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Welcome to Vacuum I've been putting together a periodic edition of a newsletter that I call Vacuum every so often since about 1998. The approach has varied over time with the available technology, starting out as an extended email and moving at various times to mailing lists, blogs, and the like. It's time to try doing the same thing for this system. Why is it called Vacuum? You'll notice the vacuum tube at the top of the screen; there was an earlier attempt briefly called Tubed, and that was inspired by Wired. At various times the tag line has been "Nature abhors a vacuum - so does my cat." Is that specific enough? When I want to write about something specific, I start a new blog for it, e.g. Superpatron for library stuff, (and others to come as are suitable, Typepad is pretty generous). This is the nth go-around of the same basic idea. A mix of stuff, mostly top of mind, a chronicle of what happens in the middle of the page. Today's mix is decidedly longer than the average (new tools will do that to you) and there's no guarantee that there will be something every day. We'll see what happens. Building Supergopher
Back in the day there was Gopher. It was pure, it was simple, you could write a server for it with a few lines of code, and it was good. Then the web took over and the BLINK tag appeared and the Gopher people went back to whatever they were doing before. Gopher gave you a nice hierarchy to sift through when you had browsing to do. You could move through the system in some orderly way, keeping tabs on roughly how deeply nested you were in the system, and backtracking your way through if you felt lost. You could get some crude sense of space in it - indeed it was called Gopherspace - and indeed there were VRML browsers written for Gopher that let you fly around in it. When Gopher died, its sense of a strongly typed network data object as a list of links went dormant with it. HTML pages could have anything in them, in roughly any order, and although there was a list tag (UL or OL) there was no strong typing of pages. An HTML page was an HTML page etc with no way to predict what was going to be in it when you started. There is a re-emergence of text data types on the net. You have RSS files, a type of document which is good for describing a list of blog postings or search results or links to other things on the net. There's OPML which describes in simplest possible form an outline. And ah, when you have search tools and outlines and pretty text you have all the components of a new Gopher. Gopher NG is not the Semantic Web. I'm not going to write SPARQL, traverse any n-partite graphs, reify any ontologies, or any of that stuff. There's a little bit of infrastructure already in place to bootstrap the system - nothing like the alt.hypertext in days of old - so it won't be entirely a lonely struggle. How do I... Publish this OPML outline as OPML, so that when the document gets returned through a delicious link it flows through back through to the outliner? Not hard at all, it turns out - which means that delicious makes a fine tagger for OPML content. Sweet. Now we just have to figure out some tags for OPML-as-data rather than OPML-as-data-format.
Link to a file on my local computer, not the net, so that I can built interconnections on my local disk that don't depend on the net?
Force a Mac to prompt for user name at login
Link to a list of feeds that are recently changed in the OPML blog server
5s - seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, shitsuke seiri - separate needed tools from unneeded, and remove the latter seiton - neatly arrange tools for ease of use seiso - conduct a cleanup campaign seiketsu - do seiri, seiton, seiso frequently, as frequently as daily shitsuke - form the habit of always following the first four Another day, another blank page The day by day nature of this blogging tool means that every day around midnight I get a new blank screen to type into. There's something very appealing about that. In the course of a day, the typical look of my typical screen on this iBook has changed quite a bit. If anything, it's looking a lot more like my paper notebooks (this is a good thing). It's mostly missing quadrille paper, and it's not quite so portable, and I haven't yet figured out how to scribble in the middle of it freehand. Working on it. In the middle 50% of the screen there is a big window showing either today's blog entry or the main document I'm working on. To the left in a 30% wide window is one or two squarish documents, and on the right in a 20% wide window is a sidebar. The sidebar is almost always a todo/do this/don't forget scratchpad, and it rarely gets hidden except when there's full-screen focus work going on. I reworked my chat window (Adium) so that it neatly and exactly fills the middle 50% space, so that I can have a chat going on and still have in my peripheral vision two or three documents in mid-edit. Similarly, I narrowed Firefox so that it to can co-exist with a sidebar. Address Book can be wedged into the middle too, and doesn't overlap with anything when it's in use. |
Last modified: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 3:02 AM.
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Gopher image courtesy 