People think that there are authorities out there with direct knowledge when in fact there is no direct knowledge, there is only focal knowledge, knowledge that is located around a set of practices, discourses, institutional locations, etc. So for example a doctor doesn’t know bodies; a doctor knows a bunch of things about the body …
Author Archives: method
Syntax Stupid Idea
I’m a big fan of English-like programming syntax. I love that Ruby has an unless operator and that both it and if can be put after the statement, like do_this if thisdo_this if this or do_this unless thatdo_this unless that . I also like Javascript’s this word. I’d like to see all the prepositions in …
Another Stupid Idea
Oh hai. I’ll start writing here again, I swear. This is just a quick “I had an idea” post. An idea for a Firefox extension/Jetpack plugin: You right-click on some text, select “speak it”, the text gets sent to the cloud and returns with a hidden flash element that plays high-quality text to speech. Sounds …
Non-Rails Autotest + RSpec + LibNotify + Linux
Update: The information below is VERY outdated. Take a look at new instructions for getting this set up. Each of those terms actually means something! If you don’t know what any one of those terms means, then you probably won’t enjoy this post. It’s surprising that something so cool and so central to the Ruby …
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Progress on “Menagerie”
As I Avoid This Sleep
This reminded me of a local meme1 in my office, based on the blank cat is blank global meme. But while I have your attention, I want to talk about my software plans. One thing I’ve meant to work on for a while is the “sessions” situation in Gnome. The fact that it’s not clear …
As I Drink This Beer
A dystopian “control” society based on distraction. Remember, in Brave New World it’s entertainment, in Brazil it’s bureaucracy and prolishness, in 1984 it’s fear and propaganda… but distraction as such is something different. You set your mind to do something and you get distracted, you forget to do it, you forget that you even wanted …
2008
You can’t really tell from this blog what I’ve been doing in the past year (or in previous years, either). Partly this is due to a congenital habit of not discussing anything that is directly relevant to my life. To know what’s going on you have to read the lacunae–if I’m not discussing it, it …
Weird Spam
I actually wrote this a couple of months ago, but I was too shy to post it then. I get the occasional weird spam mails that are sent to the alexandria-list-owner and I’m not sure if I can safely spam them in Gmail, so I end up reading a lot of interesting spam1. Most of …
Idea Quickie: Event Wiki Site
Okay, so events are past public occurrences that get a URL. E.g., “a man who was wearing a gaudy green coat and playing a ukelele that disturbed people in the cafe at X.” In the case of crimes, these events would be linked to a crime report. But mostly the wiki page for an “event” …