as users

- can help with the success of TheBrain
- can make sure that TheBrain serves our needs.

Part of this involves reaching out to others.  I share a letter
(copyrighted) that I read in the eccopro@egroups.com group.  Netmanage
ECCO was a best-of-breed PIM (Personal Information Manager) that could
be used for organizing free form notes in very elegant ways.  It was
discontinued with the introduction of Microsoft Outlook.  So
import/export between ECCO and TheBrain could be very cool.

Maybe you can improve on my reply (which is in the public domain).

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas

mlindsey@... wrote:
>
> This is a curiosity question. I don't know of any PIMs written in
> Java but I suppose they exist.
>
> Personally, my experience is that Java programs are noticeably slower
> than native equivalents. And I like my apps fast! <g>
>
> Oh, another question:
>
> Is it important that a PIM be cross-platform available, i.e. Windows
> variants, Linux, etc?
>
> Why am I asking? I have had ECCO for several years, am saddened by
> its demise, and have an interest in this area. I worked on Groupwise
> for several years, moved on, but never really lost interest. And I
> want to play around again. In my spare time <G>
>
> Mark Lindsey
> mlindsey@...


I think that TheBrain, www.thebrain.com, is written in Java.  Not your
traditional PIM, more of an environment for organizing thoughts, but
some people use it as a PIM.

TheBrain has a Software Development Kit written in Java, and has
versions designed for the web: SiteBrain and WebBrain.

Speed wise, it is uneven. On the net it can be slow, but locally it can
be snappy.  Actually, on the net it can be surprisingly snappy, too,
once you wait for it to load.  As a site map, it can let you quickly
walk through the structure of a site to the page you want without having
to wait for each intermediate page to load.

There is a free download trial of TheBrain, so you can try it out.  And
also, there is a free download trial of the new release of the SiteBrain
2.0

TheBrain is sponsoring work at our laboratory to develop an
import/export standard for software for organizing thoughts.

I will share your letter at personalbrain@egroups.com  Maybe somebody
there can reply better.

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...
+370 (2) 60-67-38

--- In personalbrain@egroups.com, Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@m...> wrote:
   So we can
> discuss that here: what kind of discussion would be useful?
>

Well, there are several threads that I remembered in some minutes:
1) personalbrain : what future
2) personalbrain : bug & fixes report
3) personalbrain : other platforms (fixed, but mostly mobile)
4) What else is there ?

I'm sure that other people will have more and better ideas, but this
is a start.

Bye.

>>> Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@...> 19/07/00 01:00:38 >>>
>
>I have spoken with Anna Herbert of TheBrain and she told me that they
>are discussing what to do regarding the discussion board.

They had two basic problems - first was that they didn't appear to take
any notice of what was going on in the noticeboards. If they had
responed sooner and more positively they could have maintained a better
balance of attitude therein.

Second was a consequence of the first - the seeming lack of interest
from TheBrain generated excess interest in alternatives and in a
progressively more negative attitude which isn't in TheBrain's interest
in their own forum.

The above problems are compounded by the fact that the web is
(currently) a poor host for discussion forums - although the advent of
hybrid setups likes egroups is beginning to change that a bit.

Last, and probably least, I'll bet there was someone in the building
who kept thinking "I'm sure we could build something nicer with a brain
navigation system..."

Have fun,

Murph

TheBrain is sponsoring work at our laboratory's work to develop an
import/export standard.  The discussion board was very helpful, so I've
taken the initiative to set up this group.  I will try to structure ways
where your input can help with the use and development of TheBrain.

I have spoken with Anna Herbert of TheBrain and she told me that they
are discussing what to do regarding the discussion board.  So we can
discuss that here: what kind of discussion would be useful?

Your Moderator,

Andrius Kulikauskas
Director
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt/importexport.html
ms@...


Nuno Esteves wrote:
>
> Here I am, accepting to participate in this group with some of my
> scarce time... I am convinced that it will be worth it.
>
> Anyway, I've known nothing of what is happenning in natrificial/the
> brain site except that it was shutdown after some posts saying its
> contents have been manipulated in dubious ways.
>
> If anybody can post a brief description of what is going on I would
> be grateful.
>
> Regards from Lisboa.

Hi,

big deal of Natrificial Marketing, uh?
Has someone kept the old discussion pieces as offline copy? Some good
ideas have been kept there...

rgds

Here I am, accepting to participate in this group with some of my
scarce time... I am convinced that it will be worth it.

Anyway, I've known nothing of what is happenning in natrificial/the
brain site except that it was shutdown after some posts saying its
contents have been manipulated in dubious ways.

If anybody can post a brief description of what is going on I would
be grateful.

Regards from Lisboa.