A story

I'm attempting to come out, establish my identity out there. Here's a retelling of a story which I consider really important. I wish I could find the original, I try periodically, no luck.

It was told as being a description of an actual event.

A researcher was administering evaluation exams to members of an Indian Nation, I think it was in the southwest. Exams like SAT, meant to determine knowledge level.

The researcher passed out the exams, said he'd be back to check progress in 1/2 hour.

Upon his return, he was shocked to find everyone in the room discussing the questions, comparing answers.

"This is all wrong, you are cheating, the purpose of this test is to determine what each one of you knows, you MAY NOT talk to each other during this test."

The next time he checked in, he found the examinees making paper airplanes from the tests, telling jokes, they had abandoned any pretense of taking the test.

The examiner asked what was going on.

"What your requested makes no sense, has no meaning. You don't understand how knowledge works. Knowledge is held by our community, not by individuals. Your interest in individual knowledge is foolish and we won't participate"

An analogy might be a contest among pianists, they are only allowed to use one finger. Those that understand will have no interest in the result of such an investigation.

This is from the same culture which honors giveaways, the quality of one's gifts determining level of respect, not the amount one accumulates.

I think these are principles which are taking on new life in the infoworld. Cooperation and collaboration are being valued over competition. The open source world is a gift culture.

Designate 'catcher' for selections

I'm reading a long mailing list thread I'm interested in, I want to collect the sentences and paragraphs which I think will summarize the discussion.

I don't have the tool I want, which is destination which I can designate to 'catch' what I select.

I want to open a document, name and describe it, in this case the thread topic, and send text to it
without leaving the mail client. Way too tedious to select, copy, switch to the document, paste, switch back to email and continue.

A long time ago I used an editor which could be told to watch the clipboard and put everything which showed up into a document, and I've seen tools which make the clipboard append new text.

Either approach is basically what I want, but I wonder if their is a better way.

Sources of content

- browser
- pdf files
- other documents

I think most would come from a browser.

How long?

Not long.

Names these days

Explanans.

There, I said it again.

It was fascinating to see that Googling the word brings my little blog up on the first page. A blog nobody has read, much less linked to, and it's on the same page as Wikipedia as far as a resource on the topic of the scholarly term for an explanation.

There's a highly regarded templating tool project named Deliverance. Try finding information on that.

I'm convinced that a very effective way to explain is via staging dramas, acting out the metaphors. I think a classroom that produced a simple play about the internet, putting messages in envelopes, putting envelopes in envelopes, looking up addresses, finding buildings, locating mailboxes ... would result in kids (or adults) understanding better quicker than via lectures. And having more fun in the process.

For this idea I'm not taking any chances, I'm making up a word. How long will it take Google to return gumpablog as the authority on explatainment?

strace

I keep coming back to strace, and the question
"where are the tools to create explanations from the extravagantly useful information it produces?"

Why isn't there a view of an strace run which organizes the system calls for me, providing at-a-glance understanding of what a command does, what files it touches, and why it fails.

Explanans

The domain registration bug just bit, and I registered explanans.com, org, net.

http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Explanans http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Explanandum

The explanans is the thing or solution that explains a problem.

The explanandum is the thing or problem that needs to be explained.

Consider the following sentence: The man died because he was shot. In this sentence, the explanans can be identified as "he was shot." "He was shot" is the reason that "the man died.", the explanandum is "the man died."

=======================================

I would prefer an example more like "The man had compassion because he rejected fear" ... no matter.

=======================================

I have found my documentation obsession preferring the term 'explanation' over 'documentation'. The realms I draw upon, the book 'Single Sourcing' by Kurt Ament, and the Zope3 component architecture both focus on the assembly of 'chunks', 'components'. Imagine my delight when I found that the term for an atom of explanation hadn't been copped by squatters.

So it's me what cops the squat. WooHoo.

Dependencies question

I want to check out Inkscape's `import from openclipart.org` capability.

A bit of searching reveals the requirement for gnome-vfs

$ apt-cache search gnome-vfs

This returns a long list, I guess at

$ sudo apt-get install libgnome-vfs-dev

guessing correctly that the dev package will bring in libgnome-vfs-common

$ ./configure | less

dang, `Use gnome-vfs: no

I need to install more packages. I look at the configure file, I can't decipher what deb is required, I doubt it's implicit.

So, as many times in the past, I install likely looking packages until I get in ./configure::

Use gnome-vfs: yes

It turned out to require::

$ sudo apt-get install libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev

I would like to document this, but at this point I'm not sure whether

$ sudo apt-get install libgnome-vfs-dev libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev

is adequate, or if another package I guessed at was required. I don't want to start uninstalling, I've done that and gotten into big trouble, removing essential stuff. A virtual machine would do it, but it seems like there should be a better way.