pages tagged links

Lately Review

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It's Friday and I have a bunch of links, notes, and accomplishments to share.

First up, jfm and I have been continuing the discussion we had about task lists in a new discussion of the mobile-productivity-challenges. I've also imported some conversation from facebook following up on the Cyborg Analysis and Technology Policy post that I made this last week. I'm really really proud of the extent to which the comments and edits that I've gotten have made my writing and thinking clearer on these subjects.

Also, a thanks to the people who have done things like fix links and correct stupid typos. Sorry to have caused the trouble, and I'm eternally grateful for the helping hand.

Next up, I wrote a document for a reader who commented in the Make Emacs Better thread. The question addressed how to load optional functionality and "contributed" lisp code in emacs, and I wrote a little tutorial on how to load .el files in emacs. I think of this as a very basic and straightforward piece of customizing emacs; but it's sufficiently complicated and counter-intuitive enough that I think a little bit of documentation is in order.

The above also marks the debut of a documentation section within the wiki, like the code section, that I hope to update every now and then as I write tutorials and reference material that I think someone may be able to use. No promises, and feel free stash content here as well. It's all gravy.

Speaking of the code section, I wrote a little script that I use as dbl, that I describe in the Epistle Linker. Basically this little function goes through a directory and creates symbolic links to that directory in a specified directory and mangles the names of the file (prepends a few charters and changes the extension.) Read the code, but it makes it possible to use a service like Dropbox without disrupting your local git setup and file organization. There's a known issue with Dropbox that makes it slightly less than ideal, but what can you do.

When I was posting epistle-linker, I realized that I had probably forgotten to mention the fact that I have this nifty little bit of glue that uses a procmail filter (you do use procmail, don't you?) to deposit note to a particular email address (configurable) into an org-mode file for filtering. This is ideal for emailing your brain (i.e. org-mode) an item from your phone or tablet, say.

And finally: I have an external link. I think this follows nicely from the "how to work and 'live' in the mobile world." Apparently ecl, an embeded Common Lisp implementation, has been built to run on Android and iOS. How awesome is that?

That's all I have. I (finally) finished the April/May issue of Asimov's, I subscribed to Clarkesworld, as if I needed more short fiction to read and distract me from everything else. been I've reading Iain M. Banks' Excision, which has been a great deal of fun.

Other than that. It's been a pretty quiet couple of weeks.

Links, Reviews, and Updates

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

While this week flew by in many respects and I only got a couple of posts out, there is much change and progress afoot. This post is an attempt to catalog some of the work I (and others) have been doing that hasn't made it onto the blog:

Discussion of the "Better Task List" post by jfm. Including spoilers for posts that I hope to have ready next week.
Further discussion of the make emacs better" post. I'm thinking that it's probably nearly time to split that into a few pages. There's a lot of great content there and people have added a lot. I'm a huge fan.
Not a link, except to say that I did some fairly substantial tweaks of the site's design, which is probably only worth mentioning because I suspect most people read the site on RSS. Different fonts in the headers, and I rearranged the masthead to be a little more clean, and changed the links a bit.
I'm in the slow process of cleaning up the Cyborg Institute site which I've neglected for far too long. I'm importing a lot of the content that I wrote over there, notably sygn and ?tubmle-manager. Next up, some straggling blog posts, and a clean up of the existing content to match my current projects and work.
The knitting page or blog, which is collected separately from rhizome posts is in full swing, and I hope to be able to post a few things there every now and then.
There's now a real tag index and a tag cloud that looks like something. I'd avoided putting together a page like this for some time, because there were a lot of junk tags and enough really big tags that the cloud didn't really work. I've mostly cleaned that up, leaving the wiki with a rather awesome tag cloud

I've also found a few things on the web that I think you might enjoy on the web:

A new blog called observatory. I've been talking to the author a bit. I realized that there aren't very many blogs that are so verbose. I suppose ByteBaker is another example, but there aren't many of them around.
undo-tree-mode is a nifty little emacs hack that makes undoing and redoing much less complicated and weird. (From that make emacs better discussion.) Though I have to admit that I no longer have a problem with the default behavior, even if I know it's a bit counter intuitive.
I've been reading Strange Horizons more than I have in the past, thanks mostly to instapaer and InstaFetch for Android. I was particularly found of Genevieve Valentine's column/review of a glorious mess of a movie trope.

That's all I have for this week.

Comments Undo-tree also allows for undoing based on time (see here), apparently a feature that vim has.

Hyperlinks

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Though short, this week has been pretty good. I've been doing cool things at work, I've been writing and posting blog entries, and fiction(!), I'm on top of email, and the sweater is growing. I hope this isn't just a fluke and that I can keep this up and also expand slightly into doing a bit more reading. Small steps.

I've done a little bit of work on the wiki and site. Notably, selected entries are mirrored on Planet Emacsen. Also consider the following links to updates on the wiki and other sites:

Discussion of "Make Emacs Better", which has been incredibly productive and an interesting discussion of emacs adoption and use by non-programmer niches. I think this discussion and the original post connect pretty well with a post that made the rounds a few weeks ago: Lets Just Use Emacs
Cyborg History - a link from my father on the history of computing. I replied to him with Code Quarterly Interview with Hal Abelson.
I've also collected a few LaTeX System links, of related projects, ideas and collaborators. I've also had a few conversations that I need to transcribe into the wiki. Watch this space.
Then there's emacs-instapaper, which isn't exactly a FaiF web service, but the functionality is great for the subway, and I like being able to keep Firefox closed more of the time.

That's all for now!

LaTeX system Resources

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:21:50 -0400

Publications.li includes, I'd say, about 60% of what I'm interests me about this project. The shortcomings with Publications.li in the context of LaTeX system are that it's not aimed at non-technical users that aren't already using LaTeX, it does nothing minimize the "gorp" that you have to wade through to get to a good LaTeX document, and it doesn't provide a system of pre-built templates for non-scholarly presentation.
LaTeX Makefile is actually probably a slightly better solution, and I think using a makefile-based approach--though bothersome--would make the infrastructural component much easier to understand and maintain in the long run.

Cyborg History

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 11:25:17 -0400

Links on the history of computing, computer usage, and computer users.

My Experience with the IBM 7094 and CTSS by Tom Van Vleck

Link Storm

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:18:48 -0500

I have a bunch of links that have been hanging around too long, that I'd like to share with you, so here they are. Enjoy!

Distrust Simplicity is a great short form blog, that I'm really liking.
The Singularity Summit is a cyborg/futurist event that a reader wrote me a note about a rather long time ago. If you're interested in the singularity and issues and ideas related to that.
Hypo a literate programing (with org-babel) based asset management system for game development. (hypo example.
Common Lisp Support in Org-Babel. I feel like there's probably a joke here.
Mango.io a markdown-based CMS, using Python tools. I'm not sure if it's the kind of thing that I'm likely to ever want to use myself but it's an idea.
A New York Times Article about Podcasting and Leo Laporte's TWiT Network While the content of this article is interesting in it's own right, there are a couple of "bigger" picture things happening. First, the old media (i.e. "the Times") covering the new media (i.e. "TWiT,") is always interesting. Secondly, and less obviously, it's interesting how the biggest successes in the "New Media," are by veterans of the "Old Media," (like Laporte, who had a career in Radio and television before doing TWiT.)
Social Text Journal: The Dramatic Face of Wikileaks, is a meta-meta-meta look at wikileaks and the "new media" moment that it represents.

Unfettered Monday

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:37:10 -0500

Fantisque Unfettered is a new fantasy magazine from the editorial team that did the Aether Age shared world project. You can learn more about this by listening to the latest version of the outer alliance podcast. I must confess that reading/listening to all of these things is still in my queue, but I have a lot of respect for the creators of all of these things, and I'd love for this wiki play host to a discussion of any of these works.

I pulled together an archive or collection of my Critical Futures posts that discuss systems administration, administrators, and what "normal" folks can learn about technology and techno/social phenomena from the practice of system administration. I'm calling it "Lessons from Systems Administration." If anyone has an idea for a more archives for Critical Futures posts, ?use this wiki page.

I hope your week is awesome!

Free the Work

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:32:43 -0500

There's a folk song with the line "let the toast go free," to which an assembled crowd of singers will often stand up and cry "free the toast!" in response.

I've been spending the morning going through email, reading feeds, tweaking some of the issues raised in ?site-improvements, and trying to rock getting things done. In the mean time I have a few links to share.

The Everyday Lives Of Video Game Developers
The Price of Free - This article, and the one before, are both open on my "things to read list. Imagine that's what I'm doing this afternoon.
Branchable - ikiwiki (like the wiki that powers this site) hosting service, based on publicly available tools. I kinda want to set up a branchable instance.
Pybtex - a python/yaml drop in replacement for BibTeX, which is really cool, and I suspect that this will probably be my next citation management tool. I've been looking for one for a long time.
Kindle Feeder - a tool to crawl your feeds and move them to your kindle. I'm currently sifting through my feeds and seeing what might make sense to read on the kindle. Might as well, and the automatic delivery makes a lot of sense.
I played with ehsell for the first time today in response to this post, and I have to say that I really like it, and it's much more intuitive and usable than I thought it'd be. I like the idea of being able to write shell functions in emacs-lisp. As an aside the post is, I think, an example of really great casual technical writing.

Links on Technology, Blogging, and Emacs

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A mostly technology-centric collection of links:

Emacs starter configuration scripts. I can't, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I've thought about doing this for my own files, but I've not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I'd love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or [the cyborg wiki](http;//www.cyborg institute.com/wiki/).
Adjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity. which might be of interest to some of you. I also have in the file [this link about yet another lisp dialect (yald?) called Lysp, but I don't have much more than that. I, on the other hand will have more to say about this in the coming few weeks.
My friend Chris Fletcher discusses his experience with contemporary blogging services in this post. I'm not sure. Right? I mean blogging is so different today than it was when I got into it. I remember when you handed FTP credentials to blogger so they could publish your blog with their system to your site. Surely people don't do that anymore. One of the things that I noticed at Podcamp (more on that on another post) that, frankly horrified me a bit, was that there was a whole class of bloggers who wanted to do "this thing," but they had no interest in running their own website or making that investment of time and energy.

And maybe that's what blogging has become. In a lot of ways doing a blog is something anyone can do pretty easily, and having a website is no longer a big part of participating in this discourse. While I'm a big fan of independence, and I don't think the technological burden is that high. "Doing websites," very much made me the geek I am today, so I'm not sure. Having said that, LiveJournal has never easily fit into a niche: It was blogging before there was blogging. It was social networking before we said that. It was subculture/niche before that became the thing. If I had more time in my life I'd figure out some way to study and capture that history.
For all of you OS X Desktop User Interaction Geeks, there's this thing that lets you hide unused windows baked into the window manager. I think. I have access to OS X, but I don't really use it enough to give this a try. GNU Screen and lots (and lots) of Emacs buffers make it possible to keep a lot of irons on the fire without getting distracted.
A good example of a zshrc file if that's your thing. I think it's my thing. Alas. I'll write more about this once I get more used to it and figure some things out. Mostly, I'm finding that one can use it as a pure superset of bash without ill effect.

Links on Post-Publishing, Gender, and Post-Humanism

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

For your consideration:

Paul Grahm on the Future of Publishing, which is of corse pretty darn spot on. Follow up, I guess to this link from the last link dump post. I think it's generally true to say that the "post-publishing" world is here, as most writers/content producers--or the young and successful ones at any rate--are already working in post-publishing business models.
SF Signal Mind-Meld about Short Fiction Anthologies. In a lot of ways I think short fiction "anthologies" are a great thing and answer a lot of needs in publishing. It's a sustainable way to publish short fiction (in the way that magazines aren't terribly,) anthologies have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts (and thus better than single author short story collection.) And they're typically great fun to read. The aforelinked article does a great job of showing the thought process of the editors and anthologists that make these collections possible.
Organic Memory Transfer and neurotechology, I'm more interested in the limitations of input/output than in the "brute power" problems that Katz raises in this article, but its interesting.
The Professionalization of blogging As an independent blogger myself, this article seems to mostly be true, though I'm not particularly happy about it, I must say. I'm interested in how the rise of the "big professional blog" integrates with the ongoing collapse of the media industry.
Rough Type - Questioning Accidentalism I seem to be on a "posting links about the media today." This one, is pretty historiographical, which is an approach to this "evolution of media" topics that I approve of with great vigor. I just wish there were a way to sort of say to the world, "lets do something different this time." Alas.
Gender in the Free Software World no matter how far away from Women's Studies and "gender stuff," it seems to follow me. That said, this article, which comments on some gender-related activism, if we can use that word, out of the FSF. The news is a bit old at this point (old links are old,) but I think the analysis here is pretty much spot on, and I'm not sure if I have anything that I could add to this. Go read. Also this which I'm still reading/groking thinking about.

Woot. Tabs closed for now.