Moved again

I moved again, to a new promised land...

• homepage: http://infofarmer.cenkes.org/
• wikiblog: http://blog.cenkes.org/

My posts and pages from other places are being migrated to the new home.
Everything is in beta state, but everyone is welcome!

On to new blogging platform

With all my recent ranting about blogs and wikis, it turns out quite naturally most of the problems I fancied had already been solved long ago. I'm switching to a TiddlyWiki to keep my personal stuff - hosted at my hard-earned piece of FreeBSD cluster web-space - http://people.FreeBSD.org/~sat/ - complete with an RSS feed, but not looking very nice as yet. As for a wiki, we've chosen TWiki at work. It's not perfect, but it's got much potential, so I'm happy for the moment. I'm not sure if I'll be copying/moving over posts from here to my Tiddly or just leave them to rot here, but you probably won't be seeing much new stuff here. Cheers!

Wiki Scalability

The main strength of wikipedia is centralized collaboration, which gets redundancy considerably lower. But the strength doesn't scale at all. Nowadays we've got redundancy all over the wiki, and no way to deal with it. A structure would help, and it will probably be introduced at some point, but the migration will not be an overnight process. A real solution would implement something like reusable objects everywhere, through heavy info modularization. We also have yet to see an implementation of a distributed wiki system. Google shows up ideas dating back years ago, but I haven't heard about any real-life solution. I would like to see a DNS-like system, fully distributed, but not redundant at the same time, working across all wiki flavors. The kind of redundancy we would want to see for data security (backup) should be achievable through much the same mechanism DNS does.

And Still Computing is Immature

So many concepts are sci-fi only because many basic, infrastructural technologies are in their infancy. We say p2p - and think file sharing. But there's so much to share! I really marvel at some older protocol stacks, like TCP/IP and DNS. If only we could apply the genius in their design to our modern shiny new technologies.

Reinvention

Is it good when a great new idea you come up with turns out to be old news? Of course it doesn't feel that great, but then if you were not pursuing some personal profit, all that matters is - the implementation has already been done for you. Not quite the way you wanted, not perfect, no, but it's there. And if we're talking open-source software, then it's there for the taking. The last few months I've been spending/wasting much of my cycles thinking about computer-aided collaboration. So, I thought, wikis are great when you want to make changes quickly, but they have limited functionality. Why not let wiki users edit the wiki itself so they can quickly improve it - and built on it then. It appears that's about what is called a structured wiki and a wiki application. And there are some successfull open implementations, TWiki for one. I'm going to study the subject for a while.

The vice of imaginary automation

Whatever you do, you should always try to automate whatever you can, as it will save a lifetime for you, keep your tasks fresh and interesting, and reduce the errors you start making when you do the same thing for a thousandth time on end. That's approximately how on of the basic principles of system administration goes. Automation is good. But what if you see a way to automate most of your routine, but not sure if you'll be able to reach that automation in a limited timeframe? For me that automation is A.I., the topic I've been haunted by for the last several years. Everybody knows A.I. can do many things for us. We've seen it in the movies, read about it in the books and dreamed about it countless times. By acknowledging that pursuing A.I. is a lost effort for most of us, we set a precedent and a comfortable excuse for suboptimal operation. So whenever I type the very same 10 commands I've been typing for the last several months, I should be thinking that a simple shell script will save me a minute each day, but instead I think, what the hell. It's only a minute a day, why should I spend another minute on a script that could get useless any time and yet another minute to remember to use it instead of the literal commands. And if I decide, like a good exec, on a fixed ratio - XX% of time spent on automation, (100-XX)% on everything else - I would probably be spending XX thinking about A.I. :-)

Why I don't like blogs all that much

Blogs encourage you to leave your ideas as they are right after you post them. That's not the way you can write something good. In fact I leave most of my ideas before I even post them because I don't consider my blog to be a suitable place to work on them. I like wikis for the way they enable you to keep the stuff you're working on at hand and available to others. Still, wikis have some way to go for them to be able to replace blogs; some features, like proper aggregation and river-of-news presentation could be borrowed from blogs, others, like distributed workflow, should be designed and implemented almost from the ground up. What I'd like to see in a couple of years is a wiki/blog engine, where I could work on my ideas, revisiting them over and over, and people could browse through them like in an ordinary wiki, but also get proper syndication of important changes.