Laziness meets frequency

Soething that I have been thinking about, or princiaplly that I’ve been to lazy to transfer over googlecl stuff from Alice to Andrea, and for how much my notes management stuff has grown. I’m thinking that my journal entries will likely start to collect into my “Scratch Notes” file, and eventually pushed off into here. Pretty much, my notes system has to solve various problems.

  • Good support for recording structured information.
  • History management; what changed and when.
  • Simple and readily accessible enough to collect/manage unstructured and “In-progress” information.

The first two are what most systems fail at, doing the latter, hell you can do with a collection of Post It! Notes if you know how not to spill your drink. Having a vim session running in dtach, that I can share e.g. between multiple tmux/screen sessions, helps. But it’s really my “Scratch Notes” file that makes it easy. It’s a structured dumping bin for the here and now: what I’m doing or what I want to note. Things either get aged off; “Eh, ain’t parsed that in a month, bye, bye!”; or being transitioned to a suitable file. For example, while working on X, I may make notes applicable to Y and Z; afterwards I rip them out at leasire and incorperate them into suitable notes. I attribute the concept of a “Scratch” note to Emacs. It has a *scratch* buffer open initially, where you can collect snippets of text you don’t want to save, and can readily evaluate elisp code; very fundimental for emacs users. Me, well, I kind of like the same idea, but in a more perm’ note.

TF101 Coolness

My tablets dock has been sitting unused since I got home from work on Friday, docking it at the office I have 97% charge on the dock; and it was probably 98% when I hit the road on Friday.

Thoughts on “Why Devs hate PC Gamers”

Was reading this article today and it basically laments that game developers gate PC gamers because of the piracy. While I can’t agree with most of the remarks about DRM, even less so being a programmer. I’ve written a bit in the past about how I feel about DRM.

What I do generally agree with though, is this persons views on pirates. I don’t pirate crap. I don’t even mind paying for crap if it’s worth having. Most games I can’t say are worth the release price, so I don’t buy them. Personally, the only distinction that I see between console and PC for piracy is that it is harder for the technically innept masses to steal. As the tech-line blurs and development becomes a bit more related, that’s going to change. Just look at the current generation of consoles versus say, the original Nintendo.

It’s funny how not wanting to trade time with somone very important to me, for carting my mother around Kroger’s seems fit to alll but paint me as a fusion of Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler. Don’t you just love mothers?

Trying to at long last keep up with my RSS feed reading was going well, until I took half a week off checking greader lol

Is RSS dying?

RSS Rant

I must agree with most of what the author wrote, and confese I prefer RSS – and would like something comparable that offers commenting. But the security implications of that are probably nightmare’ish to say the least.

Changes coming

At some point, greater integration between spidey01.com / blog.spidey01.com and a number of other stuff should be coming. One that is already apparent or should be, is my entries here now carry my name rather than my call sign. That’s part of the Google+ Profie integration that has hit Blogger in Draft. I could easily change it back now that real names needen’t be used on G+ (which has always been against Facebooks policies AFAIK), but for sharing the same display name across Google Mail, Talk, Plus, and Blogger, it’s worth it to me to use my name.

Spidey01 is my call sign of choice, and very much a piece of who I am. It’s something I’m comfortable with, associating my Digital Presence with my Physical Presence as it were. My blogs side bar has always carried Spidey01 / TerryP on it, and unravelling the rest non-trivial for the initiated or the persistent; thus no fear.

Pretaining to this blog itself, I’d rather like to experiment with a darker and more computeresque theme, the teasing page at my site probably should clue one in on what sort of look I’m interested in. It will probably wait for a stretch of free time though, where I can tweak things to taste. General restructuring and house keeping also needs doing. Content wise, there’s a number of things I’m interested in presuing. I have been doing a lot with the conversion to using Android as my main computer, both for personal tasks I do every day and for programming. Since I’ve been exploring the market a lot more, there’s apps I would like to note here before they swap out of storage someday. More or less the same for a few programming ideas of my own, hehe. There is a chunk of “Posts of Note” that will eventually be moved out of my personal notes and become a page here or at the main domain.

Google+ arguably fits my life better than any other resource for such stuff like this, in terms of connecting with my friends. Facebook and Twitter users, you are just left out in the cold, sorry; the most you get is an alternative to my RSS feed here. Where as Google+ is better for sharing with friends and stuff that peers would probably tweet, I find Blogger more comfortable for organizing content, and finding it again. Stuff that goes on G+ is more aimed at sharing, stuff here is more Me oriented. That’s why I tend to call it a “Journal” and only use “Blog” for consumption by others. Stuff kept in my journal is principally for me, and offered for where it may be useful. I will be rather happy someday if there is an integration between Blogger and G+ that would use the same permissions and commenting engine (while retaining the existing login options for non G+ users) but really don’t expect it to ever happen. In the  mean time, I just hope that the Google+ API expands and that it will eventually become like Twitter in that regard.

Or in short: G+ -> for the water cooler; Blogger -> for the journal.

In the future, journal entries should now be syndicated via RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Commentators using Facebook rather than Blogger, will be LARTed. 






When Google+ integrates better with Blogger, we’ll see what happens, hehe. It is rapidly becoming my preferred media but Blogger is better suited for longer stuff. Give us more API Googlers, more API!

Understanding Twitter

Newsgroups, forums, blogging, Facebook, Google+, etc are all things that I understand fairly well. Twitter less so for me, as it’s not a service that I ‘use’. Some people I know use Twitter but mostly it’s just businesses and marketing, and I don’t care about any of the businesses I like that much to listen; so I’ve little use for the service.

Viewing someone’s tweets reads off like a list of short messages, similar to the blog model (e.g. like a Wall post on Facebook) which almost everyone understands these days. But it includes the users comments inline, along with their comments (replies) on other peoples posts (tweets). In a way, it is coser to the newgroup/forum model where in you have a node that fits into a ‘thread’, yet the head of the thread is just a normal post (node). In the blogging model, it’s somewhat different because of the emphasis on the blog comment.

This makes it rather disconcerting to look at tweets for the initiated. From first glance, it’s like listening to a twittering bird that not only talks to the open air (hello you Facebook mob!) but also to its imaginary friends. By clicking the tweet (look for the icon top right) you can see the thread and explore the relationship between tweets. It’s a decentralized version of how forums work; instead of defaulting to viewing by topical thread, your default view is by the user.

If that last paragraph makes sense, particularlly the last sentence: you now understand Twitter. Or I’m missing something lol.

What remains to be seen until the course of history has advanced much further, is whether or not any given model (newsgroup, blog, twitter) will become the universally accepted model of communication on the internet. Twitter is a leg up over using a mail client that doesn’t do threads (eww) but I personally prefer the newsgroup model, but profese, twitter is an interesting data model for machine processing to whatever corporations will do to profit from that data model.

Definitions:

Newsgroup model
Someone starts a topic, other people reply; replies and topic starts are all the same thing (posts) but things are usually collated into “Threads”. Examples include USENET, mailing lists, and forums.
Blog model
Someone blogs an article, other people comment; comments are distinct from the content and may be deemphasized depending on the platform. Examples include Blogging and Facebook.
Twitter model
Someone tweets a short message, other people may publically or privately reply . All nodes are equal and connected as in a shared thread, but are collated by “Users” rather than threads.

Right, premake4 is one of my favourite ways to build C/C++ stuff but tonight I’m thinking it has a moron involved. You can specify a project as being one of four kinds: ConsoleApp, WindowedApp, SharedLib, StaticLib. The documentation here states that this likely means /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS will be passed to link.exe, and indeed it is. That is how you say call WinMain and do any other I’m a GUI app magic for Windows; other wise you get a main and a command  prompt; simply put.

This FAQ entry on the other hand, is just retarded.