Gimlé

One of the reasons why I ‘blog less these days is that it just isn’t part of my routine anymore.

On the GNU/Linux side of my computer I, first of all, have a lot of very nice, free text editors to work in.

And second of all, I just got into the habit of always working on a weblog post in the background that I could work on when I felt that I needed mental space from my task at hand.

But the date when I switched to Mac OS X on my laptop coincides almost exactly with the date when my weblogging hiatus began.

I just fell out of the habit for a while.

The text editor situation is also a bit annoying. I know that I can get all of the same text editors I was using on GNU/Linux to run on OS X under Apple’s X Windows server, but I tend to prefer using native applications on whatever platform I’m running.

And most of the good text editors on the Mac (or ftp programs, for that matter) are proprietary apps that cost money.

They’re good apps, I’m sure, but paying for a usable ftp program and a usable text editor is like having to pay extra rent to have running water in your flat.

Stuff like that aren’t perks or extras. They’re basic features that every single operating system should support natively, and not in the ugly and unusable way that Apple has implemented ftp support in the Finder (OS X’s file browser).

And a simplistic rich text editor like TextEdit doesn’t count either.

Well in one case Free Software comes to the rescue, as it always does on the other Unixes.

Luckily for me, since most of the ftp servers I need to work with support sftp, I could switch to fugu for the ftp support.

Fugu’s a very nice user interface for SFTP, SCP and SSH available under the BSD license from the University of Michigan and has deservedly won an Apple Design award.

The text editor situation isn’t that clear. I’m writing this in a fairly nice free as in beer text editor called mi, while most of my other work is either in Project Builder (nicer than I expected) or Alpha (a pale shadow of it’s old Mac Classic self).

OS X is an interesting beast in many other ways. Feels a lot slower than the GNU/Linux system, which is mostly due to OS X not supporting Quartz Extreme on my laptop, as well as it’s monstrously excessive memory use.

And the overzealous unhinted anti-aliasing, probably all nice, sweet and pretty on larger, higher resolution screens, makes this small screen look as if it has been smeared with vaseline.

About as nice as trying to read a newspapers through a thick mud of multicoloured sugar. Which makes you wonder why the colour schemes in Windows XP and OS X seem to have been chosen by a bunch of overactive five year olds high on chocolate, sugar cereals and ritalin.

Sheesh.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

This is something I had planned to write a while ago, as a sort of followup to my last entry before my slight hiatus.

And today, as I glance through my daily reads, I read a post over on Mark Bernstein’s website that mentions this Postel fellow and a law of his.

Not that I’m disagreeing with Mark’s post in any way. It, and Aaron Swartz’ post Mark links to, just sparked of a thought I’ve been nurturing for a while. Their thoughts are definitely worth reading.

Postel’s Law goes along the lines of “be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you put out.”

Which seems fair enough. I also happens to be the magic rule of conversation (stick to it and people you talk to are less likely to want to shred your face with a fruit peeler).

The problem, it seems to me, only starts when people assume that XML breaks Postel’s law because it demands validity and failure upon non-validation.

Which glosses over the fact that Postel’s law refers to actions, a task, a process, things like protocols and applications.

Repeat with me: “XML is just a format.”

It doesn’t break Postel’s law any more than a light-bulb does. It works until it breaks. Then it stops working. Trying to keep it working after that is generally too problematic to be worth the effort.

No, Postel’s law kicks in when you view the production of XML formats as a task.

When you look at weblogging tools, that is.

Tools like Radio, Blosxom, Movable Type and such are the true criminals in the eyes of the law.

They should take crap input (the junk users like me shovel in) and output healthy, valid XML formats. Without exception.

Liberal in, Conservative out (sounds like a Democrat slogan for the next US presidential elections).

It’s the applications that should follow Postel’s law, the authoring applications, that are the ones causing the vast majority of our interoperability problems on the internet.

Stop blaming it on XML or XML-based formats.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’ve been away for a while.

Three weeks in Iceland. A week and a half semi-unconscious due to the fact that my Icelandic body thinks that 20 degrees centigrade is tropical while the heat has been hovered around the mid-thirties.

The Icelandic word óveður comes to mind, basically our word for weather with a negative prefix.

“Bad Weather” essentially, but with additional connotations.

The main difference being that the recent heat here in the UK definitely qualifies as óvður but might not be “Bad Weather” according to the English.

So Iceland and a torrent of scorching heat partially explains why I’ve been so silent. Making this weblog like a graveyard more because of its utter lack of noise rather than the customary morbidity or cynicism.

It doesn’t help that I don’t particularly like this Iceland.

For some reason that never fails to surprise most people, both Icelanders as well as foreigners.

As with most things interesting, the reasons have something to do with history and change.

And awareness of change.

The easiest way to attain some sort of personal growth is to go to a new place. Put yourself in a different context.

Not for a visit. To stay. If you can do that without knowing whether the move is permanent or not, so much the better.

A new place. Uncertain circumstances. Strange surroundings. New friends. All force you to change.

And if you go with an open mind, your basic survival instinct will force you and your personality to adapt to the new situation.

Weird social interactions. Seemingly arbritary rules in conversation.

It remolds you.

But for the personal change to turn into personal growth, you have to return.

You have to go back. To a locus. A center. A place where you both knew yourself, your old self, and where you have a lot of friends and acquaintances that know you. Knew you.

If this sounds like a narrative cliche, that’s because it is. The horrible thing about life is that it tends to be an aggregation of formulaic events and nasty, scratchy cliches. Non-formulaic is just another reason why novels and movies remain cliches.

I’d fire my writer were I a TV series.

Returning home, that’s the time when you notices the changes.

Which is fairly important because most of the time, noticing your personal changes, those small, incremental and evolutionary changes, is impossible.

But you, as you return, get a fairly unique chance to see them. To note down which ones are obviously bad, which ones are obviously to the better.

You might notice that you’re more mellow. Or that you engage in conversations in a much more forgiving manner. That you are more critical of some things and less of others.

You see which friends you still have something in common with. And the ones you’ve grown distant to.

And the simple act of being aware of the changes, affects them. It gives you perspective.

Sight.

A small, dark light…

And a glimpse of the path you’re treading.

Coming back to Iceland once every six months is important.

But my old self—the person I used to be—is alive in all of my memories of that place.

It’s a person I don’t particularly like.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.