• This space left unintentionally blank.

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• I wonder if there's something like irc it for Jabber?

  • That is, a daemon that maintains a directory hierarchy of FIFO pipes giving access to input and output from the network service...

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• Hmm: With the advent of Google App Engine and Python web apps presumably ascendant thanks to it — should I bother with PHP any further?

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• vs — FIGHT!

• Age of Conan looks interesting, but I think I'm not so attracted to it because it's just so damn serious and grim.

  • I like to /dance in WoW.

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• Thinking I'll soon stop redirecting decafbad.com to my accumulator and replace it with a simpler intro page with big buttons pointing at my big topics, maybe with a few teaser bits.

• Project idea: Replace / rework my accumulator with a daily bucket fed from FriendFeed.

  • Accumulate a day's worth of FriendFeed droppings, archive by date in static files.

    • Could this just be an augmentation to Venus?

  • Leave the door open to replace FriendFeed with my own parts.

    • Or maybe skip FriendFeed and stick with plain old feed fetching.

  • Copy FriendFeed's presentation for grouping and collapsing multiple successive updates for a given service.

    • Listening to a few hours of music makes last.fm noisy.

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• Looks like my adoption curve for this, yet another blogging tool, is falling off like usual. Maybe faster than usual. Not sure what that means yet.

• Trying to read Shadow Unit, because I really love the concept of writing episodes for a TV series that never aired.

  • Part of the reason I love the concept of Shadow Unit is that I'm thinking about doing something similar myself.

  • But, I can't really get into it, because I'm just not into cop / profiler shows.

    • The one exception lately might be Dexter, but there's more creep than procedure going on there.

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• WordPress annoyance: The textarea for editing a blog post doesn't start until more than 1/2 way down my screen. Too much nav; always scrolling.

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• So, like, if Twitter keeps going down, we're all going to have to talk to each other through blogs and IRC again. It's certainly a hard act to follow.

• Holy crap, the new Penny Arcade game is so completely made of win.

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• Thinking a bit about creative constraints. 140 characters on Twitter, 1024 on Ficlets.

  • Writing feels a lot more considered and tight - I wonder how that could be applied to longer works?

  • I know this is not a new idea, but it's lately novel to me.

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• i've got a text editor on my Centro. So, I might try maintaining a mobile bucket.

  • I'm spending a lot of time on the bus lately.

• Apropos of my US$0.02 on Markdown yesterday, an app idea occured to me:

  • GreaseMonkey script that uses Showdown to turn all <textareas> into Markdown fields, like I did for hCal awhile ago.

    • Write in Markdown
    • Get previews in-line or in a popup
    • Submit raw HTML

• Yesterday, I managed to write something longer than the usual quick thought, about Markdown.

  • I think it really pushed the usefulness of this thing, and belongs in a full-on blog post after lots of editing.

  • I met Rohit Khare for the first time at SHDH yesterday. Upon my being introduced, he recognized my name from the SHDH 25 who's who list—mainly because of how unreadable this bucket composition was.

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• At SuperHappyDevHouse 25 today, hopefully getting a little writing done in between wandering around mingling and playing Rock Band.

• Now having written this whole thing on Markdown, I've succeeded in entirely Yak Shaving my way away from writing in Word thus far.

• I'm using Markdown to write in this Bucket. I consider it crucial to actually getting any writing done online.

  • Moving the rest of these thoughts to the blog proper.

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• Considering a trip to SuperHappyDevHouse 25 tomorrow.

  • I should probably try working on writing there.

  • But I might also work on this bucket and a few other things.

  • And I really should try to mingle a bit and make a few last connections with people before we move.

    • I'm hoping I can finagle a way to return to CA on a schedule that coincides with future SHDH happenings, but who knows?

• Today was a day of Mozilla work from home, followed by an evening of book work from home.

  • I feel like I've read every line of mootools-trunk-1553.js.

    • I've probably missed a bunch of things.

    • On the other hand, I think I found a few bugs too - I wonder if and how I should file those with that community.

      • Oh, hey, they use Trac.

• Firefox 3.0 RC1 dropped today!

  • I'm amazed at how much smoother and quicker all the animation examples for the book seem to go!

• Real Synthetic Audio is one of my favorite music podcasts evar.

  • IPM Radio is pretty dang nifty as well.

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• Attached a patch to a bug today, and watched it get announced in an IRC channel. Like, in public. This'll take some getting used to.

• As seen on Twitter, I biked to work today. It was only about 11 miles from Santa Clara to Mountain View, but that was enough for me.

  • But, it wasn't too much for me. I've only got about a month left out here in CA, but I wonder if I might just keep this up.

  • Oh yeah, and I wore this snazzy Firefox cycling jersey. I felt at once silly and like a superhero.

• Once upon a time, about 5 or 6 years ago if I recall, I quit smoking cold turkey. Having done that, I feel like I can do damn near anything sometimes.

  • The trick is remembering that feeling.

  • And the other trick—as I find it currently difficult to rise from the couch with muscles overused through 22 miles of bike riding today—is not to overdo it.

• Seems like Twitter is down again. Makes me happy I have a bucket.

• I need to collect bucket thoughts in order to compose a long-form blog post explaining and introducing the thing. Maybe it'll happen under this bullet.

  • Or, maybe not.

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• Thinking about writing a proper long-form blog entry about our having bought a house in Michigan.

  • Kind of the reverse of my post, Go West, Young Man!, from almost 2 years ago.

• Thank you, Akismet:

  • "Akismet has protected your site from 419,402 spam comments already"

• I'm hoping to make this the Summer of Skein.

  • Not to be confused with the Summer of George.

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• Someday, I'm going to explain what this bucket is about. Prerequisite to that is figuring out what it's about. A few quick notions, though:

  • For me, at least, perceptible interface + laziness threshold = weblog silence

  • Dave Winer's OPML Editor has been the only tool in recent memory to keep me publishing thoughts for any respectable stretch.

  • My favorite word processor, once upon a time, was WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

    • I always did love "Reveal Codes"

    • No me gusta mucho el WYSIWYG.

• I keep thinking I want a Psion PDA. They seem to have nice workable keyboards. I miss my 8086 palmtop with Microsoft Works and a sunlight-viewable greyscale screen.

  • This ties into my persistent Golden Age vision of writing at a picnic table in the sun, which I haven't done since college. That palmtop was my enabler then.

• Something else I want to do things with:

  • Google App Engine

• Comments were working in Firefox. Just checked in Safari and found things broken there. Can't be bothered to try MSIE yet.

• To emphasize the notional units here, I've tried especially styling first-level bullets. I can't remember if MSIE is happy with this particular CSS selector yet. If not, tough.

• Tagging per bullet or line in this thing would be interesting at some point, too.

  • I'd like to be able to search for and possibly re-aggregate bullets by tag.

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• I added the bucket to my accumulator, which should be interesting to watch when the "final" version of each day's bucket shows up in the feed.

• At some point, I want to return to that accumulator and implement the custom feed filtering stuff I meant to do. That way, I can offer feeds that gather:

  • a firehose of everything I emit online;
  • just the stuff I emit to decafbad.com;
  • just the long-form articles and posts.

• Time soon to check this bucket stuff into SVN, since it's grown to about a half-dozen scripts and templates. There's some content accumulated, too.

• Tossed in some Haloscan comment links next to the titles. I'm also thinking about switching to Disqus if I can find a clean way to integrate.

  • This might offer a clue toward the Disqus integration I want.

• Hmm. I wonder how hard it would be to tell blosxom to mind the creation date and not modification date on these entries?

  • I remember playing with plugins and other touch-based hackery to sort this kind of thing out, years ago.

• Have a passing thought that I might convert everything from my OPML blog into entries for this bucket. They're very, very similar in spirit.

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• Nothing much dumped here today - I spent pretty much the whole day finishing the third-to-last chapter of the book.

• So, I'd thought that the upload script was working, but it was failing on the SSH auth part of the rsync. Seems to be working again now.

• Since I end up using a lot of the same links repeatedly, some sort of link palette or persistent link notepad would be nice.

• Still thinking a feed-to-markdown thing would work nicely for copying over links to things I've bookmarked, made favorite, or whatever.

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• More things to remember to play with:

  • Google Gears
  • Dojo Offline
  • Get back to XoxoOutliner someday

• Oh hey, my laptop's on PDT time and my server's on UTC time. That'll affect Blosxom date headers a bit, ugh.

• Okay, so I slapped together a quick CSS theme and an rsync-based uploader running every 10 minutes. It's live, after a fashion.

• I've also hacked the feed not to include the most recent entry that I'm editing right now. That's important, and hopefully I'll explain soon.

• There's not much to this thing yet besides Blosxom and a handful of shell scripts that:

  1. Rotate my always-open editor to a new blank file at midnight.
  2. Upload everything to my server every 10 minutes.
  3. Can open the editor from Quicksilver if I happened to have closed it.

  Keeping it stupidly simple for now. Maybe I'll keep using it.

• Thinking of borrowing my Haloscan comments integration from my OPML blog and trying it here too.

• Also thinking of trying Disqus, but not sure it lends itself well to this thing.

---

Metabucket

• Maybe midnight-process the single day's bucket into multiple entries, cut on <hr> and entitled with first <h1>
• Use some ASCII-text convention for embedding link anchors.
• Possibly attach delicious-style tags to anchors for future lookup and search.

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• Since I'm walking distance from Google now, I should see who I know over there who might want to share a table for lunch.

• Hitting the home stretch on writing my part of Professional JavaScript Frameworks. The first half or so went pretty well, but the last month or so has brought a legendary number of disruptions. I'm hoping to write about them all soon.

• Once finished with the book, I hope to have a brief period of getting my shit together before starting to do serially enthusiastic things again.

• I'm also yak shaving and procrastinating a bit in this home stretch, trying to think of sufficiently interesting things to say about what's been happening with me and what it feels like to be a newbie at Mozilla.

• There's a lot of awesome here at Mozilla that's making me feel the need to step up again.

• More stuff I want to do things with:

  • OpenID
  • OAuth
  • AtomPub

• Been reading Let's Tell a Story Together. Here's a goal: Complete at least one work of interactive fiction per month.

• Wondering if scheduling some serial enthusiasms with deadlines over the summer and fall might help me get some interesting things done. Like:

  • July:
    • Record a limited run podcast, say 10 episodes or so.
    • Build something with OpenID, OAuth, and AtomPub
    • Write up the experience of building the above.
  • August:
    • Compose a work of interactive fiction
    • Write up the experience of building the above.
    • Write a few serial short stories
  • September:
    • Revisit podcasting? Podcast the serial stories?
    • Write up the experience of building the above.

• Be careful using images hosted on my site. You might get nipples.

---

Metabucket

• Still haven't pushed this thing live anywhere yet.
• Still talking to myself and wibbling over format.
  • Should an <hr /> indicate a new entry? What about an <h1>?
• Want to spend some time giving this thing a bit of style.
  • No more Times New Roman.
  • Narrow column width.
• Really need to implement comments in Markdown to hide my Vim modeline.

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• I hadn't realized before how close the relationship was between Mozilla and Google. We have the same snacks, and I can have the famous free (and tasty) lunch and dinner over there.

• Also on the Google campus, lots of awkwardly piloted blue granny bikes with mud fenders and MacBook Pros in metal handlebar baskets. Doesn't pay to be a pedestrian when a dozen or so of those go by on the sidewalk.

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Random

• It's kind of weird starting work for a company where almost everything I'm starting to learn, install, and work on are all already open source.

• I have a list of things brewing in my head that guy I want to be when I grow up would be doing interesting things with:

  • Here are a few off the top:
    • Inform 7
    • Jabber
    • Podcasting
    • Storytelling and fiction writing
  • What's keeping me?
    • That's an interesting question.

• Just when I was thinking I wish I had a command-line tool to look at what Time Machine was doing, behold it appears!

• If ever I turn this thing into a web app, I'll think about making a textarea work like Vim

Metabucket

So I'm just going to start writing this blog on my laptop using Blosxom and see if I actually manage to capture some ideas, even if only I'm reading them for now.

This thing isn't going to be solved by software - at least not at first and not ever entirely. To get it going, I'm going to just open a Vim window and start spewing into a text file and let Blosxom feed from the directory.

Is "bucket" a good name for this thing? I keep thinking I want to come up with some coffee-based pun for it that's not yet been used by a Java project.

---

Inspirations:

• Scripting News
• OPML Editor
• Anarchaia: A tumblelog by Christian Neukirchen

---

Some goals for this thing:

• Turn the page daily.
• Keep the page one hotkey or Quicksilver access away.
• No structure, titles, or anything decided up front.
• Must be as quick and easy as tweeting to Twitter.
• Must be dead simpler than WordPress.
• Must absorb a day's worth of dithering before bothering feed subscribers.
• Should capture ideas and lend itself toward the shaping of more proper long-play blog entries.
• Should make it easy for me to occasionally pull in and comment upon items I've shared / bookmarked / gathered using other services.
• Develop a style that could evolve naturally into microcontent.
• Develop some creative constraints ala Twitter's 140 or Ficlet's 1024 characters.
• Accumulate features a bit at a time, but just start writing.

---

TODO

• Feed-to-Markdown script
  • Fuels cut-n-paste link palettes
• Pre-filter for Markdown
  • Omit /* */ comments
  • Quick notation for anchors
  • Anchors for H1-H6
  • Anchors for HR
  • Discuss / Haloscan comments for each anchor
• Post-filter for Markdown
  • Convert some links into embeds
    • ie. YouTube videos

---

Code so far, in a midnight crontab:

BASE=$HOME/Documents/bucket/entries; 
NOW=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
NOW_FN=$BASE/`date +%Y/%m/%d-%H_%M_%S.txt`; 
NOW_DIR=`dirname $NOW_FN`; 

mkdir -p $NOW_DIR; 
mv $BASE/now.txt $NOW_FN; 
echo "bucket for $NOW"  > $BASE/now.txt
echo "" >> $BASE/now.txt

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