Categories
Technology

Working on Techie Stuff

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. What’s particularly rough about this post is a link to a discussion thread I had with Aaron Swartz. Because of legal issues, Aaron committed suicide ten years later— an incredible loss to us all. I just wish we had told him more how important he was to all of us. 

No blogging for me until the RDF book is finally finished. If it seems to be taking forever, it feels that way to me at times, too. However, there’s been many a change since I put fingers to keyboard for first word of the book and writing has morphed into re-writing and re-writing.

Additionally, in the last few months I’ve promised some tech tools and utilities to people hearabouts. I’m not coming up for air until these are finally done and published for people to use if they have an interest.

In the meantime, Lawrence Lessig has responded to some of the questions about the Creative Commons license, here and here. No answers, but responses. (Thanks to Denise for pointing these out.)

I have continued the CCL discussion over at the metadata discussion list attached to the CC web site. As you can see by my comments on the thread, my fractured writing is a good indicator of my level of frustration related to the discussion.

Back to book. Back to code. Happy New Year.

Categories
Just Shelley

Snowfall

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There’s something magical about seeing the first snow flake falling. At that moment, you and nature are joined in a special secret only shared by those who look out their windows at just the right moment. The first flakes are few, and dance lightly about in the breeze, like the tip of a tongue during foreplay. Moving here, no there, no here.

During the snowfall I watch the pattern of the wind, no longer limited by my crude perceptions that tells me the wind is blowing in a straight line from here to there. The snow traces the individual movements of the wind, a waltz of breezes.

During the day, through my window I watch a father take his child for her first walk in the snow. Hesitant footsteps made a little more unsure by suddently uneven footing that shifts about and causes her to fall. Cruel! But then there’s that moment when tiny face is turned up into the snowfall for the first time; gently, cold touches sweep across cheeks and wisps of cotton at lashes and falls and melts in mouth opened to cry out in pure discovery. All is forgiven, and another child is found winter.

Better than watching the first flake, I love to go to bed with bare streets and wake up in the mornings knowing that snow has started falling. You can hear it by the absence of sound, and you can see it through your window as streetlight reflected. Pulling back the curtain, you look out on a world of white, lines softened between objects until the differences are erased. All you see is soft, crystalline mounds, sparkling in the light.

Snow brings with it a hint of Mother tucking us in against the cold, and a promise of waking.

Categories
Critters

Down the path walked three…

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Since techie woman does not live by beating up on techie men, alone, I thought I would get outside, have a nice walk.

Powder Valley was my choice of destination today, but in addition to the Ridge trail, I also walked the little 1/3 mile Tanglewood Trail. Since the latter is handicap accessible, it makes a nice gentle walk for cooling down from the peaks and valleys of the other trails at PV.

Along the Tanglewood, the rangers had stationed implementations of projects you can work on to make your backyard wildlife friendly. Projects like creating brush heaps, planting wild grape, or building backyard ponds. An effective use of trail space to educate people into taking responsibility for the environment.

At the end of the trail is the the restrooms with a sitting area and a wild bird habitat. As I neared it, I noticed movement on the trail in front of me. Three wild turkeys were walking towards me, looking like so many other walkers I’ve met along the paths. Except those walkers didn’t have feathers. And things hanging underneath their chins.

The turkeys moved off the trail as I approached, but didn’t go far. I was close enough to the birds to smell the stuffing and see the marshmallows bubbling on the sweet potatoes.

In my mind, I named the birds, but I’m not going to tell you whose names I used.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

The story of the RSS feeds and the little CC license that could

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Again the consideration of exactly what it means to put an RSS feed online has reared its head. Specifically, Mitch Wagner found out that his RSS feed — which includes full posting content not excerpts — was re-published online at LiveJournal. He wrote:

 

That site is my intellectual property. You do not have permission to post the entirety of my weblog to your site. Please take down the site

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mitchwagner/

immediately.

Well, all sorts of interesting commenting occurred, as you can imagine. In particular the implicit assumption that RSS feeds come with ‘tactic approval of republication’ was raised.

What was a surprise is that Mitch reversed himself and now offers a Creative Commons license on his material, though the license information isn’t duplicated in Mitch’s RSS feed directly. Mitch also brings up the ‘commercial’ aspect of re-publishing the material at LiveJournal, and what’s to stop someone from grabbing the content and putting it behind password protected sites that charge money for access.

Easy — don’t publish all your entire posts in your RSS feed. Keep the RSS feeds to excerpts only. Remove the content-encoded field and just leave the description. And adjust your blogging tool to publish excerpts, only. If your weblogging tool doesn’t allow this adjustment, ask the tool builder to provide this capability. The RSS feeds are there to help promote your ideas, not promote their theft. But you have to control the technology, not let the technology control you.

I have a feeling that 2003 is the year when technology and the law will finally find ways to learn to live together, or forever exist in a state of permanent hostility.

(Thanks to Ben for the story.)

Categories
Weblogging Writing

And they lived happily ever after

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A joke for you:

 

A woman approaches the counter at a bookstore. The guy behind the counter smiles and says, “May I help you?”

“Yes. I bought this book last week,” she said. “And I wasn’t able to put it down for a moment”.

The clerk replied, “It was that good?”

“It had everything”, the woman exclaimed. “It had laughter. It had tears. It had drama, and comedy, and angst. This book explored every aspect of the human condition.”

The clerk smiled. “Great! We like to hear from happy customers. Thanks for coming by and telling us you were pleased with the book.”

“Oh. That’s not why I came by. I want to return the book and get my money back.”

The clerk was puzzled. “But you said this book had everything. It had comedy and drama, and tears and smiles, and even angst. Why would you return the book?”

“Because,” the woman explained. “The book is supposed to be about programming Python.”

 

My favorite new papa, Gary Turner, is talking about weblog writing at his weblog. Specifically he wonders if there’s anything about good writing in the Essential Blogging book, which I co-authored:

 

Shelley had a hand in Essential Blogging, which I haven’t read, but does anyone know if there’s any focus at all given to writing in Essential Blogging? Knowing Shelley and how she highly she values good writing it would seem a little ironical if there’s no coverage on writing in EB. Presuming, of course, that good writing is an essential part of good blogging.

 

Must be something in the air because a few other people are talking about weblog writing. Maybe it’s that end of the year reflectivity that strikes us all, that desire to look back at where we were and figure out where we’re going. Auld Lang Syne.

Steve Himmer the question:

 

What are we we writing, and how are we writing it? What constitutes good writing on the web, and is it determined by the same criteria that determine good writing elsewhere?

 

As you can see from the joke that started this post, good writing is relative. With computer books ‘good writing’ is measured by how little you really notice the writing. Why do you want the book? To learn about Python, you say? Well, did you learn about Python? And did the book help? Then that’s good writing.

Jeff Ward answers Steve by comparing forms of writing. He writes of what I call the LinkerLoggers (Blinkers?):

 

Link heavy blogs create persona through a process of selection, of valuation. It’s interesting that this is perhaps the longest surviving mode of blogging, which does not show much sign of fading— I remember when I started that this seemed mostly bush-league. It takes guts to put yourself out on the commons without any trinkets to sell.

 

After first counting the number of links in this posting (four), I thought long and hard about what Jeff is saying. He has a point — why weblog if you don’t write? Still, there’s that relative thing again. Isaac Asimov once wrote that short stories were the truest challenge to the writer. Anyone can write a story in 400 pages, but only a great writer can write a story in 400 words.

There is skill involved in linking to a story and providing just enough information about it that people want to follow the link, to see how the story ends. Just because the diamonds are tiny doesn’t mean they don’t still sparkle.

What do I think is good weblog writing? I think weblogging is weird. If there’s a crack between all the traditional writing forms — the books, the articles, plays, and poems — weblogging fills that crack. We’re not bricks, we’re cement and we’re oozing all over the world. We’ll never know what is or is not good weblog writing, because the writing is as unique as the number of writers, as good as the worst of us and as poor as the best. We define the rules and we can break the rules, and the first rule we break is to throw out all our assumptions about ‘what is good writing’.

I once said in a post that weblogging is writing the world’s greatest novel with 10,000 of your best friends. Hell on royalities.

Jonathon Delacour joined the writing discussion with the following:

 

Comparing the link+quote+comment weblog to show-and-tell made me laugh, even though I started out that way myself. I didn’t stay there for long—within my first week of blogging I’d written my first long form post. Thinking back to how I approached blogging in those early days, there was an element of wanting to please that’s less evident now (to me anyway).

 

…there was an element of wanting to please that’s less evident now… I watched Jonathon emerge, from dark background to light; from frequent small posts heavy with links, to creating lovely melodies in virtual ink. Doing a Dave. The less he cared about wanting to please, the more pleasing the work. Odd that.

Jonathon discovered the real essence of ‘good’ weblog writing — not really caring if others think your writing is good, or not. Try putting that on your scale and see if you don’t get jello.

I haven’t said Happy Holidays, have I? Happy Holidays, fellow authors. I wish you joy in your words.