Yesterday I was looking at a listing of updates for free software projects.
I commented that the package moe could be used as a replacement for
nano or zile, that is, when you need to quickly edit files from the
command-line.
So today I'm giving it a go. I downloaded moe via the GNU project's FTP server and installed it. The compilation was insanely fast, I think it took less than 10 seconds to get it all built and installed.
Update: I found a copy of the essay here but it appears to be a reprint with a different title, “Time To Liberate The Web”. Same content though, so it doesn't matter.
I found an essay by Ted Nelson titled “Way Out Of The Box”, and it's about limitations imposed by technical-minded people on everyone else. It's about the assumptions made when programs and computers are designed.
Here is a particularly good passage that tells us what we sacrifice when we force users to become distinct from programmers,
Suppose they gave you MTV, and in return took away your right to vote? Would you care? Some of us would. That's how I think of today's computer world, beginning with the Macintosh. The Macintosh gave us Fonts, pretty fonts to play with, and graphic arts tools that previously were out of reach, except in the most high-budget realms of advertising and coffeetable book production. Those fonts and graphic arts tools were a great gift.
But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away.
It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM.
If you bought an Apple II, you could begin programming it right out of the box. I have friends who bought the Apple II without knowing what programming was, and became professional programmers almost overnight. The system was clean and simple and allowed you to do graphics.
But the Macintosh (and now the Windows PC) are another story. And the story is simple: PROGRAMMING IS ONLY FOR OFFICIAL REGISTERED “DEVELOPERS”.
(Emphasis mine)
I hve been re-arranging my TODO lists using Emacs's Org-Mode and when I realized that it could calculate the exact hours taken for a bunch of tasks, I felt I should explore the rest of the Org-Mode manual and see what else I had been missing out on.
Org-Mode allows you to use relative timers which, it says, are useful for recording notes during a meeting or video viewing. I did not understand exactly how to use the relative timers, but it looks like they are like timestamps. Here's a brief run-down and example on how to use them.
I just stumbled upon the Online Journalism Blog. My entry point was a post on how to make money from [online] content. An interesting topic because it appears that much of the money is made indirectly through advertising, events, etc. What was more interesting, however, was a post on the the death of the interactive presentation tool Flowgram.
I overslept by a few hours but I decided to change the colour scheme. The stylesheet I uploaded last night was hideous, though good enough for testing. The new styles and page generation functions are up and I've switched the main page to PHP. The Friend of a Friend Creator is also partially up. I need to add more of the FOAF specification stuff of course, but there's a fancy new date picker (Thanks jQuery-UI!)
The design is very retro, very 70s I would say...at least in terms of the colours. The striped background reminds me of the swimshorts I bought that also have racing stripes. Obviously the design is solid because of this, heh.
Some details...
The following is a snippet for LaTeX mode in Emacs. The snippet uses the wonderful YASnippet package and inserts the date of the poem being written and a tiny bit of LaTeX around it.
;; LaTeX snippets
(yas/define-snippets
'latex-mode ; Snippet is available when in LaTeX mode
'(
("poem" ; Keyword that will trigger the snippet
; The snippet itself
; (Each newline can be replaced with \n to make the snippet fit on one line)
"\\begin{verse}
\\poemtitle{${1:untitled}}
% Written on ${2:$(format-time-string \"%e %B %Y\")}
$0
\\end{verse}
"
"begin verse ..." ; Name of the snippet
nil)
)
)
