The Prince Of Swords

Today was a sad day.

I’d applied to attend TED2007.

I was one of more than 800 competing for 50 slots.

I just found out that I did not get in.

Sniff.

TED Conference

Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

Lookie there! He’s using the “Purple Number” concept from wayback to append comments inline to content nodes. Smells like a living document to me!

When adding a comment, check out the custom cursors for the re-size of the dialog window: vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. Nice touch.

Cool stuff. Thanks AJAX.

(Having looked at the Yahoo UI Lib, its powerful, has some nice widgets, but is way too complicated for my taste.)

I’ve been going through Pragmatic AJAX: A Web 2.0 Primer and got to the debugging section this morning. They mentioned some Firefox plugins and other useful things:

Firefox Plugins

View Source Chart - shows you the page’s structure in colored, nested boxes.

View Formatted Source - color-coded source with CSS properties

MODI

MODI v2.0.2 - A bookmarklet that lets you mouseOver elements to get more info.

DOM and Debug in Safari

To turn on the Debug Menu in Safari, open a Terminal and run:

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

You’ll now get the Debug Menu and be able to access the DOM Inspector and other goodness.

Magic Cone
by I.P. Freely

Even better, here’s an instructional animation!

How does it work?

Heard about this as an alternative shot glass.

For a long time I’ve wanted some software to capture all the ideas in my brain that could then analyze, index, and generate relationships between them via a a natural language inference engine for a Me-specific ontology of purple numbered multi-faceted metadata (or NLIEMSOPNMM for short).

This isn’t it, but it is a very interesting approach for a knowledge managemet interface.

H2O Playlist: About H2O

…and the source code is pointed to from here:
H20 Philosophy

Does this sound familiar?

STSC CrossTalk - Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet - Jul 2003

Just reminds me that to fully apply a methodology or framework, you have to have a solid understanding of it plus the environment into which you will be implementing it. (Environment includes at least political, social, techinical, operational, and cultural forces.) Otherwise, the translation/integration will quickly get you into trouble and the overall sucess will be jeopordized. Sounds simple enough.

I ran into this with an eXtreme Programming experiment from a few years ago. I thought I understood XP and the team I hoped to transform. Turns out I didn’t have a solid enough grasp of either nor the skills to pull off such a radical change, so it never really caught on. But lesson learned, we’re taking a different approach and are hoping for better results. My personal change strategy is to do it often. When I look at what I do in my day job, in the last two years, I have changed about as much as you can including work environment, programming language, software tools, focus, team, and I have moved completely to Mac and everything that comes along with that.

My favorite part of change is the cascade of new insights you gain from a switch. For example, I can now compare Visio to Omnigraffle. Before there was only Visio to measure with so then I was attempting to address my issues with it when I found All Clear. Now that Omnigraffle is in the mix, I have more information and diversity to make better decisions. As I learn Omnigraffle, I have the Visio background to refer to which speeds up learning compared to not ever using a graphing tool. If my needs change, I’ll be ready to switch to another tool and able to do that even faster.

Conceptualist or Experimentalist?

Wired 14.07: What Kind of Genius Are You?

I’ve come to realize that as nice and simple and seductive a binary designation can be, the real world is just messy and in shades of grey. In this case, I tend to sway towards the Experimentalist with my incessant testing and breaking of things. Those experiments do build up a knowledge base in specific lines of inquiry, but can often lead to conceptual breakthroughs in tangental areas. This goes back to my experiences reading books. First, I often don’t necessarily learn a ton of new information but I do find better ways to label or organize the ideas I’m carrying around. Second, when I read after a while I realize that my brain has gone somewhere else while my eyes go through the motions of reading. This used to frustrate me since I’d have to back track and figure out where I fell off the path. Now I know that where I went when I went off the path is more important than just reading the book because my mind has already gone off and applied something it had just learned.

I’ve added Galenson’s books to my reading list.

Speaking of genius an wanting to understand how minds work, I do recommend The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius.