Monday, January 30, 2006

Quick comment I made about personal timeliness vs. personal individuality Blogger


100% right.

At some point we realize that some of our information consumption has to be a "minority game".

The winners will be those who know things that other people *don't*. That's what makes you valuable to other people. Being an expert in the top ten most known topics makes you worth what?

By definition, there's no algorithm which can give this to you. You need to cultivate your own tastes and ideosyncrasies. Your outlier blogs.

Don't worry about being the first to follow the fashions. Something which is number one on memeorandum or digg today (and is actually important) will probably turn up on one of your regular blogs within a week. So decide how you'll trade-off your own personal timeliness for personal individuality.
This isn't a problem. It's the solution.

Politicians who try to spin their wikipedia entry are getting named and shamed.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Latest news copied from the ShowStoppers page

I'm still thinking, more and more seriously, about rewriting at least the wiki-to-html engine in Python.

I'm also seriously thinking that the next release will actually be a complementary "web-server" edition, which allows you to edit pages via a browser (over the web) rather than through the VB program.

Right now I have a simple webserver application which let's you access the SdiDesk pagestore via the browser over HTTP.

Of course, this raises questions about security which will have to be answered before release. Will there have to be a login? Can you mark some pages as personal and private, while others are public, etc?

If I go 'browser only' I'll initially lose the network diagrams. (Would anyone miss them?) Although it may be possible to put them back for the more recent Firefox using SVG / Canvas tags.

None of this is ready yet. But it is looking promising. And the main reason is that the new code is in Python which will allow me to work on a proper Python based rendering engine. (Where I should fix all those bugs.)

If the Python rendering engine works out, I'll then try to retrofit it behind the current VB front-end.

Thoughts anyone?

Tuesday, January 03, 2006