---

Whooo-boy! Yessir, nothing like reading old files to get a sense of how one has come to be the person one has come to be! If my old collection of HyperNews related items was not enough of a chocker *waves and shouts to Daniel LaLiberte; may he always drink deep and prosper*, I found another directory full of items relating to *what else?* topoi. What is this about? Well, let me tell you about my theory of how strange attractors play a role in the cognitive processes of conceptualization. !now. Okay, instead, let me share this with you ... I had a local copy of this item, which is still alive on the web!

This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 68) - October 29, 1995, by John Baez

Okay, now the time has come to speak of many things: of topoi, glueballs, communication between branches in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, knots, and quantum gravity.
1) Robert Goldblatt, Topoi, the Categorial Analysis of Logic, Studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics vol. 98, North-Holland, New York, 1984.
If you've ever been interested in logic, you've got to read this book. Unless you learn a bit about topoi, you are really missing lots of the fun. The basic idea is simple and profound: abstract the basic concepts of set theory, so as to define the notion of a "topos", a kind of universe like the world of classical logic and set theory, but far more general!"

Isn't that wonderful?! I feel like I've discovered that my clansmen have not all died off! *blush*

Now, it's just a matter of relating this back to BPML/N and SMBmetta.

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

What a hoot! I noticed an old directory in the faculty account that Dalhousie University has very kindly allowed me to keep active (given a dual-boot box, I really and truly would be making more progress on my "VRML in Ethology" project, honest!) ... this dates back to early '97. In among the dusty links I found this sweetheart:

Taking the High Road to Institutional Self-Promotion
Many organizations are coming to see the Worldwide Web's revolutionary potential for presenting accurate and useful information about themselves -- data, for example, on their missions, businesses, cultures, and competencies -- to key audiences that can directly influence their continued success and prosperity.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme!

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

 posted Thursday, January 16, 2003 at 6:03 pm MST

---

Following the "copyright" thread [1, 2, and 3 good links thanks to Doc Searls], I came across this bit of RealAudio, an NPR column by David Weinberger that could well be entitled "It's just email. Point being, of course, that it isn't just email ... it's something like discourse!

* A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discourse Analysis
* Roland Barthes - The Discourse of History
* The Internet and Public Discourse by Phil Agre at FirstMonday
* Technologies of the Self: Foucault and Internet Discourse

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

WebReference posted a short update on 9JAN that slipped past me: Safari Roundup / Usability ROI

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

 posted Wednesday, January 15, 2003 at 10:45 pm MST

---

*sigh* I just adjusted my style sheet; consequence? the horizontal rules in the right sidebar have all gone to 100%, and archive links have disappeared. !crap!

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

You'd think that republishing archives would force those old pages to use the new template, right? And, in fact, you'd be correct. And you'd think that when the changes were incorporated you'd end up with archive pages that look like the most recent, right? ... !Ha! ... you probably think software is deterministic!! *Geeeeeeeeeeeezus*

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

Okay ... date/time stamp looks great, archive list is complete, even my counter is working. Sooooo, lets just say the system was being adjusted, ok? (I got a database ODBC error when trying to save the template at one point ... "database full" *yikes* ... so this is possibly true.) But the problem remains: dare I go into Edit Template and risk blowing everything away?

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

 posted Tuesday, January 14, 2003 at 11:53 pm MST

---

On 7JAN03, in my little item on Apple chooses ''Safari'', I wrote. "A choice of browsers ... hunh ... Given that I've never and will never use IE, that's truly novel concept for me! So, it comes to this, then: shall I use Mozilla 1.2.1? or Phoenix 0.5? .... ummmm, I think the latest Phoenix nightly is the order of the day."
For the record, I've been using Mozilla 1.3a since then ... sweet.

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

I've recovered archives, which is a Good Thing.
From this evening's experience I know that, if I go back to edit the template, it will 1) destroy the contents of the right sidebar (either the text, or the archive script, or bits and pieces of both) and/or 2) destroy the counter script I've put in. Life's like that, I know ... but I'm not convinced it has to be.

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

N.B.: my blogger.com template has been thrashed /yet again/ ... image gone, counter gone ... *sigh*

Eric Meyer takes the XTML2.0 controversy (best expressed in Mark Pilgrim's rant) head on, coming down on a good point:

"I'm broadly sympathetic with their frustrations, but since I was never that thrilled with XHTML in the first place, I can't get too worked up about the breaks between 1.x and 2.0. I never really got why HTML had to be reformulated as XML. [...] I do broadly agree that XHTML 2.0 is way too unrealistic for its own good. It outright drops too many things authors find useful, [...] On the other hand, if this stuff was deprecated instead of eliminated, I'd have many fewer points of concern about XHTML 2.0..

[G]iven that you can take XML and CSS and create your own documents out of whatever markup language you can invent, and use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones, I find XHTML to be of minor import. If it gets too ivory, then it will be ignored, and some other XML-based language will take it place. Or, more likely, lots of markup languages. Either way it will be interesting, and the XHTML 2.0 advocates won't be able to blame anyone else for the explosion of non-interoperable languages. Which, I suppose, is the point of all the sturm und drang of late. If XHTML 2.0 were interoperable with XHTML 1.1, people wouldn't be nearly so upset.

Wow... all this concern over making things work together. Can it be that the Web is all growed up?"

In a good long piece on XHTML2 in his Daily Report, Jeffrey Zeldman opines that " "The problem is one of nomenclature rather than hubris or stupidity."

"The W3C seemed to have abandoned the notion that the web could move forward without breaking what we already know and use. Standards had been a lie. The sky was falling.[...] Next day I realized the sky was not falling. W3C does have a problem, but it can be fixed. [...]

My hope is that the language I know as XHTML will continue to be gently upgraded in parallel with that different, alternate markup language.
The standards I use every day work for me, and I owe most of them to W3C. I’m giving that organization the benefit of the doubt—and telling them my concerns about XHTML 2.0."

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

 posted Monday, January 13, 2003 at 10:33 pm MST

---

Creative Commons, "little or no significance". YAGT! ... that's "yet another gauntlet thrown" [@ hfx_ben 14JAN03 01:30AST ... j/k]

Dan Gilmor gets his wrist slapped for supporting Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons by TechCentralStation's Arnold Kling in his 13JAN03 TCS: Tech - Content Is Crap

"While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I do not. It has little or no significance, because it is based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view of how content intermediaries function. The Commons enthusiasts believe that content publishers earn their profits by using copyright law to steal content from its creators and charge extortionary prices to consumers."

[the heads up on this from mike and the folks at techdirt.com, where they have a discussion on this item]

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

Blogs refine enterprise focus by InfoWorld's Cathleen Moore begins, "Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies.

XpertWeb's Manifesto for a New Economy conceptualizes things wonderfully: "The Internet is a conversation. Work and its Reward is primarily a conversation about quality: money is just the punch line. The quality of the work-reward conversation, not money, is the best benchmark for a 'New' Economy."

And in the cluetrain manifesto we're treated to this: "A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter faster than most companies."

An introductory sidebar reads

"This Site Declared A Read-Only Landmark -   When we created Cluetrain.com in April, 1999, it kicked up some dust. A few thousand people signed their endorsement of the ideas. Lots of email, lots of press coverage. This is the site as it existed then. The conversations continue elsewhere. Please read and enjoy. But don't tap on the glass as it just annoys the animals."

This is followed by a shortlist of bloggers [the animals?]: "To catch up with the site's creators: Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger."

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

 posted Sunday, January 12, 2003 at 11:33 pm MST

---

The UK Register reports that Norwegian courts have rendered judgement: DVD decoder Johansen did no wrong. Kewl. More on this "real soon now". [thanks to h2odragon and kuro5hin for this. h_b]

On the Sematic Web front [no secondary links right now ... it's 02:20 and I'm pooped. h_b]: In Attention MovableType users! the creator of Idle Words writes:

"I am working on a semantic search engine plugin for Movable Type. The technique I have been working with, called latent semantic analysis, uses linear algebra to examine patterns of word use across many blog entries and make intelligent guesses about the topics those entries cover."

(As well as having an interesting project and some tasty items, the guy is reading Joseph Heller's Something Happened right now!)

On a different thread entirely, Conservative Columnists Bruce Bartlett on blogging. (Earlier this evening I came across an item on libertarian hawks ... dynamical systems indeed!)

Here's the item that moved me to blog at this ungawdly hour after so long online: if we drive someone offline by linkiing to them, shouldn't we arrange that they get served with higher bandwidth capabality? Set up a tip jar somewhere ...

Web sites can in effect get disappeared by their popularity; getting linked by the likes of Slashdot and Kuro5hin, can bring down the server that isn't ready for massive hits. (I've often told friends that if they think failure is hard to cope with, then they really aren't prepared to handle success!) Exceeding bandwidth can result in suspension of service. It can easily drive up costs. [thanks to zonker for the kuro5hin item "Ethics of Linkage". h_b]

An online book: KDE 2.0 Development - Andamooka Reader Table of Contents

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---

---

!Headline! Exposure to Mozilla world shocks Mac thinker into sensibility!

Yes, of course that's silly. But how else to explain this bit of sophomoric cant? (Alright ... over-paid hot-house dot-com sophists on phurlough. Yes, there is that.)

dive into mark "How to hide CSS from Safari" reads, in part:
Recently, I floated the idea that perhaps Safari should be intentionally buggy in parsing CSS, in order to leave a backdoor for web designers. [??!] Of those who thought it was a bad idea, arguments fell broadly into two categories:
1) “We had enough buggy CSS rendering in Netscape 4; modern browsers should render perfectly.” This is true, but it is not an argument against my proposal. My proposal was about bugs in CSS parsing, not CSS rendering. Obviously Safari should properly render all the CSS it finds; the only question is whether it should intentionally not find some of it. [Obviously. But what an inarticulate way of explicating what has been so thorougly discussed in the explanation of Moz's "quirks" mode.]
2) “Web designers should just code to standards and not make concessions for buggy browsers.” Um, OK, you’re certainly free to do that on your own site. Meanwhile, over here in the real world, half a million people have downloaded Safari in the last 48 hours, I’m getting 1000 Safari visitors a day, and my site looks like this. [ohhh for *&^@$# ... see above]

It's gratifying to see that people are coming to grips with what is under their feet. I hope we don't have to reward them too highly for their having coined the working concept of "ground".

---

0 comments   |  

<>

---