Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 2/25/2001
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 2/25/2001; 6:03:18 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 2/25/2001 Msg #: 22095 Prev/Next: 22094 / 22096
DaveNet: Workflow.
Newsweek: Who's blogging who?
Tim Bray kicks off a new mail page.
Between you and me, I don't think Dan Gillmor read the whole Jonathan Lebed article in the Sunday NY Times. The adults are total Loony Tunes characters, the kid played the game by the rules the adults invented. Of course the SEC knows that analysts promote stocks in companies they have positions in. It's well documented practice. The article is very long, but it's totally worth reading. There's a discussion on Kuro5hin as well, with other people who clearly didn't read the whole thing.
A whole new class of jokes. Ole and Sven meet and decide to go to Ole's house for a few after-work beers. They walk in the house and go through the living room where Ole's wife Lena is on the floor naked having sex with the mailman. They go into the kitchen and Ole opens the fridge and hands a beer to Sven who says "Oh Ole, what about the mailman on the floor with Lena?" to which Ole says "He can get his own beer, Sven."
SoapClient.Com: SOAP Message Builder.
Standards to the rescue!
Paul Sniveley asks if workflow is an illusion.
Rogers Cadenhead adds to the 16-categories discussion.
Rick Winfield pushes back on my Workflow story. I sent him an email, pointing out that despite his decision not to use my software, he does use my software. It's running his Manila site. It's true that Frontier does have its own scripting language, but I don't feel it's very different from Python or JavaScript, and someday we will get Python running in Frontier, lots of people want it, it's the right way to go. And as far as the database is concerned, well, it's a huge win to have the database integrated with scripting. I'd love to see an A-B comparison on ease of scripting our database versus scripting an external database. It wouldn't surprise me if ours performed quite a bit better too. His comments on workflow are on-point and some not. Supporting multiple editors with different permissions is something Manila does well. And as Rick points out, scheduling can be handled in other apps, and when we get a better handle on exactly what people want, we might be able to add the features.
BTW, I did a little searching and found that Rick and I agree on the value of simplicity in XML formats. This is important because the value of simplicity is not widely respected in the XML community, or so it seems, and it's, imho, essential to the success of XML that formats be groomed according to users' needs.
From the You Learn Something New Every Day department. I got a pointer to LiveJournal. I hadn't been there in a while. They have a client that runs outside the browser. It looks very cool.
Instigators
Don't ask me why but the subject of mortality has been floating around me. I don't know if this means I'm about to get sick and die, or what, but it's there, and there's no avoiding it. Sorry if you didn't want to hear this. I'm still happy, probably happier than most times, but if you're over thirty you must know what I'm talking about.
Actually, since I've been reading more lately, I've learned that kids go through this too. At age five or so, children become aware of and then preoccupied with death. I remember going through this, literally paralyzed with fear lying in bed, probably around age five, shocked by my lack of clues about death.
Now the good news is that if you don't die you get over it. So one line of reasoning (my mind is always working) is that some part of me is dying, perhaps in a symbolic way, and my body is grieving. A friend reminds me that my body tends to do this symbolic acting-out thing.
By the way, my friend is dead.
But the powers of his ideas live on.
";->"
To children
To children who read this site, let me offer a clue, for what it's worth. Life is a big loop. It's a lot like a computer program. The first four years of our lives is when our loop is written. Then we spend the rest of our lives in that loop. When we test the condition that would break out of the loop, our CPU, which has bugs, fails to break out, and around we go, one more time! It's OK, in a way, because we like our loops, they're comfortable, but they can stop us from seeing that there's more to the universe than our loop. Perhaps more disturbing is to find that people have different kinds of loops! That's cool. We're not all running the same program.
I don't know the answer, or really any answers, but I do believe that the more you know about your loop the happier you will be. "Oh that's just what Dave does," I say with a laugh. "It's not as big a deal as he thinks it is," referring to myself in the third person.
Thanksgiving 2000: The Baby Eagle Story.
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