The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Category: work Page 9 of 24

An Open Company

2009-04-04

work

Sometimes the series of connections that is the internet (not the wires but the ideas) is truly amazing. As many readers of this blog know, my editor of choice is Textmate. Textmate made quite a hit when it premiered on the Mac platform, which up until that time really only had BBedit for users in need of a heavy-duty editor. (Was XCode available and useful then?) BBedit had a free version, but if you wanted the full version, it was expensive. Textmate was €39 — which was closer to $39 then than it is now. Textmate also possessed the amazing ability to be extended in utility by its users, who quickly proceeded to share bundles of snippeds, commands, and macros with each other.

Linux and Windows users who saw Textmate, perhaps through David Hansen’s famous Rails screencasts, wanted to know when its developer, Allan Odgaard was going to port his application over their preferred platforms. Allan steadfastly refused, and in a move that surprised everyone, seemed perfectly happy when Alexander Stigsen began to develop an editor not only a lot like Textmate but also one that could use adapted Textmate bundles — the very engine of Textmate’s success. I occasionally checked out the E Text Editor, but because I don’t work on Linux or Windows, I never paid any serious attention.

All that has changed with Stigsen’s announcement that he is going to turn his stable, profitable, conventional software company into an open company.

What does that mean? The first thing he has made the application’s source open — except for a small, central portion that he maintains as proprietary. The next step is to set up a venue in which individuals can participate and begin to feel their way around the project — the code, the tasks at hand, the procedures. What he hopes will happen is that as some individuals become more interested in working, they will find themselves commensurately compensated. (The mechanism he has planned is worth reading on his site.)

Why is this an interesting series of connections? Because these kinds of enterprises are exactly the kind of thing that I think we should not only be studying in the academy but also replicating.

Lily’s First Report of a Dream

2009-04-01

work

We have been asking Lily to tell us her dreams for, it seems, a very long time now. It all began when she wasn’t even a year old and she had night terrors. As someone who suffered nightmares as a child that I still find haunting, I hoped to get her to talk about her dreams and to give her control over them. But up until today, she has never told us, or never been able to tell us, what was the content of a dream.

Today she did. And she dreamed she was in a store with her friend Ava and they were looking at ponies. Toy ponies? we asked. Yes, she said, and then added that there were also two unicorns off in a dark area. We asked her if she was afraid. No, she said. I could see them. I could just see them.

On-Demand Magazine Printing

2009-04-01

work

Well, here’s an interesting item from the on-line New York Times: Hewlett-Packard is offering a new web-based on-demand printing service for magazines, called MagCloud. A content creator uploads a properly formatted PDF and the cost to the purchaser is 20 cents per page plus shipping. (That’s the base cost. Anything on top of that results in profit for the content creator.) Here’s the story.

Our New Truck

2009-03-29

work

In my life I have loved one vehicle I owned, a 1986 Isuzu Trooper that I bought used in 1992, with a lot of help from my mother. Since 1999, I have driven a 1997 Isuzu Hombre pickup truck that we bought used after living in Lafayette for a few months and trying to make do with one car. I had planned on driving that truck until at least half of the boat book was done, but it seems to have had a different idea about its life course and gave up its second clutch. With the cost of repairing it estimated at $850 on a truck whose total value was only about $1600, I got our mechanic to agree to buy it for the difference and we headed out as a family to buy me/husband/daddy a new truck. I have always wanted a Toyota Tacoma, and I was pretty content with the extended cab model with the inline 4 cylinder engine. Yung took one look at the cab and decided it was too small for our growing girl and voted for the double cab.

I think I now have the second vehicle in my life that I will love:

Laudun-2009-4679

For record, here are the cars I have owned/driven:

  • 1973 Ford Gran Torino (hand-me-down — thanks mom and dad!)
  • 1982 Toyota Tercel SR5 (bought new and sold to a French exchange student in 1992 for $500)
  • 1986 Isuzu Trooper (bought used, sold to some high school kid who promptly tore the bumper off)
  • 1996 Volkswagen Golf (given to Yung)
  • 1997 Isuzu Hombre XS

And now this truck.

Tweet Your Power Usage

2009-03-27

work

Adafruit Industries, the folks who also brought you the DIY TV-B-Gone remote control to turn off the televisions in public spaces that sometimes are just too much have come up with another DIY kit: a monitor that sends usage statistics to your Twitter account. Check it out. (It’s a terrible URL, btw. Come on, Adafruit. Join this millenium.)

Smart and Smarter

2009-03-26

work

This afternoon on the way back from school, I told Lily that Yung had made an appointment to get Lily’s hair cut by one of her favorite former teachers who is just about done with her training at the Aveda Institute here in Lafayette.

“I know,” Lily said.

“How do you know, honey? Mommy just made the appointment this afternoon.”

“I know.”

“But she just made it.”

“She told me.”

With that, I understood that Yung had told her that she was going to call and make the appointment. We went on to talk about something else, and she said “I know.”

“How do you know so much?” I asked.

“Because I’m smart.”

“Well, you know,” I said thinking I would take advantage of this moment to make a lovely point about life. “You know, Lily, some of the smartest people I know are the ones who know what they don’t know.” Top that, I thought smugly to myself.

“Well, daddy, what if you know what you know?”

Ouch.

Adding the XHTML Closing Slash Automatically in Textmate

2009-03-26

work

This is just one of those tips that is so amazing that I have to note it down. As many readers know, one of the rules that XML has that is not part of HTML is that all tags must be closed. Thus, the IMG and BR tags in HTML are something of a problem for the child of the marriage of XML and HTML: XHTML. The solution was to add a self-closing slash just before the closing angle bracket. For example: <br />. It turns out that my text editor of choice, Textmate, has the ability to do this for you:

In TM’s Advanced preferences, in the Shell Variables segment, add a new variable named TM_XHTML with the value of / (single slash) and you will get this trailing slash everywhere you use a singleton tag, without editing any of the snippets.

Rain of Terror

2009-03-22

work

They are simple little things:

Laudun-2009-0252

On their own, oak tassels are quite lovely. But what you can’t see here is how they fall and fall and fall, like Satan’s version of snow, snow that covers everything and makes you sneeze. (I manage to capture some of the tassels falling in the lower right-corner of the image.)

Laudun-2009-0257

Until they cover everything:

Laudun-2009-0255

And that doesn’t even begin to capture the green pollen dust which changes the color of cars and driveways.

Research into Writing

2009-03-21

work

As the research for the boat book began to pile up — goodness, especially the things in the “need to read” queue — and I felt the urge, or need, to begin writing, I felt I needed to revisit my “workflow”, workflow here being “how I do what I do.” One of the conclusions I came to, comparing how I did things ten or fifteen years ago with how I am doing them now was that I got a lot accomplished using paper. Perhaps more than I am getting accomplished digitally, which makes no sense because digital notes are a lot more searchable. What’s the problem? I wondered. I think it all comes down to interface. I really like working with paper. I like pens, pencils, and paper. I like working on my Mac, but I haven’t found the interface that works the way I do.

Here’s how I understand my process:

  • Inputs are all the materials that I collect: books, articles, tear sheets, field notes. These are raw.
  • Intermediate forms are summaries, quotations, and responses to topics and arguments found in the texts above.
  • Output takes the form of chapters in a book (in the current moment.)

As the materials travel through their transformation from raw, unprocessed texts into useful summaries or quotations, they need to have, at the very least, be tagged with citation information. Other tags — by topic, area, etc. — would be useful, too.

A number of folks I know are very fond of DevonThink, and DT2 promises to have tags, which might make it useful for me. I can almost see the interface and the data structure that would work for me, but I do not have the time, at the moment, to hammer it out. (I would need not only the time to code such a thing but to learn how to code.)

Files on Augustin (HD)

2009-03-21

work

/Backup
    /112CANON_1         1271 - 1300
    /113CANON_1         1301 - 1332
    /113CANON           1333 - 1400
    /114CANON           1400 - 1432
    /114CANON_1         1433 - 1500
    /115CANON_1         1501 - 1561
    /115CANON           1561 - 1600
    /116CANON           1601 - 1700

/Guirard Photos

/Lightroom
    /Download Backups
        /2007-05-18     1786 - 1822

/Pictures
    /images
    /photos
        ...
        /2007           1271 - 1332
                        1433 - 1822
            /-06-28     1874 - 1906
            /-07-18     1965 - 1989

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© John Laudun