Page of Moss - bloglet for Wednesday 24 April 2002

An e-text of Beowulf in Old English. Found via a page on Mozilla's abandoned Grendel project. _
respond? (2)
03:32:32 PM, Wednesday 24 April 2002

Hungry Freaks, Daddy! _
respond? (3)
05:25:12 PM, Tuesday 23 April 2002

Java makes difficult things simple. Unfortunately, it also makes easy things ridiculously complex. _
respond? (3)
02:30:55 PM, Tuesday 23 April 2002

The previous entry, if you skip long entries, is an attempt to articulate what I want from a content management system, combining the virtues of a weblog and a wiki. Now you know if you'll want to read it. _
respond?
02:54:20 AM, Tuesday 23 April 2002

Blogs function essentially as disposable content. Bloggers make a big deal about getting permalinks working right, but still, when's the last time you looked at old content from a blog? They're not made for it. Things are said, and then they drift off into the past. The time-based organization of a blog is nice in that it makes it easy to see where the newest content is, but it's troublesome in that, with no system of organization other than time, old content drifts away never to be heard from again.

The other side of this is that the lack of organization makes it really easy to maintain a blog. You just type what you're thinking, hit add, and poof, there it is on the web. This is good. It reduces the barriers to getting good stuff out there. It's just that we also need something to reduce the barriers to finding that stuff once it's there. Search engines help somewhat, but a search engine is only useful if you know what you're looking for.

The ideal solution would be something as easy to add to as a blog, but as easy to navigate as a traditional website. It would be able to present a bloglike view of things, for those who were already familiar with the site and wanted to watch updates, but it would also have a more structured view, forming a subject hierarchy, and making connections between relevant entries. Adding something would be just as easy as blogging, but it would automatically place new content in the proper contexts, in addition to just adding it to the top of the stack.

Of course, this is too much to ask. To be able to do that really well, a program would have to have natural language parsing abilities the likes of which have never before been seen. So what's needed is a good partial solution.

It helps to look at some of the things people have tried already. On the simplest level, Scripting News has links to this day in every earlier year that it was around, and sometimes reinserts this content into the blogstream when it's still relevant. Thus doesn't provide any organization, but it does churn up older content, rather than leaving it totally dead. Oblivio goes a step farther, and has a sidebar with randomly selected links to earlier entries, each with a short teaser to give an idea of the flavor of the piece linked to. Movable Type adds support for actual organization: it has teaser excerpts for entries, but it also adds categories, so that it's easy to browse the archive for particular kinds of content. Coming at it from the other end, content may be organized in pages based on subject, but a What's New type page can show the most recently updated items, as is done in Cosma Shalizi's Notebooks. Wiki adds to this a drastically simple interface for editing pages, and a what's new page--RecentChanges or quickChanges--that is automatically updated and highlights the changes on modified pages. Finally, WikiLogs such as WebSeitz integrate weblogs for time based content with wikis for more permanent content.

The WikiLog approach seems to me the most encouraging one. In both wikis and weblogs, it's very easy to add content, because the user doesn't have to spend much time thinking about organizational details. From what I've seen so far, though, WikiLogs haven't quite reached the ideal I'm looking for. The weblog essentially acts as something separate from the wiki that just happens to do automatic WikiLinks. It may refer to wiki content, but it doesn't automatically become wiki content. The naive solution to this would be to build the weblog directly from the wiki--a more bloggish view to RecentChanges. Apart from the messy details, I can see two major problems with this: first, it requires that the user specify where new content is to be added. Ideally, I don't want to think about these details--even the kind of categorization that Movable Type does is too much work for me. Second, if a page has been edited, rather than just created, it's hard to find a good way to present the edit in the weblog.

The solution I'd like to try is a WikiLog type system where the weblog, not the wiki, forms the single primary entry point for new material. The user enters just a weblog entry and, optionally, a list of keywords. The entry is than added to the top of the weblog, and also to the bottom of each WikiPage listed in the keywords. Ideally, it should also identify major keywords in the content, and add the entry to those WikiPages as well. Thus, if the user takes no further action, they get a blog with an additional category-based view. This still has some overhead for listing keywords, but it does at least automate the process of adding categories, which is, to my mind, an important step. Furthermore, since relevant entries become part of the content of a WikiPage, the author can take time later to revise those pages, turning them from mere lists of weblog entries into a more coherent whole. In essence, this combines the weblog, as the ideal interface for adding content, and the wiki, as the ideal interface for editing content. It is still imperfect, but it is progress _
respond? (4)
02:48:31 AM, Tuesday 23 April 2002

A good explanation of why the GNU GPL is enforceable even without a formal process of agreeing to the license. Essentially: the GPL conditionally grants you rights that you would not normally have under copyright law. Refusing to accept the license means refusing to accept any right to redistribute the software. _
respond? (1)
08:02:29 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

What is the significance of the magic number 2,147,483? On my particular combination of webserver and servlet engine, it acts as an upper limit to the maximum age of a cookie. It gets about 300 hits on Google, as compared to around 20 for its lower or higher neighbors. It isn't a power of two. It's representing a number of seconds here, but it isn't a whole number of minutes. _
respond? (1)
07:10:48 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

refcards.com has nice quick reference cards for a number of different programs. Worth taking a look at, if you use geek tools. _
respond?
03:45:34 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

If I'd known this was coming, I would have added a filtering feature to my blt. _
respond? (8)
03:18:01 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

My keyboard at work has a scroll wheel on it. It makes me happy. _
respond? (7)
02:16:30 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

Nielsen observes that Flash is actually good for making websites for kids. Unfortunately, he misses the point that making websites for kids is in itself bad. _
respond? (3)
12:39:25 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

Society exists for the sake of the individuals within society. _
respond?
12:08:24 PM, Monday 22 April 2002

Enhanced Security Regulations FAQ
#16: I have filed down my teeth to sharp, sharp points. Will I still be allowed on your airplanes? _
respond?
05:12:56 AM, Saturday 20 April 2002

There's a sign outside the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. It says "Welcome", in large, friendly letters. But you're not welcome. It's the fucking Naval Academy. So Kerne thought of something better--and you can too. _
respond? (7)
03:18:46 AM, Saturday 20 April 2002

I think I've linked to sodaconstructor before, but I was reminded of it again just now, and it's so much fun that I had to link to it again. Wonderful playful use of Java. _
respond?
06:39:51 PM, Friday 19 April 2002

cartel _
respond?
06:04:27 PM, Friday 19 April 2002

See, I have mixed feelings about static variable typing. On the one hand, Java's static type safety has caught a lot of errors for me at compile time, which is certainly convenient. But on the other hand, most of those errors only existed in the first place because Java is statically typed. _
respond? (1)
08:38:08 PM, Thursday 18 April 2002

If you haven't looked at Tanya's blog since it crashed, don't go now. Please check your browser cache for a copy of it. If you find one, save it somewhere and let me and Kerne know. _
respond? (3)
05:52:35 PM, Thursday 18 April 2002

The National Security Archive _
respond? (2)
05:01:03 PM, Thursday 18 April 2002

Interesting, in so many ways. _
respond? (1)
03:32:01 PM, Thursday 18 April 2002

How To Argue Wrong _
respond? (2)
03:08:59 PM, Thursday 18 April 2002

PHP is worse than most other languages. But the PHP online documentation is better than anything else out there. _
respond?
06:58:52 PM, Wednesday 17 April 2002

All the larger units of political organization appear to have been formed mostly to provide mutual support in times of war. At what level does that stop being true? _
respond? (2)
06:21:45 PM, Wednesday 17 April 2002

This is a test. _
respond? (4)
02:59:47 PM, Wednesday 17 April 2002

I hadn't really thought of it this way before, but U.S. dependence on foreign oil is actually a major force for stability worldwide. _
respond? (17)
02:17:46 PM, Wednesday 17 April 2002

Even though this bug report is really a feature request, I must say I very much approve of it. _
respond? (1)
10:15:05 PM, Tuesday 16 April 2002

Plan for tonight: if Wobble really is as simple to work with as I say it is, I should get it working properly. If not, I should build--from scratch or from ready made parts--something that is that simple. _
respond?
08:59:27 PM, Tuesday 16 April 2002

Les Orchard wants Wiki syncing too. _
respond?
06:57:04 PM, Tuesday 16 April 2002

An AIM library for Python. That could be handy. _
respond?
04:19:07 PM, Tuesday 16 April 2002

And here's a whole bunch of stuff about using Vim as an outliner. Neat. _
respond?
04:07:28 PM, Tuesday 16 April 2002

The Error Message Of The Day comes from Adobe Acrobat running as a plugin in Mozilla on Linux:
Warning: No action proc named "ManagerGadgetArm" is registered for widget "form" _
respond?
10:16:28 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

1) Keep a personal Wiki as a Personal Information Manager.
2) Convert it into Palm memo format. Sync it with your PDA. Use MegaWiki to make it behave properly.
3) Write a program to read text from elsewhere into a wiki page. Set up a hotkey for it in Mutt. Automatically add information from emails into the Wiki. _
respond?
08:04:23 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

Consider: gelato. One scoop chocolate. One scoop hazelnut. _
respond? (14)
08:01:13 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

This feature could make me seriously consider running KDE, or at least Konqueror. _
respond?
07:45:20 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off _
respond? (9)
02:59:18 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

All requests will be logged in the order in which they are recorded. _
respond? (2)
02:07:03 PM, Monday 15 April 2002

older entries