[Inquiry] Re: Arisbe -> Inquiry

[elijah wright]

> > can he dump his database out so that i can re-import it and then do
> > useful things with it?  (is he working in SQL these days or what?  or
> > is it still wiki-text?  if he can just give me a dump of the whole
> > directory, i might be able to suck it into some other system.  it
> > would probably break all the links, sadly...)
>
> i hope to hear more pretty soon.  incidentally, this whole business of
> maintaining a complex linkage system in portable form is one of those
> things that i began addressing in my theme-one program way.bak when.

how do XML fragments and schemas take a stab at this ("maintaining a
complex linkage system in portable form")?  one would think that they
would be quite useful...  'specially if you can write transforms from one
flavor of data into another one.

> i called it "content addressable relative memory access" (carma), or
> "graphically abstract structure" (gas), and this came up again

funny :)

> when jack started to talk about building desktop modules that you would
> then have to keep coordinated with each other and with the master/mirror
> copies.

synchronization without intervention is Really Hard, if you don't have a
common ground from which to evaluate two things... that common ground can
be as simple as "which one changed last", but that still can't cover all
possible cases where changes in a system happen...

i dont think i'm making sense ;)

> it's really just virtual copies, or even more archtypical, the theory of
> manifolds all over again. we are yet to finish that conversation/story.

hehehe

> > a couple of my fellow students here (chris dent and kathryn labarre)
> > were working on integrating 'purple numbers' into mailing list archives
>
> yes, i remember their names.  i gather that jack's notion of
> "addressable information resource" (air) is in that ballpark.

i think so.

> that's dormitive right now --- http://www.nexist.org/wiki/ yup, it's
> still sleeping ... but he says any day now ...
>
> i have been looking at my wordpad files and trying to think about how i
> might recreate something with this archive system that might be
> analogous to the "glossarium" that i built before at the nexist site.

describe in more detail?

> the big catch is the lack of ability to edit stuff after you have sent
> it, and so that demands more think-ahead than i am accustomed to muster
> up.

that's kind of a nasty thing about both email and netnews - they're not
particularly oriented toward version control.  mostly, people 'fake' it on
top by settting up another layer of complexity (usually, version numbers
of some sort).  you could probably do something like this, though it might
be easier to come up with an interesting mail header tag that lets you
trace changes...  (not in the subject line - a full X-header tag...)

> i can send raw source code and exe if you want to play around with it.

go for it.  won't happen anytime soon, but an archival copy isn't a bad
thing.  you could even send it to the list if you wanted...

elijah