Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

The proof is in the pudding. Despite everything nice that Paul Graham and other Lisp advocates have to say about how great Lisp is, it failed as a programming language. Ultimate proof: Jabberwocky. It’s a Lisp IDE, presumably written by people who know and love coding in Lisp.

It’s written in Java.

Wikipedia - a free, on-line, collaboratively edited encyclopedia has just improved its looks. If you ask me, the new look is much better. I find Wikipedia project fascinating because they achieved something that seemed impossible: high-quality source of information created by unwashed masses of Internet users.

“Purple numbers” is an enigmatically-named but simple idea: assign unique URI to parts of the html document so that others can point to wisdom on the web with granularity smaller than a web page. The concept was first developed in Purple Wiki. Simon Willison created JavaScript implementation (which looks like it can be easily added to any other tool or existing static pages).

I wrote an article on using Unison for remote backups. Unison is a program similar to rsync. It’s less popular but more powerful and, unlike rsync, works well under Windows. It’s also an example of useful, shipping software written in a non-mainstream, functional language OCaml.

Apple Software Design Guidelines is a short and worthwile read. Some of the sections are Mac-specific but most of it applies universally. Such is the nature of universal truths.

The future of weblogging is a good and balanced article on the nature and future of weblogging with a “journalism” angle.

Comparing journalism and weblogging usually brings controversy; personally I don’t care. An interesting question still remains: how do we define journalism. One angle would be to define by technology: journalists are those who write for newspapers. If we take that angle I find it strange that the article claims:

One of the greatest limitations of Weblogs is their temporal nature. Postings are always arranged in date order − irrespective of their other dimensions, including importance, substance, popularity − and this often celebrated and rarely decried. In reality, the Weblog model of reverse sequential posting doesn’t even support story-telling, which is one pillar of journalism.

There are few problems with this statement:

• it’s not exactly true. A common feature of most current weblog system (including WordPress that powers this site) is categories i.e. ability to categorize posts based on topic. It’s not as powerful as other dimensions mentioned but it’s not inexistent either.
• isn’t it the case for majority of the “real” journalism? No one reads “Seattle Times” from a year ago. No one reads “Vogue” from a year ago. Newspaper and magazine publishing has a temporal nature.
• is it wise to add sorting by those other dimensions to weblog software? Weblogs became popular in major part thanks to their simplicity. Type the title, post, press “Publish” and there they are, your thoughts on the internet. That’s the killer feature. The more sophisticated features, the less people are interested in them. Maybe there just isn’t the need, both from blog readers and blog writers, to have those sophisticated sorting dimensions?

Personally I think that weblogging software is good for what it is and for content that doesn’t fit well the format of a blog post we should use other means of publishing it. For example I have an articles section with static html content for publishing articles that, in my opinion, outlive the temporal nature of a weblog. But in the age of
Google even that might be considered a waste of time. People interested in the article will find it anyway. Maintaining this static content requires more work on my part for (potentially) little benefit for my readers.

Post about backing up WordPress MySQL database. The magic incantation is:

mysqldump −user="db username" −password="db pwd" −all "db name" | gzip > "full path to backup file"-`date +%Y%m%d`.gz

I’m a sucker for real-world stories of succesful high-tech companies. Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure isn’t such a story because GO, company described in the book, was
unsuccessful but it’s still a great read.

The story begins with Jerry Kaplan (book’s author) and Mitch Kapor discussing an idea of a PDA. They get excited and start the company to build it. They invite Steve Sokoman, a top Apple engineer to join them. Sokoman gets counter-offer from Apple which results in Apple producing (also
unsuccessful) Newton. Kapor looses the interest, doesn’t want to be personally involved in this venture but encourages Kaplan to go with it alone. Alone but well funded (thanks to Kapor Kaplan gets initial VC funding). The journey of GO begins and it’s a fascinating journey. Reading the book gives an insight into workings of PC business and GO, the company, did everything there is to be done: fund rising (to the tune of $75 million, and those were not dot-com days), good and bad partnerships, brutal competition (with Microsoft, among others), spinning off another company, being bought out and going bankrupt.

I joined the legion of WordPress switchers. I just migrated from MovableType to WordPress 1.2. It was quite easy although I had to spend a lot of time creating a new template (the one included with WordPress is, frankly, quite ugly).

Engadget got hold of a picture of new SideKick. Doesn’t look terribly exciting - just an incremental update.