Just a Theory

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Posts about Just a Theory

Plain Text Figures

A couple weeks ago, I implemented JSON Feed for Just a Theory (subscribe here). A nice feature of the format is that support for plain text content in addition to the expected HTML content. It reminds me of the Daring Fireball plain text feature: just append .text to any post to see its Markdown representation, like this. I’m a sucker for plain text, so followed suit. Now you can read the wedding anniversary post in plain text simply by appending .text to the URL (or via the JSON Feed).

Markdowners will notice something off about the formatting: the embedded image looks nothing like Markdown. Here it is:

{{% figure
  src     = "dance.jpg"
  title   = "dance.jpg"
  alt     = "First Dance"
  caption = "First dance, 28 May 1995."
%}}

This format defines an HTML figure in the Hugo figure shortcode format. It’s serviceable for writing posts, but not beautiful. In Markdown, it would look like this:

![First Dance](dance.jpg "First Dance")

Which, sadly, doesn’t allow for a caption. Worse, it’s not great to read: it’s too similar to the text link format, and doesn’t look much like an image, let alone a figure. Even Markdown creator John Gruber doesn’t seem to use the syntax much, preferring the HTML <img> element, as in this example. But that’s not super legible, either; it hardly differs from the shortcode format. I’d prefer a nicer syntax for embedded images and figures, but alas, Markdown hasn’t one.

Fortunately, the .text output needn’t be valid Markdown. It’s a plain text output intended for reading, not for parsing into HTML. This frees me to make figures and images appear however I like.

Framed

Still, I appreciate the philosophy behind Markdown, which is best summarized by this bit from the docs:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

So how do you make an embedded image look like an image without any obvious tags? How about we frame it?

        {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
        {                                                          }
        {                      [First Dance]                       }
        {  https://justatheory.com/2018/05/twenty-three/dance.jpg  }
        {                                                          }
        {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
        {  First dance, 28 May 1995.                               }
        {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

Think of the braces and tildes like a gilded frame. In the top section, we have the bracketed alt text like a descriptive card, followed by the image URL. Below the image area, separated by another line of tildes, we have the caption. If you squint, it looks like an image in a frame, right? If you want to include a link, just add it below the image URL. Here’s an example adapted from this old post:

  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
  {                                                                         }
  {                       [*Vogue* on the new iPad]                         }
  {   https://justatheory.com/2012/03/conde-nast-ipad/vogue-ipad-retina.jpg }
  {      (https://www.flickr.com/photos/theory/7007813933/sizes/l/)         }
  {                                                                         }
  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
  {  Image content from *Vogue* on the new iPad. Not shown: the second that }
  {  that it's blurry while the image engine finishes loading and           }
  {  displaying the image.                                                  }
  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

The link appears in parentheses (just like in the text link format). The format also preserves the alt text and caption Markdown formatting. Want to include multiple images in a figure? Just add them, as long as the caption, if there is one, appears in the last “box” in the “frame”:

  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
  {                                                                            }
  {                   [*The New Yorker* on the 1st gen iPad]                   }
  {      http://localhost:1313/2012/03/conde-nast-ipad/new-yorker-ipad-1.jpg   }
  {         (https://www.flickr.com/photos/theory/6861697774/sizes/o/)         }
  {                                                                            }
  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
  {                                                                            }
  {         [*The New Yorker* on the 3rd gen iPad with retina display]         }
  {   http://localhost:1313/2012/03/conde-nast-ipad/new-yorker-ipad-retina.jpg }
  {         (https://www.flickr.com/photos/theory/7007813821/sizes/o/)         }
  {                                                                            }
  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
  {  Text content from *The New Yorker* on the first generation iPad (top)     }
  {  and the third generation iPad with retina display (bottom). Looks great   }
  {  because it's text.                                                        }
  {~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

You can tell I like to center the images, though not the caption. Maybe you don’t need a caption or much else. It could be quite minimal: just an image and alt text:

        {                      [First Dance]                       }
        {  https://justatheory.com/2018/05/twenty-three/dance.jpg  }

Here I’ve eschewed the blank lines and tildes; the dont’ feel necessary without the caption.

This format could be parsed reasonably well, but that’s not really the goal. The point is legible figures that stand out from the text. I think this design does the trick, but let’s take it a step further. Because everything is framed in braces, we might decide to put whatever we want in there. Like, I dunno, replace the alt text with an ASCII art1 version of the image generated by an conversion interface? Here’s my wedding photo again:

{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
{                                                                                    }
{  NNNmmdsyyyyyyysssssdhyssooo+++++++++++++ooymNNNNyo+/::::-----------------------:  }
{  NNmNmdssyyyyyssssssdhyssooo++++///++++++ooymNmmmyo+/:::--------...-------------:  }
{  mmddddsyyyyyyssssssdhyssoo++++/////++++osydmmmmNyo+/::--------.....-------------  }
{  Nmddmmsyyyyyyssssssdhysooo+++///////++osso+oymNNyo+/::--------.......-----------  }
{  mmmmmmyyyyyyysssssshhysooo+++//////+ys+//:///sdmho+/::-------..........---------  }
{  mmmmmmyyyyyyssssosshhysooo+++////+ydmy/:/:/+ossydo+/::------...........---------  }
{  mmmmmmyyyyyysssoosshhysosshdy+/+odmNNmdyddmmNNmdmms+::------............--------  }
{  mmmmmmyyyyyyssooosshdhyso:/ymhhdmNNNNNmyhNNNNNNNNNmmo:------.............-------  }
{  mdddmmhyyyysssooossdmdmho.-hmmNNNNNNNmdyhmNNNNNNNNNmh+/+/--..............-------  }
{  mmmmddhyyyysssoooymmNmNmo--yNNmNmmmmmhhyhdhydNNNNmmmdysshy:..............-------  }
{  mmmddmhyyyssssoosdNNNNNmssydmNddhssossyyhs::+ssyhmmh+///ohh-..............------  }
{  Nmmmmmdyyyssssoohhdmddhs:-:hdhyhdso+++///--::/:::+o/://oosy:-.............------  }
{  NNNmmmdyyyssssosdhhyyh+//oohdmmmh///+/::::::---:++/://+hddmdho:...........------  }
{  NNNmmmdyyyssssosmmdmdy+.-/mmdmho+//////::::::/sddddhs/.:sdmmmmy-..........------  }
{  NNmmmmdhyyssssooydmmd+/+sydNmmh+/+yddyo/://oydmmmmmmdy:..:ymds:............-----  }
{  mmmmmmdhyysssoooo+oo+ohdmmmmmddhhsyddddysyddddmmmdddho-..`./h/.............-----  }
{  mmNNNNmhyysssoooo:-/.-ymmmmmmmmmmmNmdddmmmdmdddhhhhs-```````/h-............-----  }
{  NNNNNNmhyysssooymddmddmmmdddddmdmmNmyddmddddhhhhhy:`   ` ```.oo............-----  }
{  NNNNNNmhyyssssymmmNNmmmddhhddddmddddhddmdhddhhhhs-     ` ```.:y............-----  }
{  NNmdmNmhyysssydNmmNmmmddddddddddddhdddhddhhhhhho.      ``````.y............-----  }
{  mmmddmmdhyssssdmmhdmmmddddddhhdhhhhhddhhhdhhho-`       `` ```.s...........------  }
{  ddddhdddhyysssymNmmmmmddddddddhhdhhhhdddddy+.``        `` ```.s............-----  }
{  NNNmmddhyyssssosdddmmmmdddddddhhdddmmmmd+..```        `` ````-s............-----  }
{  NNNmmhysssssssooooymmmmdddmmmdhhdmdmdddd/``.`        ``  ```.-o...........------  }
{  mNNmddhhysssssssssydmmmmdmmmmmddmmddddhdd+``        `` `````.-/...........------  }
{  NNNmmddhhhhyyyyyyyyhmmmmmmmmmmddddddddhhy.``    ` ``` ``````./-...........------  }
{  NNNmmmysssssssssssssdmmmmmmmddddddddddh+.`     ` ```   `````.+...........-------  }
{  mmmNmmhyyyyyhhhhhhhhdmmmmmmddddddddddy:`````` `````   ``````-:...........-------  }
{  mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmddhdmmmddddddddddy/.`````` ````       ```./...........-------:  }
{  mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmhyssdmmmmdddddho:.``````````-```  ``````./:...........-------:  }
{  mmmmmNmmmmmmmmmddddhysydmmddho:-...`````````:oh/```` ````.-:............-------:  }
{  mmmmNNmmmmmmmmmmmmmddyoydo:.``.`````````.:+ydddh-```````-/--............-------:  }
{  NNNNNNNmmmmmmmmmmmmdyyyoo.````...`````:ohdmdddddh+oosyyhdmo--..........--------:  }
{  NNNNNNNNmmmmmmmNmmmmhys+//-```...`.-+yddddmmmddddmmmmmmmmmm+--.......----------:  }
{  NNNNNNNNNmmmmNNNNNmmsyysohdyosyhyyhddddddddmmmmmdmmmmmmmmmmh--.......---------::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNyyhhdmmdddmmdddddmddddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmd-----------------:::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmmdddddddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy-----------------:::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmmddddddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm+-----------------:::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmNNNmmmmmmmmmdmdmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmh:----------------::::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmdmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmo----------------:::::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm/---------------::::::  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmNNmy::::::::--:-:::::::://  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmNmmo///:::::::::::::::////  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmdddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmNmmy///////////////////////  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmdddddddddddddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmNmm/::::::::::::::::::::::/  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmdddddddddhddddddmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy::::::::::--:::::::::///  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmdddddddddddddddmmmmmmmmmmmNNNmNyo++++/////////////++++oo  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmdddddddddddddddmmmmmmmmmmNNNmmNhyyyyyyssssssssssssssssss  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmdddddddddddddddmmmmmmmmmNmNNmmmysssssooooo+++++/////////  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmddddddddddddddmmmmmmmNNNNNmmmd/::::::::::::::://///////  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmdmddddddddddddmmmmmmNNNmNmmmmd::::::::::::::://////////  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmdmmmdddddddddmmmmmmNmmmNmmmmmh::::::::://///////++os+++  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmdmmmmddddddddmmNmNNmmmNmNNmmNh/::::///////////+oo+++++o  }
{  NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNmmmmmmmddddddddddmmNmmmmmmmNNNNmmNy////////+oossyyhhhdddmmmN  }
{                                                                                    }
{               https://justatheory.com/2018/05/twenty-three/dance.jpg               }
{                                                                                    }
{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}
{  First dance, 28 May 1995.                                                         }
{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

Silly? Maybe. But I’m having fun with it. I expect to wrangle Hugo into emitting something like this soon.

Update 2023-08-05: Changed the location of plain text files for each post from $slug/copy.text to $slug.text, and updated the links in this post to reflect that change. In other words, the plain text file for this post is now plain-text-figures.text.


  1. Surely someone has come up with a way to improve on ASCII art by using box elements or something? ↩︎

Evolutionary Theory

Back in 2013, a slew of new top-level domains became available, and I pounced on a number of them, thinking it’d be good to make a shorter domain my own. My favorite was theory.pm. In the early years of Just a Theory, I wrote mostly about Perl and related topics like Bricolage. I thought naming a Perl blog like a Perl module would be appropriate. By that time I wrote a lot about Postgres, and didn’t want to mix topics. So alongside theory.pm, I also launched theory.so — as in “stored objects”. Both used a new static design built on Octopress hosted on GitHub Pages.

Unfortunately, by this time I wrote very little about Perl anymore. I wrote more on Postgres and Sqitch, but had to shut down theory.so when the domain registration became too expensive. I merged it into theory.pm, but it never felt right to post about Postgres a “Perl blog”. I wrote a few link posts about security and privacy, topics I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, but it still felt…off. My last post to theory.pm was nearly two years ago.

I’ve posted little personal writing, either: no politics, photos, travelogues, essays, or anything else. I let Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook fill those gaps.

Lately, though, I’ve had the itch to write my own site again, both to think through technical and cultural issues in the technology business, but also to reclaim a personal space on the net. The recent privacy challenges for the big social media companies finally drove me from their easy embrace back onto the open web. But where to put down my hypertext roots?

My friends, Just a Theory returns

In retrospect, I now realize that my original domain name was just right. It’s, me, just me, but not topic limited. I can post whatever I want, without constraints imposed by attention-limited domains. I decided to rehabilitate it.

Of course I could no longer use the old design. Inspired by the likes of Slashdot, it was boxy, crowded, and 2004-era ugly. I took a few weeks, imported the theory.pm posts into a new Hugo-powered site, and revamped the design from there. I took on the arduous task to import all the original Just a Theory posts, cleaning up typos and fixing images.

The result is the revamped site you now see in your browser. Or perhaps in your RSS reader (The old URLs should have redirected you here). The result is something far better than any of the previous sites:

  • The design emphasizes readability above all. I’ve made it as clean and attractive as I can. The design is my own, and likely full of flaws; don’t hesitate to holler if you spot anything that doesn’t look right.
  • No baggage. The new design uses no JavaScript — no tracking or analytics at all. I’ll never host ads, so I don’t need all the weight of ad-tech. The site is 100% HTML and CSS and nothing else. Only the custom fonts, Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro, add to the bandwidth.
  • No comments. I’m serious about shedding the baggage. Wading through comment spam wastes valuable writing and family time, while the comment services demand heavy JavaScript and tracking penalties. I generally get very few comments, but if you really want to talk to me, hit me up on Twitter or drop me an email (david at this domain).
  • The imported historical posts have no comments, either, but you can still browse the old design if you need to see them. Each migrated post links to the original, as well.
  • History. Previously, it was impossible to find stuff on Just a Theory. The new design borrows a page from kottke.org to provide links to all the tags, and all tag pages are paginated — as is the home page. Plus, the Archives lists every post and link post on the site, nice and friendly to search engines.
  • Speaking of tags, each has its own RSS feed. If you’re only interested in a particular subject, you can just subscribe its feed. I will never create topic-specific sites again; tagging is so much easier.
  • Identity. Yes, this is really Just a Theory, and you can tell because the TLS certificate proves it. Thanks to CloudFront and Let’s Encrypt for making it a cinch.
  • Scaling. It’s unlikely Just a Theory will be Fireballed again anytime soon, but since I’m using CloudFront for TLS already, this is a no-brainer. Just a Theory should be served from somewhere reasonable close to you.

Punctuated Equilibrium

I plan to write a fair bit over the next few months. I’ve been thinking a lot about security, privacy, and the impact of data privacy regulations like the GDPR on data rights and the technology business in general. I’m happy to once again have a place to write on such topics. I expect to make social posts too, to share what’s going on with friends and family. Before long, I expect to also make photoblog-style posts and perhaps integrate micro-blogging posts.

Let’s find out if I’m as good as my word.

theory.so is No More

Until last week, I had two newish blogs. This one, theory.pm, was to be my Perl blog. The other one, theory.so, was my database blog. I thought it would be a good idea to have separate blogs for separate audiences, but it turns out I don’t post enough to make much difference. And now, as of last week, I let the theory.so domain expire. Control the .so domain was turned over to Somalia a few months ago, and domain renewal fees went way up. Since I had so few posts over there (14 since August, 2013), I decided it was a good time to just merge it with theory.pm and be done with it.

So my apologies if a bunch of my old posts just showed up in your RSS readers. (You all still use RSS readers, right?). This is a one-time merging of the two blogs, so should not happen again.

Well…maybe. Now I have a total of 25 posts on theory.pm (since July 2013), which is still pretty paltry. I’m thinking it’s silly to have this thing separate from my original blog, Just a Theory, so I might eventually merge that blog, too. Not sure what domain I’ll use for it. Maybe I’ll go back to justatheory.com. Or maybe I’ll use one of the other domains I registered, like the recently added theory.one. Or maybe theory dot something else.

Not that you care. Good on you for reading this far. I would have stopped before now. You’re a better person than I.

Update: 2018-05-23: I merged everything back into Just a Theory last week.

A Perl Blog

I have been unsatisfied with Just a Theory for some time. I started that blog in 2004 more or less for fun, thinking it would be my permanent home on the internet. And it has been. But the design, while okay in 2004, is just awful by today’s standards. A redesign is something I have planned to do for quite some time.

I had also been thinking about my audience. Or rather, audiences. I’ve blogged about many things, but while a few dear family members might want to read everything I ever post, most folks, I think, are interested in only a subset of topics. Readers of Just a Theory came for posts about Perl, or PostgreSQL, or culture, travel, or politics. But few came for all those topics, in my estimation.

More recently, a whole bunch of top-level domains have opened up, often with the opportunity for anyone to register them. I was lucky enough to snag theory.pm and theory.pl, thinking that perhaps I would create a site just for blogging about Perl. I also nabbed theory.so, which I might dedicate to database-related blogging, and theory.me, which would be my personal blog (travel, photography, cultural essays, etc.).

And then there is Octopress. A blogging engine for hackers. Perfect for me. Hard to imagine something more appropriate (unless it was written in Perl). It seemed like a good opportunity to partition my online blogging.

So here we are with my first partition. theory.pm is a Perl blog. Seemed like the perfect name. I fiddled with it off and on for a few months, often following Matt Gemmell’s Advice, and I’m really happy with it. The open-source fonts Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro, from Adobe, look great. The source code examples are beautifully marked up and displayed using the Solarized color scheme (though presentation varies in feed readers). Better still, it’s equally attractive and readable on computers, tablets and phones, thanks to the foundation laid by Aron Cedercrantz’s BlogTheme.

I expect to fork this code to create a database blog soon, and then perhaps put together a personal blog. Maybe the personal blog will provide link posts for posts on the other sites, so that if anyone really wants to read everything, they can. I haven’t decided yet.

In the meantime, now that I have a dedicated Perl blog, I guess I’ll have to start writing more Perl-related stuff. I’m starting with some posts about the state of exception handling in Perl 5, the first of which is already up. Stay tuned for more.

Update: 2018-05-23: I decided that a separate Perl blog wasn’t a great idea after all, and relaunched Just a Theory.

New Home

After the Fireballing week before last, I put aside a bit of time to rejigger things. This blog now has a new home.

  • Moved all content to a Linode virtual server. No more serving from my crappy old desktop system behind my Comcast connection. The VPS is kind of skimpy on the RAM, but seems fine for my basic needs.
  • Still using Blosxom, but all content is statically-generated.
  • Switched to Nginx. It’s fast. Especially for a 100% static site.
  • Search is gone. No one used it, anyway. That’s what Duck Duck Go is for.
  • Comments are gone, sort of. I removed the plugin for adding comments to posts. Existing comments are still shown, though.
  • Added Disqus commenting. The upshot is that, for the first time in years, one can comment on any post at any time. No more closing comments after two weeks.
  • Got rid of the “sociable” junk. No one needs hand-holding for sharing, and very few sharing sites are relevant anymore, anyway.

Oh, and I also moved strongrrl.com, kineticode.com, and my PGXN mirror to the Linode host. They’re all static, too, so everything is nice and peppy.

So that’s step 1. It’s enough that I can get back to posting stuff and, on the off chance that I get Fireballed again, I think things will hold up (a simple ab test shows pretty good throughput at about 100 requests/second at a concurrency of 100). Over the next few months, I have other plans:

  • Throw up a new kineticode.com. The company has actually shut down, so I need to put up a new page to direct interested parties elsewhere.
  • Redesign Just a Theory. This design was okay in 2004, but never very forward-looking. I want to vastly simplify things. Just down to the bare essentials, really. Be prepared for more junk to disappear.
  • Move to a new blog engine. Blosxom is okay, but finicky. There are a lot of steps to publishing a post, most of them involving SCP and SSH. I just want to write to a directory to do stuff, and support drafts and whatnot.

That last task is the one I’m least likely to find a lot of time to work on, though, as I am already overcommitted to numerous other things, and thinking of new stuff all the time. But I’d really like to make things much nicer for myself, so we’ll see.

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

How Not to Withstand a Fireballing

Fireballed!

Yeah, hovering along at 50-200 hits a day, and then, BAM!

  • Set up a simple Blosxom-powered blog on the advice of a friend who wrote it
  • Never bother to make it anything other than a CGI script that crawls your file system on every request
  • Add a bunch of plugins for various doodads and useless doohickies, also executing a bunch of crap on every request
  • Put it on your eight year old Dell Dimension running Ubuntu Linux
  • In your basement
  • On your residential Comcast connection
  • Let many years go by, giving it very little attention
  • Write something interesting
  • Laugh about your complete inability to connect to the box from work while Daring Fireball melts your connection

I have more to say on the topic of iPad magazines, but I’m using the meager tuits I have to first make some infrastructural changes.

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

PGXN Blog and Twitterstream

I crated the PGXN Blog yesterday. Tune in there for news and announcements. I’ll also be posting status reports once development gets underway, so that all you fans out there can follow my progress. Once the site is done (or at 1.0 anyway), the blog will be used for announcements, discussion of support issues, etc. So tune in!

Oh, and I created a PGXN Twitterstream, too. You should follow it! New blog posts will be tweeted, and once the site gets going, new uploads will be tweeted, too. Check it out!

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

Atom Sources

I’m working on a project where I aggregate entries from a slew of feeds into a single feed. The output feed will be a valid Atom feed, and of course I want to make sure that I maintain all the appropriate metadata for each entry I collect. The <source> element seems to be exactly what I need:

If an entry is copied from one feed into another feed, then the source feed’s metadata (all child elements of feed other than the entry elements) should be preserved if the source feed contains any of the child elements author, contributor, rights, or category and those child elements are not present in the source entry.

<source>
  <id>http://example.org/</id>
  <title>Fourty-Two</title>
  <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
  <rights>© 2005 Example, Inc.</rights>
</source>

That’s perfect: It allows me to keep the title, link, rights, and icon of the originating blog associated with each entry.

Except, maybe it’s the database expert in me, but I’d like to be able to have it be more normalized. My feed might have 1000 entries in it from 100 sources. Why would I want to dupe that information for every single entry from a given source? Is there now better way to do this, say to have the source data once, and to reference the source ID only for each entry? That would make for a much smaller feed, I expect, and a lot less duplication.

Is there any way to do this in an Atom feed?

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

Sociable Plugin for Blosxom

I notice a number of places recently where some blogs had a nice array of small icons to make it easy for readers to add particular entries to their favorite social bookmarking sites. The example I noticed most recently was on Simple Mom. After a bit of digging, I found the Sociable plugin for WordPress. It had just the format I was looking for.

So today I ported it to Blosxom. You can get it yourself here. You’ll also need to download the Sociable WordPress plugin so that you can get all the necessary images and styling. Read the docs for how to use it; it’s pretty simple, and supports a lot of social bookmarking sites, and even good ’ole “Email” and “Print” links.

And of course, also starting today, you can see the links right here on my site. So, yeah, go ahead and link me up!

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.

Now with Markdown!

Lately I’ve been fiddling a bit with Markdown, John Gruber’s minimalist plain text markup syntax. I’ve become more and more attracted to Markdown after I’ve had to spend some time using Trac and, to a lesser degree, Twiki and MediaWiki. The plain-text markup syntax in these projects is…how shall I put this?…gawdawful. Why do I hate these wiki syntaxes? Becaus they’re unnatural. Maybe it’s just because I’m most familiar with it, but Trac’s syntax is just completely random and inconsistent. Trying to get anything other than simple paragraphs formatted just right is just a giant pain in the ass. Just try have multiple paragraphs in a hierarchical bulleted list and you’ll see what I mean. If I wanted to worry about space this much I’d hack Python! I mean, seriously, there’s a reason I write my blog entries in pure HTML. It’s not so user-friendly, but at least I know exactly how something will be formatted when I’m done.

But Markdown is different. It’s syntax is almost exactly like what I’ve been using in lain-text email messages since the mid-1990s. It’s humane in a way that Textile only approaches in its inline markup (as long as you don’t use attributes, of course). There are a few oddities, such as the definition list syntax used by PHP Markdown Extra and MultiMarkdown is a bit unnatural. But overall, it’s quite close to what I type anyway. I’ve been writing the pgTAP documentation in Markdown, using Discount to generate the HTML you see on the Web site (plus my own custom hack to create the table of contents), and it’s just a thrill that it’s so easy to maintain: I can easily read and edit the README file like any other text file, and then generate the HTML for the Web site with a simple make target. It has been such a great experience that I’m tempted to stop writing documentation in POD!

So in my next app, I’ll likely be making use of MultiMarkdown for the end-user management of content. It has nearly everything I want, formatting-wise, and I can likely get used to the few cases where its syntax seems a bit weird to me. Plus, I can then use the generated HTML to output PDFs and other formats from the same document. I expect it to be a dream to work with. (Oh, and thanks to Aristotle Pagaltzis for patiently putting up with my questions about markdown in private email messages; they’ll help keep me from saying anything too embarrassing on the Markdown mail list!)

In the meantime, I’ve modified the comment system on this blog to support Markdown. You can still use HTML in comments, same as always, as Markdown passes HTML through unmolested. But few of you ever did that, and I was always adding HTML tags to the comments. Now maybe I won’t have to: Markdown is so easy and natural to use, that the vast majority of commenters will just leave paragraphs and they’ll look beautiful.

At any rate, you now have one less reason not to leave a comment!

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Blog Restored, Google Analytics, FeedBurner

My “Server Room”

My “Server Room”

Some of you no doubt noticed that this site was down for several days, starting last Friday and lasting until yesterday. Sorry about that. I had a hard disk failure of some kind on the ca. 1999 OptiPlex I was using. I’ve had a newer box (ca. 2005) to move to for a while, but lacked the tuits. With this change, I was forced to make the switch. Fortunately, a Debian install CD let me login to the OptiPlex and access all my files, so I was able to recover everything. I even managed to keep the file modification times the same, so feeds won’t show everything as unread (which I’ve seen many times when other bloggers I’ve known have switched providers or recovered from some catastrophe). Unless you tried to hit this site over the weekend or on Monday or Tuesday, you should notice no changes at all (except speed, the new box is a lot faster!).

Naturally, I took advantage of this opportunity to get my blog configuration into SVN via my Capistrano deployment system. Hell, none of this stuff was even backed up before (although I did back up all my blog entries about a week before this happened—but not comments, yow!). The new box is now properly backing itself up and backing up the Kineticode server, and I can make changes to Blosxom and configure and reboot the blog from my MBP. Yay! No more remote editing.

I’ve also upgraded my “server room,” moving out the gigantic 17" CRT and putting in the 17" flat panel screen I’ve had floating around. I also plugged a USB keyboard into my KVM, so I no longer have to move keyboards around when I switch between the Linux server and the G3 Mac server. Of course, now that I have large disks and Time Machine running on all the other boxes in the house, we don’t use the G3 anymore. So I think we’ll be donating it soon.

Another change I’ve made was to stop doing my own log analysis (the command-line tools are such a PITA) and switched to Google Analytics and FeedBurner for tracking visitors to the blog and its feeds. I’ve still got the old log files around, so I can see how things have changed since before the switch to outside analytics providers, but I’ll probably just create a report from them and then ignore them from now on. Too much work to track that stuff.

In the future, I’d like to switch from Blosxom to some other tool. Maybe Movable Type, now that it’s open source. It’s pretty well-regarded and written in Perl, so I could hack it pretty easily. What I should do is avoid writing my own Blog engine. Right? Right?!. In the meantime, I have other priorities, so I’ll be sticking to Bloxsom for a while.

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Teasers Only Atom Feed

Select a feed

I’ve just added a new feed: teasers only. It makes things a log shorter for those who just want to get a teaser for each blog entry, rather than complete entries, such as Planet Perl and Planet PostgreSQL.

Any questions or problems? Leave a comment. Thanks!

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I’m Ba-aack!

Sandy - your free personal email assistant

Yes indeed, I am back. Was I ever gone? Well, yes, I’ve been rather busy for the last 15 months.

But December 31 was my last day at Values of n. I’m really pleased with the work I did there. Sandy in particular, was a pleasure to work with. I really think that the work that Rael and I did with Sandy has been important work. Dare I say potentially paradigm-shifting? At any rate, I’m convinced that Sandy is really going to go places. If you haven’t signed on to become her client, do try. Though I will no longer be as intimate with her as I have in the past, we’re still going to keep in touch—I’m still her client. And Rael will do a great job pushing forward with her.

So why did I leave? Well, the truth is that, after Julie’s dad died in July, I found that I no longer had the resources to commit to the 80-100 hours/week required to work in a startup. It was just no longer that important to me. Don’t get me wrong, it was rewarding work, but my priorities completely realigned. It was vital that I continue helping Rael to get Sandy’s career launched, but once that was done, it was time for me to move on.

And what am I doing now? Well, first and foremost, I’m taking a few months off. I’m going to spend a lot more time re-acquainting myself with the two terrific women with whom I share a house, and just generally reset myself. Take a few deep breaths. Relax and enjoy life a bit. Sleep in now and then. That sort of thing.

That’s not to say that I’ll be sitting on my ass all the time. I have a very long list of things I want to do during this time, including catch up on my blogging (hence the title of this post), fix some bugs in Bricolage and help get 2.0 out the door, update my Perl libraries (I’ve got some great ideas for improving SVN::Notify), finally get all my digital photos organized, etc. I already spent much of last week revamping our mail system (I outsourced it to FuseMail). And all that’s leaving aside all the things Julie and I want to get done around the house. That’s the really important stuff.

But do watch for more blog posts in the coming months, too. There are a few interesting things I want to write about, and I’ve got some serious catching-up to do. Interested in following along on my adventures? Follow me via Twitter.

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New Just a Theory Blog Policy: Limited Comment Period

I’ve had an open policy on comments on this blog since it started. A couple years ago, I added a timeout on trackback pings, so that you can’t trackback ping a posting more than two weeks after I wrote it. But I left manual comments in, along with the simple math bit, since comments and spam have been low volume.

Curiously, though, although this is not a popular blog, and I’ve posted to it all of twice in the last six months, I’ve been getting a lot more comment spam in the last few weeks. I’ve been having to manually delete upwards of 100 spam comments a day. Well, I’m bored with that. So I hereby announce a new comment policy: You can comment on a blog post for up to two weeks after I post it. After that, the comment period will be over. I’m sorry to have to do this, and maybe it will change if I ever switch to Word Press or something, but for now, I think it will do.

The vast majority of non-spam comments I get on any particular post after two weeks or so is a request for support. So I don’t think that the new policy will hamper anyone much, and for those looking for support, well, this is not the appropriate forum. But if you do feel compelled to comment on something after the comment period, just email your comment to me and I’ll add it in as I deem appropriate.

Thanks for understanding. I really appreciate getting this time back every day. And, of course, if you’d like to respond to this new policy in any way, well, you have two weeks to leave a comment on this post. ;-)

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Search Powered by KinoSearch

On a whim yesterday, I decided to give KinoSearch a try. I’ve had the module installed from CPAN for a while, so I can say that it installed very easily. So then all I did was to cut and paste the sample programs from the tutorial, tweak a few things for my blog entries, and try it.

And lo and behold, it worked! After a mere 30 minutes work, it worked so well that I was willing to spend the couple of hours it took this morning to get the results nicely formatted wrapped in my Blosxom templates. So now this site is fully indexed and searchable, and all I have to do is reindex it every time I publish a new entry. So now the search field at the bottom of every page uses KinoSearch, or you can just go to the search page to perform the search. Sweet!

So give it a try. Search for “iraq” or “svn” to see how it works. And check out those KinoSearch benchmarks, too. This thing is fast!

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david.wheeler.net Content Migration

I’ve completed the migration of all of the content from my old site, david.wheeler.net. All requests to that domain will get a permanent redirect to this site. Where possible, I tried to make the old URLs redirect to the new URLs. So if you try to connect to david.wheeler.net/osx.html, you should be automatically redirected to www.justatheory.com/computers/os/macosx/my_adventures.html. The same goes for the following documents:

If you happen to notice that I missed anything, comment on this blog entry to let me know.

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