Page of Moss - bloglet for Monday 1 July 2002

Computer programming is a liberal art. And what's more, it isn't a new liberal art, either. It is one of The Seven Liberal Arts. Specifically, it is music.

A Google search reveals:
[supporting material]
[a visual depiction of Music]
[Music personified]
["The Roman Catholic Church and the Freemasons agree on few things"] _
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06:10:17 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

This is the final test. If this does the right thing, then it's really working. _
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05:05:44 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

This is a test. _
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05:04:07 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

Email gateway test
beginbegin This is a test of the bloglet email gateway. endend _
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04:39:58 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

I've installed SpamAssassin. We'll see if it does any good. _
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04:15:53 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

A regular expression class for Flash. That is unspeakably beautiful. _
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12:41:30 PM, Monday 1 July 2002

rhwng ddau begwn: but blink tags r kewl! how bad can a blink tag be?
Platonism Elbow: You've heard of Satan? _
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01:45:51 AM, Monday 1 July 2002

I guess I'd say that altruism is orthogonal to morality. They're really separate issues. I think that's even true in a Kantian moral system. _
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04:52:13 AM, Sunday 30 June 2002

And this doesn't necessarily mean making programs less powerful just so they'll be easy for new users. In some situations, I'm glad to spend time learning to use a program. What I don't want is to have to constantly pay attention to it. I was happy to learn vim, because, even though it took time to learn how it worked, after I'd learned, it made it easier to focus my attention on writing. It took me a little while to learn Python, but having learned it, when I write code, I don't have to think about language details--I can just think about describing what I want it to do. If I was coding in C, the need for memory management wouldn't go away with time. It would always be an extra thing to have to think about.

Of course, most people aren't willing to take the time to learn vim, but regardless of what some hackers would like to think, that's not because they're stupider than me, or because I have some special way of thinking about it. I spend several hours a day editing program code. They don't. This means that the time it takes to learn vim is a reasonable investment for me, where it would just be a frustrating waste of time for them. It's okay if it takes some effort to learn to use your program, but it shouldn't take more effort than it's worth.

The less people need your program, the more it has to work just like everything else. _
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04:01:41 PM, Saturday 29 June 2002

Of course!

The virtues of a program user interface, for a user, are the same as the virtues of a programming language for me: it needs to make it easy for me to do things within the problem domain, and to avoid distracting me with things outside the problem domain. When you have to mess around with program configuration to use the program, it's just as frustrating as it would be to have to do pointer arithmetic to write a weblogging program. Now it makes sense to me. _
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03:49:43 PM, Saturday 29 June 2002

"Thank you for your patience. Calls are answered in the order received. Please continue holding. Our representative will be with you shortly." _
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01:44:42 PM, Saturday 29 June 2002

Kill your darlings. _
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06:15:47 AM, Saturday 29 June 2002

Woohoo! _
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07:06:28 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

And judging by the packages coming in on my last couple of updates, it's hitting Debian today. At the moment, some of the dependencies seem to be set up for it, but it's not all there yet, so I can't install. Blargh. _
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04:24:17 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

Apparently Gnome 2 has been out since Wednesday. I may try it out when it hits Debian. _
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04:14:11 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

Idea of the day: loosely integrated systems. _
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02:20:55 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

This is a test. Keyboard shortcuts should now work. _
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01:29:34 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

When Wobble's done, one thing I'll be able to do with it is keep a glossary: have pages defining terms like bloglet (the cute little Perl script that manages this page, and a handful of others), Wobble (my current weblogging project, a sort of WikiWeblog), Bloggish (the weblogger that Martin's been writing in Python), and wl (Kerne's weblogger).

...

...dear God, how many different in-development weblogging programs do I refer to regularly? _
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01:22:50 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

Peter Lindberg is writing a weblogging program, and it sounds like an interesting one. Written in Ruby. Interface seems to be based on the same principles as blosxom, except that it publishes to files, which is nice. Like bloglet, Wobble, and Bloggish, it's partially a language-learning project--he's trying to become more familiar with Ruby. This convinces me still further that a weblogging tool is an ideal project for familiarizing yourself with a new language. _
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01:17:56 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

The more I work with it, the more I'm surprised at how powerful and dynamic ActionScript is. This trend seems to have gone even further in Flash MX. It appears, for example, that it now supports the equivalent of the __getattr__ method I like so much in Python. So, while it still has all sorts of maddening peculiarities, I can honestly say that I've come to enjoy coding in it. _
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01:01:32 PM, Friday 28 June 2002

Platonism Elbow: I should like to go to Spain.
Platonism Elbow: Also to the moon.
Cnidarae: what would you do there?
Platonism Elbow: jump up and down a lot, mostly.
Platonism Elbow: or did you mean in spain?
Cnidarae: either one.
Cnidarae: you wouldn't jump up and down a lot in Spain?
Cnidarae: I bet you would if there was a 2-ton bull heading for you.
_
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09:45:07 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

And it's pinging weblogs.com. But of course, it's pinging with the URL of my Radio weblog, rather than my bloglet, which is my real weblog. So for now, I should perhaps turn that off. _
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08:51:37 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

Sweet! So I've got this big fancy publishing interface running on my desktop box, and through the wonders of standardization, it's happily able to talk to my own blogging script running on my server. The two pieces are really totally seperable components--so, for example, if one person develops a really powerful weblogging server, and another develops a powerful frontend that's a combination of a weblogging program, an aggregator, an outliner, and God knows what else, there's no reason the two programs can't be used in conjunction with each other. Interoperability makes me happy. T.I.A.I.L.W. Dave Winer. _
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08:47:51 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

This is kind of an interesting test--can I get Radio UserLand to post to my bloglet? _
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08:40:41 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

Figures the problem with the first Blogger API post would actually be an old bloglet problem, totally unrelated to the API. _
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06:47:48 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

Well, I've done it. I've added Blogger API support to bloglet. This means that m14m.net blogledytes can now use tools like BlogBuddy to post to their blogs. Technical details:

Only blogger.newPost is supported--you can't edit old posts or change your templates.
The server URL is http://www.m14m.net/cgi-bin/blogletBloggerAPI.py
Your username is the same as the name of the directory in which your bloglet resides.
Your password is the same as the password you use in the normal web interface.
The blogID and Publish settings are ignored, as they don't apply to bloglet's way of doing things.

I don't yet know what sort of bugs might be lurking in it, but I'm eager to find out. I don't want to dedicate a whole lot of time to this, but if anyone's using it and having problems, I'll try and fix them.
_
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06:43:14 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

This is a test. _
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06:34:10 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

_
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06:33:25 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

This is a test. _
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06:32:51 PM, Thursday 27 June 2002

"I have my orders."
"Well you don't have to relish them so much." _
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01:23:32 AM, Thursday 27 June 2002

fortune says: "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they become soggy and hard tolight." _
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10:59:48 PM, Wednesday 26 June 2002

Thinking about the last entry, I have a question: how many of y'all went to schools where the pledge of allegiance was said?

Growing up, I'd sort of assumed it was a long-abandoned tradition from the old days when people were silly. I was asked to say it exactly twice in my nine years of public school--once at my eighth grade graduation (in Berkeley, no less), and once in fifth grade by a substitute who we all thought must be crazy. Other than that, I don't remember it ever being mentioned. Reading some discussions about it online, though, I get the impression that it's still a fairly common way to start the schoolday. So I'm curious: did I just have a sheltered life on account of going to all those weird hippy schools? Or is it pretty common not to bother with the whole thing any more? _
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09:39:38 PM, Wednesday 26 June 2002

This news fills me with such joy. Bridgie gets many, many points for posting about it. _
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07:55:39 PM, Wednesday 26 June 2002

"The first thought Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old.."
--Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report" _
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04:55:25 AM, Wednesday 26 June 2002

Jonathan Lampe takes a systematic approach to the age old question: Which is better, Doctor Who or Star Trek? A side-by-side breakdown of the best and worst elements of each show. While it does contain some errors in judgment (Kirk the best Star Trek captain? Excuse me?), it's a fun read, and he ultimately reaches the correct conclusion.

Yes, I am a big geek. _
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04:30:06 AM, Wednesday 26 June 2002

::singing::
La di di, one two three,
Eric the Half a Bee. _
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10:03:14 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

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