Category: Computer Stuff

Wiki Wednesday

As I’d hoped, I did go to Socialtext this afternoon for . It had been far too long since I’d gone to an informal gathering like this, at least outside IBM; I didn’t do a good job of catching names, but I had some interesting conversations about favorite computer languages (or maybe it was least-favorite languages…the first thing I heard was “Algol 68”), as well as talking to the Socialtext folks about my experiences installing Socialtext Open and what I wanted to do with it.

The main topic of the evening, though, was TiddlyWiki. Jeremy Ruston, TiddlyWiki’s creator, showed off its capabilities, talked about its genesis and support (in large part, from Ricoh Innovations), and about the community around it. Eric Shulman was also there, and he talked about some of the plugins he’d created (as part of TiddlyTools.

There was also some discussion of the various GTD tools built around TiddlyWiki — I plan to take a closer look at a few of them, especially MonkeyGTD and d3, because I keep falling off the GTD wagon, and maybe having a tool will help me. (Yes, I know that’s foolishly optimistic.)

Eventually, the discussion turned to Open Source software licensing — soon after that, the official meeting broke up, and the aftermeetings began. I spent some time talking with Jonas Luster about Django (and discovering that he liked Rexx).

Most of the group continued on to Gordon Biersch, but I decided to go home and see how Diane was doing — she’s a bit better than she had been (she describes it as having more periods of less vertigo than before), but she’s gonna stay home tomorrow, too. Reading is still quite a challenge for her, and driving would be out of the question.

Technical Stuff

Diane didn’t have to see any doctors today, so I went to work as usual, where I finished installing the Socialtext Open Wiki on a spare machine. The installation was, ummm, challenging — Socialtext says that improving it is a high priority — but possible.

The job might have been easier if I were more familiar with Perl, but I really don’t like that language — I had to use it back in the early 90’s when I was spending a lot of time on AIX (and, let’s face it, Perl is easier to deal with than ksh), but I never got into it. The syntax looks too much like random punctuation for me. I much prefer Python, which just feels right to me — it’s a worthy successor to Rexx, my first real scripting language (I refuse to count EXEC2 or CLIST, both of which I used because I had to).

But I digress.

Even though I’ve got Socialtext up and running, I’ll probably go back to MediaWiki for the project at hand. Socialtext is prettier, and probably would fit this application better, but I haven’t a clue where I could add support for using an external LDAP authentication and authorization tool — in contrast, I have that running for MediaWiki right now, exactly the way I need it. And running code is always a strong argument.

But I’m going to keep an eye on Socialtext, because it really would be nice to use. And besides, they’re hosting Wiki Wednesday tomorrow.