tychoish, now without a net

I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my neuroses surrounding productivity and creativity get enacted around the organization of my files on the computer, right?

Well they do.

I spend, probably way too much time thinking and considering the schemes that I name my files, their organization in relation to each other, their internal organization, the way their backed up. And so forth. The good thing is that I’m usually pretty happy with the way things are organized, and I tend to establish pretty flexible systems, but when I’m coming back to a couple projects after some time off or I’m restarting work on a project (at the beginning of a semester, say) I’m prone to clean house–as it were.

As the anxiety surrounding my past couple of months dragged on, and as that was wrapped up in a bunch of concerns about the state of my projects, I rearranged and reorganized things a few times, and for completely different reasons, got a lot of nothing done. Long story short, while I don’t like the way that the files were back in January, I also don’t like the way they are now.

The eternal debate is between putting a bunch of stuff (files/ideas) in a few baskets (folders/files) or putting a lot of little groups of stuff in a lot of baskets (folders/files). The bigger the baskets the more complex naming schemes have to be to keep the piles separate, but the chance that any one thing is in a specific basket is pretty high. So if there’s folders for “archives” “current” and “output,” and you’re looking for an old file that you haven’t touched in a few weeks, it’s probably pretty likely that it’s in the archives folder. And what you’re working on is in current. But if you have a lot of little files, say you’re writing an essay, a knitting pattern, and a play, and all have several files, you need a pretty complex naming scheme to keep things together. And you have to have this scheme in place early, because otherwise, it’s a mess. In contrast, if you have 6 (or three) different folders (with their own subfolders) for different projects it becomes much easier to ignore a file/project if you think “ah, I’m not feeling very dramaturgical today.” So I hope that sets the stage.

Once upon a time, rather than having files and directories like I do now, I would use programs like Voodoopad which is a great piece of software, and I used it quite successfully for a long time. The end result was that I wasn’t really using it like you’re supposed to, and it magnified this problem, because moving pages around in the VP was more difficult than moving the files around. And all the other wiki programs seemed less suitable (I really hate web apps, don’t get me started.) But as I’ve been writing here recently, I think I’m ready for that kind of approach again.

So I think I’ve discovered the best of both worlds: ikiwiki. This is a program that reads files in the format that I like most (plain text, markdown) and then turns it into a blog. It basically works off of a flat file system except(!) it uses a couple of nifty CGI wrappers (on the webserver and as a post-commit hook) to use a versioning system like Subversion or Git, to keep track of everything. Works like a dream, and there are tons of plugins that work pretty well. I have it installed on my own machine, but I expect that once Joe and I get some stuff nailed down, I’ll have a copy of it running here for some community editing and more of my rough thoughts.

Here’s hoping it all works out, I’ll keep you all posted.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: technology • writing

I was listening to FLOSS Weekly this week as I was running about, and there was a bit in one of the episodes about leadership and organization of open source projects.

Not being much of a programer at all–but being very interested in, for lack of a better term, the anthropology¹ of open source projects–this sparked a larger interest. Lets back up for a moment.

Some of the larger (and apparently smaller ones as well?) open source projects like Perl, Python, and the Linux Kernel are lead by sort of “benevolent dictator,” types who guide development, make decisions about release dates, provide vision, and are generally responsible for some major part of the code.² These are typically the people that started the project, though I think there are some second/next generation leaders of projects, (Matt Mullenweg of WordPress³ for one.)

And this is interesting, because we generally think of open source as being this incredibly democratic space where users and developers can all sit on the same level and say “this is what I think,” and have their voices heard.⁴ Right? I mean isn’t being able to shape the direction and tools of your (technological) experience, sort of what democracy (in this sphere) is about?

Of course it is. Democracy isn’t about voting and contentious power struggles with small margins, democracy is about a group of people making it possible for different perspective to be heard. So to put it in parliamentary terms: it’s the debate/discussion, not the vote that matters.

And here you thought I was going to post something about the current american political debacle? Pass. Not because I don’t have opinions (I do,) or because it’s not fascinating (it is,) but because there’s absolutely nothing to say. That kind of “democracy,” isn’t by this definition particularly democratic and doesn’t have as much impact on the way we live our lives as the other kinds of “micro-political” democracies that we are constantly participating in. Many kinds of work environments are democratic in this way, after a fashion, and many other small groups, like dancing, craft-related, not for profits, grassroots organizations, have strong (and potentially static) leadership and vibrant discussion, which nets a very democratic result.

I think this is a continuation of some of my earlier postings on open source, but I think will also be part of a new (irregular) series of posts on leadership, because there’s so much to talk about and so little room (and time.)

I think the major ideas that are running through my head are:

• the difference between power and leadership
• how democracies scale up and scale down to different group sizes.
• the symbols associated with democracy, and the power of those symbols (maybe this could develop into a post for the theory blog, nu?)

I really enjoy thinking (and talking!) about these sorts of political notions, but I’m always disappointed by the shape that most “political discussions” take. So here’s my attempt to take back the night and start a more frank (and productive discussion.) What’s leadership to you, and what kinds of successes and failures do you all see in your own microdemocraies?⁵

So, anyway, think about that, I look forward to hearing from you, and there’ll be more knitting content soon; I promise.

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tagged: anthropology • technology

So, folks, in an effort to provide a service to the community rather than simply nattering on about my neuroses, I thought that I would provide a list vim resources that you might all find helpful on your own journeys with vim.

Just a refresher: VIM is a super old school, super powerful text editor that I’m in a battle to learn. For people who live and breath text, this is sort of the ergonomic “leather man tool” to end all such tools.

It’s all below the fold…

Continue reading Vim Resources

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tagged: technology

Contrary to your first impressions, this post is generally not about computers. Ok, a little bit.

I went to the computer store this afternoon. I got a computer from a friend who had upgraded and moved away and claimed that this old box was too old and slow to be of much use.

Well it turns out that this computer is actually about as powerful as my current machine, and I figured that I could get linux or some such working on it with minimal fuss, and it would be good to have a machine around that could manage torrents while I was away with the laptop, and host more regular backups, and so forth. In short order I got Ubuntu, but quickly realized that I would need a monitor¹, a wireless card, a bit more ram, and so forth.

So after a bit of hemming and hawing I finally went into the computer store today. There’s this local independent computer store in town that has used gear and what not, which is great if you’re in the market for something specific and don’t need the fuss of comp USA or some such. We’ve been going there for years and years and it seemed like the ideal place for this kind of task.

I got there and this very young looking (I wonder at what point we start identifying the people who help us in stores as “young looking”) guy came up to help me. Short. Thin. Emo. Obviously knew what he was doing. And so I let myself be the customer for once. “Yeah, I need this,” and he was able to do it, pretty much without a hitch.

I told him what I needed, he got the wireless card (last one) told me that flat panel monitors where in high demand and didn’t last long on the shelf, but quoted me an acceptable price. I looked at the CRT monitors, but didn’t get one. He husseled about trying to look for the right kind of ram, but didn’t find any.

It was at this point that I realized that this fellow was me. Sort of. I mean, I have a better fashion sense (gawd, the emo.) and taste in operating systems (he was using vista!), but other than that, here I was. It also struck me, that at this precise moment I was very not queer. Geeks are already a bit off of norm, and in casual interaction, it doesn’t come up/make itself apparent. Which is all together an odd feeling.

Anyway, so I brought the computer in, he put in the card and took out the modem, which was convenient, and then I left. We made small talk about operating systems, I was like, 10.4 it’s good stuff. He said something about the Air, I shrugged, and then left.

I didn’t get the wireless to work off the bat, and I’m currently reinstalling the OS (last time when I installed, I was able to disabuse it of the notion that I had a turkish keyboard, which complicated the login process.) With luck, I’ll be able to get the wireless to work after this is done. There seems to be confirmation of this wireless card working with Ubuntu, but we shall see.

Anyway, I’m going to tinker more, and knit some this afternoon. I’ve not been doing enough knitting, or writing for that matter.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: journal • technology

So I’m back to trying to learn how to work with vim more seriously, and I think with a more seriously modified .vimrc file. Thank g-d for dotfiles. I did realize that I don’t need to remap a key to escape system wide, as long as it works in vim at the right place, and it turns out (of course) that getting this to happen is a synch).

As this is a fairly geeky post, I’m going to put the bulk of it below the fold…

Continue reading Tech Stubbornness

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tagged: technology

Chris and I had a discussion about LiveJournal last night, that lead in some interesting directions.

Though the discussion was started by the impending (21st March 2008) day long boycott of the site (which I’m not commenting on, and neither know enough about to pass judgment, nor am particularly moved by the whole deal), but quickly moved on to a contemplation of LJ, and you know, the internet as a whole.

I wrote this entry yesterday but didn’t post it. It’s since come to my attention that the rhetoric of the strike errs towards anti-semitism, which is a bit troubling. I think I’ve technically read my friends page since midnight GMT yesterday, and this post will get pushed to LJ, so I guess that I’m not participating.

I’d also say that it doesn’t strike me that anything is particularly different this time around. When I joined LJ the first time (with my old handle as the username), you had to be invited/have a code from an existing user, there weren’t free accounts. Frankly I think that’s part of the reason that the LJ community is what it is. As for the censorship stuff, that’s not particularly new and though distasteful, a completely enforceable part of the terms of service. Anyway, on with the entry…

What we recognized was that LJ is basically the only consistently successful social networking site on the internet, ever. Furthermore later social networking sites, like facebook and myspace, have started to look more and more like LJ as time goes on. The facebook “feed” is a lot like the LJ friend’s page, the facebook profile and the LJ userinfo page are remarkably similar. And so forth.

The surprising thing is that LJ, though developed and changed over the years, is pretty much the same thing that it’s always been, and that’s sort of cool.

I attribute the success of LJ to two things: the friends page, and the granularity of security that “friend’s locking” provides. The diverse and dedicated (and not unsizeable) userbase seals the deal.

While I adore Wordpress, and think that it’s great software, the truth is that WordPress.com and blogger that preceded it, really can’t hold a candle to LJ because though there are “community features” (comments, blogrolls, rss feeds) the “blog,” they don’t have the friend’s page.¹

And admittedly, today, we have things like Google Reader and other RSS services, and Open ID that go a long way to replicate the “f-list” experience, but it isn’t the same, and it isn’t automatic. Often, in this whole cyberspace adventure, I think independence is the way to go, but I really think that in the case of LJ, there’s no way to do the community aspect of blogging or social networking as successful in an independent sort of way².

Our conversation ended with Chris’ recolection that he thought–years ago–that we should have tried to replicate the LJ phenomena and improve upon it somehow. He/we was/were always unclear of the details. The conversation then moved on to a discussion of programing languages and methods and projects, both historical and future. I will no doubt continue to blog/write about where this train of thought is taking us, but I think the observations about LJ and what constitutes success in terms of software and cyber/social phenomena will prove useful in the future.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: interwebs • technology