Discussion of Rhizomes

jfm and I had a good exchange about an old post, /posts/ideology-and-systems-administration. Basically the posts says, "systems administrators have a unique approach to solving technological problems," and discussed the implications of systems administrators background on technology development. I think our clarifications were useful.

There are a couple of comments on my recent series on a productivity. First, I wrote a post about task planning and creating task items, and Matt posted a comment. Second, a number of us had an ongoing conversation on mobile productivity in response to the "Mobile Productivity Challenges" post that touched on emacs (of course!) input, and context switching.

Site Tweaks

This is a pretty minor point, but I've been subtly tweaking the design a little in the site. There are now links to the tags page and the site map in the upper right hand corner. I've also made links to as-of-yet-uncreated wiki pages red (according to wiki-convention.) I think (and hope) that red links are easier to spot when they're red. Feedback on the design would be most welcome. My goal is to make the site welcoming, easy to use, and to minimize the amount of "fussiness." It might be time for a full refresh, but feedback on the subject might be good.

Critical Futures and Wiki Fiction

Eventually the story will move to the Critical Futures domain, but that's a bit down the road. Right now I'd rather focus my time/energy on writing some stories, for now (on this wiki.) Infrastructure can come next.

I hope to work on a series of posts that explore collaborative fiction organizing over the next few weeks. If people are interested, that is.

External Links

I came across a blog from the comment on the make emacs better post that I wanted to offer as a link The Babbage Files is a great cyborg/emacs/free software blog.

This is probably not news to anyone, but from John Wiegley I learned about the following two emacs gems that merit mention:

• paredit which makes handling all of the parentheses in Lisp coding much easier.
• redshank, which basically adds a number of tempting systems and associated tools for

And in another direction, I've been playing with pylookup. This emacs add on makes it possible to access python documentation from within emacs, from a local copy. The interface is a little bit fiddly but it's pretty much heaven. More things should work like this.

Onward and Upward!