Vi Hart on Making Her Videos

How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make a Video... 

There's something about Vi Hart's recursive video about how she makes her videos which reminds me strongly of the Lispish ideal of having the Lisp interpreter available at write-time, compile-time and run-time.

Plan 9 mounts and dependency injection

Cool.

Do The Simplest Thing

Congratulations to Bill Seitz on launching his Personal Finance startup / project.

My Simulations

Over the years I've done a few agent based simulations to look at questions that interest me.

Here's a quick Bootstrap page to get at them.

Strapdown.js

Very cool : Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents

Dog : A Social Language

Dog seems to be a little language for writing social software.

Initial thoughts :

Big question is what it compiles to. It's about time we had a programming language that compiles a single program down to parts that run on both server and clients, in a really easy and transparent way.

Building in knowledge of protocols like http and json and making services like twitter at least members of the standard library is a good idea.

Like most programmers, I'm sceptical of the  "easy English-like" nature of it. We've had plenty of time to learn that what's hard in programming is the logical thinking not the strange syntax. (Update : See my Quora answer)

But if Dog can become a little-language which makes it easy to configure and administrate social software back-ends then it will be very useful. Particularly if there are ways of compiling the same program down to multiple back-ends (Django, Rails, Chicago Boss etc.)

Project Schema

This is awesome : Project Schema combines mind-mapping with management of parts of a CAD model. 

Command Line In Web Apps

Excellent!

Mozilla is releasing a command line library for use in web-apps. 

Initializr

This looks pretty good.

O'Reilly Early Release

I didn't know about the O'Reilly Early Release program. Basically, it seems you can buy a book as it's still being written, and give feedback while receiving updates and rewrites.

Nice idea. I'm tempted to buy some of these.

Programming With A Mind Map

Using a MindMap to store documentation.

Actually it sounds like Freemind is much like an outliner, in that you can drive it with the keyboard and collapse / expand etc.

I wonder how using this compares to LEO.

(Hat-tip Other Michael)

JSON / RSS

Dave Winer is considering an official(?) JSON flavour of RSS.

I just want to say here that I like RSS, for what it is, and what it does, and I like JSON to actually work with, because parsing XML is still a faff. So it gets my vote.

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.