June 28, 2002,
Kirby,
>
> Is there a plan to ever go to the
left of the decimal point with a
> version 1.x? That connotes "out
of beta and now ready for user
> space in general". Anything 0.x
means "user beware -- bugs
> lurking".
>
> I may have asked
you this before, and you probably answered.
>
I think you asked this a long time ago and I didn't
answer it, or I don't remember doing so, as something else in the email caught
my attention or m' talking. Even the .x in 1.x screams of the "undone" or
the danger of a "serial" killer app. I figured that when 0.9z was followed NOT
by 1.0, but by 0.A I was nudging at the momentum of intertia....
Everybody stopped using version numbers openly,
when MS Wrod 7.0 got called Word 95....
Anyway, no-bug software is a futile dream. I use
the endless 'beta" numbers to keep the viewer (of listings notices) ...uneasy.
The higher the numbers, the greater the uneasiness, weith that bump when I went
to 0.A being a wake up call. A "What's going on?" moment. More importantly, the
"beta" numbers help keep in mind what I say everywhere, "This is a
home-built eTypewriter." BUT it's serious, not a hobby. Beta (testing) means a
product is in the offing....
All those messages. Any of them get through except
maybe to feed that subliminal restlessness? Well, ...who'd write anything
if there wasn't the hope, at least, of a reader, somewhere, who'd at least sense
that some communicating, hell, some communing, was going on.
It's made in all seriousness, but it's
home-made, home built. What the current beta number is (0.Cj) cries out that I'm
always puttering with it. Most, waking to hear that message, will go back to
sleep. They'll say, okay, he thinks of ways to make it better, fix bugs, add
tweaks or features or whatever. In short, they don't wonder, "What's he
puttering at?" That seems easy: "A text editor he calls a textwriter." Well, a
shaman (poet, maker) is a shape-changer. That's what e looks like. What e's
doing is more like being a paradigm-shifter.
I keep those who open m' textwriter uneasy all the
way through. No toolbar with bright buttons. No "a lot of things" as somebody
goes forward. Yet, sooner or alter, everything is findable. It's home-made, but
it's well-made. It's just ...different. The main paradigm shift, of course, in
coming to think of tagging as punctuating, not as layout.... But a whole lot
else is floating about as tiny cybercomic tensors floating about and pushing at
brain cells.... Take just the punctuating vs laying out. This isn't to put a
writer's comfort over a designers. It's to change what people think a writer
does ...when writing.... If somebody wants to change how designers think, e'll
have to build something that imposes those changes on some of those willing to
go with e for a bit.
>
> Given any thought to going open
source at some point, making
> the Delphi code world-readable with an
invitation to others
> to enhance etc?
>
My worse nightmare, showing the powerful elasticity
of paradigms. Everything I "left out" for a purpose would get "enhanced" back in
...starting, I guess, with brightly buttoned toolbars.... Layout tools like
Frontpage , "Dialogs" for setting batches of partameters like Hot Metal Pro and
the rest of the HTML "editors"....All the Windows-ways I've corrected, like the
Next on Child Windows that runs aimlesslesly through a scrambled z-stack, or the
Window/Tile that will subdivide a winmdow down to the byte. Hey
soos!
Any Delphi programmer of any experience at all can
do everything I've done. Not a stanza of breakthrough code in all of eWriter.
Beyond that, any experienced Visual Basic, C/C++ programmer can also do anything
I've done ANYwhere in eWriter. They don't need to have my code to modify except
that modifying is less typing than starting on a blank field. I started eWriter,
in fact, using TextEdit, a demo that came with Delphi's successive editions. The
one down at the bottom of eWriter came with Delphi 3.
The only thing to copy from eWriter is what I do.
I've prayed to Jupiter, the god of education, with His twelve-year orbit and
lightning bolts, inducing flow, that makers of various editors and processors
might be seduced into copying almost anything that might, then, induce further
flowings in this other direction. I've felt this hope might be fed by the sudden
spread of XML because all the long-experience main people worked for years or
decades with documents before all the data-entry and -handling started. They
think in text-flow that can, then, spread out in all the dimensionalities....
BUT the SGML and XML editors are all data-entry and parsing oriented, not
anything you'd really want to write in....
I'm sure many could build better textwriters than
I've built, but if the goal was to "fix" eWriter, they'd just make it a text
editor or html editor or word processor with Web capabilities
or....
I guess you could call it "open source" in the real
sense, there's no "breakthrough" code to be reverse engineered, there's only
"breakthrough" notions about what a writer is doing, what punctuation is for....
My underlying insight isn't about the tagging as punctuating "very"
inclusive text. It goes back to Bucky's reminder about the turn of the century
(19th, 20th) geometers. It wasn't just the scribe, rule, and compass, but the
fourth tool: the surface written on.... Well, we're at the rollover of
the 20th into the 21st and we've got to take writing where geometry went, in a
sense. And the surface, here, isn't just the computer monitor, but, maybe, the
generalized, layered, etc. surface with kinds of curvature we've yet to
imagine.
>
> Just read <i>The Cathedral
and the Bazaar</i> (hardcopy library
> book, vs. web versions, which
seemed less complete) -- pondering
> the connections between 'design
science revolution' ala RBF, and
> the open source revolution ala Stallman
et al.
>
Sounds interesting. Since some of it appears to be
online (I just took it to Google), I'll look at it. I think the "open source" as
an approach to collaborative effort is interesting....
>
> Was thinking about your line
about making HTML part of the
> original author's toolkit, augmenting e's
expressiveness, vs.
> some under-the-hood trade secret of a web
publishers' guild --
> in connection with TeX. Web pages about TeX
sometimes
> express these exact same goals; to give original authors
the
> power to produce 'camera ready' output, independently of
>
typesetters and others (Knuth was dismayed by the lower
> quality of
computer typesetting, the degraded appearance of his
> own work -- so set
about, as an author, to rectify the situation).
>
Yeah, these are those "early" folk who maybe are a
hope for the whole works, because they were essentially writers, not
data-handlers. But you can't hold out too much hope because they get caught up
in what's going on. Take Berners-Lee, who did the home-built ur-Web. In an early
chapter of his book he spoke of the original dream of researchers who could, in
effect, be at a virtual coffee-house table and shove materials across the table
in the conversation. He was thinking then of what we do at coffee-house tables.
Later, though, he was excited because somebody at MIT or UCB had built a browser
from which you could edit and re-boost Web pages. He'd already gotten sunk into
the Website frame-of-reference, or system-of-referents. Now, that's okay. He was
building the Web. But his original dream was for something more like email. It
was more like writing, or talking, actually, and handing things back and forth
...and not like hooked up editing.
>
> I find myself thinking that in a
parallel universe, Gene would have
> been a happier pooter
putterer in a Linux-type environment, where
> the ethic of
self-reliance and not surrendering to guilds, various
> under-the-hooders,
is more shared, more pronounced. Plus there's
> more little gizmos
to play with, complete with source code, for
> regeniusing
around.
>
I'm very much an amateur pooter putterer (I like
the title, though), and those guys around Linux aren't amateurs ...whether or
not they get paid. And I'm not a young amateur, or for that matter, a
particularly bright one. So, I'm thankful that between Windows and Delphi the
parts I needed to make my textwriter were at hand....
My notion of regeniusing was, yielding the
imprimatur for Waking the Poet, was pretty close to Bucky's notion of how we get
degeniused, sort of a course correction to get back to the course we'd
presumably have sailed. Software gizmos, even Bucky's models, weren't much
except play areas to see if you were loosening up, okay. Mostly "Do your own
thinking" and, to extend that, Do your own imagining."
>
> I think for a lot of Amerish, regeniusing these days
means aiming
> for the core of hacker culture (projecting an image of
oneself as
> ideally competent with techne) and gradually moving
inward
> (converging to ones inner ideal) through successive rings
(degrees
> of self-mastery). To learn to program in a computer
language is
> to teach oneself to think a particular way -- learning
really different
> ways of thinking, the process for learning "languages"
(of various
> kinds -- not just computer), is a recipe for
regeniusing. It helps
> if there's also a rebel code, and ethic of
fighting a corrupt status
> quo (rescuing the ungeniused).
>
I think that's probably right on accurate, but it's not a direction I c'n
go in, or be easy around. It's too late to get involved with orders of growth
such as you sketch with frightening concision above. Even C++, let alone Greek
or Latin, would way beyond me now. I've been privileged to see a lot with only a
fair brain by catching, almost by accident, some ways of ...well, loosening it
up. I've written some poems that aren't just verses and I know why so I'm in a
position to work up something useful in annotations as I "archive" a body of
work. And I've written somewhere around four million words of "letter"
with a lot of that loosening allowing some catches including prompts toward
similar loosenings, so that's to be archived, too.
A fair task for an old guy with some time on his hands. And a Web to put
the archive on instead of in the rare books area of a university library.
Remoner that fourth tool, the surface?
>
> Connections here to the Church of the Subgenius, which
blends
> science fiction, hackerdom, and a need for free time to learn
in
> one's own way (getting slack). Hacker culture derives from
slack
> i.e. enough time left over from a day job to devote to
learning
> and projects. Self-teaching and the internet go hand in
hand --
> define the education platform of the here and now, for
many
> soon-to-be nextgen Amerish leaders.
>
Sounds like a live thread, and I'm sure there are others.... Perhaps
thousands, or hudreds of thousands. I wouldn't mind bein' thirteen hearin' about
these, or flossing my trooths with 'em....
>
> Kirby
>
1.0, Open Source, and other ponderables
1.0, Open Source, and other ponderables - segment 2
1.0, Open Source, and other ponderables - segment 3
1.0, Open Source, and other ponderables - Afterword