langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-03-02-7

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comment-2002-03-02-7

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 8361 days AGO

David, I know how frustrating losing one's efforts thanks to technical immaturities is. Because I'm spending almost all of my time awake (heh) either building or working with web applications, the first thing I do when I (re-)install anything remotely browser-like is to turn off caching. This has resulted in a sudden drop of Aspirin consumption.

If it's anything I can fix (i.e. fixing it isn't made impossible by browsers, proxies or other intermediaries) I'll most certainly try to do so. Maybe you can give me any more details what "losing your comments" _means_ (it hasn't ever happened to me) — do you get to the login snip? An error message?

A rather easy work-around might be to write everything in the text box and before posting selecting everything (Ctrl-A) and copying it to the clipboard, so that it will be ready to paste should anything go wrong ... (it might well be that your scenario is different from the one I'm imagining).

The Vista visualization helps me to keep the information structure sane, i.e. reveals at once if a snip is embedded in too much (too diffuse) or too little context/neighbourhood. Quite often it also drives me to connect heretofore unconnected snips, when while glancing at the visualization I expect a connection where none has been established yet.

We are bound to reinvent wheels until everything has been read and understood by everyone (which will, alas, hardly ever happen). That phenomenon is especially visible in the software industry, where the duration of one reinvention cycle might have fallen to less than five years.

That's, however, neither too much of a problem (much more an annoyance for long-timers) nor all too astonishing. Lots of idea germs need the right context/soil to grow, the right combination of intensifiers — the VM had to wait until the mid-nineties for mass deployment of rather overpowered computer equipment and the formation of Netscape Communications, the primary product of which would then serve as mass distribution vehicle, taken together resulting in amazing market and mind penetration.

So multiple tries (maybe eben hundreds) are, IMO, a natural on a crowded marketplace.

The same thing might be true in all areas which involve ideas. Unfortunately I haven't been introduced to the ones of Tom Allen yet (if you could supply me with some pointers, be those ISBNs or URLs, I'll be happy to read up, and I'll question Google tomorrow as well, but unfortunately the Web skews the history of ideas badly, making the late eighties and the nineties way too well-represented in comparison to anything that has happened before — "Online or Invisible?"), so I'm rather content to enjoy "repackaged" Morville columns for the moment being, postponing idea archeology until I convince myself that the topic is actually worth my time.