jerakeen.org

created 29 February 2008 in links tagged paradox, philosophy and sorites.

All arguments on the internet are merely re-statements of something the greeks came up with. Smart guys.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/

created 06 August 2007 in blog tagged philosophy, urls and web.

jerakeen.org contains just about everything I produce, and I try to use sensible urls - every page has a unique url, of the form /category/slug/ or /category/yyyy/mm/dd/slug/. The index for a category is just /category/. Pages have tags, and you can see all pages belonging to a tag at /tags/tagname/ as well. You can search using /search?q=search_term. Finally, you can get a feed of any category at a /category-name/feed page.

Enough back-story. This system is just about sensible, but only because it’s so simple, and even then there are odd bits. For instance, why category/feed? Why not feed/category? Why does the search page have a CGI parameter in it, but not the tag pages? Suppose I wanted an RSS feed of pages tagged with ‘python’, what would that URL look like? /feed/tag/python? /tag/python/feed/? Feed types are not sub-headings under categories. The single-page permalinks make sense, but why do they encode only the category, date and slug? Why not the tags?

read more (326 words)..

created 01 June 2006 in links tagged hivemind and philosophy.

On Hive minds, and aggregated content, and why it sucks. Ironically, I’m deliciousing the link. I like to think that this is because I don’t care about the agregation ability of delicious.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html

created 13 February 2006 in links tagged games, mmorpg and philosophy.

http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/FracturedReality.htm

created 19 January 2006 in links tagged internet and philosophy.

because it’s good, albeit cheesy

http://lesscode.org/2005/07/21/motherhood-and-apple-pie/

created 17 October 2005 in links tagged philosophy and specs.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs

created 09 October 2005 in links tagged philosophy and programming.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7996

created 13 August 2004 in blog tagged macos, philosophy and windows.

There was a throw-away comment by Dan Hill in an article on Elite about the desktop metaphor and the workarounds we have to use to make it work. Now, I don’t think exposé is a work-around. I think it’s the most sophisticated window-management system I’ve ever used, it’s lovely. But it does hilight something that’s need nagging at me for a while. The Desktop.

Now, essentially, the desktop metaphor is broken. It’s not a desktop at all. It’s far too small, for a start, I’ve heard it described as the airplane seat metaphor. But the most important distinction is what’s underneath all your bits of paper. Suppose you have a real desk. Pick up all the things on it and look underneath them. What do you see? You’ve got a completely blank desk. Ok, now hide all your windows and things from your computer ‘desktop’. Got a blank desk? No? Didn’t think so.

Eventually, everyone needs a hack in their windowing system so that they can get at the desktop. Windows has ‘Minimize All’, or in extreme cases, ‘Show desktop’ (there’s a difference between these two. Try explaining the difference to a non-geek). For me, Windows always seems neatest with all windows either maximized or minimized. The fact that the only graphical way of getting at your hard disk is the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop means that you need to be able to get at it easily. Mac OS X 10.2 and before never had a really good solution to get at the desktop. There are various third party hacks but the only decent way I ever used was to Command-Option-Click on the desktop, or Command-Option-H with the Finder focussed. This hides everything except Finder windows. Of course, if there are Finder windows blocking your desktop, you’re stuffed. Ah, well.

Exposé solves this - one button and all your windows get out the way. Yay! Finally they’ve solved a problem Windows solved 5 years ago. (Or whenever, I don’t care).

I’m tired of working round this. I can shuffle through all of my windows with Command-Tab, but I can’t get to the desktop without moving all the windows out the way? This is an annoying special case, and I don’t like it.

New philosophy. Nothing will go on the desktop. Nothing at all. I won’t display drives on it, I won’t save files on it. I’m going to change it’s permissions so that I can’t write to it. My default download folder will be a folder in my home directory. We’ll see how long I last before I go insane.

Update - I follow this up here