Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:00 pm on 6/23/2005
(To my less techie readers, I’m sorry; this’ll just take a minute.)
So, Greasemonkey. You love it, I love it, it lets you hack just about danged everything. It lets people do lovely stuff like Instant Textile, which is a nice band-aid for when web sites ask you to submit text, but don’t do any nice auto-formatting for you, insisting on HTML markup instead. Sometimes I don’t wanna write HTML. Sometimes Textile is much nicer.
But! Textile is not the only attempt out there at being nicer than HTML. There’s BBCode, a curious tag set popular on forums like phpBB, which is basically HTML with square brackets instead of pointy ones. There are nearly as many kinds of Wiki markup as there are kinds of Wikis. And then there’s Markdown, which is Textile for people who hate some specific thing about Textile that Markdown does differently.
A Textile-to-HTML button on our textareas is lovely. Now, how about a universal damned translator? Something that figures out, from some contextual thing on the page, what kind of markup is required of us, and translates Textile (or anything else) to that? Yes. This is what we need IT CAN HAPPEN IN OUR LIFETIME.
Lingua Franca is a first (baby-)step. It converts a small subset of Textile markup to either HTML, BBCode, or MediaWiki markup. The translation is one-way, alas, and the version number here is 0.1, which means that most of it flat-out doesn’t work right. And the code’s ugly. And so is the UI. It’s doing everything right there in your browser’s little JavaScript-brain, and I am totally open to doing it on the server side of some server. In fact, I think that someone who provided a nice web service for translating back-and-forth between all these formats would earn glittering prizes… possibly on the Nobel level.
Anyway. It’s GPL. Hack it. Take it and run with it. Please. Or just leave a comment telling me about the brilliant stuff which I’ve just poorly duplicated. One way or another, let’s solve this damn problem.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 11:26 pm on 6/12/2005
Here’s a snippet from It Must Have Been Something I Ate, newly retrieved from loan to a friend and just as much fun to read as it was the first time through. This is the paragraph that, a year and a half ago, got me to eliminate beef from my diet almost completely, except for four times a year when I gorge on it luxuriously. To wit:
Beef is not really good for us, especially fine, fatty, juicy, expensive beef. The environment is certainly not improved by the sheer number of cattle we raise. World hunger will never be solved by our eating so much so high on the food chain. And, according to some feminists, beef-eating is somehow connected with testosterone and the hideous control of human society by guys. But to deny our occasional need for the chewy, bloody, raw, primeval, primordial, ferrous, feral, slightly rotten taste of beef is to deny our very chromosomes, our human inheritance. We should consume beef infrequently, but when we do, we should buy only the most tender, rich, juicy and flavorful beef we can afford, and grill it over wood or charcoal.
Obviously I had to have been exposed previously to lots of ambient info about beef’s health and environmental risks to go over any sort of tipping point when I read this. But still, isn’t it beautiful? (Hey, speaking of tipping points, it’d be wonderful if Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book were the halfway measure between his first two, and covered the difference between information that doesn’t make us change our minds yet, and the crucial bit that does.)
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:18 pm on 6/11/2005
In the latest episode of the Honest Information Program, topics include Music and Divination. My Criswell tribute is featured (peep the hidden track of outtakes).
The website will hopefully be up within the week, which will have an RSS feed and therefore be a “real” “podcast.”
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:40 pm on 6/2/2005
Before I fly up to Portland for the weekend, I want to make a blog post. I am not sure why this fairly inessential item is on my goal list for before I rush out of town, but there it is. I don’t have time to do anything but a quick rundown of what I’ve been thinking about lately; if alla y’all can maybe make notes in the comments about what sorts of things I might pursue to further these lines of thinking, I’d love it a whole lot.
What I’ve been thinking of posting about:
* Lots about the Brian Eno book, including the notion that music is as much as force for keeping people apart as it is for “bringing people together”
* Paul Graham’s essay on startups, ideas for them, and work, vis a vis my own quest to really learn how to work on unpleasant things (or accept that nothing I’m interested in will ever make me successful)
* My God this new Sleater-Kinney record is phenomenal
* The game-design textbook Rules of Play, which A) reads like a textbook, and B) has such a huge amount of meta-talk in its first section, defining this and that and finally defining the word “schema” (so they can tell you that they’re about to define some more things in terms of those things’ essential info, not all the info) that I only just got to the interesting stuff after 80 pages. It seemed utterly like padding until I thought about how Swerdloff and I wrote to each other after graduation that nobody in college, or any time before college, had ever bothered to actually, explicitly teach us any methodologies that would actually help us learn. They just assigned the reading and the papers.
There’s learning by doing, there’s learning by being told, and there’s forms of learning in the middle, but for a class of people I seem to be in, learning works best when it’s nearer the being-told point on the continuum, or in the middle. Nearer the purely-doing axis tends to just piss me off, especially when someone around me is in a position to provide some info that might be helpful. So I became really grateful to Rules of Play at that point, for “padding” itself with meta-stuff that some folks out there probably needed.
link here