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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

There was once a discussion among some of my coworkers about documentation on using some sort of cloud platform tool. I have a paraphrased version here for the purpose of discussion. “The book? But there’s the blog too, what’s the difference?” “The blog is all online, and it was written first. The book, you have to pay for, but it contains more information.”

So, here’s the deal. All books start out as a series of notes that are then assembled and organized to create the final book. A blog, as it stands, is a collection of individual articles that are concatenated one after another, in chronological order. Suffice it to say, starting out with a blog is a great way to transition into writing a book. But a better question is worth asking. “Why would you want to write a book?”

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I’m still looking for the next new replacement for Wikipedia. Have we found one? Maybe, Everipedia.

20180530/DuckDuckGo what will replace wikipedia
20180530/https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-wikipedias-cofounder-wants-to-replace-the-online-encyclopedia-with-the-blockchain/

20180530/https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-wikipedias-cofounder-wants-to-replace-the-online-encyclopedia-with-the-blockchain/

With Wikipedia’s growth of new editors and new articles waning, the world looking for a new solution that can scale to larger domains. Has anyone used Everipedia? It looks like a much more promising replacement as it is not as restricted as Wikipedia, yet it still has a content-quality system built-in, although much of the existing content that was copied from Wikipedia doesn’t yet have as many improvements as I would expect.

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So, this is interesting. The chickenpox vaccine wasn’t introduced until 1995. In Minnesota schools, a whole bunch of my peers had been vaccinated, but I was immune from getting the real infection, in about 1997. Why? Well, I was in Washington state at the time, so their health system might not have been as advanced as Minnesota’s… I got it from my older siblings who got it from school, who purportedly would have been vaccinated by then. Purportedly, another one of my Minnesota peers who may have been in Washington state at the time (he had a “Boeing” shirt) also got the real infection rather than a vaccine.

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So, earlier I’ve noted that my DSLR camera is practically limited to 1 exposure per second. That’s 1-2 pages per second. I’ve also noted that almost all photographic systems are limited to approximately this speed due to digital bus bandwidth limits with today’s technology. So, what are the fastest book scanners available today? Yep, your assertion is true: approximately 3600 pages per hour is still the practical limit. A HowStuffWorks article from 2009 says that Google’s book scanner could scan 1000 pages per hour, which is not any faster than hand-paging. Wikipedia says the fastest is 2900 pages per hour. So, yes. Indeed we don’t have scanners operating at 10 pages per second or faster. Not until we solve the digital data bus speed problem.

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So, this is interesting. It turns out that there are practically enough public domain components on the Internet in 2018 to build a quite convincing minimal operating system.

20180529/http://invisible-island.net/byacc/byacc.html
20180529/http://re2c.org/
20180529/http://openxos.org/
broken/http://home.swipnet.se/smaffy/snafu/
20180529/https://pdclib.e43.eu/
20180529/http://pdos.sourceforge.net/
20180529/http://www.t3x.org/subc/
broken/http://www.cod5.org/archive/
20180529/http://charon.persephoneslair.org/~andrea/software/mpkg/

CC0 or Unlicense?

2018-05-29

Categories: license  
Tags: license  

Which license is better for public domain works? I will provide my judgement here:

  • The Unlicense is shorter, but still longer than a simple declaration of being in the public domain. Thus, it may be a good choice to get started for very small works.

  • CC0 is longer, but it appears to be more widely adopted in the modern era. Just a few years ago (2014), it was actually pretty hard to find major parties that used the CC0. Nowadays, all of GitHub’s legal terms and conditions are CC0 Public Domain.

    • Also, due to the impact of Wikipedia, Creative Commons licenses are generally the preference for literary works. Due to the impact of Flickr, Creative Commons licenses are sometimes the preference for photographic works.

Truly, I wish that public domain declarations could be more painless. They could be, but only if you ignore the jurisdictions that don’t recognize a public domain.

20180529/https://github.com/github/site-policy
20180529/https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses

But wait! Our discussion isn’t finished. What are other people saying about CC0 versus Unlicense?

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Looking at writing and documentation practices in the business world, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon that is quite similar to what we’ve been observing on Wikipedia for quite a few years: just adding a little bit more restriction to a publication platform dramatically reduces contributors. Like, it’s a exponential relationship. Why is this? Writing, as a part of a person’s everyday workflow, is very sensitive to interruptions. In general, there aren’t very many people in any particular community who are have a disposition toward writing. Of the few who do, they tolerate very little interruption. Matter of fact, they have so little tolerance toward interruption in the writing process that they will flat out reject any platform that requires a review process. Nope, it doesn’t work. Zero tolerance toward review processes.

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  • 1995 - 2010: By far and large, images were used for math display on the web, even though there were newer technologies and possibly better ways available to do math typesetting on the web.

  • 2010 - 2014: MathML and jsMath emerge as two viable solutions for displaying browser-side typeset math on the web. A few adventurous site authors start using these newer solutions, but the biggest operators still stick to image display. A variety of tools emerge for generating or authoring MathML, all with their early limitations, but none of them become sufficiently popular to reach critical mass and speed up in development.

  • 2014 - 2018: Even the big sites have since switched over to either MathML or a solution like MathJax. Kahn Academy creates yet more math on the web solution called KaTeX and SsKaTeX, both of which prove to become quite popular, unlike the older MathML tools.

In any case, what most of this otherwise redundant implementation progress has done is successfully affirm one unchanging standard in math typesetting: Donald Knuth’s TeX system, responsible for the core typesetting algorithms, and the derived LaTeX system, mainly a syntactic convenience library.

The short answer? You can’t do it without plugins.

The long answer? Well, in GitHub pages history of times past, you would have been able to use the redcarpet Markdown parser that you could then configure an autolink plugin, and Voila! It would just work. Nowadays you can’t do that anymore since Kramdown is now the only supported Markdown parser on GitHub Pages.

And unfortunately, it appears the only easy way to get this working with Kramdown is through the use of a plugin, which isn’t as convenient on GitHub pages.

20180528/DuckDuckGo jekyll markdown flavor
20180528/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13464590/github-flavored-markdown-and-pygments-highlighting-in-jekyll#13614020
20180528/https://github.com/nono/Jekyll-plugins
20180528/https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet
20180528/https://jekyllrb.com/docs/plugins/
20180528/https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/

20180528/https://help.github.com/articles/updating-your-markdown-processor-to-kramdown/

20180528/https://kramdown.gettalong.org/documentation.html
20180528/https://kramdown.gettalong.org/quickref.html
20180528/https://kramdown.gettalong.org/rdoc/index.html
20180528/https://kramdown.gettalong.org/rdoc/Kramdown/Document.html
20180528/https://kramdown.gettalong.org/rdoc/Kramdown/Options.html

20180528/DuckDuckGo kramdown auto links url
20180528/https://github.com/shoyan/kramdown_easy_link

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