THIS IS IMPORTANT: 24 hours, starting midday Saturday, finishing midday Sunday, Comic Exhaustion October. Yeah, this Saturday. February 16th, 2002. Starts at 11am PST/2pm EST. Finishes at the same time, the next day. Draw a 24 page comic. Do it. It'll be fun. Hang out on AIM with the rest of us freaks.
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(2)
03:36:28 AM,
Saturday 16 February 2002
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The term 'consciousness' is defined with respect to my experience. I know I am conscious. Being mistaken about that would be like being mistaken about what the color red looks like--not improbable, not impossible, but nonsensical.
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(2)
09:15:53 PM,
Friday 15 February 2002
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Kerne reports that his computer is having problems, of the burning-electronics-smell variety, and that he won't be able to fix it till he gets to Seattle, so he'll wont be doing bloggy sorts of things for a few days. He has taken this (quite rightly) as a sign from the universe that he's supposed to visit with people in Real Life while he still can.
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08:54:28 PM,
Friday 15 February 2002
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Some of you wacky language-creating types might want to check out this beautiful website that lets you evolve new alphabets.
[via A Day Late]
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07:42:01 PM,
Friday 15 February 2002
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Dave Winer: "I see people doing hierarchies with Wiki's these days ... I'd love to know what the user interface for creating these hierarchies looks like."
The original Wiki doesn't have any hierarchies at all, of course--the feature Dave noticed seems to be specific to ZWiki. It took me a little fiddling about to catch on to how it works, but having found it, I must say it's actually a rather elegant way of adding a hierarchical structure to a wiki: when you click on a page title, it gives you backlinks (as usual), but it also lets you specify one or more of those links as a parent. The navigation tree at the top of the page is just following all the parent links. Cute! It's the bottom-up equivalent of an outliner.
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02:15:41 PM,
Friday 15 February 2002
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That was unexpected: the new way of organizing wobble will actually make it easier to store a blog in a MySQL database, when it comes time to implement that.
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07:03:30 PM,
Thursday 14 February 2002
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We put the music server into iTunes. It's on randomize.
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06:29:05 PM,
Thursday 14 February 2002
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If I had gone to Thomas Aquinas, I would have developed the spiritual perspective toward my monism more than I have, and the material perspective less. I would be firmly decided against Catholicism, but would believe that all world religions are inspired by the same fundamental insights. I would be an impeccable debater. I would probably be a Hegelian. Politically, I would lean towards limited representative democracy--essentially the American system, but possibly somewhat more conservative.
If I had gone to Gutenberg, I would be a radical atheist. I would be more a materialist than a monist. I would see all religions as basically superstitions, and as tools for keeping people under control. I would be extremely anti-authoritarian. I would probably be an anarchist of some sort, possibly even a libertarian.
If I had gone to Rose Hill, I would probably be an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Did you know they do gardening there?
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(8)
04:55:23 PM,
Thursday 14 February 2002
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Ska bands usually have "ska" somewhere in their names.
vi clones usually have "vi" somewhere in their names.
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(9)
01:54:30 PM,
Thursday 14 February 2002
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reading an argument between a left anarchist and a right anarchist on Wiki (vitriolic and decidedly off-topic)
Aha! Real anarchy--total freedom for everyone--is not practically impossible, it is logically impossible. Thus, the most notable features of any anarchist philosophy will be what sort of limitations it places on freedom. This makes it almost trivially simple, in a debate between two anarchists with opposing ideas[1], for each to accuse the other of not actually being an anarchist at all.
[1] The old joke: What do you get if you lock two anarchists in a room? Three splinter groups.
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(5)
01:14:10 PM,
Thursday 14 February 2002
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Hold on, please.
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08:03:02 PM,
Wednesday 13 February 2002
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"Oh Mr. Bellpit, your legs are so swollen."
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06:38:44 PM,
Wednesday 13 February 2002
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Drupal is interesting, but... PHP?
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12:50:33 PM,
Wednesday 13 February 2002
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The problem is that now I have too much energy to go to bed.
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03:12:06 AM,
Wednesday 13 February 2002
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I went to a David Byrne concert tonight, and it was unbelievably great. The Luther Burbank Center is nice and small, so you can actually see the people performing. He was clearly having a lot of fun, and the crowd was wonderful, which I'm sure helped. Also the fact that it was the last night of the tour. And then at the end, a gloriously twisted marching band came in and played for a good long time. All in all, a splendid way to spend a fat Tuesday evening. I am a Happy Moss.
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03:09:48 AM,
Wednesday 13 February 2002
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I think I am about to do something really unspeakably clever.
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06:08:05 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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My brain is on fire.
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(2)
05:46:29 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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Question: do any of the potential Wobble users actually care whether it publishes to static html files? 'Cause I've been acting like that's one of the constraints, but I've just realized that there's no real reason to, and taking that away would make a lot of stuff easier. I'd get a lot of stuff for free if I just let Wobble handle display all by itself, and it wouldn't really change things from the perspective of the reader, I don't think.
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(14)
05:17:09 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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The power to revolutionize the world.
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(3)
03:10:04 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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I want all this, and I want the core wobble engine (not counting interface or testing code) to come in at under 3000 lines of code.
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03:02:53 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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This recent outpouring of Big Ideas was caused by Kottke's personal taxonomy question.
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02:19:02 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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Idea: I'd like Wobble to be able to manage its own interface. This can't happen right away, but ultimately, I think it can be done. An interface is just a special kind of page.
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02:11:48 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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A post is an object. A weblog is a list. A wiki is a dictionary. Those are basically the only concepts you need to build a website: an item, an ordered set, and an unordered set.
Right now, Wobble--the part that's already built--can handle an item and an ordered set. I'd like to give it the ability to handle an unordered set as well, as would Mike, so that's going to be done before iteration 3 (I'll describe the iterations in the Wobble Wiki when it's up). Once it's possible to do an unordered set, I'd like to make the standard datastore unordered, and make all orderings secondary. A weblog, then, is not a particular type of page, but a display choice: it shows entries sorted by date. A wiki is a display that automatically links to other entries by name.
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02:10:07 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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My comment about not giving users choices gives Mike nightmares of a return to the batch processing priesthood--and I'm sure I don't want that. I think what I was really getting at in that entry was something like this: most often, giving the user a choice between two different ways of doing something is just a cop out, a way to avoid figuring out one way that actually makes sense. Also, a program shouldn't try to do more than it has to--needless complexity is the enemy of working code. And really, these problems have probably been around since the days of batch processing on room-sized monstrosities. It's not about limiting the user, it's about limiting the program.
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01:57:42 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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Vanilla is closer to what I want than any other tool I've seen. Fucking beautiful. If I can make Wobble even half as sweet as that, I'll be happy.
(And you're damned right I'm going to keep working on Wobble. I've thought too much about it to stop now. I'm obsessing over it. I'm trying to make it realize everything that is good and beautiful about the web. It's in serious danger of becoming The Right Thing--only it's being iteratively developed, so it'll actually work from moment to moment.) (Okay, it's also behind schedule, but personal projects are like that.)
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01:44:20 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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Woah! There's an RDF format for listing RecentChanges on a Wiki! This could be extremely useful for certain things. It makes possible the sort of Wiki-for-long-term-data-storage/Weblog-for-updating-everyone format that I've been wanting.
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(1)
12:15:12 PM,
Tuesday 12 February 2002
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I think I can actually develop a fairly coherent case that giving the user more options is never a good idea.
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(3)
09:26:44 PM,
Monday 11 February 2002
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You've probably heard about the Terry Gross / Gene Simmons incident. You may have heard that Gene Simmons did not grant NPR permission to make the archived copy of the interview available. Well, someone posted it to Usenet. And now it's on the web.
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(6)
06:25:03 PM,
Monday 11 February 2002
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Okay, I've thrown together some html for the three hour comic.
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09:45:12 PM,
Saturday 9 February 2002
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Remi and I just did a three hour comic, in preparation for next week. You can see it, either in nicely screen-formatted greyscale or in its original 300dpi printer-formatted black and white:
| Screen: |
Page 1,
Page 2,
Page 3 |
| Printer: |
Page 1,
Page 2,
Page 3 |
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(11)
09:28:03 PM,
Saturday 9 February 2002
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Yes, Leonard Cohen certainly should be Canada's poet laureate.
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(8)
02:33:16 AM,
Saturday 9 February 2002
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Observation -- what with the blogmass, I now have a higher friends-I-have-never-met quotient than I've had any time since I stopped BBSing.
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(5)
02:21:28 AM,
Saturday 9 February 2002
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Critical IP sucks.
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01:46:21 AM,
Saturday 9 February 2002
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And I've finally bookmarked my blogging bookmarklets at home. Don't know why I hadn't done so earlier.
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09:01:07 PM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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Oh, a new archive page. Well then: don't miss the instructions on how to make teasmoke.net work without having to wait a week, on the previous page.
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09:00:09 PM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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"I want a giant robot."
"Can you imagine if everyone had a giant robot?"
"This world would be a better place."
"It'd get kinda crowded. They'd be bumping into each other all the time..."
"...and there'd always be giant robots doing battle in the streets."
"Yeah."
"It'd be bad news for Tokyo, is what."
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(10)
07:23:02 PM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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