Programming Pauls of Wisdom

Syndicated Conversations

One of the difficulties in reading other peoples blogs (something which no-one seems to do for mine - do I hear violins ?), is that conversations following those blogs become hard to follow.

Now the conversations are either blog to blog (inter-blog) or inside one blog (intra-blog).
That is, fred writes an article, barney references it and comments, wilma adds her own and so on.
Or Fred writes an article and barney, wilma, fred and Dino all add their comments below the original article on blogspot.

The problem is following the thread of any one conversation. No series of comment posts manage to be threaded - they are just shown in choronological order. However if each post contained a simple tag (I shall now call it RSC Really Simple Conversations) that was a hash of the commenters timestamp and email (ie the permalink line) any competant client could easily sort out the conversational thread, and make it pretty simple for a client to notify you when a conversation on the thread you posted on has changed.


I want to comment on one particular post, I include at the top of my post :

>
Really Simple Conversations

If my reply looks like this

+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| RSC::posted by paul @ 7:43 AM
| Well paul that was an interesting comment you made but I think that
| ....blah blah
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
OR
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| RSC::www.blog.com?permalink=123456
| Well paul that was an interesting comment you made but I think that
| ....blah blah
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+

Now how can I easily get a javascript bookmark to squeeze that into any random commentators
reply textbox rather than do it the hard way??

I need to have aright click sensitive action, that grabs the properties, opens the link,
then puts my hash into any textbox on the incoming page. Hmmm - looks like I am off to javascript school

posted by paul @ 2:48 PM 0 comments

Open SOurce does not need to grow up

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1875122986;fp;2;fpid;3

Like it or not, this is the public face of open source. No matter how warmly vendors such as IBM or Novell might embrace Linux, their marketing departments must still contend with the fact that, in the eyes of many customers, the movement as a whole is inseparable from the tirades of Eric S. Raymond, the radical politics of Richard M. Stallman, or that great cafeteria food fight of popular opinion known as Slashdot.
That's what I meant by my reference to the grown-ups' table. That table isn't hard to spot: It's the one where nobody's throwing rolls.


Well, actually the grown ups do throw rolls. They just throw them under the table. (the analogy is breaking down soon). But every company is full of egotistical idiots, forcing their way to the top and using "grown up" sounding words to justify their own tantrums to the public. If open source has anything to teach the wider world, it is that getting your arguments and issues out in the open makes for better decisions.
Politics might learn something from that - oh look, the UK parliament actually has parliamentary priveledge where an MP can effectively libel anyone and not get prosecued - why - so they can speak thier minds in the place where decisons are made. Of course the decisions are now made behind closed doors, but thats an argument for open doors not more grown up behaviour.

posted by paul @ 7:43 AM 2 comments