Sunday, March 31, 2002

remember, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom wisdom is not truth truth is not beauty beauty is not love love is not music music is the best -- frank zappa Refactoring Home Page. "Refactoring is a technique to restructure code in a disciplined way. For a long time it was a piece of programmer lore..." SoapWare.Org : xmlStorageSystem. "xmlStorageSystem is an Internet storage system for XML documents that's programmable via XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1. This specification documents the system for SOAP 1.1, however the same procedures are also available in XML-RPC in UserLand's implementation." [Is there an OPML.com the way there is a Weblogs.com? And by that I mean a place where people are saying "I have an I/O, come check it out!". I don't know who does and who doesn't, IM has the same problem. There's no place to go to find out who uses this and who doesn't. Hunting for OPML Mugs is not my idea of fun... although maybe it could be if I'm inventive about it. Maybe a new drinking game?] * Dave: "Someday we may have a product that is just an outliner." [I'd be so surprised if this was the case. Users (including yourself) would want the scripting and flexibility of the current environment. Of course, you may have product where the outliner is up front -- the pleasure button of which you speak -- It's not hard to picture.] [A Ruby knowledge spike. I've decided it was time to learn a new language. My previous choices were Perl and Python. I've never been able to wrap my head around Perl. Despite so many having a profound love for it, I can't make sense of what other folks write. It's almost as if no one reads it but everyone else somehow learns to write it. Python makes much more sense to me but hasn't provided anything compelling for me. Ruby looks like it will work with the coding style I use (am trying to develop?) as well as some interesting new stuff. It has the key internet libraries I'd need if I ever get so far as to develop something useful (including XML-RPC). There's also a mod_ruby, so it seems that folks are doing good stuff. It may be flavor of the moment, but it's been around since 1995 and the lists and community seem vibrant. No harm.] * [Three things. Don't "yell" at me about languages. I don't care. If you have any valid reasons for why one is better at something than another, you still won't get an argument out of me -- If for no other reason than not having extensively used Perl or Python, I lack an opinion. Secondly, I'm not learning a new language because there's something lacking in the languages I know. Sure, everyone has an "ifonly" list. Big deal. And to explain what I meant by "compelling" above... Python is fairly similar to UserTalk. I'm learning something new to expand what I understand. While Python may very well do that, it feels familiar enough that I'm concerned I won't get enough brain stretching out of it. Lastly, I borrowed the term "spike" from XP, where it is used to refer to time spent "researching" something in order to provide a more accurate estimate. You drive a spike deeply into something... so the metaphor is that you learn enough about something you've never done before in order to help estimate how long it will take to build. A "knowledge spike" is the same sort of thing. It's a page devoted to a single topic. It's not meant to be a directory, or inclusive or exclusive. It's links about a single possibly obscure topic that in the past would have filled up my home page for that day. Needlessly I think. Instead as I "spike" into various topics I'll create a "spike page", it'll keep things tidy and collected. ] * [Al, didn't you watch the Grammies? All I have to say is, we saw an international performance of "O' Death".] * [Fair enough Al. I'm sorry you missed it also, it was a great performance. Anyway, the point of this was simple. A lot of folks are getting fed up with massed produced, flavor lacking, integrity lacking pap that is designed to generate dollars for corporations and the folks that run them. They want more reality in their music, food, work, and lives. Amen.] 11:22:19 PM    comment