The Unofficial Emdros Blog

Interview with US-P to understand if the development of Emdros stop now

2008-07-24T12:16:00.009Z

The summer is here and most of the Unofficial Emdros blog readers will, by now, have read the dissertation "Annotated text databases in the context of the Kaj Munk archive: One database model, one query language, and several applications". Some of you may even have understood the dissertation, so now it is time to look at new interesting facts about Emdros and the creator, US-P.

US-P, I understand that there was a milestone in your life a few weeks ago, can you tell more about this?

Certainly. On June 27, 2008, I defended my PhD thesis. I was awarded the PhD degree by the Academic Board on July 18, 2008. The Assessment Committee had been unanimous in their decision that I was qualified for the PhD degree, so there was no real surprise when the letter came.

A friend of mine had a beer before his wedding, apparently the best beer he ever had drunk. Did you enjoy a glass of the local “Aalborg Akvavit” before defending the dissertation?

Nope. I don't drink.

What was the high point of the research behind the dissertation ?

I think that must have been at the beginning: Cranking out two research papers (which both were accepted for publication) in the first month after I started.

What was the low point of the research behind the dissertation ?

Hmmmm... low points? Isn't PhD study all fun and games? I'd be hard pressed to find anything negative, but perhaps the low point was when my supervisor suggested something to the effect that I stop developing Emdros any further, and go on to something more interesting. I told him that that would kill my interest in the PhD, after which he (he is a very wise man) told me not to stop developing Emdros.

What would you do differently if you could re-do the research ?

That's called “future work”. But seriously, I don't regret anything.

Has your wife read the dissertation ?

No, but she has skimmed it.

Is the lack of photos from the defence of the dissertation down to the fact that you had coloured your hair blue like you did when you got your Bachlor's degree ?

Come, come now. You know very well that it was a Certain Person's PhotoShop do, and not something for real. Besides, it wasn't for my Bachelor's degree, but for my Master's degree. That Certain Person with the PhotoShop skillz shall, of course, remain nameless on this blog...

Will the development of Emdros stop now ?

Most certainly not! The interest in Emdros is growing, as evidenced by the number of people who have contacted me in recent months with questions about how to use it for their purposes. Also, a number of commercial companies have expressed an interest in possibly using Emdros. So no, the development will not stop.

Can you give any indication of what could be the next major feature we may see in Emdros ?

Yes. I hope to make the deployment easier and more streamlined, more “user friendly”. That is, make it easier for the average user quickly to get up to speed with Emdros.

It is correct that Emdros can make sense of the F1 Help in MS Office 2007 ? Nobody else seems to be able to do this.

No, sadly, Emdros cannot perform miracles. Besides, making sense of the F1 Help in MS Office (any version) is a bit like God creating a stone that is so heavy, he cannot lift it. Both feats are logically inconsistent, and therefore unreal. A bit like God creating a brilliantly shining, all-white stone that is all-black and dark. Emdros tries very hard to be logical about what it does. But making sense of the F1 Help in MS Office? You gotta be kidding.

So on second thoughts, I take that back. Thankfully, not sadly, is Emdros not able to perform miracles...

Is there a plan about an Emdros Lite ?

No. Emdros doesn't need to lose weight. It's perfectly fine being heavy-weight, thank you very much!

Many know about your amazing ability to work any time of the day, do you think this skill could come in handy soon ?

Indeed, yes Sir! My wife and I are expecting a baby.

Ah, say no more. Is it correct that a number of people have predicted you could become a Full Professor within the next 25 years if you keep up your hard work and focus ?

That is correct. Whether it actually comes to pass, of course, is still hidden in the Ockhamistic future (see Øhrstrøm and Hasle, 1995, “Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence”, Kluwer Academic Publishers).

Any unknown fact behind Emdros or US-P you can share here ?

Nope.

Do you see any other major events over the next few weeks ?

Other than the baby? No.

Dissertation

2008-05-06T20:38:00.006Z

U S-P made the last copy of his PhD dissertation yesterday 18:20 and handed in the dissertation today, so the creator of Emdros will soon have his PhD degree !

Big congratulation to U S-P !! Well done, we all knew you could do it !

The defense will take place on 27 June 2008 at Kroghstraede 3, Aalborg University, Denmark, U S-P will be happy to provide more information.

I was asked by no one less than U S-P himself to say: "And if ye be not of the house of Montague, come and crush a cup o' wine."

UP is no more !

2008-01-18T16:26:00.000Z

The creator of Emdros has on this blog been know as UP, but UP is no more, it is now USP or US-P, all down to the marriage mentioned in an earlier posts.

In Denmark, where US-P lives and has the Emdros development studio, laws allow you to change your surname and it isn't uncommon any longer that the groom change his surname, for example if he has a very common surname, you even seen cases where the groom takes the brides surname - very confusing for people from other traditions.

I understand this change also will be reflected at the various Emdros sites soon.

Don't worry !

2007-12-20T22:04:00.001Z

Most of you will know there hasn't been a public Emdros release for a long time. Not to worry - Ulrik is alive and well, but has got married. There will be a new version of Emdros in the future, and he claims he has made 7 internal releases since the last public release. There may even be support for horizontal trees at some point.

Is UP busy writing Christmas cards ?

2007-08-23T15:58:00.000Z

Many of the readers of this blog will have used the Emdros text database or know about it, but few will know the interesting person behind Emdros, known as UP.

UP once told me he knew all the users of Emdros, but I am not sure if this still is the case, so I contacted him and asked him a few questions.

UP, you once said you know all the Emdros users, I understand there have been over 16000 downloads so your Christmas card list must be pretty long now. Do you really know them all and will you, in fact, send them a Christmas card?

No, I don't know all users, never have, and never will. It is true, there have been more than 16000 downloads (see http://whi.wts.edu/blogs/emdros/?p=41), but more importantly, I have sold commercial licenses to Emdros (see http://emergence.dk/index.php?page=references), and this means Emdros is probably in use by thousands of my customers' users every day. So, no, no Christmas cards for users this year.

Ok, I am sure many of the users would be interested in knowing a bit about the person behind Emdros and maybe one or two unknown facts about Emdros. Could I ask you a few questions.

Certainly.

Thanks.

How old were you when you got fascinated by dictionaries and started to read them ?

I must have been around 14 or 15.

What did/do you find so fascinating about reading directionaries ?

You say “reading dictionaries”, as if I read them at length. In fact, I do. I can get totally lost in a good dictionary, and suddenly two hours will have zipped by, with me tracing all the meanings of a word through the entries for its synonyms, stumbling upon interesting words all the time, which leads to new paths of inquiry into the semantics of a language. A dictionary is truly a fascinating reference tool. I am not sure why dictionaries fascinate me so much, but I am a language geek, so I guess that goes a long way to explain my fascination.

What is your favourite dictionary ?

Webster's Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. It's totally awesome, dude. Wicked cool.

Let us jump a bit in time, a few years later you got your master's degree in computational linguistics and I understand you coloured your hair green, why did you choose green ?

That's not true!! I did NOT colour my hair green!

Interesting, So how would you explain this photo ?

I have a very good friend (who shall remain nameless on this blog), who is good with photo-retouching software.

What have you paid the young man to keep quite about your hair colour ?

You mean the young man in the photo beside me? He's silent as the grave. A loyal friend! Unlike some others!!!

Which hair colour would go for next time ?

Purple. Except you already ... oops ... except my very good friend already used that colour in another retouching of the same photo.

Is it correct you have appeared on the front cover of The Times ?

No.

Do you know why this is the case ?

Yes. I am not famous enough, and have no intention of ever doing anything that could make me famous enough to appear on the front cover of The Times.

Is it correct that you blew the socks off the interviewer when you applied for a job some years ago ?

Yes, that is true. As part of the interview process, they introduced me to “The Beast”. “The Beast” was their smartest C++ guru employee, and he grilled me ferociously on deep issues in both the C++ language and the C++ STL for quite some time. Apparently, he said something very nice about me afterwards to the HR people, because they offered me the job right at (not after) the first job interview.

How did you decide which Pizza to have when you worked in a company that was located above a pizza take-away shop ?

When I worked for that software company (which was my first real job after High School), I used to eat so many pizzas, I had the pizza take-away shop keep a counter, telling them which pizza I had eaten last time. Then I just called them and said “counter++; order_pizza(counter);”. And they would whip out the next pizza on the menu for me in no time flat.

Side note: This very good friend of mine tells me it is so, but I don't remember myself. It's more than 12 years ago, and I really don't remember that many sins of my past.

I have noticed you aren't online on Skype so often, any special reason for this?

Ah yes, you must be referring to the fact that I am engaged to be married. Talking to my fiancée is, in fact, more interesting and fulfilling than being on Skype all the time, believe it or not.

When are you getting married ?

In November 2007.

It is correct you have considered painting your hair green or possible blue for your wedding to make it an unforgettable day ?

Yes. And the moon is made of putrid, foliage-coloured cows' milk.

Some readers may wonder what you day job is, do you work full time on Emdros ?

No, I don't work full time on Emdros. I am a ph.d. student in “human-centered informatics”. I work with the nachlass of a Danish playwright, poet, pastor, and author, named “Kaj Munk”. My charter for my ph.d. is to build database software that can power a future website dedicated to bringing Kaj Munk's works both to the masses and to the throng of scholars interested in him, enabling “intelligent” searches in Kaj Munk's writings. So Emdros is a big part of that, but it's not the whole thing.

Can I ask a few questions about Emdros before we end the interview ?

You most certainly are very extraordinarily welcome.

What made you create Emdros ?

Why do painters paint? Why do relief workers bring aid to those in need? Answer those two questions, and you've basically got it. Let me explain.

First, I saw a need, and I couldn't help but fulfill it. That's the relief work part.

Secondly, I see myself as an artist rather than an engineer when it comes to writing software. I want my software to be beautifully written, and my technical solutions to be aesthetically pleasing. I often fall short of the mark, but it's my goal. I want to create beauty. I can't help but write software. It's there in my mind, and I must get it out, or else suffer the agony of not having a creative outlet. It's the same with painters, I am told: They MUST paint. It's an urge they can't resist. It's the same with me and writing software.

On a more practical, less abstract level, here's what happened: I was given the PhD thesis on which Emdros is based by another good friend back in 1996. He told me, “one day, it would be good if you could implement this, Ulrik”. So I spent about three years mulling over it at the back of my mind (and sometimes at the fore), and finally, I had an epiphany. For two days, I was almost in a trance, writing down ideas frantically, seeing the topographic core of Emdros' query language take shape as I wrote faster than was good for my right wrist. – On paper, mind you: My mind was racing so fast, I couldn't type it all out. Now, the PhD thesis on which Emdros is based was written by Dr. Crist-Jan Doedens. In his thesis, he specified a query language which he called “QL”. He gave it a syntax and a semantics. However, the semantics was denotational, meaning it told you what should be computed, but not how. I had so much trouble during those three years figuring out how to translate the “what” into a “how”, but that's what I did in those two frantic days, at least for a small subset of the much larger, much more powerful QL. In effect, I gave the core of QL an operational semantics, by specifying how to compute the answer, but not what the answer should be. You see, Doedens' had already done the latter, so the former was needed. And so Emdros was born, in 1999. The write-up of those two frantic days turned out to be what I eventually did for my B.Sc. thesis, which was a 100-page document. A bit large for a B.Sc. thesis, at least in Denmark, but they accepted its length.

Two years later (2001), I had another series of epiphanies. On the 24th of January 2001, I suddenly realized, in a flash of inspiration, how the EMdF database model specified in my B.Sc. thesis could be implemented very simply in a relational database. I was going up north in the country (of Denmark) to visit some family that evening, and I brought with me some paper and some pens. In the 40 minute train ride from Copenhagen Central Station to the town where my family lived, I sketched out most of the rest of the MQL we know today, writing down examples of statements that would be needed.

Once I got home after visiting my family, I set to work. The first code was only written a few months later, because I spent a couple of months writing design documents and making sure the ideas were rigorous enough to be implemented. By May 2001, I had something working. By July, it was in a reasonably good shape, and on October 3rd, 2001, I made the first public release on SourceForge.Net.

Why is it called Emdros ?

You know, that's another one of those moments of inspiration. I was going to go on the train to my place of work one day in the Spring of 2001, and I suddenly felt this “wave of inspiration” flooding me. So I let train be train, and went somewhere else for a few minutes. I sat down by myself somewhere private, and then played around with the letters of some key concepts in Emdros. After some minutes of ruminations, I stumbled upon this acronym: “Engine for MdF Database Retrieval, Organization, and Storage.” Because that's what Emdros is. I thought it sounded cool, and neither Google nor Altavista could turn up any instances of this word on the entire web, so I thought, “let's invent a new word, then”, and off I went, writing it all over the sourcecode and the documentation.

What has been the biggest design decision ?

The biggest design decision has been to use a relational database as a backend storage. Without that decision, I might never have started, because I am not an expert on storage mechanisms.

What would you do different if you started again?

Oh, man! Talk about bringing my sins of the past into the light! I would not have been so thick as to provide a symbol table for the object references that could only hold one value at a time, regardless of the fact that the topographic nature of MQL, along with the linear execution strategy, dictates right in your face that there might be more than one value for any given object reference under certain circumstances.

What is the most unknown fact about Emdros?

If I tell you, it won't be the most unknown fact about Emdros any more, but that might not be so bad. I think one of the most unknown facts about Emdros is that I actually do keep it under sourcecode control (I use Subversion). The sourcecode repository isn't public, so the general, Emdros-hungering public will have to wait for my releases in order to get new code.

... Or perhaps the most unknown fact about Emdros (or the most ignored) is that you can actually contact the author with questions and comments.

Can the users of Emdros expect a Christmas card from you this year ?

Not every one of them, but my customers might. The others will have to languish in their Christmas-card-deprivation-induced state of internal turmoil and anguish.

Not even if they report a defect ?

Well, I might relent a little under certain circumstances.

Thanks for your time.

You're welcome.

Exclusive interview about the new C# bindings support in Emdros

2007-05-20T18:39:00.000Z

Below an exclusive interview with the creator of the Emdros, UP, about the new C# bindings support in Emdros.

Will the C# support benefit mankind ?

Certainly. Like ham & eggs benefit mankind: They're good for you.

Plus, a customer of mine makes some really good software which does benefit mankind, and they've been asking for C# bindings for some time.

Of course, there may be negative effects, such as a butterfly which is crushed in Samoa because of chaos-theoretical side-effects (not that I believe in those), but the net result is expected to be a win situation.

If it didn't benefit mankind, who would it benefit ?

Well, that's a counterfactual question, since it does in fact benefit mankind. But let's assume for a moment that it wouldn't benefit mankind. In that case, I wouldn't have made it, in which case it would benefit the butterfly in Samoa which wouldn't be crushed.

Did Steve B or Bill G pay you for it ?

Not yet.

How do you see it fit with your past commitment to open standards ?

C# and the related technologies that Emdros C# bindings use *are* part of an Open Standard. It is an ECMA specification, for crying out loud! If it weren't, Novell wouldn't have held on to and supported Ximian's implementation of .Net in the form of Mono. Novell are far too patent-pandering for that. There exist at least two independent, Open Source implementations of C# and the related technologies, so this in no way is a Free Software vs. Closed Source Software issue.

A more interesting question to ask would have been: "How do you see this fit with your past commitment to Free and Open Source software." (I thought I was asking the questions ;-) maybe time I sign up for the blogging school)

I do not see a conflict. I use Windows on occasion, such as when I compile a new release of Emdros, or otherwise have to leave the productivity of my Linux environment for something only available in Windows. I am not a Free Software Only zealot. If I were, I wouldn't support Emdros on Windows, nor would I support it on Mac OS X.

As it is, my paying customers all use Emdros on Windows, so I am very happy to continue supporting Emdros on Windows.

Have you ever compiled any C# with Microsoft's C# compiler?

No. But I may have to one day. So far, the Mono compiler on Linux does everything I need, including making Windows-compatible binaries for shipping with Emdros.

Thanks for taking time to answer these questions. Looking forward to have you back at the The Unofficial Emdros Blog soon.

Astonished to hear people read unofficial Blog

2007-01-29T20:33:00.000Z

The creator of Emdros is astonished to hear there are people who actually read the Unofficial Emdros Blog

Import tool for Emdros

2007-01-29T20:31:00.000Z

I have heard from well informed sources that an import tool soon will be added to Emdros.

There may be support for as much as 7 different formats, including Penn Tree Bank.

Linguistic Tree Constructor with more linguistic layers

2006-11-24T22:59:00.000Z

Rumours says the the author of Emdros is working on a new version of the Linguistic Tree Constructor so it has more linguistic layers (not sure if he also has been pulling out the weeds and killing the bugs).

I am sure we will hear more soon...

Emdros gets a commerical arm too

2006-11-21T18:37:00.000Z

The creator of Emdros now offer consultancy too, see http://emergence.dk An very interesting development in the Emdros eco system.

Did version 1.0.3 work for you ?

2006-09-11T20:31:00.000Z

UP tells the new version is better than the first release he made of Emdros - please don't look at version 1.0.3, it wasn't pretty (hardly working).

Emdros afffected by HW failure.... but sorted now.

2006-08-31T12:39:00.000Z

The Emdros developer has got his Mini Mac back from repair, It had a RAM error all along, right from when it was bought. UP claims he overcome the problem by writting Emdros so it had a small memory footprint and didn't use the defect RAM blocks.. hmmmm UP certainly has humour too.

Will UP be using Plaxo soon ?

2006-08-20T12:34:00.000Z

Emdros developer has worked so hard he forgot to set-up the Plaxo account he had planned, but he should soon be on Plaxo.