Month: October 2003

Eclipse live diff

You can now configure your text editor to show changes from the latest revision in the CVS repository. Not only can you see your changes, you can back out of them without leaving your editor. You turn this feature on with the Select Quick Diff Reference command found in the context menu for the left-hand ruler of a text editor; choose Latest CVS Revision.

in eclipse 3.0 M4
plus, you gotta love their sense of humor: While “The Terminator” has been formulating his conquest of California, the Eclipse team has managed to remain undistracted and come through with their fourth milestone build of the Eclipse 3.0 development cycle.

Mindmap to outline

continuing with my mindmanager x5 experiments, i wrote XSLT that converts the native mindmanager xml format to OPML. as it turns out,
if you disregard the presentational information that mindmanager stores for each node, the 2 formats are quite alike. it was very easy to convert from one to the other.
i have yet to do the inverse, opml2mindmanager. i guess i could figure out the minimal requirements for the mindmanager xml representation, but i will probably wait until mindjet releases their mindmanager x5 developer docs. you’d want to round trip to make this useful beyond satisfying your inner geek.
i always liked outlines, being very much a list person, but when i discovered mind mapping software, something clicked. i realized that i could harness latent visualization skills to help with retention of ideas. my clumsiness with analog media had prevented me from experimenting with mind maps earlier. not so with mindmanager.
the biggest improvement of mind maps over outlines is the ability to relate nodes in a mind map to each other. also of interest, embellishing a mind map with visual clues. i know that some outliner let you attach links to a node, but unless i am missing something, there can only be one link per node.
i am not yet sure what i will use this XSLT for. here are some ideas:

  • export mind maps as outlines (obvious)
  • annotate imported OPML blogrolls
  • prototype sitemaps (though i am not sure if any CMS besides the userland products uses OPML for that)
  • aggregate with other XML data (RSS, FOAF etc)

mindmanager ships with some XML aggregation samples, such as the ability to associate RSS feeds with certain nodes in the mind map. upon first glance, it struck me as a toy, but i am sure they are only scratching the surface there. mac users have had software to correlate feeds, contacts, bookmarks, pictures etc for a while, but i am not sure if these products hit a sweet spot just yet. then again, they exude cool, and that is reason enough 🙂
i am pretty confident that interesting stuff like XTM support will fall into place quickly once mindjet builds upon it’s quite active community and encourages it to innovate. being of the geek tribe, i am not very often prepared to pay for software (with all the open source solutions out there), but i gladly pay for mindmanager.
anyway, let me know if you think this is hot area, or have ideas for exploration.

A dying breed

nerds with attitude problems, a dying breed

Yeah, I have no social skills. I’m what you would call a dork or a nerd. But that’s ok, because i’m not here to be please everybody.

i have run into my share of people with that attitude. here is the antidote. elke, take note 🙂

on this day in 1660

I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major- general Harrison hanged, drawn; and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross.

some bloggers have more interesting experiences than others.

Fusing math and art

A 22-year-old MIT professor whose work fuses art, science, work and play is the recipient of a $500K MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the genius grant. Assistant Professor Erik Demaine of electrical engineering and computer science – who last month was called one of the most brilliant scientists in America by Popular Science magazine – is one of the youngest people ever selected for the fellowship and the youngest of the 24 named this year.

interesting combination of approaches. there is so much to explore here.

Enforcing netiquette

Paradoxic: so given your apparent dislike for forums, you have never found any useful information off forum ?
Paradoxic: I find myself discovering a wealth of information off forums almost everyday
gregorrothfuss: i guess the kind of info i am looking for is not on forums
gregorrothfuss: and your in the business of caring about forums
gregorrothfuss: so that figures
Paradoxic: you have never found anything from a forum tho /
gregorrothfuss: well, maybe some posts from the googleguy
gregorrothfuss: but since most forums have horrible urls they are not indexed
gregorrothfuss: so how would i find the gems
Paradoxic: what is your solution for forums then
Paradoxic: there needs to be a way for communities to discuss
gregorrothfuss: forums are ok for nebies
gregorrothfuss: because novice web users do not realize they use the medium ineffectively
gregorrothfuss: if you work on the web all day, you appreciate better tools
Paradoxic: i don’t wanna argue with you on it, just seeing what solution is more effective
Paradoxic: mailing lists aren’t
gregorrothfuss: yeah
gregorrothfuss: mailing lists suck too
Paradoxic: you waste a shitload of time downloading useless crap
gregorrothfuss: for different reasons
gregorrothfuss: and blogs suck for yet other reasons
gregorrothfuss: i think you can do a lot with netiquette
gregorrothfuss: if you have good titles, concise posts, forums work well
gregorrothfuss: same for mailing lists
gregorrothfuss: i would focus on educating people how to use the tools properly
gregorrothfuss: seems the best ROI
gregorrothfuss: i wonder if tools can be made to enforce netiquette
gregorrothfuss: for instance, it should not be possible to send email without a subject
gregorrothfuss: that is just plain broken

cms lessons from the best of the intranet

This year’s winning intranet designs emphasized workflow support, self-service content management, and offloading tasks from email to collaboration tools. On average, companies spent 3 years between redesigns, and 1 year on the redesign itself.

conclusions:

  • move from top-down publishing to bottom-up: more weblog, aggregation technology, xml fragment support, xlink leverage
  • reduce email load, make it easy to use intranet as part of PIM
  • provide rss feeds for workflow to do lists
  • enable trackbacks on any content type