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?

I just wanted to check to see if you all use RSS, and if so I have a few questions:

• Is one of the primary ways you interact with content on the web?
• What software do you use to read feeds? (Google Reader? NetNewsWire? Lifrea? Newsbeuter? FeedGator/FeedDemon? LiveJournal?).
• What’s your biggest pet peeve about the RSS ecosystem? (including feed readers, feed parsers, variations in feed generation/publication, under/over adoption).

Thanks.

(my answers? yes; google reader; non-full text feeds and generally lackluster reading options.)

I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

People who use free software are almost all “open source/software freedom advocates” in on sense or another. There’s something empowering about the experience of using software that you control, really control, and we want to share this with others. That makes sense, not just on a “lets get the family using GNU/Linux” level, that we want to increase the user base of free software as much as possible.

One of the chief recruiting concerns for communities, seems to be “lets make this piece of software more usable.” This gets us into a lot of trouble as a community as there are a lot of similar and intersecting issues that get confused in the project of increasing usability. While “usable” is a subjective thing in the end, there are a lot of factors that make software more or less useable, they include:

• greater or lesser functional complexity,
• more or less visual clarity (of control interface and data visualization,)
• functional and/or visual minimalism,
• thoroughness of documentation and support materials, and
• the learning curve.

One of the most powerful effects of free and open source software is the way that it encourages users to learn more about the software and systems they use. We say that one of the reasons for software freedom is “education,” and you might think that this relates to the great potential for the use of GNU/Linux in schools, but I think it really relates to the way free software encourages users to learn more about the software they’re running.

Given these notions, I must say that writing software that “even a non technical user could learn” (dumbing down features and interfaces) doesn’t strike me as a very productive project, and a poor excuse for providing good documentation and support for a given project.

But maybe that’s just me.

A collection of thoughts about git.

I caught news, somewhat late in the game, about a project called “Flashbake” which is a tool to make git use-able for non-programmers to take advantage of git without needing to bother too much with thinking about how to use git. (Which is needed because git is incredibly complex). I think this (and tools like and derived from this) is really cool, and a train of thought that I think we’d really benefit from enjoying. Here are some thoughts:

• What if, in combination with text converter tools, we had a tool that could: Take a text file written in markdown, and convert it to HTML and LaTeX and insert the output along side the source file in the repo.
• What if the LaTeX or HTML template was customizable
• What if it could also generate PDFs.
• What if it could do all this compilation from a GUI or a text-editor plug-in as well as (or in addition to the current cron-like interface).

I guess the inspiration for some of these features would be to make git version-control work, totally without the command line interface.

I suppose (heh) that I should work on hacking some of this together, the flashbake code is on github, of course.

I have another brief coding project to deal with before I get to deal with this, but I think I think I’ll take a stab at integrating some of the automatic conversion stuff, and talk to some people about GUI layers. My branch will be there, if you’re ever so inclined.

Second thought about git, is about github. The truth is that I don’t use it that much: I can host my own git repositories, I’ve not yet gotten to a point where I’m working on things that I might publish things with git. But, it’s not hard to notice the impact that git hub is having on development communities and code. I think there’s clearly some research that’s needed on the topic, but something is changing as a result of this site. Thoughts, in no particular order:

• There are, I think, legitimate, concerns about the openness of github itself. Why are we trusting our open source projects to hosting that isn’t open? At the same time, the openness of git itself mitigates this slightly, as well as the fact that github’s business model is one of hosting-services rather than one of data lock-in.
• The fact that there isn’t a bug-tracker built in means that people with a problem are, I think more likely to look for the bugs in the code and hack on problems them-self rather than simply provide bug reports and feature requests. Not that bug tracking systems are problematic, but I think presenting users with code and the opportunity to easily publish their own branches without needing permission, increases involvement and connectedness to the code.
• I saw mojombo post a link to a specific revision of the change-log to a (really awesome) ruby-based git library. Really awesome. But the cool thing, I guess, was that the link to the code was similar to the way that people post links to their latest blog posts. This isn’t revolutionary, I suppose, but I think that git promotes a different sort of publishing style for code, that I think is pretty cool/interesting/important.
• I suspect, though I don’t have data to verify this, that github promotes people to publish things that would have previously been too trivial to publish. Flashbake, as above, people are posting repositories of their config files, of the odds and ends scripts that they use to make their computing experience easier. These are the kinds of things that I don’t think people have (very frequently) stored in version control, and even less frequently published. The fact that both of these things are happening is very cool indeed.

That’s all. What are you thinking about?