The W3C Persistence Policy (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Persistence) states how the consortium will guarantee the persistence of documents it publishes in the event of its demise. Seems like one of the documents not covered is the Persistence Policy itself.
Bizarre.
Slashdot had an article on the site Cooking for Engineers which has recipes written for the analytical mind (as opposed to lists of recipes of flat foods).
What interested me was the presentation of the recipes. After the standard prose description, is a table of the ingredients and the method. Simple, but effective presentation. For example, check out this
recipe for tiramisu - scroll to the end first and take a look at the table - it gets the whole process across incredibly easily.
Tufte for food addicts :-)
NotCon'04 seems to have been a roaring success. I arrived early enough to get in (the venue quickly reached capacity and all day people were waiting on a one-out/one-in basis). Luminaries of the technorati including Cory Doctrow, Bill Thompson and Brewster Kahle were on hand and the twin foci of the day were web politics and inappropriate technology. I'll be picking out a few of the most interesting bits of the day in a series of posts.
First up was Dan O'Brien's presentation on the working habits of prolific geeks. In an interesting piece of research Dan emailed a questionaire to a selection of about 50 or so geeks known for their prolific output (including XML's own Tim Bray). Some of the results were interesting and will probably ring true with many geeks.
Shells are incredibly popular - respondents were asked to provide screenshots of their current desktop. Most included several shells (one was just one big shell). One possible explanation given was that many of the respondents have been through numerous cycles of technology, OS and application suites and that the shell is one of the constants across all of those changes.
Text files and email apps were the two most popular ways of organising todo lists.
Many respondents had lots of home-grown scripts - with backup being one of the most common tasks automated by scripts. Possibly indicating a lack of faith with commercial backup tools or the need for a more personalised approach to backup than a commercial tool makes easily possible.
Many respondents have written far more than they have ever released to the public - the biggest factor against this being the feeling that the code was "not good enough" for public consumption.
It is interesting to compare my own habits with those presented by Dan. In general I do much of my work with browsers, shells, Eclipse, Emacs and Evolution. I don't think I could get much done without Emacs and Eclipse has rapidly become my weapon of choice in Java coding. What I do like about both of these tools is that they do not get in the way of using the command-line. All my coding projects quickly get an Ant build file (even those that are not Java projects). Being able to run a shell command from Emacs (or run a shell in a buffer) is a major plus.
I can't really comment on task organisation as I am incredibly bad at it. I've tried keeping todo lists in a variety of technologies, but just don't have the discipline to keep it up to date.
The scripts I use are principally short-cuts for repetitive command-line tasks such as starting and stopping my SETI client. I would argue that an Ant project / Makefile is a form of scripting and it is the form which I use principally in development.
As for lots of scripts and unreleased hacks. I've tried to make the most useful stuff available and I don't really consider myself to be a prolific creator of small hacks - the software I tend to produce is relatively heavyweight. There is somehting to be said for creating a releasing quick hacks such as XSLT for RELAX-NG documentation and diagramming, but a degree of professional pride and the desire to avoid dealing with support for incomplete code makes me shy away from putting all of those quick hacks online.
What do you think about these generalisations of the habits of prolific geeks ? Do they match your habits ?
I've just downloaded and started playing with RSSOwl - a free RSS newsreader. Interesting to see a Java app written with SWT (other than Eclipse!) and nice to see that the download is "only" 3MB for the whole shooting match (including the SWT bits).
or should the headline be: "Java not suitable for Solaris daemons shock!"?
Still the numbers quoted in this internal memo are pretty shocking....
I have just had an email from the webmaster of Charity-Ware.org an index of software for which the developer asks that money be donated to charity. Did you know that Vim is charity-ware ? Neither did I. Of course, that is part of the problem - and its nice to see an organisation trying to do something about it.
Of course, you don't need to have software in return for giving money to charities like Shelter - just donate something! :-)
Call me jaded, but its been a long time since I've seen anything on the web that made me laff this much.
It seems that everyone has to put up with nonsense in some form or another. Some days I feel like I am being targetted with more than my fair share of it, but I guess that I probably give as good as I get. Now James Robertson has handily explained the Three Laws Of Nonsense.
Blogstipation (n.) - the inability to write any new blog entries. Usually based on the justified belief that one has nothing interesting to say. c.f. this blog.
Blogorreah (n.) - the incessant blogging of stuff that no one finds in the slightest bit interesting. c.f. most blogs everywhere.
I have spent the day in the company of a gaggle of Mac users (is 'gaggle' the correct collective term ?). They made me quite jealous with Hydra a collaborative editing tool in which users not only share documents but can work on them simultaneously. It makes things like collective to-do lists or meeting minutes really easy.
So far I haven't been able to find anything similar for my collection of Windows/Linux boxes.
At last! An excuse to by a Mac !
Looseend has got a set of new features.
Rumours that John The Furry is in the back pocket of Jeff Bezos are yet to be confirmed.
Another Blog...
Why ?
1) Because there aren't enough blogs in the blogosphere...
2) As a place to put the links I find when I am in the middle of something else
3) As a place to rant about stuff
