Fascinating Fascicles

The words "juncture" and "clamber" are very useful. The former reminds me of junctions in Perl6, the new name for what were known as superpositions. The latter is like some evolved son or daughter of clam, timber, eclipse, chowder, coomb, and climb. At this juncture, I'm clambering over the landscapes of a few different ideas. I'm still working on Mimulus, but not using it for its initial purpose, which was to maintain a small site of notes. I was going to host it at /stuff/marsh/ or /stuff/notes/, but I'm not sure which yet. I'm not going ahead with it yet because I'm not convinced of the structure.

I'm thinking that I want to develop some ideas for Eastward Ho!, but I don't think I want to do that in public. On the other hand, I want to work on just anything cool, and having a new notes directory will let me create some new idiom which is much bigger than I intended it to be and eventually becomes so good and constraining that I have to leave it in case another brush stroke ruins it. I'm also thinking about organisation again, about the One Big Directory approach for storing data, and about a .info site that I registered for the purpose of testing that out.

As time goes by, I'm getting dragged more towards the soft sciences of literature and history than my original starting points of physics and computer science. But whilst physics has been entirely swapped out, I certainly feel like my other interests are in some kind of magical superposition. They don't seem to enrich one another particularly, and I can't really find much in the way of interdisciplinary links between computer science and history, for example, but I still switch between them with a stark regularity.

As well as Eastward Ho!, I've been wanting to do synthesize something about one of the exciting periods of history that I like, especially literature in Elizabethan England. It's a much bigger and more exciting topic than is ever really made out. John Cowan went to see a production of Edward III the other night and we started talking about exchanges between the playwrights of the time, which really piqued my interest about it all again. I wrote an exceedingly good forward for a book on the subject of Shakespeare not so long ago, but it's unlikely that I'll write the book to go with it.

I found some fascinating fascicles a couple of weeks ago that reminded me that I used to work on paper a lot more than I do now, even when I was transitioning to using the computer more, so I'm wondering about working on paper again in part. I've tried this quite a few times, on the other hand, and it's never really paid off. The fascicles were fascinating because they covered a kind of personal history too, just showing some of the kinds of stuff that I was working on at the time. It's not really different to looking on my boxen for things that I've been doing so that I can better document them. For example, doing my recent Semantic Web Projects documentation was very important because it summarised half a decade of work that I've been doing on that, whereas previously it was all just a bit focussed in and not clear how all the different things were relating to one another. If there's one big overlap between history and computer science, it's finding patterns to things and abstracting and coming up with models of what went on and then writing that it's important not to conflate the models with the things and then realising that the models are things too and then coming up with models of the models before going to far with that and then getting back to the main work of finding patterns again.

I also want to revamp infomesh.net to use it as a dynamic site, and have been wanting to do that for a while, but the main problem there is over which software I should use for syncing it. I've been thinking about unison, but unison is a really pitiful and badly designed bit of code. I don't really want to roll my own solution either, so it might have to come down to settling with unison and learning how to cope with it.

Once that's set up, I'll be able to do dynamic projects more: ones that require to be able to write to the local disc. This is something that I don't do on inamidst.com so that the whole thing is static and very easy to backup, but of course it's very limiting in the sorts of services that I can provide. No wikis, especially. I'd also like to set up a kind of Welsh language corpus based on the kalusa paradigm, since that was so compelling. On inamidst.com, I'd like to document some more of the code that I've done, such as loggy.py and put.py, both of which are single files of excellent code that don't really have much in the way of instruction over how to use them. I'd also like to document some of the larger systems, such as the changesets system that runs Changes and Updates, which I'm also in the process of porting over to this box.

So lots of Ceres-sized dwarf projects to work on, but nothing a bit more pointed except for Mimulus, which itself was supposed to be a gateway to some more interesting projects only I'm stumbling a bit. A stepping stone here and there may help.