...more recent posts
Peep. Ping. Coming up for air. I think I've got the translation script working. This script walks the tree, starting at a given page of the old system, and translates all the posts into the new system. The hard part is that each post is itself the top node of a smaller tree which represents the downward cascading comments which may or may not be under each post. And these comments cascade down to an arbitrary and theoretically infinite depth. So that means lots of recursive functions (a loop of code that invokes another iteration of itself from inside the execution of that same loop.) This sort of thing is hard for me to grasp. And it can get out of control. (Remember way back in the day when I basically crashed that csoft server with some faulty perl code? That was a recursive function that never came out of its infundibular self invoking spiral.) There still might be some subtle bug in it, but I can't find one. This is the hardest thing I've ever written. Very interesting process. I wonder if people who are really trained work this same way. For me it's like having a conversation with the computer. Eventually I'm going to write something longer about this interesting phenomenon. I guess it's a dialectic. In any case, it lets me make things beyond myself. I don't know exactly how this script works, but I'm pretty sure it does. I figured it out, like I said, by having a conversation with the machine. Both of us (the machine and I, as it were) understand the script, but neither of us alone can understand the whole thing. Or something like that. Cool stuff.
So if I'm right, and it is working, it won't be too long now. First of May seems possible. Or, hey, the third is a Thrusday. That's a nice date.
To settle the wager from last night. Does 23% constitute ownership? In this case I'd say yes. 50 cents to Mr. Fink.
almost there...
The new Wired (May 2001, yes I still read it sometimes) has an interview with Larry Roberts, one of the creators of the internet, about his company Caspian Networks who are supposedly making a next generation router that will "kick Cisco's ass". Anyway, in the article he says the following:
"They're [cisco, juniper, avici] using hypercube or hypertoroid topology, so they're limited to six dimensions.... I've been able to take more steps, to go into n-dimensional space..."If anyone could explain to me how present network topology is in any way related to a hypertoroid (and you'll really have to explain because I'm a little rusty on my higher dimensional topology mathematics) it would be greatly appreciated. I know I know some people who could, but I don't think they're reading. Anyway, I love that shape and have always had the intuition (intuvision?) that it is important, but I don't know enough about these things. BUt that's the first time I've heard it mentioned.
Mmmm... higher dimensional doughnuts.
Rohit Khare (of knownow and foRK fame) on namespaces and the future of "postmodernist networking". Fairly technical.
O.K., I think the 'new post' feature is working again on my page. Let me know if it's not. Thanks.
Booknotes is talking about an idea to enable "block blogging" of important topics (where many people link to the same story from many individual personal sites.) I don't quite get it. I understand what people are after is some idea that certain news topics deserve to be widely covered (maybe things that specifically don't get covered in the mainstream) and that all these personal sites can help out by jumping on the bandwagon and all linking to the same stories. But isn't that exactly what happens already? Without any news feed apparatus? I remember when people used to think all the link overlap was a bad thing.
Paul Ford has been traveling in Israel and thinking about the Holocaust.
My friend J. wrote yesterday about us getting together, and I mailed him back saying I was around Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. The fact that it was already 6:00 pm on Wednesday probably made that email a little confusing. When we finally talked I could tell he had that "are you sure you're ok?" sound in his voice. Yes, I'm ok. Just been concentrating a little too much maybe. So what if I thought it was Monday yesterday.
"What we need now, McCloud argues, is new ideas for presenting comics digitally, which will inevitably emerge from many directions; but we'll also need new technologies to make digital delivery easier."