In my previous post, I discussed what I believe is the outline data structure in current use by outliners, and why they are inadequate for my purposes. I discussed why transclusion doesn't work very well under that model (an algorithm can sort of hack transclusion on top of the tree, but it's not "real" enough), and the difficulties of replacing some of the tree concepts when you have a full graph.

It happens to me without fail. I have three computers in this house. One is a headless machine that runs Radio Userland, providing my news aggregator and this weblog, and nothing else. One is a Linux desktop machine that Windows literally refuses to run on. One is a laptop that runs primarily Linux but has Windows only because it came that way. Thus, only two usuable machines. Whenever I take one of the machines down for heavy duty maintenence, secure in the knowlege the other one can easily pick up the slack, BAM one of the hard drives in the other machine comes crashing down, taking down both of them at once.

All this week, I've been Joe-job'ed. It's in "response" to my insulting comments about spammer's intelligence here, here, and here, with regard to the article I wrote on Bayes Filters. The efficacy of a Joe-Job has decreased significantly over the past couple of years. Ever since the Window viruses that starting forging return addresses willy-nilly, we've all been "joe jobbed" for the last few months. Going from 0 to 100 spam bounce messages a day would be much more annoying then going from 20 to 120 spam bounce messages.

As I hinted at in my previous post, this is not as easy to answer as you'd think. To give you a hint on how hard it is, I'm currently up to my fourth major version of my fundamental data structure. The best way to answer "What is an outline?" is probably to take you through the same development process I used to get to where I am now.

I've been writing ahead on my promised developer travelogue posts, because I am trying to make them high quality posts useful for programmers both new and old, not just off-the-cuff reportings of what I happened to be doing last night. I was concerned about the time lost writing these posts, because as I said, time spent writing is time not spent coding. (Though I'm getting much of the writing done when coding is not possible.

We know reporters are biased. They are human, all humans have bias, therefore the reporters are biased. Suppose the large journalism institutions tried a new style of reporting. Instead of letting one reporter write a story, assign two reporters to the story. We want them to be clearly biased, one on each side of the issue. Then, write a three-part news article: A core that both agree to. One part each that are the aspects they could not get the other to agree to.

Some of the best-justified criticism of the Administration's Iraq plans I've seen to date. People who expected us to anticipate and have a plan for every possible contingency annoy me; such a thing is not possible. People who don't understand the value of flexible plans that involve intelligent agents in the field responding dynamically to local conditions annoy me; it may look like a lack of a plan but that "

Slashdot recently had an article on gibberish in spam. I posted a comment about my work on Bayesian, which reminded me I need to update that. This post will have to do. First, you'll note a cranky tone in the Slashdot postings. Would you believe that Bayesian filtering has fanboys? A lot of people seem congenitally incapable of reading something about Bayesian once they get the faint idea that I may be a little critical of them.

Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed! Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it's a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it's a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you'll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there's little that's more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.

There’s just no nice way to say this: Anyone who can’t make a syndication feed that’s well-formed XML is an incompetent fool. - Timoth Bray on ongoing I'd like to chip in on this with a couple of hard numbers. Depending on your library support, it is possible to write a basic OPML parser in around half-an-hour using an existing XML parser. I've done it twice now, once directly using a SAX-like XML parser and once with a home-rolled XML<->object library; it's easy.