Archive of June 2003
Yikes
It apparently wasn’t weird enough to have a discipline known as “Data Semantics” –; they had to go a form a community. (Disclaimer: I should admit that I probably dwell on at least the fringes of this “community” myself; after browsing around there for a bit, I downloaded a paper titled “Avoiding Structural Conflicts in Collaborative Ontology Engineering” which I have to confess I’m sort of psyched to start reading. Doesn’t mean it isn’t weird, though.)
I’ve actually had this idea kicking around my head for awhile now, that a lot of contemporary CS writing, and even commercial software documentation (particularly of large systems like RDBMSs &c.), reads very much like medieval theology, in terms of style and the exquisiteness and elaboration of its esotericism. I suspect there’s something similar going on in the motivation for this obscurity in each case (something not entirely cynical, either). I think I’d like to blog about this at more length sometime. Not tonight, however –; right now I just wanna walk the dog and get to bed. Good night.
16:08 | 0 CommentsGak!
Gak! I’m sorry, dear blog, I realize I’ve been neglecting you, but I didn’t notice just how long it’s been that you’ve had to go without an update, until I looked at you today. I promise, I’ve been thinking of you every day, but I just haven’t been able to find the time or the energy to post to you lately. The only thing I can say in my defense is I’m still really, really busy.
16:08 | 0 CommentsOK, titles!
See, I never really got the idea of titling my blog entries. I mean, I guess it shouldn’t be that different from putting a subject line on an email - which is something I do just routinely and without thinking and I really wouldn’t think of sending email with a blank subject. So I don’t know why I’m so crabby about doing it here, but there you are. I seriously don’t like to do it, and wouldn’t at all, except that it’s sort of obviously helpful for RSS for entries to have some sort of title. Entries I’ve left untitled in the past, NetNewsWire displays the first dozen words or so from the post as the title, which is awkward, unhelpful, and sort of generally ugly. So it was starting a regular RSS feed for this blog that led me to get more in the habit of titling stuff here.
But I still haven’t really gotten used to it, and I don’t really like it. So today, the solution that should have been obvious all along finally hit me: I will be storing titles for posts, but I’ve redesigned the template for regular HTML display so that titles do not appear. Incidently, for the Aggregator-using crowd, fair warning: given this new arrangement, I plan to start using titles more frivolously than ever. Look for them to be sort of arbitrary tokens, with at best a sort of tangential relationship to the story they link to. On the other hand, maybe some of them will be more like email subject lines - just a six-words-or-fewer precis of the post, boring but effective.
One unfortunate side effect: during the period where I was trying to get along with titles, I sometimes put the first few words of a post in the title, and then continued the first sentence in the body of the entry. Those entries look weird now. Maybe I’ll fix them later, maybe not. I wish I would have thought of this at the very beginning. Oh, well.
16:08 | 0 Comments