So I’m now modifying a tree control to support dragging. I’m rather thoroughly hooked on Laz, at least for the moment.. I think it has great possibilities for the future.
Is it perfect? No. but what is? As Lee once observed, there is a crack in everything.. that’s how the light gets in.
Thanks to the modern development of mental hospitals having computer terminals, we can now see postings from sheer when he’s crazy. Since apparently I have to spend some small portion of my life not entirely all there.. (we can hope that with the advent of my new, less chemically enhanced life these will be fewer and further between, but this may not in fact be the case, it’s difficult to say).. but somehow it amuses me to no end that I have LJ posts from when I was crazy
I have LJ posts from when my memory wasn’t even sequencing anything remotely close to right. This is just *funny*.
We’re coming up on four years of Sheer LJ – I wish that I’d been introduced to the concept earlier than that, as I do find looking back over my LJ enlightening at times. I suppose if I were really ont he ball, I would have been one of those kids who kept a diary.. but I’ve always been too busy poking my nose into various bits of technology to do anything that sensical.
I should go browse on sourceforge and see what scary bits of software are being developed today.
Far too much to take in here..
Well, my playing with lazlo has lead to something that you might almost call a application. THat’s probably being overgenerous, but you all can decide for yourself here. Please bear in mind that I’ve only been writing the script for a couple of days, and there is a bit of a learning curve involved.
I guess the real trick, on another topic, of designing a utopia is that you have to design it for 6 billion people – *AND* it has to be opt-in. After all, it’s not much of a utopia if you’re forced to go there / participate in it. So, how does one manage to:
a: give 6 billion people everything they want
b: permit Earth to return to a stable state – while being able to support those 6 billion people
c: not permit any of them to infringe on the rights of any others
d: Permit them to communicate and share art and creations and whatnot
Hm.
This is harder than it looks.
I would observe that one thing that might help is if we had a ‘bill of rights for sentient creatures of Earth’. Of course, then we’d all have to ahve a argument over who is sentient. Is a dog sentient with protected rights? How about a dolphin? And when we get done having six million wars over that..
oh, brother.
You think you know something about a technology, then you start RTFMing, and you discover that it goes several HUNDRED layers deeper than you thought.
Such is my recent experience with XSLT/XML/XPath.
I’ve been doing a *LOT* of things the hard way in webland.
Why didn’t anyone *tell* me about these things?
Can’t learn everything as fast as they create it.. it’s *insane*.. ‘far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found..’
So, I was noticing that there are 2.6 million active LJs.
That’s got to be bordering on a cultural phenomenon that has global inpact. Especially since I know those aren’t all english, and I know there are other blogging sites, and I know as XML/RSS feeds get better, sooner or later there will be a unified blogreader site. Not that I can’t already read all my blogs togeather via Thunderbird in theory. (I haven’t yet tried this to see how it works in practice, but I expect it does)
I’ve been learning Lazlo, a open source shockwave/flash bytecode compiler. It’s been slow going in spots, especially since the eclipse plugin is still a little on the unstable side. But I’ve gotten my application to where it switches views based on a menu, pulls data from a XML data source, and whatnot. Not bad for a couple of days playing around. I hope inside a week to actually have a nice looking web applet for MC’s site. Then I have to convince people they should be paying me to develop these things for them.
I have my doubts as to whether this is a single solution, though.. I think a combination of flash and css, to offer a rich broadband experience and a tolerable narrowband, is probably where the future’s going. But it’s hard to say. Anyway, I’m having fun developing web applications. Hopefully soonish someone will be paying me to do that..
.. or something.
Anyway, I still can’t believe things like the net aren’t resulting in real political change, and real diversification of opinions. I feel like the world should be evolving faster.. but I guess I should just be grateful that it is evolving as fast as it is. I’d just like to not be seeing wars, and not be hearing about how I should be afraid of the big scary terrorists.
Actually, I’d like to be hearing about how television viewership is at a all time low, people are building their own community wireless networks, and open source software has just hit another explosive development curve – this one trying to bring open source back to the masses. [Actually, I’d argue that Thunderbird is about as mass-accessable a program as you can get. *Very* user friendly. Plugin-based. I haven’t tried extending it yet, but I’m guessing it’s not hard to do. And it’s lightweight and fast on its feet.. if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a shot.
I’ve mixed opinions about Eclipse. I guess I see promise, but I also see a lot of problems. Still, this is a IDE to keep a eye on in my opinion.
I’ve *seriously* mixed opinions about gentoo.. although it does make me look forward to genthree. If I had nothing better to do, maybe I would try and build a linux distribution that *actually* didn’t require any advanced knowledge. Or I’d go work for microsoft. [Actually, I’ve been having some corrispondence with M$ – applied for some jobs over there, talked to some people. It might be fun to come full circle, work for the evil empire. To be honest, I’m no longer convinced that they’re even remotely a bad thing. After all, they don’t seem to be shutting linux down, and they do seem to be learning from it. XP loads drivers without rebooting, kernal module style. It seems possible that maybe we *can* all get along.
Wonder how the IPv6 implimentation is coming over at my ISP. I’m envious.. my friends in other lands are on IPv6, and I’m still stuck in v4land.
Time to make the next quantum leap. 😉
S.
I tossed these two questions at my friend Cori, and she asked that I answer them as well.
1) What do you think the meaning/purpose of life is?
2) Of all the places you’ve been, what one thus far has been the most memorable for you?
1 is a particularly difficult one for me right now, because I’m feeling like there is no purpose and no point. But, I would say the purpose of life is to create and to love. And, I hope, to learn that love will always find a way.
2 – I think probably the acropolis in greece. I remember looking at the stones going up to the top which had been worn smooth with time and many, many, many visitors.. standing where some of the first great minds to pen down their ideas stood, and feeling the continuity through history.
Other places also stand out, of course.. but this is the one that first leaps to mind.
Why must humans make so many complicated rules for other humans?
Why does power corrupt?
We must climb higher.. we must find words..
If I were dropped into my current life with no memory of who I was, would I be happier or less happy?
I don’t know. Having a day of feeling abjectly miserable. I know my emotions always ran strongly, but I don’t remember them running *this* strongly. The last few months seem confusing, unreal.. like they were lived by somebody else.
I love Phoebe. I love Kayti. Phoebe is a door that is closed. I understand that, but it hurts. Kayti loves me.
I really, really hate N2O. Yay, let’s invent a drug that will allow you to drown in air, that will disconnect emotions from memories just long enough to give you a false sense of peace and security, just so when the emotions reconnect to the memories it’s like a 2×4 over the head.
Just for the record: I do not suggest large doses of nitrous oxide, or extended times under the influence of it, to anyone.
And, as far as I can tell, my memories are all still there.
I’m having a particularly strong spot of self-loathing.
We’re doing something wrong that is costing us a lot of personal growth and a lot of growth as a culture.
We’re teaching our children that it’s *wrong* not to know things.
‘I don’t know’ is one of the most beautiful statements – one that beckons to far horizens of knowledge, to fountains of discovery. To imaginings and experiments and readings and writings and trying things and coming back able to say ‘I do know.’ There’s nothing more important to learning than the understanding that you don’t know something.
P. seems to be under the impression that I learned biochemistry.. I don’t know how to break it to her that I’ve never studied intimately the copying process by which DNA is copied, stitched, and executed. But it’s not that I’ve forgotten – I’ve never known this material. I know the difference between ‘I’ve forgotten’ and ‘I don’t know’ – it *tastes* different, as Kayti would say.
And we’re teaching our children also that there’ ssomething wrong with forgetting things. It’s true that we would like to shoot for 100% data retention.. but the reality is, that’s not how our analog, multipath brains work. We’re not digital computers, and let’s be grateful that we’re not!
And yet.. there is such a thing as failing a test.
The challenge, it seems to me, is to find a interface for dumping data into a child’s brain, and find some way to make them like aquiring that data. Because once you like reading, fiction or non, you’re going places. IMHO.
One of the long standing debates is whether we should teach children creation/intelligent design or evolution. Both is one acceptable answer.. since one has to suspect both occur and have occured and will occur. Teaching that we don’t, in fact, actually know yet, and that these are the most current guesses but that no one has any actual hard data on the subject would seem the honest thing to do. Of course, this offends some people horribly..
Pandora’s box is opened. The genie is out of the bottle. The ‘net gives us all free speech, freedom of the press.. and the powers that be may be discovering that this is really terrifying for them, becuase it means that sooner or later, they will be the powers that were – but they can’t stop it. Information and ideas want to be free… they always have. The Man has been caging ideas since there was a Man – and now, he can’t.
The next ten years should be interesting.
S.