Solipsism Gradient

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Input to output ratio

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Jeremy Zawodny worries about his input to output ratio:

I go through cycles of productivity like most hackers do. Some days I get a lot done while others are mostly wasted. Some of my productive days involve a lot of output like e-mail, code, discussion, debugging, and so on. Other times it’s a lof of input: reading, listening, etc. Once in while I manage to have a day in which the two seem to balance out and I go home feeling like I’ve accomplished three weeks wort of work.

Yes, these cycles happen to me too, and have in fact been getting more extreme. Before the Internet came up, I was buying 15 to 20 technical magazines per month, and would take every other day off to read all that stuff… even study the advertisements one by one, if you can believe that.

For the last years, information overload from the Internet has been increasing. I don’t buy any more magazines, but reading and responding to e-mail, browsing for news, and so forth has been expanding to fill most of my time. And now weblogging and reading RSS feeds is taking the place of e-mailing and browsing. (My advice: don’t subscribe to more than 150 feeds if you check them every hour, or you’ll never catch up icon_wink.gif).

On the other hand, the amount of useful input – that can be converted into productive output – has also increased vastly, so it seems to boil down to a question of discipline. Inspiration doesn’t come by every day, so I usually slack off for periods that vary from an afternoon to a couple of weeks, and catch up again in frenzied bursts of creativity. Turning off the phone and ADSL – or making a trip to somewhere off-net – often works wonders.

Joel on Software also addresses this issue:

But it’s not the days when I “only” get two hours of work done that worry me. It’s the days when I can’t do anything.

…Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

The Reversible Net

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Jason Kottke is asking people to link to (and ping) http://reversible.org/kottke . OK; let’s see what happens…

In case you’re wondering, here’s an explanation about what’s reversible. Looks like the beginning of something interesting…

Dori Smith kindly did a trackback ping test for me. Thanks again, Dori!

It didn’t work; it tried to ping the permalink instead of the corresponding trackback ping URL. I installed a test blog using Movable Type and didn’t find out how to activate the automatic trackback feature (at least, not without reading the manual icon_wink.gif).

Manual pinging worked, however, and produced the entry you can see below. Tomorrow I’ll try RTFM and checking up on my autodiscovery RDF lines.

Posted by Guest:
RB’s Test Blog: (Re:#)

Here we go again

Yet another test of the new trackback system on Rainer’s weblog. This one with the MT bookmarklet – which, incidentally,

OK, I think trackbacks are working now. I’m generating the necessary RDF comments so others can autodetect my trackback ping URLs, and I’m posting the URLs themselves in the left margin of each post. These links aren’t meant to be clicked, but copied by whoever is pinging manually. Unlike many existing implementations, trackbacks are equal to comments and will be posted in-line with the normal comments.

I’m still working on automating part of my own pings to other sites, but it’s not a high priority thing… I’m using Movable Type‘s sample standalone implementation meanwhile.

By the way, installing this on Mac OS X (10.2.3) isn’t completely straightforward. The trackback code uses the optional LWP Perl module, which itself needs several other modules. As I’d never messed around with Perl before, it took me some time to find the modules on CPAN and learn the necessary Terminal commands.

I read several tips warning about the LWP installer overwriting /usr/bin/head. This didn’t happen in my case; apparently saying “no” when LWP asks if you want to install test programs skips that part.

Many thanks to Dori Smith for correcting some misconceptions I initially had about trackbacks, and e-mailing me several links about the subject.

Tips for new bloggers

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Dave Pollard writes about the loneliness of the new blogger:

So what can the new blogger do to salvage his (or her) self-esteem when, like the guy that sets up a snazzy new office, sends out flyers and then sits by the phone wondering why no one is calling, his brilliant new blog flounders at the bottom of the page-reads list, unloved and, worse, unread?…

He goes on to give excellent advice… thanks to Radio Free Blogistan for the link.

Topic Exchange

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Sébastien Paquet‘s weblog reminded me to look at Topic Exchange, which I’d been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. Basically, it’s a central database for trackbacks about a given topic… very interesting. I’ll be using it to debug my trackback implementation.

Slowly, I’m getting rid of several bugs in my phpBB code, and implementing new features.

Subscribing to a topic’s feed was crashing if the feed contained a poll; this has been fixed.

I’m implementing threading and trackback now. In preparation for this, the per-message “reply” button now copies the subject line – just like the “quote” button, but no quote is generated. In the next version, “quote” and “reply” will tie the whole thread together.

In contrast, the former top-level “reply” button now says “New Post” and will open up a new thread inside the current topic.

I’ve been getting some comments from people used to standard phpBB forums, mostly complaining about not being able to open new topics.

My intention is to slowly evolve phpBB towards a MovableType-like model. Since I’m the principal poster on this weblog and the forums, and other people post occasional comments and suggestions, this seems very convenient; I’m not interested in running a completely open forum with hundreds of topics.

So, I see my Forum Index as similar to a weblog’s categories, and the topics themselves as sub-categories. And the way I’ll do threads and trackbacks will make them similar to in-line comments on MovableType weblogs.

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