2007-05-02 18:27 UTC:
Sycamore trees are great, even when they shed their little flowery things all over the place. The spinning seedpods are good too. Sycamore trees are fun.
Being for the Month of 2007-05
These are quick notes taken by Sean B. Palmer on the Semantic Web, Python and Javascript programming, history and antiquarianism, linguistics and conlanging, typography, and other related matters. To receive these bits of dreck regularly, subscribe to the feed. To browse other months, check the contents.
Sycamore trees are great, even when they shed their little flowery things all over the place. The spinning seedpods are good too. Sycamore trees are fun.
My little UTC experiment, setting my watch to UTC and everything else to BST, is still going well. In fact, I quite recommend it. After you get used to it... well actually, that's kind of the point: you don't get used to it. It's a constant reminder about just how silly the concept of BST is, which can only be a good thing.
Switching to BST is like when your teachers told you "no, 1 isn't a prime number" and you said "why?" and they didn't have a clue. Only, it's actually worse since there's less justification for BST than there is for 1 not being a prime number. At least my watch knows where it's at.
At last, England gets some mystery graffiti, though it doesn't rival the Toynbee tiles and looks rather a lot scrappier compared to those. Still, you take what you can get. The London graffiti says "Alphabet of Brooke Shields", which currently has a Googlecount of 29, none of the results of which give anything in the way of clues or explanation.
Via Fortean Times news.
Today I was looking at a picture of a post box and cow parsley, and the cow parsley reminded me of the word "kua" for cow in Kalusa. Kalusa was the open constructed language that I was working on a year ago with other contributors. The idea is that the language was built by a corpus alone, with a list of English to Kalusa translations that were submitted anonymously by anyone that came across the site.
Each sentence also had a means to rank it, so that when someone submits a new sentence and it has a new word or something in it that you like or dislike, you can make your opinion known. Thus by a democratic consensus, the language grew and grew. You'd think that it'd become a hodgepodge of inconsistency due to the wiki + democractic method, but in actual fact consistency was one of the things that people came to vote up very quickly; if a word didn't look "right" compared to all the existing words, it was very likely to get voted down harshly.
But even with the voting, it was possible to play the system. One of the things that the "kua" memory reminded me of further was one of the tricks I used to use to ensure that my coinages got accepted. It was very common in Kalusa to submit a new word or piece of grammar, and then have someone else suggest an alternative and suddenly there'd be a huge battle between your word and the other person's word. Eventually I realised that since it's anonymous, it's possible to actually set up this kind of condition yourself. So I'd often submit one coinage, and then I'd come up with another fairly different coinage not long after, so that people suddenly thought "ooh, two things to choose between—it's a battle!" rather than "ugh, I don't like that word; I'll submit my own". It wasn't foolproof, but as far as I recall it worked surprisingly well.
It's sad to see that the original Kalusa site has seemingly gone down. I'm not sure why. The Yahoo! Group has been deleted too, so it looks like it's been purginated for some reason. Thankfully as well as my own archive of the Kalusa materials, Jim Henry also collected some stuff, so between us we've got a fair coverage. It's funny that Jim actually derived "The Saga of Malia and Kuana", as he calls it, from the corpus: this was actually written by Pat Hall and I in semi-collaboration on IRC. We called it Loatra kia Malia in Kalusa... it was an attempt at the first ever literature in the language. Sadly it seems it may be the only ever literature in the language!
I've just been having a debate over whether the Tudors can be considered mediaeval or not. Wikipedia has a good piece about the terminological origins of mediaeval and middle ages, but generally concludes that the middle ages ended around 1500 AD. Now, Henry VII came to the throne in 1485, but the bulk of the Tudor reign was in the renaissance. If you include Elizabeth's reign (she was Elizabeth Tudor, after all) in the Tudor period, then that runs up to 1603. And anyway, the Tudors, the Elizabethans especially with their university wits and playwrights, seem to embody the renaissance quite splendidly. Plus you had all the religious reform dating back to Henry VII, who seems to have spearheaded a great period of growth for England. If that isn't considered the renaissance, I dunno what it.
Of course, since Wikipedia says that the renaissance began in the late middle ages, that doesn't really bring us anywhere. As usual with categorisation and nomenclatural wranglings, as soon as you make a term for it, you lose a bit of the truth. The Tudors were really very transitional.
(The first draft of this note had "enlightenment" peppered in it in place of renaissance because I was still thinking about my point that if you don't consider Elizabeth's reign to herald the renaissance, then you must be thinking into the Jacobean period; and then when does the enlightenment come? Has it even happened yet?)
A nice little example of code evolution: adjacental. I had made adjacental(...) as a function to check a number to see if all of its digits were adjacent on a keyboard. So for example, "987656789098765" is adjacental whereas "81740278" is not. After I'd pasted the initial couple of attempts, Kevin P. Reid and Brian Templeton appended their own quite different versions.
I was thinking that a simple ircgame could possibly be made out of adjacental, but as yet I haven't been able to contrive such a thing. At least the code was interesting.
Also, I found in the process that the "window" itertools recipe in Python has been renamed "grouper", presumably for Python 2.5. The itertools recipes are awesome, but it'd be great if they included them in the stdlib:
$ python -c "import itertools; print itertools.grouper" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'grouper'
Two of the old recipes, "all" and "any", are actually builtin functions now. If that isn't a testament to the potential usefulness of their brethren, I dunno what is.
For some crazy reason (people were discussing it in front of me) I got into investigating the new HTML WG and the WHAT WG. Thanks to a recent poll, the work of the latter will probably be a large part of the work of the former, with Ian Hickson at the helm. Could be some fireworks.
I got this odd vision of writing a book that described the Past, Present, and Future of HTML in very clear historical terms. It might bear nicely on some of the current discussions about tagsoup, behaviour, semantics, and all that. The whole extensibility and validation side of things is interesting too... what with Mark Baker's comments on supervalidation. It's odd that Schematron came before RELAX NG, isn't it? A step too far, perhaps. The ESW HTML Subwiki is interesting. An IRC channel for the HTML 5 stuff would be nice too.
If Scotland were to leave the union, what would the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland be called then? In other words, what would the new UK-minus-Scotland's formal name be? It can't include "Great Britain", because Great Britain would no longer exist. It could be some play on England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, perhaps?
The last time that the name of the United Kingdom was changed was back in 1927, in the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927 ("A Bill to Provide for the alteration of the Royal Style and Titles and of the Style of Parliament and for purposes incidental thereto"):
"2.--(1) Parliament shall hereafter be known as and
styled the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland"
So if Scotland were to break the union, the English parliament would, I presume, be responsible for changing the name of the country again. If that does happen and they do call it the "United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland", I hope they use the serial comma.
I set up an account on Flickr, but I'm not sure if I'll use it. Again I've used the Weird Gherkin Thing as my "buddy icon" (no idea why they give it such a silly name).
Word of the day: "airshipologist".
Today I saw three curlews, some pigeons, two greenfinches, ducks (mallards), egrets, black headed gulls, starlings, lots of swans, two pheasants, rabbits, crows, some little sandpipers, blackbirds, a chaffinch, two robins, a green woodpecker, a squirrel(?), a jackdaw, a great tit(?), a sparrow, wood pigeons, a coot, magpies, a swift, a wagtail, and many herring gulls. And a biplane.
I also saw some whimbrels, but I didn't know what they were at the time. They look a bit like the curlews, only smaller. At least, the juveniles do... most of these were juveniles, which are brown, and there was just one adult, which was lighter to the point of being grey or white. They're quite speckled, and in manner they look a bit like a cross between a duck and a thrush, if you can imagine that.
I've seen plenty of pheasant before, but I'm not sure if I've ever heard one. They sound pretty funny. One of the many swans was interesting because its bill was very pale, and kinda pink. Perhaps it was an albino swan! Or a flamingon.
A green woodpecker is really, really hard to spot when it's wandering about in the grass, but it's certainly worth looking out for because it's a beautiful bird, and it has an interesting bobbling walk.
Victoria's Empire, that I so enjoyed last week, was just as good again this week. It took me less by surprise this week, so I think I was able to pin down some of the reasons that I enjoyed it so much. In summary:
It's a shame that there's only one left in the series of three, but deltab says that it's been well received, so perhaps she'll do something similar in future. Also, if there were more shows in this series I guess it wouldn't be as tight, which is part of its endearing charm.
You Can Own an Integer Too is awesome. I got "17 7F B6 0D B6 1D B2 97 99 3A 49 5B B3 F7 E6 47". How about you? Plenty of integers for everyone!
I wonder what happens if two people get assigned the same number by accident and then publish their numbers? Can they claim that the other is using their number, or what?
One factor that might've gone into Apple having delayed OS X Leopard: the features are being announced and proven in June, but nobody can buy it until October. That sounds a lot like iPhone, which we now know the features of, but nobody can buy yet. With the iPhone, the delay between knowing and buying is causing the hype to spin all out of control, because the features are awesome. As long as the Leopard features are similarly awesome, the delay mightn't hurt it as much as some people have been saying.
Word of the day: "sailormongering". Via Bjoern.
Oh right, I didn't do the beginning of the month font splurge yet. Well I have been thinking about fonts, just not writing about them so far. Today Arnia came up with Helvetica at 50, celebrating 50 years of everybody's favourite font. Except... well it's not mine. Will it be spoiling the party if I said that I don't like Helvetica all that much? This is probably a part of my sans-serif disillusionment, but maybe not. Even the BBC article has a whole section entitled "Bland uniformity" dissing the Grand Old Swiss. Helvetica does seem to embody some of the best things about modernism, the few scant things, and yet like modernism itself after fifty years it seems very hollow.
I'm still wondering about the semi-serifs as a way forward. Someone was asking me for advice on a font to put on book spines for a library project, and the requirements were: legible, but classic looking. I've seen a few semi-serif fonts around but the only one that I know by name is the already venerable Optima... perhaps I should check out some more. Feel free to send me suggestions as to good semi-serifs.
Since Origins of a Pronoun I've been using "ich" and "utchy" and variants like that as much as possible, mainly in my head since it just produces pure bafflement in conversation (except on Swhack, but even there sometimes). After all this time, I'm just about starting to get used to "ich" being a pronoun. It's really hard to take a basically random word and force yourself to think of it as a pronoun. "Ich am" and "'cham" are finally starting to sound like they're linguistically acceptable; but "utchy am" still sounds rougher than "utchy is".
Arnia mentions that he quite likes Sabon at the moment. It's quite nice. Looking at the sample made me think: how come so many fonts use double storey "a" (even this Courier New that I'm using in emacs), whereas in handwriting it's very rare?
I'm constantly on the look out for great pens and great notebooks. Some months ago I found an absolutely excellent notebook meeting my requirements in a shop that I don't normally visit, though it's easy enough to access. Needless to say, I've been going there more than usual. I also found the notebooks in another shop recently, and so I stocked up on a few even though they were more expensive there... It's probably a good thing that I did because, horrors!, the first place that I found them no longer has them. They're selling a similar kind of thing, but it's much bigger, which means it won't fit in the various pockets that were just right for this smaller sized notebook.
I've looked on the stationer's website and I can't find the exact product that I'm after, so I'm a little worried that they might've discontinued the line entirely. Just when you find a product of awesome, they get rid of it!
As for pens, I've been using a Pentel that, whilst it's scratchy, writes cleanly and nicely and seems to be lasting yonks. The thing just doesn't run out. I've been using it all year so far, and it's still going strong! Actually, I should probably pick up some more of those too before they discontinue them.
Chandler (on Swhack) just reminded me of the Middle English t-shirts, so I've been laughing myn asse off at them again, and the awesome new ones. "Armor doth weare KYNG RICHARDE for proteccioun." Seriously great stuff. I don't read the weblog as often as I should, which is to say that I completely forgot about it after I first found out about it... it's houseoffame. Chuckle, about a train: "Y did ryde a thyng marvellous and straunge--an yron hors, or so yt ys yclept. But methynketh yt was nat ryght horsly, thys yron hors." So yeah, this should probably go into my very select Subscription List in my Reader of Feeds.
Middle English chat up lines... "Yf thou were a latyn tretise ich wolde putte thee in the vernacular." Funniest thing I've read in days.
Just had a debate with Saul Albert about whether "my lovely" is particularly pernicious or not. He pondered ("ponder" is a good word, along with "snuck" and "palisade") that it's okay if the my is possessing an "a subjective judgement or abstract noun". I wondered though if it might be elliptical, with some noun that "lovely" is modifying omitted. We figured that perhaps the omission of said noun might be an indication that the possessivity is not to be taken literally. So it goes.
Today I did some tracing of my lineage, and one my first discoveries was descent from a now extinct baronetcy. Eventually I managed to trace that back, through five maternal links, to Edward III, Plantagenet; so it turns out that I'm very, very distantly related to Arnia, whom I've known for some time is descended from the Plantagenets (from Henry II he said today).
Then I figured I'd trace the lineage of Edward III by opening his Wikipedia entry, opening his mother and father in new tabs, closing the tab and moving on and repeating the process. It took two hours to go through it all, and along the way I passed people like King John, William the Conqueror, Harold II, various saints and Holy Roman Emperors, Alfred the Great, and Charlemagne. Wonderful stuff.
On Swhack we were talking about Dawkins and Secularism, and eventually I got to ranting about history (apologies to those who've already seen this there)...
"So I was reading Terrors of the Night the other day, by Thomas Nashe, and it's a piece about superstitions and so forth. Back in Elizabethan England, there was a lot of controversy over superstition, witches, magic, and that sort of thing because of the upheaval associated with the switching back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism--not to mention the Puritans coming into the fray.
"So you have people like 'onne Scot, an Englishman' as King James called him... Reginald Scot, who wrote a huge piece that talks about how fairy stories and witchcraft and all this stuff is utter bunk. And in 1603 you have Samuel Harsnett coming out with a tract speaking out loudly about the papists, the Catholics, and their exorcisms and all the silliness associated with devils and demons and so on. It's really easy to lampoon, so Harsnett did so. Though oddly enough, King James was very into demons and wrote a book called Demonologie, even though he was a Protestant. So it wasn't entirely a division across the denominitions.
"Anyway, one of the things that struck me about Nashe's piece was that in demonstrating how the superstitions of the day were completely bunk, he debunks them by using his best science of the time. Now, his debunking turns out to be right, but his science has now been proven wrong. He's talking about how dreams are caused by humours, not by possessions.
"So I wondered: ¿how valuable was that railing against superstition given that he was a) right, but b) for the wrong reasons, and yet c) there's no way at that time he could've known the right reason (and really, we still don't quite know how dreams "work")? And I guess that it's related to the larger question of whether all the people who were born before Jesus are going to heaven or hell in the Christian viewpoint because they couldn't've been Christians; whether babies go to heaven or hell; whether people on remote islands... &c.
"You sorta have to do the best that you can, and you're judged on how well you overcome local conditions. There isn't exactly a universal yardstick, only inasmuch as it's distributed to all of us depending on our contexts.
"I think Nashe knew he was so obviously right, it was just a problem of how to relate a thing so obvious. It's like people were arguing that the sun didn't shine and he knew that it did, but when people just obstinately believe in something so stupid, it's hard to know which kind of cloostick to administer. And also, with Nashe, there's always a million things going on at once. I mean, the debunking is the most ostensible of the reasons behind the pamphlet, but there's a lot of other good stuff going on there...
"So anyway, what got me thinking about this is that Terrors of the Night was showing that there were, back to the C16 at least, people who believed in rubbish, and people who knew that the rubbish was rubbish and were attempting to decry it. A lot of these things don't change. But watching the methods and stuff evolve is fun.
"It's like... Dylan's got this new radio show which is pretty good, and he's usually playing old songs on it. Someone wrote in and asked why he plays old songs all the damn time instead of recognising the new progress and the great new musical talents, and Bob just said that well, there's a lot more old songs than new ones. It's just a fair representation; and I can't help thinking about a lot of things in that way...
"Another interesting thing is that in ye olde dayes, people used to pin learning on the ancients a lot more than they do now that the scientific method is so prevalent in our thoughts. I was just thinking that it's sorta like moving from the taught to the teacher; it was a kind of ancient intellectual subservience of mind and now we're shedding that because we're do damn terrific at coming up with intellectual and physical gadgets and geegaws. But I think that really, both have their merits, so I think that we're debalanced towards the arrogant position now and aren't really looking long term enough, which is probably why all of a sudden climate change and whatnot have snuck up upon us and that eventually we'll have to be a bit more temporally holistic to kick us out of our collective pomposity!
"Which I guess is why I'm much more interested in history than technology now. Technology can go swivel. I'm hypercorrecting individually, but fighting the tides socially."
Every so often I consider putting post-it notes in university library books when I find a significant error or other item of important note that future perusers might be interested in. I haven't done it yet, but I wonder if that sort of thing would be good practice--it's making the book itself a kind of centre of conversation. On the other hand, setting up a website that lets people comment on books in such fashion would be almost as good in availability and much better in terms of centrality.
Someone has been successively scribbling dates on the very front left seat in the front carriage of trains on a particular train line. When I came across the first one I wrote down all the dates because I thought it was a pretty fun and wanted to see if the person was still active; but when I came across it again I noticed that it was an entirely different set of dates, so the person has been doing it on multiple trains.
Björn showed us a proposal to add LATIN CAPITAL SHARP LETTER S to UCS. Good idea, though I'm more eagerly anticipating COMBINING DOUBLE CIRCUMFLEX. Also, if they're going to add a capital sharp s, which is basically a capital long s and small regular s ligature, shouldn't UCS also have a LATIN CAPITAL LONG S? It could be useful in the same way as the LATIN CAPITAL SHARP LETTER S: for times when you want to use a long s in an all capital title.
Today I was grumbling to someone about how much of a shame it is that it's difficult to achieve critical mass on exciting web projects. First you have to think up something that'll get a significant amount of friends likewise interested, and then you've got to hope that the people you have in mind are available. Just an idea by itself is so far from being enough, it's unreal.
I'm not even sure what the most recent really interesting thing I worked on with people was. It might be RSS 1.1, which was back in 2005, and was really just Chris and Cody and me (though that's enough people really, and the Atom Extensibility worked with me and Ken and Sjoerd; five plus minus two seems to be about right). On the other hand, if you count Swhack, that's one that's lasted years and is still going fairly strong.
Still it's depressing because I'd pottering about doing things individually doesn't seem to give as many decent cumulative developments as working on a central exciting thing, and usually it's not as fun. It's sorta moving towards the hunter-gatherer end of the scale... people are too busy because they're working and filling their days up with sand instead of working on the pebbles first, or however that old scheduling maxim goes. It's just not very clear to me what factors go into successfully exciting tech projects.
I keep thinking I should build a dictionary site, like Wiktionary but without all the preëminent suck. But what would I call it? I rather liked the idea of "lextionary.com" this morning, but of course that's already taken.
Anybody got any good ideas? Do let me know!
˙ooʇ uɐɔ noʎ ʍou ˙ʇᴉ ɓuᴉsn unɟ ɟo ʇol ɐ ɹəɥʇɐɹ ɓuᴉʌɐɥ uəəq əʌ,ᴉ ˙ɟləsɯᴉɥ oɓoʎoɯ ʇɐəɹɓ əɥʇ ɟo əɔuəsəɹd əɥʇ uᴉ əɯ pəʍoɥs ɯɐqʇɐd ɥɔᴉɥʍ 'ʇdᴉɹɔsɐʌɐſ uᴉ ʇdᴉɹɔs uoᴉsɹəʌuᴉ əlʇʇᴉl ɐ uəʇʇᴉɹʍ sɐɥ oɓoʎoɯ pəllɐɔ ʎnɓ əɯos 'uʍop-əpᴉsdn əʇᴉɹʍ oʇ əʌɐɥ ʇsnſ noʎ uəɥʍ suoᴉsɐɔɔo əsoɥʇ llɐ ɹoɟ
For some reason my HotComments design pattern has been receiving lots of hits even before I've written it up, so I've done that now. Basically hot comments are subversions of documentation facilities in a language for other purposes because the language wasn't forwards extensible enough.
Today I came up with a really, really great idea for a book. It's a kind of Manifesto of Philosophy with a lot of really hard practical consequences; if you think of taoism and how lofty and yet very society-based that is, you're along the right lines. Things that I've been influenced by lately, in concept, include the Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the Codex Seraphinianus, Thomas Paine, the Tao Te Ching, the Political Compass, the Journal of George Fox, the Terrors of the Night, and many other things along those lines. If you can imagine mixing the best bits of the sentiments of each of those and expositing it in a clear, contemporary style, then you have an even better grip than I do on what I want to be doing! I think it's a really good idea... It'd probably be pamphlet sized, which is rather in keeping with part of the manifesto.
Christopher Schmidt got me to sign up to Jyte, pretty much by just mentioning it in my presence and even though I didn't know what it is. Such is the power of Web 1.995 (as Kevin Reid observed, it didn't give me a seamless user experience so it can't possibly be Web 2.0). Anyway, it turns out that the point of the site is to make "claims", literally statements about whatever, that people then vote up or down according to whether they fancy you or not. So I went for Troy is a better measure than avoirdupois, even though "avoirdupois" is a much nicer word for example as one of my first "claims". I think the word "claim" reminded me of claiming a stake in a goldrush. A bit like signing up to all the Web 2.0 sites that you can, then.
From publishing the design pattern earlier (along with another one I didn't mention, ChoiceNotEcho; one of my favourites), Simon Rozet browsed through a few of the others and remarkably happenstanced upon my single mention of Equid, the homebrewed version control system that I use to back inamidst.com. I sent him a tarball, he tested on Fedora Core, it failed (it was written for Cygwin and OS X/Darwin), and with lots of help from Terje Bless I managed to fix the problem and put the result on the web: equid.tar.gz.
Now you can see the wackiness driving things such as Changes and Updates. I wrote it because the supposedly stable fsfs subversion database that I was using got corrupted one day irrecoverably, so either I was going to have to keep the SVN database in CVS, or just write my own RCS that doesn't lose all your data in a broken binary blob. I did the latter, clearly.
The way it works is to maintain two directories, a working directory and a "previous" directory, which is an old snapshot of the working directory. You do all of your work and store all of your files in the working directory (the $DOCUMENT_ROOT of inamidst.com, for exmaple), and then when you "check in" the data, Equid compares the working directory to the old snapshot, computes unified diffs from that, and stores various versions of them in different directories that you specify on the command line. The various versions correspond, for example, with pages deemed public by robots.txt. I've been using Equid since 2005 or so, and it's worked pretty well, even scaling up somewhat well.
Mark Jeeves, of Planet Rock linked his listeners to a video of John Paul Jones playing Whole Lotta Love on a mandolin with The Duhks (who I'd never heard of before) live at Merlefest 2007. It's pretty good, so I wrote in and said so, because Mark was horrified at it; and he read out my response on the air:
"After the Unledded performances of Page & Plant in the late 1990s, the JPJ thing is hardly without precedent! I think it's pretty good, too, really... JPJ said recently that he's a better guitarist now than he was with Zeppelin, and I think that his latest albums have probably proven that. It's a shame they don't all reform."
Though he disagrees about the mandolin performance (not a Led Zeppelin III fan then, I guess?), he did agree that they should all get back together. I think that's one point at least upon which almost all Zep fans will agree!
Terje found an interesting new contribution to the semi-serif saga: Malaga. At first I just thought it was a hideous serif, but then I realised that they're actually leaving about 20% or so of the serifs off; and doing it inconsistently between normal and italic variants, for that matter! The Q in the italic is like a weird "2" with a quiff, and the letter spacing is somewhat out too. But I think that the experiment could've worked had they a) put in a bit more thought as to which serifs to omit; and b) made the remaining serifs a lot, lot sleeker and smaller.
Word of the day: "transcytherean".
Someone put a list of all the Voynich Manuscript images at the Beinecke Library on the web. Problem is, though, they all use Beinecke-internal codes for the file names, rather than the folio numbers and side designations as is more logical. Someone else put up an HTML table of the correspondances between the codes and the folios, though, so I manipulated that into a machine readable conversion table. Code for moving the images once you've downloaded them is included at the top of that file.
Dave Beckett's Triplr is awesome. First time I came across it, I thought "-r? eek!" and didn't look further. Turns out that the -r in this case means awesome-thing-of-awesome, not Web-2.0-junk, however. It converts stuff on the web from one Semantic Web format to another, rather like the service that Aaron set up as part of SWAG back in 2001, me on sbp.f2o.org back in like 2003, and Mindswap in c.2004, only it's got a much better interface and it's using all the latest redland wizardry.
One small thing, though, is that it doesn't seem to support conversion by POST. Now it's not too difficult to put something on the web and then convert, but it would be nice to use it in a local conversion script. On the other hand, I guess that's what rapper (redland's converter script) is for.
Apparently I've written 169,026 words on my primary weblogs since about 2002 or so. The breakdown, ordered by size:
Slightly surprising that miscoranda should be first on the list still, since I've rarely written to it for years, but it did steal a march on all the others. Whits is doing well.
Today I saw some moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), and a garden warbler (Sylvia borin).
Moon jellyfish are like pink gossamer underwater parachutes with circular configurations inside that, I learned only when I looked it up later, are apparently their gonads. They eat and excrete from the same orifice, and although they're venomous, they don't have enough power to break the human skin. There were probably about 25 in total, mainly divided into noticably larger and smaller types (adults and juevniles?). They're sorta hypnotic to look at... when the sun was out they were swishing along quite happily, attaching themselves to seaweed, and glowing a very vivid pink from their less diaphanous parts. When the sun went in, they were much more lethargic, and the luminescence seemed to depart them. Apparently they disappear about midsummer.
The garden warbler looked a bit like a nightingale to me, and its song was also very pretty. It sings a bit like a blackbird, very melodic, only its passages are shorter, and it ends on a kinda weird strike. Its melodic lines seemed to be a little more frantically intricate too, as though it were a virtuoso singer. It's dark brown above, light brown below, and has a white bib; not a very remarkable bird to look at, but certainly remarkable to hear!
Yesterday I met Tav Ino and Yan Minagawa. With names like that, you have to expect that some awesome schnizzle went down, and indeed it did. I wrote up some of what went on, but I didn't finish it yet and I still have some stuff to scan in.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that Web Architecture hasn't come very far in the past five years in the kinds of areas I'm usually interested in. EARL is still being standardised. RDF-in-HTML issues have fractured into several different competing ideas. HTML is slowly coming around to being revised into HTML 5, but there are troubles behind the scenes. RDF is still stuck in its plastic fantastic SPARQL scene, and hasn't got around to fixing all those deferred issues that the RDF Core WG had to buck. The TAG are still debating the same old things; w3cMediaType-1, the very first issue, is still open. What's actually exciting these days about Web Architecture? Not very much.
People ask the same questions about the Semantic Web now as I was asking six years ago. I can still mainly give the same answers now as I got then. There seem to be more monkeys working in these areas now, but less traction overall. At the same time, it's nice in a way since at least one has to do very little work to keep up.
Someone emailed me a link to a book that I'd been seeking for years for sale on Abebooks. It's the Tri-State Spooklight Booklet that I transcribed back in May 2002 from online JPEGs that someone had scanned from the original booklet; and when you transcribe a whole thing as large as that, it's difficult not to want to obtain a copy of the original thing. Thanks to this wonderful tipster, whom I've thanked profusely (and I should thank the whole mechanism of the internet and web too; they make getting rare books so much easier), it's now shipping to me for the reasonable price of $29. Good stuff!
Yesterday evening I wrote 5000 words towards the pamphlet idea that I had about the patterns and practical consequences of philosophy, history, and science. It sounds kinda boring when you boil it down to a one sentence summary like that, but it's been exciting me for weeks now; and the seeds of it are visible in things that I've been doing for some time. It's a reasonably radical idea, I think, whence the fun.
I did an hour long pitch of the idea to someone recently and found that though it excited them too, I didn't have as clear an exposition of it as I'd thought, so that evening I settled down to start writing it figuring that it's much harder to be pessimistic about something once you've done it. But it didn't go to plan since I just couldn't figure a good way to start it, so I emailed William Loughborough about it and he suggested that I at least just take down some notes for myself about the idea. I was, in fact, already way ahead of him: I'd done 3500 of the 5000 word note to myself by the time he'd emailed.
Now I'm not entirely sure where to proceed from here on it, but it's a suitably enough generic thing that I'm bound to get interested in many different aspects of it as a consequence of other related investigations; so I'll just try to make sure that I document those aspects with the pamphlet in mind.
I'm rather pleased with the TAD Chat; things are hopping with Tav and the crew right now. It's been distracting me a bit from other things, including Whits, but it's been a pleasant distraction. One thing that I learned is that using U+261E WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX to give the direction of arcs in arcs and nodes diagrams is awesome, especially if you have kpreid to look it up for you.
So yesterday I wrote The Plexnet and Practical Philosophy which seems to have helped people working on that project out somewhat, but it's also a fairly good read about how really large systems should be designed.
Apart from that, I've been really busy. There seem to be two types of busy insofar as Whits is concerned: the busy which makes me to post to Whits a lot more, and the busy which makes me post to Whits a lot less. This has clearly been a period of the latter. The former comes from when I or someone around me is generating lots of ideas so I have to write them up; and I guess the latter comes from implementing those ideas or doing other stuff that isn't idea generation.
It's notable that though I've been immensely productive recently, not much of that has filtered through online. I'm hoping that some of it will do eventually, and I'm setting up things to more or less do that, but I'm plodding away at lots of really interesting things at the moment anyway.
Today someone visited one of my pages by searching for the phrase "Yiffy Dragon - too many dicks". The funny thing about the page that they found was that it's a wordlist, just a text file with lots of phrases, and apparently Google uses link texts as the titles of pages like that for which there's no obvious title. So that particular page, courtesy of an external site over which I have absolutely no control, is now entitled "i have no fucking clue what this is". Thankfully, as it happens, I wouldn't've come up with anything better.
The PPP thing that I wrote will soon have a radio counterpart. Danny Bruder's running a kind of podcasty radio show for the 24weeks.com project and wanted me to cram the PPP down into something that he can read out "on air". So I've obligingly sent him a script which is... well let's just say that it departs from the original on a few matters of style. Hopefully, if Bruder can hook it all up neatly, it'll be hilarious.
That's the first time that I've written anything to really be performed in many years, as far as I can recall. I used to write plays, in fact, but that was some time before I got into Shakespeare; and for some reason I just haven't bothered since...
I just closed a window full of tabs in Firefox 1.5 and, as usual, it's sitting there spinning the old beach ball at me. I didn't switch to 2.0 because my core extensions are so slow to be upgraded, and because I hear that the problems are just getting worse anyway. Once again I started to think about Colloquy and Safari... I think that half of the knack of designing a good new browser is choosing which features are the core features. Undo Close Tab is so absolutely a core feature, for example, and yet it's a second class citizen to browser designers.
The 24weeks.com project is, it seems, over after just two weeks. Tav has pulled the plug, I fear, by pushing the pause button; and though he says that he'll be back, I don't think there's anything to make of this iteration. Every year Tav pulls an interesting new thing out of the hat, and though this has been perhaps the least impressive ever, I'm still fairly optimistic that whatever thing he comes up with next will be worth checking out.
In the meantime though, that means I won't be doing any documentation like the TAD or PPP. That's a shame because it's been fun to think about big systems and how projects work and, actually, through conversations with people like Saul and Jeffarch I've actually stumbled on some new design patterns and bits of learning. And at least this time round I did my best to archive it, so the little value that I did manage to milk out of this iteration hasn't been lost as badly as with previous ones. Overall, it's probably been about the same!
One thing that I kept getting reminded of was TimBL's PaperTrail Design Issue. The idea of modelling document processes that way is really compelling. A bigger lesson, though, was over the way that Vectors Not Resultants can be used to good effect... it was essentially a small test case for it, and I guess I have a bit to ponder over now. I like to make exciting projects happen, and I wonder what conditions and approaches are best for that.