Topic: Posts

Though I’ve never asked directly about this, I have sort of hinted around the edges and thought about it a bit, so I figure, it’s worth bringing up. Here’s the question:

You install a new wiki somewhere, and you have a blank “welcome to your wiki page.” How do you go about editing these pages and developing a wiki from there?

The idea behind a wiki is that it provides a quick way to edit and create web pages, without needing to know very much about HTML and associated technologies. Right?

In addition to radically de-centering authorship, wikis also have profound effects on the structure and organization of websites/documents. While much attention has been paid to the former on a social and software level,¹ I think the latter has been mostly ignored.

I think the tendency is to think of the organization of data within a wiki as being largely emergent phenomena. I think this is more true when there are a lot of people starting a wiki and when the size/growth of the wiki is appropriate for the community size.

The truth is that I think this kind of approach ignores this huge data management problem because it’s not an issue for 10% of wikis/documents/collections. I mean, if you throw up a wiki you can’t just let it go the way that Ward Cunningham did for the first wiki (because the people who would contribute and the internet would come to the wiki from a much different place), and sites like wikipedia have a lot of very intentional structure. And while I like the idea of emergent structure, I’m not sure that it actually works in practice.²

And I’m not sure the question ofwhat is in the wiki matters a lot for the organization, because I’m more interested in how much and what kind of structure people create when they’re editing in this kind of document, rather than specifics about naming schemes or the rationale behind a classification system. I guess, if I had to break this question down further I’d be interested in:

• What kind of metadata (categories, tags) do you use?
• How hierarchical is your document. Too much hierarchy and pages get lost at the end of trees, not enough and you have a mess of files and no way to tell them apart.
• Do you use natural phrase WikiWord titles for pages, or do you have a less natural naming scheme?
• How much do you use talk/discussion/commentary pages?
• CamelCase Wiki words or not?
• What kind of search tools do you use? Does this help?

Your thoughts are much appreciated.

Onward and Upward!

I have never really considered myself a short story person. I’m not really very good at writing on that scale, and for most of my life I’ve never been particularly good at reading that literature.

In a lot of ways, I think 2008 will be/is the year that I decide if I can make a go of this “writing” thing. I mean I think it’ll take longer than a year to decide if I’ve been successful at this writing thing, but I think in a year and some change I can decide if it’s something I want to do.

So you might think, given this that I would have made some sort of new years resolution to write a certain number of words every day or week, or to write a novel, or something. Instead, I resolved to keep a record of my reading, and by doing so I hoped that I would read more (though technically I didn’t actually resolve to read more.) Which makes sense, at least to me. It’s important to read, to be familiar with the literature of discourses you hope to participate, and after a very eccentric introduction to science fiction and fiction in general, not to mention several years of hiatus from the genre, I thought it would be good to spend some attention to this shortcoming.

And then there’s the issue that I really don’t grok short fiction very well. Or it is, at least not something that I’m drawn to. I like stories that draw me into their world, that ask me to think about an idea not simply in a “isn’t this interesting,” or “imagine the implications of this situation,” but rather think about all of the possibilities that grow out of the journey/story of the characters in this setting.

So I bought Dozois/Stratham anthology `The New Space Opera <http://www.amazon.com/New-Space-Opera-Gardner-Dozois/dp/0060846755/tychoish-20>`_ earlier this year and have read many of these stories, and I’m almost entirely caught up on Escape Pod, and I’ve been reading 365Tomorrows, and I have a stack of old SF magazines that I’ve been picking my way though.

And I still don’t get it.

I mean, I can appreciate a story, and I can almost write a short story,¹ and I feel better about being able to speak intelgently about short stories (what people are doing, the mechanics, and so forth), but I don’t get it. I’m going to keep reading short stories of course, but I think at this point, I’m going to stop guilting myself into reading more of them.

So there!

Onward and Upward!

Surprisingly my last post about git was more well received than I really thought. I promised that I’d collect some of the resources that I found useful when switching to git in a separate post. While this has lingered on my todo list for some time, I’m only now getting around to writing it. Hey, I just write about productivity, I never claimed to be any good at it.

I should also disclaim that I am, by no means, in full command of git. I mean, I use it a lot and greatly enjoy my experiences with git, but there are tons of features that I don’t use that I’m clueless about. Just saying.

If you’re interested in git, try it! At the core, git does something that I think just about everyone who creates something with a computer can use: it provides a way to backup, store, and organize versions of your files. If you use git, or any version control software, even if you don’t write code, even if your only collaborators are yourself working on different machines, you never have to worry where your data is or what happened to that version of the story you were writing three weeks ago that you deleted because you thought that the character was coming off to strong. It’s just there, and being able to really trust your computer with your data is an awesome thing. Really.

Anyway. Resources. Git.

Linus On Git: Linus Torvalds, better known for writing this little thing called the Linux Kernel, wrote git. Here he is talking to google engineers about git, and I think here better than just about anyone else, you can really get a good idea of what it is that git does. There are other videos of talks about git, of course, google will reveal those to you, but for the most basic understanding of how git works (which isn’t essential, but it helps things make sense if they seem a little ass backwards at the onset), this one can’t be beat.

Dream Hosting Git. I use dreamhost for hosting this site, and I push copies of my repositories to bare repositories in a nonpublic directory on my account for backup and remote access. This makes for a much better backup plan, and with git-web everything is pretty swell, but that post outlines all the stuff that needs to be done in order to make it all work in terms of pointing origins and what not so that the pushes all work.

If you’ve used svn before (and you’ve compiled git with svn support) this blog post explains how to import your commit history to git. It’s not something that you’re likely to need to do a lot but it’s good to know how to do.

One of the great things about git is that it theoretically it allows for decentralized collaboration. If you have a git repository, even if it’s not one that you started, you and a friend can push and pull with each other without needing a server. This blog post explains how to do this without mucking up with security holes and the like.

Finally, I found this just a few days ago, but ticgit is a cool python doodad that lets you store a ticketing system (as in for bug tracking and feature requests), inside of a branch in git. Which though not really a replacement for something full fledged like trac, might be good to keep track of your own goals. I can imagine how this might be useful for todo management, though I haven’t used it yet. Someday.

Hope this helps and if you have any good links or resources I’d love to hear about them.

Onward and Upward!

I’m sure in a year or two I’m going to look back on this summer and say “that was the in-between summer,” and shudder. Indeed this past year has been a series of “hurry up and wait,” games, but that aside, as I’ve been struggling to write more effectively this past week, I’ve realized that my writing problem--such as it is--and my life problem--such as it is--are really the same. I’m in-between big things and I’m not sure how to keep things moving. This entry is an exploration of this.

The writing first, on the assumption that you’re much more interested in that anyway:

I’m I don’t know where I got the idea that trailing edge was going to be something really long term, but it’s becoming clear to me, that while I have a few weeks worth of posts that aren’t edited and posted yet, it looks like this piece will turn out to be a novelette/novella. And strangely I’m ok with that. In fact, I think this is a good thing, as it means that I have something of a concrete plot, a goal and a plan, and one of my larger concerns/worries at the moment is that I feel like I have weak/cerebral plots.¹

The problem with this is that the idea that this was a long term project was one that I was pretty fond of, and it means that I have to think about starting a new project sooner than I had planned. I think I’m going to go back and write a prequel to Knowing Mars that I sketched out and then put on the back burner, (because it’s a cool story, and because someone asked for it.) And I want to work on getting more Station Keeping nailed out. I have about half to three quarters of the second (new!) season of station keeping to write. The third season, I plan to write as a single script², possibly in conjunction with script frenzy, and that’s what I want to write more, but I need to get everything setup for that first.

But these are all shorter term projects (which is odd, given that I don’t think of myself as being incredibly useful or coherent with fiction under 25k words.). And not only that, but they’re old shorter term projects. While Trailing Edge is new (though connected to previous projects) and the KM prequel is newish, it’s an elaboration on something old. Station Keeping, is basically something I came up with during my junior/senior year of high school. Knowing Mars itself is reasonably new, but it grew out of an outline (that I didn’t realize was an outline at the time) that I wrote even earlier. Though I’m not sure what form it will take, I’m itching to work on something new. For some reason I’ve been completely enraptured by concept ships and I have a couple of ideas that might work in a gritty space-opera-style world.

But that’s all a ways off, and it’s not the doing as much as the amorphous uncertainty that surrounds the future of my writing projects. I said at the onset that this was both a post about writing uncertainty (as above) but also personal uncertainty. And I have enough of that too: my current work contract is up, and while I’m employable enough and I have a few prospects nothing is nailed down. Same about school: it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that when I go back to school it needs to be for something else. For the sake of not being overly confessional, I’ll spare the details, but I think it’s at least passingly interesting that the feeling of being snagged by the in between works in parallel for the “life stuff” and the “writing stuff.”

Knowing is half the journey. Onward and Upward!

I rewrote the about page for tychoish this weekend. Because it was about damn time, really, and though this one doesn’t cover much new ground the format isn’t so… ass-y. And because it’s a slow blogging week, it’s also a post. Have a good day, check out `today’s critical futures story <http://criticalfutures.com/>`_, and I’ll catch you around tomorrow.--ty

This place is mine, I’m your host tycho garen. I’m just your average geeky, male knitter, who write science fiction, and posts to his ‘blog about things like writing, current knitting, technology, academia, and other shiny topics that catch my attention.

I’ve been blogging for a long time, the archive goes back to 2003 (but I don’t think you should read those anyway) and I’ve found residual evidence of my online presence going back to early 2001, and I’m pretty sure that I was doing this kind of thing since mid ‘99 give or take a little, but I’m almost glad that there isn’t a firm record of that early stuff. Once upon a time I collaborated on sites with Chris Knittel, but in 2007 we decided to divide up the archive and start posting independently. Hence tychoish.com.

In truth during the first (many years) I posted infrequently, but since the spring of 2007, I’ve made a point of posting something at least once a day. When I started tychoish, I thought that it would be like my paper notebook--a random collection of thoughts, lists, and raw ideas--only digital. Which meant that I might actually go back and use it more than once, and it might be a cool discussion starter, since I don’t have a lot to hide. Also, about this time tumblelogs became popluar (again), and I thought “nifty! want.” And seeing that I tend to post several hundred words of rough prose every day, you can see how well that idea went.

With the rhythm of daily posting pretty much under my belt, and a rather substantial reevaluation of the role of fiction writing in my life, in July of 2007 I launched a new website called `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com/>`_. I’ve been interested in hypertext and the future of prose and fiction on the internet for a long time, and CF is a blog where I post manageable snippets of stories every day of the week. Eventually, I hope that CF will be a paying market and there’ll work from other similarly minded SF writers, but for the moment it’s a fun experiment and great motivation to write and edit (somewhat) my work regularly.

And before you ask, tycho garen isn’t really my name. I mean, it is in a sense, it’s just not what people in real life call me, nor is it what’s on my birth certificate. I like it for both of these reasons, and because it references some of my early writing, it allows me some measure of privacy or separation between my cyber- and meat-space identities, and it helps that it is an unequivocally cool name. I don’t capitalize it (nor my given name much) because names are as much adjectives as they are proper nouns, and particularly since tycho isn’t an official name, it seems even sillier to capitalize it.

That’s me. My email is all over this site, and my username on most major websites/communications services is “tychoish,” if you want to get a hold of me, you know how. I love hearing from readers and fellow bloggers.

If I left something out, don’t be afraid to ask.

Onward and Upward!

Knitting camp got me back into the knitting, but I haven’t written about it in so long that I think it’s only fitting that I write a little bit about my current projects. Here they are:

1. Latvian Dreaming:

   This is the project that I am, at least theoretically, leading a follow-the-leader knit-a-long on. But it’s the summer, and few people are actually follwoing along. Also, I’ve only written instructions until the underarm point, which I just surpassed this past weekend, so I’ll be posting the next step soon. I want to put a v-neck on this sweater, and I’ve not yet really done a v-neck successfully, so I want to test some things out before I commit to something on this sweater. The good news for all of you who want to knit this sweater is that this is still my primary project and that I am “unstuck” and making progress.

2. A plain V-Neck/Raglan Sweater:

   For knitting camp this year I started a plain raglan sweater to knit on while I was at camp. Needless to say, not only did I not knit on this sweater, but I didn’t even take it out of the bag. It was a good thing that got be back in the mood for knitting, but it did cause me to break my “one sweater at a time rule,” and is thus a little bit distressing for this reason. It’s also destressing because I’m allergic to the yarn (a merino possum blend) which makes me sneeze and feel as if my face was attacked by a fuzzy monster. Furthermore it doesn’t help that the yarn, which is a discontinued Cherry Tree Hill, has an inconsistent level of fuzziness, sort of like a dye-lot issue, except with more sneezing. Further distressing elements of this design: I have the sleeves left to knit at the end; the yoke shaping is always mysterious and magical when it is in progress, and I’m using this to figure out how to do the v-neck on the latvian dreaming pullover.

3. The Never Ending Movie Sweater

   Three years ago I, on a whim, bought a 1.5 pound cone of fingering/jumper weight alpaca lambswool. I didn’t do much with it for a while, but that winter I started making a cabled strip that was about 30 stitches wide on US 1 needles. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be, and in fits and starts I’ve turned it into a sweater. The strip was continued to form a ring, which I picked stitches up around and knit the body of a sweater. It’s mostly plain, and I call it my “movie sweater” because two summers ago, I lived with someone who really enjoyed going to movies. While I also enjoy going to see movies, I like having knitting, and there was enough endless stocking stitch in the round that I could do it in the dark. At knitting camp I finished the second shoulder strap. Now all that’s left is knitting the plackets and collar (with lots of cables on them), and then the sleeves. On US 1s. I think because this has lingered for so long as a side project, that I’ve never really felt like I needed to finish, I have remarkably little stress/angst/worry over this project. Also, a fingering weight sweater? How cool is that.

4. Lace Shawls

   I have a couple of lace shawls floating around the house that I started at various times because I had the yarn, and/or I needed to figure out something. They’re low-stress and non-teleological (like the movie sweater, and unlike the other two sweaters) and it’s an interesting change of pace from all the colorwork that I’ve been doing the past couple of years. I’ve not knit lace in years, and I’ve finally given away all of the shawls that I knit during my last lace kick, so it’s time to create another little stash of these shawls.

I think the 2008-2009 knitting season will be marked by a branching out. While I think I have a couple of colorwork sweaters in the plan, I’m going to be knitting from handspun stash and there will be a couple of cabled sweaters. Though I suspect that I’ll write about my knitting again before I get to that point.

That’s what I’m working on at the moment.

What about you?

I have amazon kindle envy, I’m not going to lie. I’ve written about the kindle before, and I don’t think my opinion has changed that much: it’s a great idea, and with some changes it could be really amazing. I’m not going to get one of course: between the ugly, the price tag, the price scheme for the books, and the DRM there doesn’t seem to be much reason. I still have envy.

This abated this past week when I figured out the iPod Touch. When I got my new computer lo these many weeks ago, I got an ipod touch, because apple was/is running a promotion for student types (which I still qualify as). 100 Bucks for 16 gbs of flash memory, is a pretty good deal, all things considered. But I had no clue how to use it. *This is a common problem with new technology/devices, it looks great and we can feel that it’s going to be useful but until it we fit it into our workflow, it’s virtually useless.

Basically when I got this ipod,¹ I fooled around with it for a while, set it up to sync a bunch of stuff included my “oft listening/hits” playlists, a bunch of podcasts and videos, and sort of left it at that.

Now I have an older 80gb ipod, that I typically use constantly. It has all my music that I care to listen to, enough podcasts to keep me busy for months, and I really like it. I didn’t and still don’t really need another iPod, so this thing didn’t do me a lot of good.

And then I got the 2.0 firmware, and a program called stanza, and evernote (though to be fair, I mostly just look at evernote) I took almost all of the music off, and suddenly I have a really amazing device that serves a pretty useful niche, and now I don’t have kindle envy any more.

Here’s what I love about the touch:

• It’s incredibly tiny. The screen is big, but it’s in a super thin package. Back in the day I had PDAs which were bulky and huge and just as hard to get data into, but they weren’t “slip into the back pocket” kind of things. I could have a stack of five ipod touches for the size of one Palm 3.
• It’s incredibly sturdy. PDAs of old were plastic affairs, with finicky touch screens. This thing has a metal back and it feels sturdy, which means a lot.
• The software is robust. I think users can really respect and enjoy the fact that the software that runs on this platform is basically the same as the software that runs on Mac desktop. The developers know how to write the programs already, and the programs work and feel like the best desktop apps from the get go.
• All the best apps have syncing built in, and are focused around moving your data from ipod to the cloud to your computer. This is cool because it’s not the kind of thing where you sync the whole system and hope for the best, a la windows mobile and active sync, but you have a lot of control over what syncs and when. With the built in WiFi, it’s fast and independent. Can’t argue with that.
• The ebook reading program has great library support a good (mac only) converter, and the interface is nearly perfect (if a bit slow).

What I don’t like:

• It doesn’t have bluetooth. I’d love to be able to do away with the sync cable, and be able to selectively sync things over the air. This also opens up the possibility for more sophisticated input methods.

• The ebook reader seems to have to recomplie/reflow the entire book every time you change the orientation of the device, or load a new book. This is painfully slow, and pretty unnecessary.

• Cut and Paste.

• I want there to be a text editor that uses a git repo as a file system. This is a pipe dream, I suppose.

  I guess the biggest thing that I learned is that as an ipod this thing kind of sucks. Most of the time when I’m using an ipod I want the ability to change the volume/track without looking, which is damn hard with the touch. The solution? Don’t put music on this device. Also, I think having more music on an ipod makes the “random” work better. The end result is that I sync the touch every day or two and I almost never sync the big ipod, and it all works great. I can imagine, if I had an iphone and a live connection all the time, that I would never really sync it to a computer.

Thoughts? Does anyone else have one of these? I realize that stanza makes a pretty weird killer app, so does anyone else have something better?

Onward and Upward!

I spent a lot of my recent Saturday spinning. It’s nice to finally have such a long period of time where I don’t have to do anything. Here’s what I did:

I finished spinning the shetland roving that I’ve been working on for a couple of months. This was the first big batch of wool that I bought after my return to spinning this spring. I got 2 pounds (which is my standard order size) of a lovely grey and I spun a DK-ish weight 3-ply yarn.

Since I’ve gotten back to spinning I’ve been spinning a lot of 3 ply. Since I intended to knit from my handspun stash in the coming months, and I like the way that 3-ply comes out, I feel like it’s worth the extra effort. I’m also trying to spin more of the kinds of yarn that I’m likely to knit with, that is yarn in the neighborhood of worsted-weight yarn. While I knit a lot at finer gauges, I often have pretty good reason to use machined yarns for those tasks, but I think having a stash of heavier handspun yarns is sort of the way to go.

I also started and spun the first skein of my next spinning project. I bought some Corriedale-Cross (2 lbs) at the Yarn Barn in April, and I’m spinning that into a more worsted 3ply. It’s a harder wearing wool, but there isn’t a lot of crimp and it’s not particularly rough. It has the other advantage of being incredibly inexpensive, considering how nice it is and given my intentions for this project (keep reading) it’s perfect.

I want to knit a guernsey-style sweater (thought it might have more cable work, if I get intense about it,) and I want to have a sort of firmly spun, rugged wool for this sweater, and I’m afraid that merino would be too soft. I also have two pounds of merino for the next project. More on that as it develops. But yes, spinning continues apace!

Also, I think that it’s going to work out that I’m going to be spending the fall knitting sleeves to sweaters again. These things happen. But the next sweater that I cast on will probably be something from my handspun. Incidentally, I’m predict a cable phase soon.

Onward and Upward!