zia

Been working at a startup for the past year. Programmer tools (compiler/assembler, etc) in Ruby, for a weird massively parallel, mostly dataflow machine. Fun and interesting, but leaving little time for blogging anywhere, especially in New Zealand.
Deb and I got to do a quintessentially California weekend a couple of days ago -- the annual lavender festival at Matanzas Vineyard, dinner at the Jack London lodge, wine and cheese tasting both days, and then back to Saratoga Sunday night for a picnic with a fabulous south bay view, and concert at the Mountain Winery.

"Happily, we're entering a world in which expertise isn't merely an assertion, it's a transparently discoverable reality."

(in a piece about old media vs new media, which also takes note of the neologism "pajamahideen").
And the screencast about Tibco's javascript-based "General Interface" is pretty astounding to watch.

Jeremy Ruston's Tiddlywiki is bubbling up into the ranks of del.icio.us/popular, mostly due to Nathan Bowers' adaptation of it to GTD, David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system. Heck, even I wrote about it!

I have seen a few folks slightly bemoaning the fact that tiddlywiki's self-contained nature (ONE single html-and-javascript file is all it needs) means that there is no server-side component. That is, you can't easily make it save itself onto an everywhere-accessible server. But hmmm... gmail exists and google's gmail servers are accessible and gmail clients exist that make gmail just look like a big filesystem.

So here's the next step in that story: marry a gmailFS-like back end into the one-html-file tiddlywiki, and voila! It should be fairly simple to make its server side live as gmail messages.

Has anyone out there done this yet? Does this count as a lazyweb request? Time will tell...

I made some changes in Joachim Durchholz' wiki about the Links Programming language. I wrote about LinksPL here, and I'm trying to create a few http references (I can't call them links in this entry, now can I?) that refer to the language using the name LinksPL instead, to make it more easily Google-able. Unfortunately, there isn't really any "there" there -- aside from Wadler's Blog, there isn't yet an official LinksPL page anywhere.
Anyway, the page I added was a survey of other similar efforts -- programming languages and libraries oriented towards creating Web Applications, including XML handling libraries and languages that incorporate XML as part of their syntax. I had made a similar survey on the late, lamented, always inaccessible Pyscerocha; now there's a much abridged version here in the Links wiki.

The Ceanothus are in bloom, all along the freeway ramps in The Valley of the Heart's Delight. Spring is just around the corner. Meanwhile:

Ajax

I've been doing some reading about Ajax...

• my del.icio.us
• del.ajax
• an ajax toolkit mostly to make XMLHttpRequest easier to use
• Steve Yen's Trimpath has some templates with a wiki-like syntax (Javascript Templates), a Javascript database (TrimQuery), and a lightweight spreadsheet engine!
• I had encountered BeyondJS last year or the previous one, via Dan Shappir on LtU
• And there is a Javascript weblog (about Javascript, not all written in Javascript).

Markup

... and also reading about the profusion of different wiki and weblog markup styles (see http://del.icio.us/scruzia/markup

Home

Got the floor done and the new bed delivered, but haven't yet moved the mattress onto it. Damn motion-sensor light is still stuck permanently on. Worked great for about two or three weeks, then after a heavy rain, I think something got shorted out.

Family

Deb's Dad had surgery today; she was up in Sacramento to see him and other family. And my folks are heading off to Lihue for a couple of months, so I plan to be visiting them in Tahoe for a few days, next week, so I can drive them to the airport.

Dogs

Partly because of the surgery, Henrike is back with us, so we're back up to four dogs. She was at the tail (so to speak) end of being in heat, and that was driving Rome'o crazy. He's still a bit too young to accomplish anything with her at this stage; I hope we still have them both next time she's ready.

Walking

Been doing a pretty regular two miles a day most days, either most of the way around HP, or south towards I-280, to Jenny Strand Park, in a quiet little low-traffic neighborhood (nearly a complex of cul-de-sacs).

I had written up a set of thoughts about "my" markup syntax, and I thought it was here on the laptop, but I seem to have lost it. Bummer. Guess I'll just go re-write it up onto the mac.

Aha, finally found it ("JS-play/dlxp/WikiThots"). Time to shoot it up ovwer to the mac so I can start writing it in Scala.

(On edit: I wrote it in Python, as a proof-of-concept. Still wish to translate into Scala, maybe change the parsing to use ANTLR.)

And oh, man, does that suck (having your control characters all screwed up) when your most commonly used editor is Emacs. But anyway...
I spent almost all of Monday laying down laminate flooring in our garage. Cutting the pieces to fit around the bifold closet door anchors, around the moldings, the doorway (not even close to square). Yeee-ick. While I'm almost always interested to learn new things, it's somewhat unfortunate to realize that I'm committed to learning a new skill that I strongly hope never to have to use again! Oh well, just another hour or two and it'll be done.

I've used my own custom keyboard layout since about 1982. I wrote a bit about it on GIGO. As usual, it all Just Works on the Mac (even through many of the weekly Rhapsody releases of the very early Mac OS X Server). And it's not too hard to get something to work well enough under X-windows on Solaris. So, as usual, it's Windows that sucks. I've run Windows XP on my laptop for a couple of years, and found the easy way to set things up, via the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\KeyboardLayout registry entry. Unfortunately, that alters the keyboard for all users. My wife want to use the laptop sometimes, so I just wanted to create my own per-user layout.
So I found Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator. Kinda works, and it's OK for the letters, but it doesn't seem to have any documented support for doing what I want with the control characters. Oh, well, maybe I'll figure out what's broken about it once I care about it a little more.

Earlier this evening, I heard a commercial on TV, and it included words from an old Mamas and Papas song ...

"You gotta go where you wanna go
Do what you wanna do
With whoever you wanna do it with..."

And, though I appreciate the free-spirit message of the song, my strongest immediate reaction was "... that's 'with WHOMever...'..."

Is it hopeless? Is there a 12-step program for over-prescriptive subconscious, automatic grammarians? 50-step?

So I set up Kimbly's DiamondWiki, and the amazing Javascript-based TiddlyWiki, on my home server. Some very vague talk here about plans. Although I have Webware up and running, I don't seem to have a use for it yet; the wiki things work fine as simple CGIs. Maybe I'll need that in order to self-host a commenting/forum system.
I want to combine the snazzy eye-catching Javascript animations and one-page look that Tiddly has, with the faceted stuff that diamond does. (And add the simpler del.icio.us-like boolean tags.)

I gave the name "zia" to this weblog partly because my wife and I had made several visits to New Mexico (mostly Santa Fe), starting with the first ACM C++ conference (1987, I think), where I first met Michael Tiemann and Bjarne Stroustrup.
My wife and I spent the past five days in Santa Fe (since Thanksgiving (Thursday the 25th)) -- just needed to get away for a bit. Drove up towards Tesuque Sunday night, to try to locate the spot of land that we chose not to buy then. Got a nice snowfall on Sunday night. We got some of my favorite kind of slightly incongruous photos -- of Santa Fe style houses with the protruding poles (Vegas) covered with snow, or the adobe walls lined with snow. Or the roof-drains of those kinds of buildings, having icicles hanging from them.
Hopefully. I'll get those photos up somewhere, one of these days.

Ever since I got DSL a month or two ago (it had only come to
Ben Lomond last November), I've been going back and forth about
whether it would be better to try some decent web-hosting company
(I'm thinking, say, around 3 Gb of space and a very python-oriented
collection of server-side facilities, for, oh, five or ten bucks a
month) ... or to make my Mac into its own server.

There are some experiments underway in the latter mode. I got a
cool, zia-related dyndns name, zia _dot_ mine (dot) nu , but
haven't yet set up either the server nor even my Energy Saver
settings. I'm still leery of having the machine up and running
at all times -- power in Ben Lomond is still only a "most of the
time" thing -- but maybe having the monitor off and the disks spin
down will make it unobtrusive enough. Hope it doesn't bother the
dogs -- they sleep in that room.