Caveat Lector

Someone else who doesn’t think Steven Pinker is where it’s at.

I sure don’t, but I’ve felt myself to be in a vanishingly small minority, and since I don’t have a rigorous refutation I’ve kept my mouth shut.

I have finally made it through all of Shell’s RDF book. Yay me. I’m not quite done yet, because I want to skim back through for higher-level suggestions, but the worst of the slogging is over.

The last chapter I read (no link, ’cuz will eventually be taken down), chapter 14, contained an Easter egg: my clownish little self is a test case for FOAF. (And I don’t even have a FOAF file up! Shall finally, reluctantly, have to fix that.)

Tech-book in-jokes go way back. Most tech books have them. I didn’t know about this until I read DeRose and Durand’s Making Hypermedia Work (well, as much of it as I could get through) and suddenly realized that David (Durand), Steve (DeRose), Elli (Mylonas), and Allen (Renear) were all friends of mine.

I honestly never thought I’d be a tech-book in-joke. Aside from my usual irritation at potential immortality, it’s not so bad.

Right. Need a FOAF file, stat. Working on it.

A quick ego-cruise through various who’s-linking-to-you services on Friday spurred a slightly off-center take on the oft-lamented “invisibility of competing ideas” in the blogsphere. Briefly stated, the argument goes that like links to like, and that’s a bad thing because we all could stand a little added perspective.

Well, yeah, but…

But we’re all multifaceted people, and a considerable percentage of us run multifaceted blogs. But we link to people because of a likeness in one facet; doesn’t mean we’re exactly alike in all other ways. But we don’t control who links to us. (At least we can’t; I hear that some people try.)

I found one or two people with CavLec on their blogrolls who quite frankly creep the heck out of me. I don’t think I’d like them if I met them. I know they wouldn’t like me. Yet somehow some facet reflected a bit of light in a pleasing way—and because of that, the entirety of CavLec got blogrolled, not just the one facet.

Take the warblogger I happened across, for instance. (No, not gonna link; don’t want to do something that could be construed as a personal attack.) S/he got my participation in the peace march right in the face last weekend. S/he probably didn’t want to hear it, and it’s certainly not the reason s/he blogrolled CavLec, but there it was anyway.

I don’t doubt, by the way, that one or two people on my blogroll have come to CavLec and had precisely the same reaction. Who is this neurotic lunatic-left geek freak and why is she linking to me?

That’s how differing perspectives travel in the blogsphere. It isn’t through principled détente with opposing viewpoints. It’s through the ordinary rubbing-together of ordinarily complex people. And I suspect it happens more often than we guess.

Actually made inroads into my things-to-do list today. Got the taxes mailed. Got a Christmas present for a special New Zealander mailed. (Yeah, Christmas present. You see what happens when stuff hits my to-do list.) Did the grocery shopping, and didn’t forget cat litter.

Got myself an eye appointment for a few weeks from now. Called the HMO for a physical (David will simply have to schedule his own; I don’t know what his daily hours are any more, as he spends in the library those he doesn’t spend in class or teaching).

Oh, yeah, the wonderful States health care system. Prompt service and all that. Today is February 21. Guess when my routine physical is scheduled. Go on, guess.

May 12. May freakin’ twelfth. I’m just calling myself lucky that I’ll still be insured at that point!

I’m gonna get things ready for a Movable Type 2.6 install and the promised Ravings redesign, and do that annoying tax form I’ve been putting off. Then I think I may call it a day. Shell won’t mind if I put off reading the remaining three chapters of her book one more day; she’s out walking and taking pretty pictures.

Read this week’s XML-Deviant for a recap of rumblings about XML in publishing that sound not a little like mine. As usual, Simon St. Laurent’s insights into the causes of things reward perusal also.

Something XML editors (software, not human) other than perhaps Topologi have thus far utterly failed to comprehend is the division of labor in publishing—indeed, division of labor at all.

Simon St. Laurent (in the above-linked xml-dev post) notes that his authors can be persuaded to use Word paragraph styles, but they consistently miss appropriate character styles. I can say from experience that Shell falls neatly into this pattern.

Look. This kind of thing isn’t and shouldn’t be an author’s job. It’s editorial work. EDITORIAL WORK. I didn’t bother fixing Shell’s manuscript because I simply assumed that O’Reilly had style-fixers on editorial staff, the way we did at Impressions (and I did plenty of style-fixing myself back in the day, which is why I noticed such niceties in Shell’s work).

Even if authors do do the work, they aren’t going to do it at the same time they’re writing. Welcome to massive PITA. Who wants to stop in the middle of a sentence to style two words’ worth of cross-reference or bibliographic data or genus-species name or code or whatever? It’s got to be a separate pass. Got to be.

Moreover, the tool and UI needs for the markup/styling pass are different. The ideal tool for this, in my opinion, would be able to lock down the text against accidental change or deletion—absolutely not something you want while actually writing. Precise control over text selection is essential—Word’s cute trick of selecting the space after a word when the word itself is selected by double-click must be eradicated (and personally I’d like to see the coder who created it land in Davy Jones’s locker, but that’s me).

And some UI work needs to be done so that character-[style|markup] changes are easily visible. Word’s style-report toolbar gizmo needs to be split into two, for one thing; it’s absurd that it’s not possible to check both the paragraph and character styles for a given span of text at once. In a markup context, I think I’d want XPath-on-the-fly, that is, an immediate look at all parent elements back to the root.

Current editors absolutely suck at making common editing tasks easier, too, even when they could, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Recognizing and styling/marking-up common patterned character spans could save oodles of effort. Take, for example, bibliographic references in-text. It does not take much knowledge of regular expressions to find (Smith 1990). Sure, I know, variations on a theme—tool won’t be flawless and will take a bit of work to code up. Even so. Every editor I’ve ever known would vastly prefer checking the computer’s work to having to do the styling or markup him/herself.

And consider the possibilities! Editors have to check every single such citation against the bibliography, and they likewise have to be sure that everything in the bibliography gets cited somewhere. My auto-markupper could easily check what it finds against the bibliography and flag potential problems. What a huge saving of effort!

I think there’s an editing gizmo out there that does some of these things, in the specific context of sci-tech-med editing. I forget its name. I hope it’s making as much money as it deserves to. What I want to know is why more XML software isn’t investigating and coding up enhancements like this.

Never mind. I know already. It’s because they don’t understand and don’t care to. Bah. I wish I could make these people sit down with real human editors for a month or so. There’d be a quantum leap in markup tools afterwards, I guarantee it.

Yet another reason to do exercise at work: motion-sensing light controls.

In my office, if the motion sensor doesn’t sense any motion in the room in a five-minute stretch, the lights turn off. Fingers on keyboards and turning of heads are not sufficient motion to reset it.

Which means that every once in a while we get plunged into darkness. Happens to me pretty frequently just after I get in and sit down, as I’m always the first to arrive.

Waving an arm at the thing turns the lights back on—but hey, damp down its sensitivity a little and we’d have a wonderful spur to do some aerobics.

Rich Keir has a cogent rundown of the Madison mayoral race. I voted for Cieslewicz (whaddaya know, spelled it right first try!), though I totally dug Zipperer’s polyglot campaign literature (English, Spanish, and Hmong). I liked Cieslewicz’s environmental and transit positions, and I wanted to give him a boost.

Like Rich, I’d’ve been boiled in oil before I voted for Sue Bauman again. Rich doesn’t mention her tendency to roll over before developers, but he gets everything else about her right. Wish I’d known before I voted for her the first time.

It’s not that she’s not a smart and capable woman; she is, and I hope she finds work that suits her capabilities. Unfortunately, she’s got approximately the people sense and emotional reactivity that I do, and that is not a commendable thing in a politician. Her concession speech, what I heard of it, was plain flat-out petulant.

Like Rich again, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do now. I admire Soglin’s record, and I admire Cieslewicz’s principles and would very much like to see what he and County Executive Kathleen Falk (who endorsed him in the primary) can do together. Two genuinely excellent candidates. Madison is lucky.

Oo ee, look what I found! The complete Scarlet Pimpernel books! My fave guilty pleasure!

I can’t tell you how many secondhand bookstores and libraries I’ve scoured for these books. They just plain don’t exist as ink on paper.

Must… not… read… now. Too much to do.

Bloody tempting, however.

So Shell’s coded up a new toy whereby all comments signed by a specific person can be inspected en masse. Whose name should appear at the top of her list of people but… and it sure ain’t an alphabetic list.

I whimpered. I really did. See Bb’s comments if you don’t believe me.

No, this is a little different from my normal self-deprecation. It’s a—a kind of a personal perspective thing. I don’t expect anyone else to get it.

I got out of the self-conscious-teenager stage of my life with the abrupt realization that I was one person among billions living and uncountable dead, and in the light of that nothing I did or that was done to me really truly mattered all that much. It is perhaps a measure of how wretchedly self-conscious I was (worse than I am now, honest) that I embraced this nihilistic anonymity wholeheartedly.

And I still do. I have no urge to immortality, none, not even to documentary immortality; rather the opposite. I strongly dislike having pictures taken of myself. A significant drawback I see to CavLec is that it may in fact survive in such places as the Wayback Machine long after I stop maintaining the site—perhaps even after I am dead.

I must rely upon being lost in the crowd, I suppose, for my hope of oblivion. Not such a vain hope; that comforts me. Even Google will eventually consign me to twentieth-result-page oblivion.

An odd cast of mind for a future librarian, I admit, especially one with serious interests in electronic-data preservation. Look, I didn’t say this was rational, just deeply-felt. I don’t want to persist past my lifetime. I don’t want social historians or anthropologists or (heaven forfend!) lit-critters pawing through my life, not now and certainly not after I have stopped living it.

Odd for a blogger, too; all I can say for myself is that I write for the moment, and archive more from custom than anything else (save that I do occasionally reread my own writing, here and elsewhere). These are not memoirs; they are sand castles, waiting for high tide.

Irrelevance, impermanence, mortality—these are my feeble defenses against a potentially crippling sense of worthlessness, futility. I cling to a false nihilism to save myself from the genuine article. Illogical, probably stupid, but that’s how I function.

I haven’t weighed in on the Digital ID wars, but a significant aspect of my strongly-felt distaste for the whole idea does have to do with it chipping away yet more chances at personal impermanence, warding off the kindly waves from my little sand castles.

I hesitate to draw the comparison, much though I feel it, and I hope any Buddhist readers will forgive me: it is as if a sand mandala, built with painstaking care precisely to be swept away, were fixed for display in a museum. Just a wrongness, that momentary minutiae should gather themselves together into a heavy, muddy trail leading straight back to me.

Which brings me back to Shell (who, I feel compelled to say, is of course utterly innocent of any intent to harm, and who has not really harmed me at all in any case). Now my comments, even more ephemeral in intent and execution than my own blog, are becoming solid, persistent, potentially permanent records. I guess I can live with it; I have to. But I’ll still whimper.

(Er. I seem to have started answering Burningbird’s question before she got around to asking it. Wasn’t intentional. Does, I hope, throw a new spotlight on the Semantic Web, however—and why some of us may eventually busy ourselves tossing dust in its eyes.)

Has anyone used Cheetah who’s willing to share their experiences with it?

I’ve had it to here and beyond with hand-maintaining sites; Movable Type has spoiled me forever. So I want to move textartisan.com to something I can live with as part of its redesign. Didn’t want to use MT because I don’t speak Perl; didn’t want to use PHP because I don’t speak that either (though I hear it’s not hard).

I was thinking about Vellum, but it’s so blogging-oriented I was a little leery, as textartisan is not a blog—plus I’m a bit of a conservative, preferring to use stuff that isn’t going to change as quickly as I expect Vellum will.

Cheetah, like Vellum, is Python-based. I don’t expect to do anything especially complex with it; all I really need to start with is basic markup-snippet inclusion with maybe some conditional class values here and there.

Looks like a good system, but I’d like to hear about experiences and possible alternatives.