Dotan Dimet has some comments on Iron Lute, which I think contains some misunderstandings about Iron Lute that mostly stem from the developer-centric view of Iron Lute y'all have seen so far. I posted a comment containing some follow-up on his post, and I replicate it here for posterity and RSS readers. Note it contains links to some of the actual code which I posted to provide evidence of how hard it will be to provide bi-directional text support in Iron Lute, so if you want to see some of my actual code, now's your chance.

Since 1996, a handful of foreign-policy wonks have been kicking around the idea of a "democracy caucus" at the U.N. Two administrations, first Bill Clinton's and then George W. Bush's, took quiet but significant steps in that direction. Now, according to Bush administration officials, the concept will be test-flown at the six-week meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that began on Monday in Geneva. I am one of those people who is very down on the United Nations in its current form, believing it to be worse then useless.

I have a case of the multi-disciplinary writer's block. I'm having a hard time writing the outline saving code in Iron Lute. I have an essay I want to post here, but it is obstinately refusing to go into focus. (I may yet just post it in a nebulous state, as I'm not convinced it's ever going to focus, by its very nature, but I think it's important that I write it.

Just a quick note: I'm still working on the XML save format for Iron Lute outlines. I'm trying to use a library I've put together for XML serialization and it's not going so well right now. I think it still has potential but I may need to re-work it into a "version 2", because version 1 is sucking pretty badly.

What is the purpose of computers in education? To cut the feedback time down. That is all they can do, and all they should do. Why? Feedback is vital for learning. Without feedback, you have nothing that most people would think of as "learning". Proper use of computers in education requires some "out-of-the-box" thinking. Proper use of computers would largely eliminate the test structures we have now, but anybody who proposes that is promptly shot as a heretic.

Microsoft reacts to marketing pressure to make design decisions favoring running a few processes faster but then finds itself forced first to layer in backward compatibility and then to engage in a patch-and-kludge upgrade process until the code becomes so bloated, slow and unreliable that wholesale replacement is again called for. Despite the obvious Linux slant, this is probably one of the most coherent discussions of the structural differences between the Linux kernel development process and the Windows kernel development process, resulting in the differences between the Linux kernel and the Windows kernel, that I've ever seen.

We've been reduced to the status of consumers and nobody seems to object. Think of the imagery: a creature with a huge mouth and an enormous gut, no brain and no soul. Consumers get points for consuming junk, the more they consume, the more points they get. They can retrieve these if they can remember their PIN numbers because unlike the customers of another era who had names, consumers have numbers.

A LASER, which is technically an acronym that stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, works in general as follows: A resonance chamber is filled with some substance and "stimulated" in some manner so it wants to release photons. The photons a substance releases will be of certain frequencies corresponding to the substance's emission spectrum. The chamber is an integral multiple of of the wavelength that you desire.

In my previous post, I discussed the practical matter of how to hold the outline structure we've built so far together. Having created a strong base, it is now fruitful to consider how to extend the data structure to handle the wide variety of outline structures I want Iron Lute to be able to manipulate. Node Types One of the most interesting possibilities inherent in this structure is to formally recognize that there are a lot of potential different types of nodes that can be built.

Slashdot recently posted a panicky article about HR3261, the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act". I read the proposed bill. Based on the Slashdot summary, especially the phrase "goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact", I was hoping to be able to perform a bit of judo on the legal system. If ownership of the database implied ownership of the facts within, then we could all form a corporation and give it our privacy-sensitive information (links to definition of this term) like our address and phone number, then sue people who use them against our will.