I’ve been reading this is stevenf.com recently, and I have to say that it’s among my favorite current blogs (by people I don’t know). Geeky, but it doesn’t revolve around code snippets, simple, and minimal but in all of the right ways. And a bunch of fun. Anyway he posted an article a while ago that got me thinking called, “it’s my xanadu,” go ahead read it and then come back.

That’s a great idea isn’t it? I’ve been thinking a lot about data management and the way we represent, store, access, and use knowledge on the computer, so stuff like this gets me more excited than it really should, all things being equal. My good friend Joseph Spiros is even working on a program would implement something very much like Xanadu and the system that sevenf described.

First order of business should probably be to explain what Project Xanadu is for those of you who don’t know.

Xanadu was the first “hypertext system” designed that recognized that text in digital formats was a different experience and proposition than analog text. Proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson in the 1970s (with floundering development in the 1980s), Xanadu to be something amazing. It had features that contemporary hypertext systems sill lack. I think everyone has their own list of “things from xanadu that I want now,” but for me the big sells were:

• Links went both ways: If you clicked on a link, you could reverse directions and see what documents and pages had links to the current page. This means that links couldn’t break, or point to the wrong page, among other things

• Dynamic transclusions. Beyond simply being able to quote text statically, Xanadu would have been able to include a piece of text from another page that dynamically represent the most current revision of the included page. For example, I include paragraph 13 on page A (A.13) somewhere on page B; later you change A.13 to fix a typo, and the change is reflected in page B. I think links could also reference specific versions of a page/paragraph (but then users could from page B, access new and older dimensions of A.13).

• Micropayments. The system would have had (built in) a system for compensating “content creators/originators” via a system to collect very small amounts of money from lots of people.

  Needless to say, it didn’t work out. It turns out that these features are really hard to implement in an efficient way--or at least they were in the eighties--because of computing requirements, and the very monolithic nature of the system. Instead we have a hypertext system that:

• Is built around a (real or virtual) system of files, rather than documents.

• Has no unified structural system.

• Must rely on distributed organizational systems (tagging, search engine indexes.)

• Is not version-aware, and it’s pages are not self-correcting.

• Relies on out-modded business models.

To be fair, much of the conceptual work on the system was done before the Internet was anything like it is today, and indeed many of these features we can more or less hack into the web as we know it now: wiki’s have “backlinks,” and google’s link: search is in effect much like Xanadu-Links, using dynamic generation we can (mostly) get transclusions on one site (sort of), and paypal allows for micropayments after a fashion.

But it’s not baked in to the server, like it would have been in Xanadu, this is both the brilliance and the downfall of Xanadu. By “baking” features into the Xanadu server, hypertext would have been more structured, easier to navigate, easier to collaborate, share and concatenate different texts, and within a structure easier to write.

And yet, in a lot of cases, I (and clearly others) think that Xanadu is worth considering, adopting: indeed, I think we could probably do some fairly solid predictions of the future of hypertext and content on the internet let alone information management in general, based on what was in Xanadu.

That’s about all I have, but for those of you who are familiar with Xanadu I’d love to hear what you “miss most” about Xanadu, if you’re game.

Overheard at a Sunday dinner with the family:

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_: Could you get the Quark [for my potato].

tycho looks quizzical.

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_: In the fridge.

`dadtron <http://www.twitter.com/dadtron>`_: It’s a yogurt cheese.

tycho: right. I was about to say… They’re awfully small, and besides, they’re all over the place.

`dadtron <http://www.twitter.com/dadtron>`_: Maybe.

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_ *sighs*

As I was reviewing the note I posted on my reading progress, realized that there was yet another piece of my effort to read more/better that I failed to cover there, but it’s substantive enough to merit it’s own post. The issue? Trust.

I was having a conversation with H. the other day, about reading and how we often find texts difficult to read when it seems like other people have a much easier time reading. Which is kind of funny because we both derive a large part of our self-identity (if not income) from our writing and we both read a lot.

One thing I suggested in the course of that conversation which I had theretofore not properly articulate was that I found writing difficult because I’ve read a lot of difficult stuff around the edges of philosophy and theory that are pretty complex where every word is (seemingly) meaningful. In the process of learning how to read this I’ve learned to not trust myself to understand the words and sentences, to be wary of authorial intentions, and to be afraid of missing important details.

Which is, as you might imagine, not that easy. And it requires slow reflexive reading. So it sort of feels like you’re not reading something as much as you are watching yourself read something.

So my new goal, is not to read faster, I guess, but rather to read less reflexively. To trust that texts have some sort of intentional order that I can understand, and then trust myself to be able to grasp the gestalt of a text (and to read it a second time if I need to,) without supervision or self-monitoring.

At least some of the time.

Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of “literature,” in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.

The overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they’re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.

So then, writing.

Writing is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don’t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing’s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (“Did you read that book? What did you think?”) and which is certainly socially productive.

But that’s not business, or at least that doesn’t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn’t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.

I’ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying “art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.”

Also in this nexus of ideas, I’ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into “less energy spent on survival” and thus more energy spent on more… abstract… endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.

I’m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more “abstract” markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their “blog” functions as advertising for “actual” work in some other arenas. That’s not a bad thing, and really I think “real writers” have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, “Authors” make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don’t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.

And maybe that’s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it’s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.

Onward and Upward!

If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, “science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.”

While this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the “mainstream” to take science fiction more seriously. It’s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you’re sympathetic.

I’m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.

Science fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it’s also about the future. And that’s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.

I finished reading Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift Anthology the other day. This was the first anthology that I read from cover to cover (I’m trying to get more into short stories). I’ve read other anthologies in bits and pieces, and the odd short here and there, but with this book, I thought, that I needed to add a bit of breadth, and I respect Strahan’s work a lot, so I gave it a go. And I quite enjoyed it.

I think that I’ll read more anthologies in this fashion in the future. The momentum and immersion of reading a novel is something that I enjoy a lot, and have had a hard time replicating when I’m reading short stories, but I figure this can be learned. I feel like I learned a bunch from the stories, both about the discourse and craft of short story writing.

I’ve also picked up Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. While I guess I read Red Mars years ago for school, I never really got into it. Or so I thought. As I’ve read these books again, I’m surprised and fascinated to learn how much they’ve influenced my writing and the way I think about science fiction world building and dealing with future possibilities.

And the books are really well done. In the last few days, I’ve read about a third of the last book (which is big in comparison to the other two,) and I’ll likely have read even more by the time I get around to posting this. After that, on to more Delany or another anthology.

My goal, I guess, insofar as I have one, is to get to a point where I can read a book a week, give or take. I’m not a particularly fast reader by default but I think as I read less than I’d like (perhaps) I’ve slowed down. Gotta change that.

I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website “TealArt” (don’t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it’s worthwhile to explore GTD again.

For those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a “personal productive methodology” designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It’s good stuff, and while it’s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:

• Have a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life. One place where systems can fail is if you’re using different “databases” (in the non-technical sense) to store information and tasks, and you have a piece of information that might fit in either system: when you go to look for it later (or need to be notified by it later) the chance of you missing the task because it’s on the wrong list is much higher if you have more than one place where lists might be.
• Think about tasks and projects being broken into “actionable items,” and have actions be the unit of currency in your system. As you assimilate information be sure to record anything that needs doing and keep it in your system
• Attach two pieces of metadata to your action: project (what larger goal does the action help you acomplish; you’ll likely have a list of these projects), and “contexts” (where do you have to be in order to do the action, things like “phone” “office” “erands”) are helpful for focusing and making it easier to move your projects forward.
• Do regular reviews of the information on your todolists, and spend (an hour?) once a week making sure you’re not foregetting things and that you’ve checked off all the actions that you’ve actually done and so forth.

There are other details, precise methods which GTD people focus on, talk about, and provide in their software applications. Frankly I’ve not read the book and I’m by no means an expert on the subject. I continue to have objections to the system: it assumes large tasks and quickly and easily be broken down into smaller tasks (which isn’t always true), and that projects follow linear and predicatable sequences, which I find to be almost universally false. While the reviews help counteract these sorts of assumptions about projects, I have always tended to find GTD a poor solution to the productivity problem:¹ both for myself and in my observations of how other people work.

At the same time, I think the notion of a single system that comes to the mainstream via GTD and of weekly/regular reviews, another artifact of GTD, are both really helpful and powerful concepts for organizing ourselves. The other aforementioned “features” are helpful for many, but I feel that very often organinzing the “GTD list,” and our lives to fit ino a GTD list is often too much of a burden and gets in the way of doing things.

I’m interesting in finding out how people these days are talking and thinking about GTD these days. I think the fad has died down, and I’m interested in seeing what we’ve as a geeky community have learned from the experience.

Interestingly, I’m probably doing something much closer to what GTD recomended these days than I ever have before. org-mode is (among many other things) a capiable GTD tool. I think it’s successful not simply because it supports GTD, and the task-management features seem to have grown out of an emacs/writing writing platform rather than a calendar platform. The end result is that I’ve found the GTD way to be quite effective, though its largely unintentional.

I’m interested in hearing where your own systems are, and how you feel about GTD these days:

• Do you use GTD or GTD based methodologies for your personal organization?
• If you only use some which, and why?
• If you don’t use GTD, what system if any do you use?
• If you once used GTD but stopped, or have considered using GTD and then didn’t, I’m particularly interested to learn why you came to these conclusions?
• What current factors influence the way that you organize your work?

I hope that covers everyone. I’m particularly interested by how creative folks work, but i think in the right light that covers most of us. I look forward to hearing from you?

Cheers, sam

New feature, I guess. I got a knitting question on ravelry, and I’m going to answer it here. I’ll answer your knitting question as well if you send them to me on ravelry, or by email at garen@tychoish.com.

I have been looking around on Raverly for a while now trying to find an alternative to the Jaimeson Shetland wool. I am going to be making a Fair Isle EZ cardigan but cant tolerate 100% wool. Do you happen to know the name(s) of other yarn that may be a good alternative?

I’d like to make a few of comments in response. First. There’s something special about Shetland wool. It’s not, soft, but there’s something about the wool that makes it much more tolerable, and I’m convinced that it has magical properties. Something about the crimp of the wool, and the way it’s spun (woolen, so that it’s airy.) I encourage everyone to knit something with real Shetland (Jamisons, Harrisville, Etc.) because it’s amazing, and you might find that you can stand it.

The second “try wool solutions anyway,” answer is to experiment with some solutions that might make the wool more bearable. I’m a bit sensitive to wool, but I think I cope with it fairly well, and there are things you can do to make a sweater “easier” to wear. For instance, having a sweater with an open (plackets) or v-neck keeps the fabric of the sweater off your skin where it is the most sensitive. Secondly you can knit turned hems out of something that you’re not sensitive too: alpaca, cotton, silk. This keeps the wool away from any place that matters while letting you still knit with wool. You can go all out here, as hems don’t take very much yarn and you generally want to knit a hem out of a very light weight yarn. How to knit a hem is, however another question entirely. I find silk and wool blends to be the way to go in this direction.

As for specific yarn suggestions? There aren’t a lot of options, and if you’re price sensitive (as I often am) there are fewer options. One of the key problems, is that Fair Isle-style sweaters really ought to be knit out of light weight yarn (sport weight or less, but not lace weight), and there aren’t a lot of options here. There are a few silk and wool blends, a few wool/tencel blend (mostly sock yarns), and there is of course cotton (which can be used, though that doesn’t strike me as fun). I think Beroco makes their ultra alpaca in a sport/light weight that might be fun for your purposes, but alpaca is much warmer than wool which isn’t always a good thing.

That’s about all I have. Anyone else? Send more questions my way

Hey folks,

Having spent a few hours (heh) going through my blog and converting and modifying it for jekyll, I think it would be appropriate to list some general directions for improvement of the software. Jekyll is pretty good and it’s certainly more than usable, but I think there is enough room for improvement, and some additional features that would be rather interesting to explore. Because I think it’s really easy for us to all develop our own forks and work in relative isolation, I worry that there’s limited space to have a conversation about how to best improve the platform. Here’s a starting point:

• Performance Jekyll, particularly for larger sites can take a considerable time to run.

  I’m not familiar enough with ruby to be able to speak to any areas of improvement in terms of code optimization, though I’m not sure that this is the best way to approach this issue. Rather, I think it would probably be best to figure out ways of gracefully preventing jekyll from recompiling pages that haven’t changed every time there’s an update. The possibility that makes the most sense to me at this point would be to include “masks” in the config file, that jekyll can skip over unless run with an --all option.

  Another option might be to develop a way to cache/store certain kinds of output files that require a lot of data to crunch (I’m thinking mostly of things like archives and of other long post loops.) Maybe developing some sort of internal index?

• I’m (preliminarily) looking at using rpeg-markdown as a another markdown option, which should both allow the extended markdown syntax to work (woot!) and run much faster than maruku (and hopefully rdiscount). It seems difficult to install, but would generally be worthwhile.

• Increase usability While jekyll just works, and the documentation is reasonably effective given the audience; there isn’t any automatic workflow for jekyll use. Having a few shell scripts and/or a “using jekyll” tutorial that explains day to day use would be quite helpful once you get started.

  As I finalize and put it through it’s paces for a few days I’ll get more clear about this, but, in general I’m thinking of things like: using git hooks to generate the content automatically on commit/etc.

  It would be valuable to write up how to use rsync as that would likely make more sense in some situations. Same with running tasks in cron.

• Template Directory: Most of the jekyll powered blogs that I’ve seen have been pretty good about publishing the repositories for their sites. This is a good thing indeed, but given how the templates work, I think it would be good to collect various templates together for ease of access and educational proposes.

• Make Categories More Flexible: While the current blog categories support is great for adding “multiple blog” support, it makes it difficult to interact/loop posts that aren’t in different categories. I’d like to have arbitrary site.key.value objects that work like site.categories.CATEGORY. There are ways to program around this, but they aren’t pretty. This would make jekyll even more incredibly powerful, but I think it’s a much lower priority.

  If you use jekyll, I’d love to hear what you’d like to see from the jekyll in the future. A number of these options (rpeg-markdown, usability/workflow documentation, template directory) are things that I can work on (and will, for sure), but a few of them are beyond me and I’d love to help folks do some of this work, if possible.

Onward and Upward!

(ps. my _posts directory is about 6.2 megs, with a file count that’s a bit south of 1,300 files, so if you wanted to assert that I’m pushing the system a bit hard, that’d be totally reasonable.)

My grandmother reminds me that she got a laptop in the late eighties,¹ it’s massive by today’s standards (particularly in comparison to my 12 inch thinkpad), but it had a great keyobard, and she remembers using it rather effectively. It had WordPerfect 5.1 back in the day but I think it also had StarWriter/StarOffice (which, the astute will recognize as the predecessor code-base for today’s Open Office). It probably weight ten or fifteen pounds, and I think she even brought it between work and home several times a week (using a luggage cart); but this was before her days on the Internet, and like all good things this laptop has gone to the land beyond.

For my college years, and a few years after I was a laptop-only computer user. It didn’t make sense to have a computer that I’d have to move so damn frequently, and it wasn’t like I was playing games or anything that would require desktop, and I loved having only one machine to keep current and up to date. It seems like laptop-only is a definite trend among the Internet-hipster/start-up monkey crowd. And it’s admirable, and for these folks (who are likely, and appropriately, Apple users) a laptop-tax of 400 dollars isn’t too much for people who have already bought into the Apple tax.

And then, along came the “netbook” phenomena, which posits that most of the time we don’t really need a desktop-grade laptop when we’re on the run. There’s a lot of merit to this model as well. We don’t really need to carry around powerhouses to check our emails in coffee shops, and for folks like me for whom the vast majority of our computing is pretty lightweight, building a system around a primary desktop computer and a sufficient but not supercharged laptop makes a lot of sense.

So what kind of laptop system do you use?