Less Rules and Less People

Two things I wanted to remember from Acts of Volition:    (84M)

Following rules makes you stupid:    (84N)

There's something there about the difference between structures that constrain and those that support.    (84P)

The rules posting points to Garrity's Law of Inverse Congregational Intelligence:    (84Q)

I suppose that runs a bit contrary to the collaboration ethic I've claimed to buy at various times, but there is a great deal of evidence in both social and personal history to support Garrity's Law. I suspect the strength of ties is another variable as well as the strength of goals.    (84S)

Posted by cdent at 03:43 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: collaboration

My Plans for Purple Numbers

The last 24 hours or so of activity related to purple numbers has been very exciting for me. I've been sitting around for more than a year wondering when the concept might get some buzz. And now it has some and that's cool.    (835)

I have some personal hopes and goals for what I want to do with PurpleNumbers that I'd like to record for posterity.    (836)

In my world there are three types of content that have purple numbers. That which is stored in PurpleWiki's persistence system, that which is parsed by PurpleWiki but not stored there, and that which is made purple by some other means.    (837)

Goal number 1    (838)

Granular chunks of all three of those content types should be reachable by a domain and document independent identifier. By this I mean that the URL+anchor at which the content is found is not the identifer, just the NID (Node identifier).    (839)

This requires that content be generated with IDs that come from a networked service that can both provide a globally unique ID as well as resolve that ID back to the current (and possibly unstable) URL where the content is at the moment.    (83A)

Besides providing persistent identifiers pointing to granular content in a way that is more stable in the face of change than current possibilities, it also means that XPath or other tools can be used to transclude content from any source that has these sorts of identifiers.    (83B)

Note that I'm not saying anything about how the purple numbers are presented or how they are added to documents just that they are added, and that the identifiers have a certain nature.    (83C)

Goal number 2    (83D)

This one's quite a bit less generally applicable, but it describes a model of content on the internet of which I'm quite fond. Some might find it reminiscent of Xanadu.    (83E)

In the current release, PurpleWiki stores it's content in WikiText. Each chunk has a NID associated with it. Any chunk that does not have NID when the text is being prepared for a write to disk is given one. One of PurpleWiki's major coolnesses is that although it stores the content as WikiText, its in code representation is a parse tree that can be traversed in a variety of ways to create interesting views.    (83F)

NodaryPublic is a wiki page that describes an in-flight brainstorm from a few days ago of my plan to experiment with separating content, structure and the notion of document away from each other by keeping content in a pool, structure in a graph of nodes that point to elements of content in the pool, and documents as transients that point to single nodes of the tree that are used as starting points for view traversals.    (83G)

In this model everything is versioned, nothing is deleted, everything gets an id. Any node or element can be used as the starting point for editing. Any version of any node or element can be included by reference (transcluded) in anything else. All of it nicely indexed for easy discovery, of course.    (83H)

I'm not entirely sure what this will do. In my mind I see something not entirely unlike a wiki, but with less sense of a page, more granular versioning, and active reuse of content. I see it starting, much like PurpleWiki's TransClusion, as a single domain of content on one computer, and then expanding, from learning and experience, into something that works across networks.    (83I)

Is this practical? Maybe not. Does it cover trodden ground? Certainly. Where will it go? Dunno, but it sure seems interesting to me.    (83J)

Posted by cdent at 12:04 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: purple

Big Day for Purple Numbers

In the last 24 hours Tim Bray and Jonas M Luster have purpled their blogs. Tim at ongoing and Jonas at a preponderance of evidence. In the process they've both decided to not display the purple numbers themselves (the NIDs) but rather a '#' symbol. As I've been down this road to hashes and back again to numbers a little history may be in order.    (827)

• Simon Willison has put together plinks a javascript solution for displaying and creating ids on content that is extremely slick. His system has different goals from some I describe below.    (831)
• mnot has a similar thing for anchors. He chooses to be parsimonious in where he puts anchors. Different goals.    (832)
• Michael Day doesn't like the number solution. He would prefer granular addresses be created when text is selected. See his comment and my response to an earlier entry.    (833)

PurpleNumbers started as a way to provide granular addressability to content on the web. What this means is being able to point into a document directly to paragraphs or lists, or whatever else, with a high level of precision. This makes reference and citation much less fuzzy. One never needs to know which part of a document is the relevant piece, the URL takes you right to it.    (828)

Early but contemporary (purple is based on ideas in Doug Engelbart's Augment system) implementations of Purple Numbers for web content created numbers that are unique only in the current document (this is how Tim and Jonas have done things). Those implementations usually displayed the numbers. In part this was because it sort of made sense: we have a sequence of numbers, they indicate a certain structure, etc. In part this was because the documents thusly purpled had a strong chance of being printed, and seeing the number on the page was the best way to make reference to the content.    (829)

When EugeneEricKim and I created PurpleWiki we continued this trend. PurpleWiki gained a small but purposeful user base who used the numbers a lot. That was version 0.1. We got in the habit of calling the identifiers on each paragraph NIDs (for Node Identifier, at least that's what I think it means).    (82A)

For the next version I wanted to implement document independent NIDs. I felt this would provide us with more flexibility for the future when I hoped we would be saving PurpleWiki pages as series of Nodes, rather than as documents. Having document independent NIDs would allow content chunks to move from page to page without too much difficulty, and allow something I had always wanted: TransClusion.    (82B)

So we set about coming up with an identifier scheme. For reason lost to the mists of time (but probably in the PurpleWiki:MailingLists somewhere) we decided to use a 6 digit wide string of numerals and upper cases letters, with leading zeroes as necessary. Eugene and I felt then, as Tim and Jonas do now, that the numbers were distracting so we hid them under a '#'.    (82C)

At that time the NIDs were only being used for making reference to content, so using a right-click or ctrl-click combo to cut and past the URL and NID was all that was necessary: knowing the value of the NID was not.    (82D)

Soon after I implemented transclusion in the PurpleWiki libraries and was able, if I had a NID, to transclude content between my wiki pages and my blog.    (82E)

Somewhere in there, some of the users of PurpleWiki complained about the '#' because they were in the habit of printing WikiPages? and discussing them in person. The '#' was trouble when printing.    (82F)

And still around about the same time, a PurpleNumbers implementation for Zwiki made it clear that the six character wide NID was pretty much stupid: just increment as necessary instead.    (82G)

TransClusion in PurpleWiki is accomplished by using the NID in a special tag. To transclude the following I put '[t 7NY]' into my document for later display processing:    (82H)

(If you click on the purple T you will be taken to the source document.)    (82P)

The combination of smaller NIDs, needing to be able to talk about NIDs and print them, and needing the value for TransClusion pushed us back to displaying the NIDs. I was initially reluctant, but now am glad as it makes TransClusion somewhat more straightforward (it's still harder than it should be).    (82J)

With the setup Jonas and Tim are using in their blogs they cannot do Transclusion or have document independent NIDs. I wouldn't be surprised is they starting thinking about such things as they get used to having the numbers around. I'm extremely happy to see them using the granular addressing aspect of PurpleNumbers.    (82K)

One thing I've found very interesting in PurpleWiki development is what people imagine possible once they've had a glance at what's already been done. Eugene had created purple based on what he knew of Augment and some other similar tools. When he and I got together to do PurpleWiki, we were primarily shooting for granular addressability. Once we got that working, I started getting all jazzed about somehow, maybe, someday, being able to do TransClusion. Eugene was into the idea but I felt somehow that he didn't quite get it. Since then we've implemented TransClusion and new people have come along with ideas of things to do that I'm sure I don't quite get, but are probably a next step that will be great. A good example are the guys who have developed Perplog, a logging (creates purple numbered logs) IRC bot that allows TransClusion of content into the IRC channel. In my work group this has proven to be extremely powerful (our email archives, wiki pages, document repository and irc logs are all purple numbered so any time you need to remind someone of something, it is just a lookup and transclude away).    (82L)

For more info see:    (82M)

• PurpleWiki:HomePage    (82N)
• My purple category in this blog    (82O)

Posted by cdent at 09:57 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: purple

Atom IDs, permalinks and persistence

It's nice to see MarkPilgrim being relatively clear about the value of persistent and unique ID's in his How to make a good ID in Atom essay.    (7O4)

What's odd, though, is that all of the reasons he cites for why an Atom ID needs to be persistent apply equally well to permalinks, yet he describes many situations where permalinks have failed to be permanent. Further, he goes on to use the data in those permalinks as sources for Atom IDs.    (7O5)

This makes no sense to me.    (7O6)

If you want an identifier to be unique, your safest bet is to use as little meaningful information as possible. This is why primary keys in databases are often auto-incrementing integers.    (7O7)

And if you want something to be a permanent pointer, like a permalink, that means it is a persistent identifier, even though it is considered in the domain of labels. This means, as much as possible, you should strive to make your permalinks behave as identifiers.    (7O8)

In fact identifiers and permanent pointers are essentially the same thing. An identifier is not a resource, it is a pointer to it. It just so happens to be the only reliable pointer to it.    (7O9)

EugeneEricKim and I had a conversation about identifiers on IRC recently in which he, surprisingly, managed to convince me that XRI may be a good source of identifiers for content on the web.    (7OG)

My interest is in using them as PurpleNumbers but they seem to be able to address some of the issues with Atom IDs and permalinks as well. The important trick is that XRI supports both e-names and e-numbers. If I understand things correctly, an e-name is one of several labels for an e-number. An e-name can be resolved to an e-number and then an e-number can be resolved to a possibly moving resource.    (7OH)

I suspect the primary issue with using XRI is implementation. There's no, as far as I can tell, immediate path to making use of the stuff.    (7OI)

To be complete, I was led to Mark's essay from TimBray?'s ongoing entry on identifiers. I mostly agree with Tim given the current constraints of the web. But those constraints are huge.    (7OJ)

The problem is that, as currently used, permalinks are labels that are vulnerable to change. This is because they contain interpretable meaningful information that is dependent on the present day situation. Tim believes his permalinks are permament but what happens when he looses his domain name or (perish the thought) HTTP ceases to exist?    (7OK)

If we claim the permalink is only the file part of the URL, it is insufficiently unique to be considered stable and persistent.    (7OL)

Also, Mark and Tim, what's with the lack of TrackBack or comments? I guess I'll ping them by other means.    (7OM)

Update: Bill de Hora has joined the fray with his usual sensible statements about the way the world is versus how we might like it to be. "The deployed Web works against cool URIs not for them."    (7OP)

Yet another update: DannyAyers joins in, pointing to both Mark and Tim and saying: "Mark’s advice is very well put, but I’d suggest at least that if advice like the following is needed then something in the state of Denmark is edging towards it’s sell-by date[...]"    (826)

Posted by cdent at 05:49 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: geek-glaxon , purple

Purple Spreading

Jonas M Luster has once again suggested PurpleNumbers as a good aid for doing proper blog sourcing. His posting prompts me to put down some thoughts I've apparently forgotten to record in the past.    (7NP)

Jonas mentions some methods for purpling blog postings:    (7NQ)

• My Purple Plugin for MovableType.    (7NR)
• A filter for WordPress    (7NS)
• PurpleSlurple.    (7NT)
• Jonas is working on something for DruPal? (I'd love to hear more about this).    (7NU)
• Phil at Among Other Things has created an additional WordPress filter.    (7NV)

There's also EugeneEricKim's plugin for Blosxom.    (7NW)

One large difference between the plugins that Eugene and I use and other systems is that ours use the PurpleWiki libraries to create unique identifiers for each chunk of content. This allows TransClusion of content among blog entries and with associated Wiki pages. Follow the TransClusion link to see this in action or visit PlaNetwork:InternetRelayChat to learn how it is being used with an IRC channel associated with next week's Planetwork conference. In that setup purple numbered content from the wiki and irc logs can be transcluded back into the live IRC chat. That system is using another PurpleWiki related tool: Perplog.    (7NX)

The long term goal of TransClusion in PurpleWiki is to enable to direct granular quotation of content anywhere on the web, making citation sort of automatic. I have a working prototype of TransClusion amongst geographically disperse servers, but the current solution doesn't scale so there's more work to be done.    (7NY)

Another way to purple HTML content is with some Javascript to process the Dom of a page when it is loaded. There's probably a way to automate this, but if you have a page that you would like to quickly purple make these changes to the header:    (7NZ)

   <head>
    <script language='javascript' src='ator.js'></script>
  </head>
  <body onLoad="purp(window.document.getElementsByTagName?('body')[0])">    (7O0)

and in a nearby file (that I've called ator.js) put this:    (7O1)

  var tagsRE=/\bh|p|li|dt|dd|pre\b/i; 
  var nid = 0;
  var purpleStyle = "font-family:sans-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:x-small;text-decoration:none;color:#C8A8FF"
  function purp(node){
      if (node.hasChildNodes?) {
        var hi_cn;
        for(hi_cn=0; hi_cn<node.childNodes.length; hi_cn++) {
            purp(node.childNodes[hi_cn]);
        }
      }
    if(node.nodeType == 1) {
        if (tagsRE.test(node.nodeName)) {
            var nidValue = "nid" + nid;
            node.setAttribute('id', nidValue);
            newNode = document.createElement('a');
            newNode.setAttribute('href', "#" + nidValue);
            newNode.setAttribute('style', purpleStyle);
            newNode.innerHTML = " " + nid;
            node.appendChild(newNode);
            nid = nid + 1;
        }
      }
    }    (7O2)

I originally posted this in a message to the BlueOxenCollaboratory. The code is adapted from PaulFord?'s The Passivator which itself is adapted from something else. Such is the way of the Internet and it is good.    (7O3)

Posted by cdent at 04:48 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: purple

Losing People

I reckon what makes a people is a form of interaction. Interaction with a mutual responsiveness. This is why some thing like your computer might be considered a people but some one like George Bush would not.    (7FV)

Some cats are definitely people. After being around for several weeks as a fixture in my daily routine and dialog, Enzo the foster cat has returned to the animal shelter to be one of the participants in their special no-kill kitty colony. As a charming fellow with a special look, he's thought a good candidate for adoption. While I'm sure that's true and I wish him the best I will miss him and I was terribly sad after leaving him behind.    (7FW)

+ ++ T    (7FX)

He's the white one.    (7FY)

Losing people and the artifacts of their presence is the central cause of paralysis in my life. Every interaction is so full of potential for experience, both good and bad, that I find myself reluctant to start anything but once started reluctant to finish anything.    (7FZ)

I had intentionally made myself too busy to take any action on Enzo but in the end I had to break the indecision. As I stuffed him into the little cat carrier I felt a traitor to the many mornings of breakfast and conversation we had shared.    (7G0)

I am not cut out to be a foster kitty caretaker. My interactions with the cats are not for the sake of enjoyment. I don't see them as my entertainment or a source of "I'm helping make the world a better place" feelings. I know that fostering a cat is helpful to the cat and the shelter organization, and I'm sure there are people who can do that well.    (7G1)

But for me when the cat, or anybody, comes to my house I'm making a pledge of loyalty to someone who will inevitably, because of the days of constant interaction, become my good pal, even if they stink and talk too much. That pledge feels utterly betrayed by the return to the pleasant but anonymous seeming confined spaces of the animal shelter.    (7G2)

So I think I better not start something with another cat, because I won't want to finish it. And if I'm not willing to talk to you, it may be because you're not worth talking to, but it could also be because I'd hate to develop an understanding and have that go away.    (7G3)

Posted by cdent at 02:18 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: journal

Cicada Sound

I came home from New York at night and in the rain. There were cicadas crunching underfoot but they weren't making much noise. The next day I stayed in all day. I could hear them out there, but the house was muffling their vigor. This morning I went out and recorded them using the voice memo service on my palm pilot. Cicadas sound like this. That's them; it sounds like that, that's not static. A few of them, close up, don't sound like that. It's more like clicking, whirring, and whining. the aggregated sound of many, though--oi it's painful.    (7FJ)

Posted by cdent at 06:22 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: house

New York Week

I spent last week in New York, attending the 13th Internation World Wide Web Conference. I had promised to blog the conference but I managed to not get around to it. I hope to soon, I learned some good webby stuff.    (7EV)

But I learned some other things, not webby stuff, I ought not forget. Full collection of pictures at NewYorkMayThumb.    (7EW)

+ ++ T    (7EX)

There's some fine bouldering in Central Park. It's late evening in this pic as I look up towards the buildings just south of the park. I'm underneath a boulder known as Rat Rock.    (7EY)

I went to the park the second day of the conference after a day of feeling socially retarded and unable to connect. Not only was I feeling shy, I was also feeling little sense of value in attempting to make a connection.    (7EZ)

At the park, I'm bouldering alone. It's rained earlier in the day so conditions are less than good. After a while a guy shows up. I ask him to show me a few problems, explaining this is not my turf. We engage in SharedJargon?. We have fun.    (7F0)

This represents a fundamental shift in my me. The meaning of which is as yet not fully sussed out. I'm not prepared to associate a value judgment with it quite yet.    (7F1)

+ ++ T    (7F2)

New York is big. In several locations throughout the place you find skylines that are adequate for reasonably sized standalone cities. This view is out the Southeast corner of the park. Here's downtown    (7F3)

+ ++ T    (7F4)

viewed from the Staten Island Ferry.    (7F5)

I don't consider myself a city dude, but I liked New York. I conclude that most cities just aren't worth the hassle: the benefits don't win when compared with the challenges. The challenges for me are compression, oppression, aggression and apprehension. New York has way more than enough of that stuff but makes up for it in several ways:    (7F6)

• The park. The cabbie took me through the park on the way to the hotel. I was thoroughly impressed and felt a relieved sense of "oh, this is here, I'll be okay." The park is a masterpiece.    (7F7)
• The subway. It works and is out of the way, at least on Manhattan (which is all I'm really talking about here, I neither saw nor have any immediate inclination to see the less vertical areas of New York). Big minus points to Chicago for putting theirs above ground. Boo.    (7F8)
• The food. There's lots to choose from it. Some of it even cheap.    (7F9)
• Pretty people that are not fat. This is a major contributing factor. Maybe it would wear off with time but the beauty and variety of the people make you feel like you are somewhere special rather than in a toilet (despite the smell).    (7FA)
• Other stuff I'm not remembering right now because this was supposed to be a short entry.    (7FB)

So, with all that I found myself thinking: I could deal with this. That's not an entirely new thought: I've often thought in the heart of a giant city was certainly a better option than some random place in a medium city. Grocery delivery would be key.    (7FC)

I prefer a slow entry to a place. Get somewhere and then wander in expanding circles, not doing much. I took this approach to my time in New York and liked it that way. As a result I didn't hit all the sites, but I got a pleasant feeling. That's my mode.    (7FD)

When I go back, I'd like to get inside the Chrysler Building.    (7FE)

+ ++ T    (7FF)

I couldn't get past the lobby, but even that was enough to renew my desire to do some Art Deco exploring.    (7FG)

When traveling, non stop flights on little jets are the way to go. Exit rows extra helpful. Bring own water.    (7FH)

Okay, one conference comment: Semantic Web confederates and cheerleaders are not as crazy as I once thought (the errors of AI are not being repeated, as it once seemed). They do, though, need to come back to earth, focus on today, and let things evolve and emerge concurrent with real-world activity. A great deal of the design activity associated with SemanticWeb? standards is intensely architected stuff. The w3c is turning into the IOETF: InternetOverEngineeringTaskForce.    (7FI)

Posted by cdent at 06:16 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: journal , photo , travel

Truth and Ugliness

A friend forwarded an article in the London Times written by Matthew Parris. He worked in Thatcher's administration back in the day. The article, for which I can't find an accessible URL, has the title Why I will be rooting for a George Bush election victory. It begins:    (4RB)

It's becoming trendy for folk on both the right and the left to put forth this idea: let's make sure this situation plays out so that truth is clear.    (4RE)

How many people will be dead? How many environments ruined? How many countries collapsed into civil war? How many mom and pop business turned into fast food restaurants and wal-marts?    (4RF)

There are limits to the purist pursuit of principle. No one's vision of truth and honor, not the neocon's, not Matthew's, not ours, can stand in the face of the sort of ignorance and suffering that will rise from Bush's friends trying to run the world.    (4RG)

Posted by cdent at 06:03 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: politics

World Wide Web 2004

I will be at the 13th International World Wide Web Conference in New York next week.    (4R7)

I hope to blog the interesting bits.    (4R8)

If you're going to be there, let me know.    (4R9)

Posted by cdent at 09:05 PM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: geek-glaxon

Tradding round the Maypole

In honor of the May Day honoring of the struggle for the eight hour workday, MattLiggett and I took off for three days of blissful climbing at TheRed. I from work and Matt in his gap between school semesters.    (4NA)

Weather at the red river gorge is a tricky business. The forecast is not to be trusted. Other than an unfortunate late night knock on my tent with "my tent is all wet, give me the car keys" we had fine weather, fine climbing and, unusually, some fine food.    (4NB)

We had some goals:    (4NC)

1. Get Matt doing some easy leads so he could hone his clipping and comfort.    (4ND)
2. Get me placing my huge pile of camalots, much too shiny and new, into some cracks.    (4NE)
3. Have fun.    (4NF)
4. Celebrate the impending collapse of the multi-national corporatist hegemony through the pursuit of leisure and the wearing of products from Patagonia and Chaco.    (4NG)

I think we hit these pretty good but it cannot be said that we pulled down hard, bro. These were not those days. Some other days will be those days, and that will be good too.    (4NH)

Thumbnails of the entire collection of photos can be found in TheWiki at TheRedMay2004Thumb. For each picture, clicking on the + or ++ will take you to medium and huge versions of the pictures. For many, if you are just looking at the thumbs you are missing out.    (4NI)

Day One    (4NJ)

We arrived late Sunday night, quickly set up tents, and waited for the morning. It arrived with a bit of a chill and a lack of coffee. Our destination: RoadsideCrag.    (4NK)

RoadsideCrag is probably the most popular crag at TheRed. It has a little bit of everything--sport and trad, easy and hard--and a nice simple approach. Because of this it is often full of people on the weekends.    (4NL)

It was Monday. Weeks of intense planning and complicated math had led us to believe that a weekday would turn the place into our own personal palace of climbing pleasure. Hee! No. It wasn't full, but we did some waiting and while we did who comes trucking up the trail but some chums from home on a bachelor party climbing expedition.    (4NM)

One end of RoadsideCrag, the right or East end, is filled up with supposedly safe and easy sport leads. Just what we wanted for goal #1. The easiest one, CSharpOrBFlat, was occupado, as was AlteredScale, so we went for AllCowsEatGrass.    (4NN)

Like most of the other routes in the area, it's a medium length, mostly vertical but kind of slabby, jesus I would hate to fall on this kind of experience.    (4NO)

+ ++ T    (4NP)

Up I went. When I came down, Matt went up. This is different from what we would do later in the day and the days following.    (4NQ)

Matt chose to top rope the route as he was a bit out of practice from all the educating he's been getting to prepare for the impending revolution. He goes to the top where he finds the anchor bolts from which I've just lowered are moving in the rock.    (4NR)

For those of you unfamiliar with these sorts of things, this is double plus ungood. From my position down on the ground I can tell Matt's a little wigged out: he's telling me to move him very gently, he accidently drops a quickdraw (which happily slides down the rope and gently lands on the ground, rather than on my head where I've not yet put my brand new helmet), and he takes extra special long to clean up and descend. But he calmly refrains from telling me what's up until he's safely on the ground (otherwise we would have a clusterfuck of deciding what the right thing to do is).    (4NS)

Oddly, when we tell our neighboring climbers of the sad state of the anchors on this climb not only do they say something that amounts to "oh yeah, most of them are messed up in some way" but then they go and climb on them.    (4NT)

We climb CSharpOrBFlat and YouCanTuneAPianoButYouCantTunaFish and decide if we are going to be dealing with unreliable anchors, they may as well be ones we place ourselves.    (4NU)

So we moved west to RoadsideAttraction.    (4NV)

One hundred and forty feet of fun. RoadsideAttraction is very well known: it's pretty easy, easy to get to and very satisfying. I'm told that climbing it naked in the dark is something of a must do once you have the skillz.    (4NW)

I found it a bit unnerving myself, first time and all, so I kept my clothes. Unlike the other routes we had done that day, when I got to the top, I sat down, set up an anchor and belayed Matt up to me. From our perch we looked out upon a lovely view and felt mighty good.    (4NX)

Here I am, the conquering hero, after our descent:    (4NY)

+ ++ T    (4NZ)

And then we were hungry. And cold. And tired. And lazy. So we went to the restaurant at the Natural Bridge Park lodge. It was yummy. We ate. We reminisced about those fun times back in the day when we climbed RoadsideAttraction. We decided we wanted more, tomorrow would be FortressWall. And to our tents we went, satisfied.    (4O0)

Day Two    (4O1)

Another fella from Bloomington, Andy, was at Miguels as part of a three week climbing extravaganza before returning to the world of employment and obligations. He (and his dog, ChiliDog) joined us for our adventures at FortressWall.    (4O2)

Fortress has traditional climbs only. A whole mess of them, from super easy to somewhere on the hard side of moderate. All kinds of fine places to place gear of all sorts of sizes.    (4O3)

The sun was shining into our lovely setting. It was dry and warm and we had the whole place to ourselves. Here's Matt, on CalypsoIi, saluting our good fortune (and the workers of the world):    (4O4)

+ ++ T    (4O5)

Next was SnaKe and WhereLizardsDare. Fortress has two levels. There are the climbs that start from the ground, like Snake, and those that start at the end of the first set, like WhereLizardsDare. If you make this picture    (4O6)

+ ++ T    (4O7)

extra big (hit the ++), near the middle of the frame you'll find my orange helmet. That's me belaying people up SnaKe (which is out of the frame to the left). Above me, at about 1 o'clock is WhereLizardsDare (where we saw no lizards, but we did see them on CalypsoIi).    (4O8)

WhereLizardsDare is a fabulous climb: difficult off balance stemming with a teeny finger crack to help you out, all way up high in the sky.    (4O9)

We were on a schedule, we had dinner plans, but there was no way we were going to miss BedtimeForBonzo. Last fall I had made it halfway up the second pitch of the climb before freaking out and downclimbing because I had no idea where I was supposed to go. Oh, and it was too dark to see.    (4OA)

The view from the top is quite compelling:    (4OB)

+ ++ T    (4OC)

Having never been there before I wasn't sure it was going to be like that, but I had a hunch. And I was right. The pleasure of topping out on this climb and simply being there,    (4OD)

+ ++ T    (4OE)

on top of everything,    (4OF)

+ ++ T    (4OG)

was sublime. Here's a demonstration from Matt:    (4OH)

+ ++ T    (4OI)

Andy clued us in to a good thing to know:    (4OJ)

You can walk off the second pitch of BedtimeForBonzo and return to the anchors of the first pitch, avoiding what might be a tricky rappel off the top. I wonder if a long rope would get us down from the top in a single go?    (4OK)

Our original schedule had us back to Miguels at 6:00 to head into Lexington to meet Jeremy and Gail. It was about 5:50 when we hit the dirt below the climb, so we skipped Miguels, and scooted to Lexington where we changed shirts in the parking lot of the restaurant. There we ate an enormous pile of yummy fishy sushi things and had a rollicking good time. Jeremy and Gail are good like that.    (4OL)

On the drive into Lexington, with the setting sun, came rain. It stayed around, off and on, for most of the night.    (4OM)

Day Three    (4ON)

I'm getting a bit tired by day three. Matt, who's been sleeping in the car because of the aforementioned rain in his tent, gives up on his first attempt to wake me up. He comes back later. I'm not up for anything too difficult and vote for the easy approach of PhanTasia.    (4OO)

Leading easy to moderate trad climbs is not all that physically exhausting. Yes, you have to work hard, but the sheer number of calories on a day of easy trad doesn't compete with a day of harder sport. Much of it is the amount of time involved. Some of it is the much lower level of difficulty. Yet, at the end of a day of leading trad routes, I'm still at least as exhausted as a sport day. Exhausted by the degree of responsibility I'm putting on my own choices.    (4OP)

So we went to PhanTasia, where we did the lovely AttackOfTheSandShark    (4OQ)

+ ++ T    (4OR)

and the imposing StAlfonsos    (4OS)

+ ++ T    (4OT)

I led the first and Andy got the second. After that we ran up LordOfTheFlies and CreatureFeature, enjoyed some fine Miguels pizza and headed home into the setting sun.    (4OU)

+ ++ T    (4OV)

The following two days I worked enough to not need to take any vacation. So much for the eight hour work day. Workers unite, anyway.    (4OW)

Next week I go to New York for a conference, after that my uncle is over from Britain, sometime soon thereafter I hope to have some time with my bun in Seattle. Somewhere in there I'll get more climbing.    (4OX)

Posted by cdent at 05:20 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: climbing , photo

PurpleWiki 0.9.2 Released

PurpleWiki version 0.9.2 has been released. See the ChangeLog for details on the changes. You can get the release either from CPAN or from the distribution page.    (4M8)

The parts that I like about this release are that it has:    (4M9)

• Much improved view drivers (the parts that take a parsed wiki page and turn into HTML or some other format) that make some forms of transclusion faster and more reliable.    (4MA)
• Support for remote NID and TransClusion handling. That is, if you configure things correctly, you can create content on one machine, and with some ease, transclude it on another.    (4MB)

Now I need to find some people who want play with remote TransClusion. Anyone?    (4MC)

Posted by cdent at 03:53 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: collaboration , purple

False Constraints

There is something very pleasing about a nice coffee beverage in the evening after months of no coffee in the evening. Is it the coffee or the removal of the constraint. Coffee in the morning is nice but not like this. So it's the latter and once again, as every day, voluntary temporary slavery is affirmed as the road to a freedom that is false but viscerally satisfying. Which matters more: having something real or thinking you have something?    (4BD)

Posted by cdent at 02:24 AM | Trackback This | | bl | Categories: journal