shesafish

	Friday, September 27, 2002

 Term Help: "Where does history end and recent history begin?"

Time doesn't flow at a constant rate for anybody, that's a given. How can people express their relative metrics for different eras? Inessential.com searches for the right word:

"But what I’m thinking about today is a different though related sense of time. I don’t have a good term for it.
It’s the sense of recent history. Where does history end and recent history begin?
It’s different for every person."

A good vocabulary can make one an effective an efficient communicator. After all:

"...people’s senses of what is recent history don’t match, and this is a source of misunderstanding, confusion, and disagreement."

One could also ask, "what does green look like to you?"

11:48:19 PM  comment [] |

 Prototypes

Carl, a member of yahoo's extremeprogramming group nails it with this post on prototyping:

"There are two forms of prototyping, throwaway and evolutionary. Both
have their merits. But the key to using the practice effectively is
to know which you are doing, and not to change your mind later on."

Same could be said about programming. Knowing what you are doing, and not changing your mind while you're doing it is the key to programming effectively. A paraphrase of the Pragmatic Programmer's edict "program deliberately, not by coincidence".

11:23:13 PM  comment [] |

 ViewRSSBox Macro

The viewRSSBox verb generates an HTML version of an RSS news feed, reading the service if necessary. This verb caches RSS feeds and re-reads them only if the cache has expired or the service hasn't been read.

Research question: can users hosting their weblogs on the Userland CS use this?

See Also: the viewRSSBox macro.

11:06:17 PM  comment [] |