Everything old is new again

I’ve been reading a bit about a certain kind of japanese philosophy called “wabi-sabi”, which is a japanese world-view and aesthetic. The list, which contrasts wabi-sabiwith modernism, is from Koren’s book, which contains many beautiful pictures of objects that embody the wabi-sabi philosophy. There seems to an inherit satisfaction in thinking about these juxtapositions for me. Perhaps favoring neither, but seeing the validity of each of the opposing stances.

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Vim is a nice editor, but I never liked the way it handles files. Thankfully I recently found a great script, which adds great quick browsing capabilities to Vim, called lusty-explorer.vim. Since 7, Vim has supported not just it’s own homegrown (and honestly fairly bastardized language) called VimScript, but also it has included bindindgs for popoular scripting languages such as Ruby and Python, so extending this script with some extra functionality was a great way to see how Vims extensibility works. And with lusty-explorer written in Ruby, this was a nice chance to learn these new aspects of Vim.

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This is a problem I’ve been thinking a good deal about lately, without really coming to any conclusion, maybe because there is no right way. The issue can be summed up fairly easily, but it does betray the multitude of issue that lie beneath.

How do you handle non-english terms in your code?

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… and the mediocre content they provide? I’m especially tired of the high ranking they (still) get in google. I go to hit google with “PlaceHolder asp.net”, and w3schools is the second hit. If you go read their page it has barely 3 lines regarding this control (highlighted with red outline), the remaining details are simply aggregate data, or advertising (outlined with green, doesn’t include all the further ads you’d see if you had scrolled down).

w3schools “3 lines of documentation” regarding the ASP.NET PlaceHolder class.

I mean, this is a total joke. When did w3schools start out? 2000? They became popular with their concise CSS properties listings back in the day. But seriously, it’s like this site is frozen in time. Their CSS reference point is 2.0 from 1998 (not that a mere properties reference would list much different from 2.0 and 2.1, but there are some minor additions.) I would prefer they would work on updating their CSS reference instead of wasting time on ASP.NET.

I guess I think of many things as arrogant. I guess it also strikes me as somewhat arrogant that visitors to my site should somehow be interested in whatever random links I might have, especially when they are so generics as to be included in “blogrolls”, or whatever the term seems to be.

There’s enough “interesting link sites” services out there there’s just no need to attempt to present down my perhaps 4-5 daily site checks as somehow unique. They aren’t. I check the old new thing now and then. I read Computerworld.dk to get a view of how the landscape of the danish commercial software scene. I wish I was cool and spent alot of time on Lambda the Ultimate, but I’m not, so I just visit it every few weeks and poke around.

Overall it just seems like we’re building paths to everywhere. But it’s nice to arrive as well. And I guess I wish for this site to be a destination for some people (and maybe helpful as well). Feel free to hit your back button now!

Riding high on the technology wave of the last millenium, I’ve finally gotten around to getting an actual genuine blog. I spent about a week tweaking the WordPress platform, look and code to make it appear more or less like my old site.

My old site had a very article “centric” look, and I’m not entirely sure I managed to translate that look and feel over to a more snippet oriented 2 column classic blog format. But mostly because this new software just contains so many more pages then my old did. So still lots of stuff to do; I need to get around to looking at making some nice URLs, instead of these horrible ?id=213 URL fragments that floats around. The site probably doesn’t validate. And overall need to check that the site works in all it’s little niches …

Oh, and if you’re looking for the old stuff, the content is in all the usual places, haven’t deleted any content, and until such a time as I get the old front page index and possibly content ported over (still not sure how to handle that), here’s a link to the old index page.

And this makes for my … 8th or so iteration of my site, which has lived on this domain since 2001, and on a few others for a few years before that. And I wish to send my gratitude to my friend Lasse, for providing great hosting ever since my former domain went defunct in late 2002.

But anyway. I’m very happy to finally have a blog and having it gotten launched tonight.