Smart Notebooks

An intriguing Kickstarter project.

Seems that Smallest Federated Wiki would be a good starting point for this.

Planet Building

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm rather taken with Planet Planet, the old-skool Python based RSS aggregator that outputs flat HTML.

I used it to build my wonderful Future Manufacturing river. And I want to use it for more things. So I've created a small script to make installing Planet ultra-easy on a linux server.


Four steps and you're rolling :

# clone it
git clone https://github.com/interstar/PlanetBuilder.git  planets

# make the planet
cd planets
./planets.sh MYPLANET

# add feeds
emacs MYPLANET/fancy/config.ini
# defaults have been set-up, just change and add the feed URLs and names at the bottom of the config.ini file and set your name and contact details (earlier in the file)


# edit the crontab
crontab -e
# and add the following line or suitable variant.
53 * * * * /PATH/planets/MYPLANET/refresh.sh
# note that the line with the correct value of PATH will have been given to you when you ran the create script


Your automatically generated aggregate will start being available at MYPLANET/index.html

Walled River

Apple join the war against RSS.

We need to defend the principle of a platform independent / open feed of news items from all the companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple who have seen the future as feeds insided their own proprietory walled "gardens".

Not sure if a garden is the right metaphor for a feed routing system, maybe "walled river"?

Something like this? :-(
 

 
Hat-tip Scribe.

Open rivers of news are wonderful things. Recently I've started using the venerable Planet feed agregator to make some public planets (rivers) such as this mind-boggling "Future Manufacturing" one. Glance at that and see exactly how awesome open RSS is. And how it can be way more compelling than the constrained Twitter or your riddiculously cramped Facebook wall. Look at a torrent of exciting information that can actually "breath", where text can be as long as it needs and where pictures are wide-screen rather than crammed into a cage designed to make you look at adverts.

World Outline Screencast

Nice screencast from Dave Winer showing where the World Outliner (the successor to the OPML Editor) is at.

Reminds me of GeekWeaver of course, though obviously slicker (and more specialised).

Artistic Filofax

Some links on ThoughtStorms

Mentoring In The Large

Dave Winer has a great aspiration for programmers to engage with long-projects that involve a teaching role.

Command 'n' Cursor

I've been travelling with my trusty (but ageing) eeepc netbook this last week. There's much to love about it but it's starting to feel slow in comparison with my other machine.

Increasingly when I use the netbook I try to get away with doing things in a ctrl-alt-f1 shell without logging in to the GUI at all. I'm starting to wish more software could be used in this environment so I began to look at Curses, the standard library for text-window UIs. There's a convenient Python wrapper of course. And there's another nice library in Python : Cmd, for creating a command-line driven apps. That is, not programs that literally run as small tools on the shell with command-line arguments, but programs which have their own internal "repl" style loop which you drive by typing in commands. Cmd handily hides the details from you, letting you declare a subclass of the Cmd class which simply defines handlers for specific commands. It's not a million miles away from something I ended up writing to handle the commands in SdiDesk.

For some of my projects it would be useful to combine the two modes : to have Cmd style input driving a 2D textual output using Curses. Unfortunately Cmd and Curses don't obviously play well together.  Both of them want to take over the input, with Curses thinking in terms of keystrokes while Cmd still expects full lines.

Nevertheless, after a bit of exploration, and learning about Curses's textpads and Cmd's supplementary methods, I'm starting to get the two to co-operate. As this gist shows :



It doesn't do anything yet. Just handles a "greet NAME" command that prints "hello NAME". And a "quit" command that exits the program. But it has combined Cmd inputs with Curses output.

Show Your RSS

Dave Winer reminds us to help people find our RSS feeds, as it seems that browser-makers are increasingly trying to obscure them from us.[1].

My approach is non-standard, but hopefully conveys the message :-)

[1] Rather like Steve Jobs trying to hide the file-system, some people love to take away anything that it might actually empower you to learn about.

Iterative, Test-Driven Development

My Quora answer :

Iterative, "test driven", development.

Break your idea down into a number of simple "stories", each of which describes a single chunk of activity which goes all the way through from the beginning to the end of a user's experience with the software. Importantly a story is not a traditional "component" ... but represents a complete, working but minimal slice through the functionality.

For example, a story could be "the user goes to our site at a URL and sees a page describing our idea" or, for a drawing program, "the user can create and save a jpg file" (even though that jpg file is just a blank canvas).

Once you have some stories, order them by importance. If you could only get one story working, what would be the most valuable? If you could only get two stories, which would those be?

Start on the most important story. As any particular story shouldn't be too complicated, you can probably figure out fairly intuitively the components you need in order to make it happen. (If you can't, you're trying to fit too much into a single story.) Those components might be functions, they might be objects which have several methods (if so, ONLY worry about the methods of the object which satisfy the current story, ignore any others), they might be HTML forms or templates.

Now write AUTOMATED TESTS for the components you need for this story. Unit tests for the functions and objects. Ideally something like Selenium for the web forms.

Write code to pass the tests in a test-driven style ... ie. write test, write code to pass test, refactor your code to eliminate redundancy, write next test etc. When one story is finished, start figuring out how to do the next most important and work on that.

Somewhere down your list of stories you have your minimum viable product: that is, the minimal thing which is worth releasing to your customers in order for them to give you feedback on whether this is useful to them. That is not necessarily just one story, it might be after the first three. Or the first ten. Whatever it is, once you hit it, release your product to the customers and start getting their reaction.

From now on you are in maintenance / iterative growth mode. You'll be taking the feedback from the customer to rewrite and reorder the stories. While continuing to implement them according to your best, most up-to-date, sense of priorities. You'll want to release new development to the customer as fast as reasonably possible so you can collect the feedback on your improvements too.

Don't assume that one story has to equal one release, because you'll be tempted to inflate your individual story to contain more than it should. But try to keep releases down to as few stories as possible so they can happen frequently : which maximizes both your information, and the customer's sense of progress.

Ward Cunningham Interview

Another good Ward Cunningham interview

The job was really to take C++, which was a fairly static language, and show people how to write dynamic programs in a static language. That's what most of the patterns in that book were about. And in the process, patterns extended the life of C++ by a decade, which is not what I thought would happen. What I thought would happen is people, when they learned these patterns, would look at them and say, "Wow, these patterns are hard in C++ and they're easy in Smalltalk. So if I want to think in terms of these patterns, I might as well use a language where they're easily expressed." And extend the life of Smalltalk by a decade. But the opposite happened.

I always suspected that the patterns everyone got so excited about were basically a way of overcoming static typing. Ward confirms it :-)

System Modeller

Wolfram Research present "System Modeller".

I've always been interested in this kind of software, so I need to check this out.

1337

Anyone else noticed that in terms of Unix Time we're in a 1337 era?

Wiki Renaissance

I believe we're in a wiki renaissance. The Smallest Federated Wiki signals a new era of wiki, slick enough for the age of HTML5, mobile devices and the "internet of things".

So here's a quick manifesto (in progress) that I'm writing about what's at stake in the new era, how it's the same as and different from the previous one. 

Meteor

Just looking at the quickstart demo of Meteor, the hot new web framework people seem to be getting excited about.

First thought. Seems to me that far more important than using the same language for the client and server is being able to write the client and server code in the same file.

That is something I've been waiting for for a long time.

LightTable

Interesting this new surge of dynamic IDEs. First there was Brett Victor's awesome demo. Now there's LightTable (promoted on KickStarter, discussed on Quora)

Sporadic thoughts.

Is this implemented in the browser? (Bespin? CodeMirror)? Perhaps we're seeing this explosion of innovation as IDE authors move to the cloud.

A Kickstarter project? That's cool. But motivated by early investors getting licenses? Does it also mean that this next wave of software innovation will be abandoning Open Source as a model?

Elements of Jonathan Edwards's Subtext in the tree of updates. Of course, he's paying attention.

Quick SFW Generator

Smart Disorganized Individual philosophy is about doing things piecemeal; engaging in small opportunistic actions as and when the inspiration strikes. Today was just such a quick burst with the Smallest Federated Wiki.

I love SFW a lot, but it's a bit of a pain to bring a page or large chunk of writing from elsewhere into it. Adding one paragraph at a time is a nuisance.

So here's a quick tool to create an SFW page from an arbitrary large, multi-paragraph chunk of text. Just paste your text into the box, add a title and choose whether you want ordinary paragraphs (of the kind that most SFW installations use) or whether you want "wikish" (the UseMod derived format which is somewhat compatible with UseMod / SdiDesk markup). Hit the submit button, and it will deliver a json file suitable for dropping into the pages directory of your SFW installation.

Update : the source-code for this is part of Project ThoughtStorms on GitHub.  (Note: I may have broken other import scripts in the refactoring to make this import script work. Please log an issue if you find this.)

SmallTalk Unix

A quick thought I had a week or so ago on the "failure" of SmallTalk. What if SmallTalk hadn't abandoned the file system? What if it had become the official graphical shell of Unix?

Here : http://thoughtstorms.info/view/smalltalkunix

Nathan's University (Update)

Just to note, I think this course is pretty good : http://nathansuniversity.com/pl101.html

Make Your Own Programming Language

Nathan's University offers an online course.

I've signed up.

Project ThoughtStorms Goes Live

ThoughtStorms has been ported across to the Smallest Federated Wiki.

Of course, there are plenty of failures, missing pages, bits of markup that aren't handled correctly etc. But this is wiki, right? It's never perfect. It's always living and dying and composting. The problems will get flushed out, or worked-around, or become charming ruins over time.

That doesn't mean Project ThoughtStorms is over. It's barely even got started. There are more wikis to port. There's an SdiDesk converter to write. There's plenty of gardening that I am committing to doing.

And then there's the really exciting stuff ... ;-)