I frequently find myself on an isoguiltotropic plane: any new thing I can think of pursuing, or any old thing that I could abandon, makes me feel slightly guiltier than I am now. If I take up a new project, I will be forcing myself to pay less attention to the worthy projects I am letting fall by the wayside currently. But if I abandon a project, then that is one less worthy thing I am doing. I reassure myself that this means in economics terms I am perfectly guilt-efficient. Or possibly I am in a local minima of guilt, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.
So, things that I have recently considered re-investigating, but am not, because of the pain of the guilt:
- Getting involved in the new DRM battles around @font-face and the catastrophic threat of downloadable fonts. Man, do we have to explain the rules of physics to every industry that touches the Internet? And damnit, surely the font world is at least relatively sanguine about the nature of copying by now?
- Re-entering the world of Squeak. They have just decided to base the new version of Squeak on Spoon, which is super-ultra-minimalist, and I think that means that you’ll be able to pick and choose what you want from the rest of the Squeakiverse. I always imagined that most of Squeak was actually a fairly stuck-together and unextractable blob, like Ruby after thirty years of monkey-patching. I love projects that sound like a monologue from the Mighty Boosh, but … must … not … get … drawn … into Smalltalk.
- Talking of which, am also writing “No Messing with Freebase on my belly with a sharpee. I am like Wesley Crusher in “The Game” with regards to Freebase. I would love to play around with it more, but I suspect that as soon as one does, one will become strangely drawn to do everything in this huge monolithic namespace, and then aliens will take over the Earth while you are fiddling with the semantics of the “person with moustache” topic or something. Instead, I will observe those messing with it from a distance, to see if they suddenly start exuding green gunge or talking about the “semantic web” with a straight face. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they called it Freebase. Is that not enough of a clue?
August 25th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Honest to god, when I first used Freebase I thought “Wow, they’re using RDF” and was later disappointed to learn they weren’t. I also once spent 12 hours straight (midnight to noon) importing data from Wikipedia, it has a multiplying effect on the standard Wikipedia time-suck problem.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Where does NTK sit in the guiltiverse at the moment?