human made

Writing Like A Programmer

I fancy myself a writer. Not, mind you, a good one. Just a passable one.

I am, however, definitively a programmer. This means that I like things like version control, scriptable or programmable tools, and open, easily interchangeable formats.

Currently, when I write things I write them in RTF or in ASCII with Markdown. I really like Markdown. I used to like RTF, until I realized that it has no really standard implementation. So I have resolved to move my writing away from RTF and into Markdown only.

So, ideally, here’s my writing setup:

Any writing project is a git repository.
All source files for the project are written in Markdown
When a project is finished, an HTML version is produced using the python implementation of Markdown
Additionally, when a project is finished, a PDF version is created with wkhtml2pdf
Optionally, if I want to get designery, output files include some nice CSS, injected in either through a hack or some sort of nice templating tool (Jinja, anyone?).

It seems like a nice idea. Of course, the problem with it is that I have a bunch of stuff not produced in this fashion, and I need to convert it (mostly because I’m slightly OCD about having all my stuff in a similar state, but that is neither here nor there). Aaron Swartz has a nice tool called html2text, which works reasonably well as part of an RTF to HTML to Markdown conversion flow. The only problem now is that the Markdown produced doesn’t return to an entirely accurate final format.

I’ll continue on here about my experiments in this vein. In the meantime, other writers reading this: what is your setup, ideal or otherwise?

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Lessig has a good response to the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate political advertising.

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Today's Thought

Those of us who refrained from referring to the administration you put into power Nazis would appreciate it if you, in turn, could avoid invoking 1984 at every action of the administration we put into power.

Thank you.

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Work has the oddest conversations...

mk: no, randy
mk: zombies dont crave pizza
mk: and if they did [their] internal organs no longer work

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Meticulous or Obsessed?

DZ commented on my previous post regarding an unfortunate use of an MLK quote.

There’s been a relatively unfortunate trend recently of idolizing the ridiculously obsessed. Obsessives, in some circles, equate automatically to quality and workmanship.

The problem here, I think, is that obsession becomes an easy stand in for meticulousness. It’s an understandable mistake to make, honestly. An artist or craftsman who is meticulous in the details of of their art or craft is generally obsessed; the focus of that obsession is however about something deeper than the number of icons on one’s desktop.

I don’t mean that a person’s obsessions are necessarily trivial—when John Gruber and Merlin Mann asked people to “pursue their obsessions in a serious way” I agreed with them along with most of the people in the world blogging. But to me, pursuing an obsession in a meaningful way means having some perspective.

Be meticulous in your pursuits—save obsession for the things that matter.

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There’s a great little blog called Minimal Mac that has a wealth of nifty little tricks for computing happiness.

I’m not mentioning it because of one of these tricks. I’m mentioning it because just now it posted the following quote:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

That’s Martin Luther King, Jr.

Really? I mean, really?

I don’t know. Maybe MM was just sharing this b/c it’s a nice quote, but given the frequent posts it has regarding “what we believe in” and “not what we believe in” I’m left feeling as though it’s meant to be applied to their views on simple computing interfaces.

Thus: Really? Equating a matter of civil rights to decluttered desktops?

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“ A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

—

From Marco, who got it from mudd up,peterwknox, who got it from The Economist.

This finally explains to me why the Brown novels are so bloody popular, without relying on a “people are idiots” excuse.

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“ if you switched to the AM dial it was nothing but ghostly mystery talk … and sometimes, the sound of someone crying or laughing in the dark but you could never tune in clearly enough to hear which.

— Ariana Osborne

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» The Things He Carried

I suppose I’ve seen too many movies, but, really? Social networks? Behavior detection? The TSA budget is almost $7 billion. That money would be better spent on the penetration of al-Qaeda social networks.

A great piece on the TSA and airport security by Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Atlantic.

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» Mag+

The smart folks over at Berg London have thrown together a prototype of a new magazine reading experience. I’m a little ambivalent on the whole e-reader thing, but it’s worth taking a look at. So do so.

Back? Okay.

There’s a lot to like here, and a lot to dislike.

I appreciate their thoughts re: scrolling, but I feel like it’s misguided. When reading a large amount of content, I prefer something with paging. I agree that the weird faux-page pull-corner paging thing they reference is awful, but I like the side to side page they show for switching between articles, and would prefer it as a means of progressing through an article. Perhaps some sort of pull down table of contents in place of the side to side could be used for switching articles.

I really like their use of multitouch to allow controls to be called up from the sides of the screen, but I’m so-so on the “heat up the contents,” both as an idea and as a gesture. A protracted touch would be sufficient to call up the menu they show.

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