I'm planning my next business trip... trying to maintain the invariant
that my PalmIIIx knows about all the things I'm expected/obliged to do
so that it can beep at me when I need to context switch from one task to
another... trying to synchronize:
* my PalmIIIx datebook
* an itinerary I got by post from one travel agent,
* an itinerary from another by email
* email recording a phone call where my wife made hotel arrangements
* the conference home page
* mail between me and the conference organizers about when I'm going
to be where to do what
* my work-internal status web page
and I grow weary of doing a bunch of clerical copy/pasting that
1. I know the computer could do for me
2. will probably get out of sync due to planning changes
So I start designing the solution to this mess... going over my Web
research notebook... and I start surfing the lifestreams stuff. It all
sounds really cool:
The Microsoft Windows view of computing (formerly known as the
Apple Macintosh view) is obsolete. It dates from a long-dead
era when most people owned only a relative handful of computer
files, since they hadn't been computer users for very long;
when e-mail and the Internet were largely unknown; when memory
and computing power were expensive. In the New View, your
files will be stored not on some particular computer but
afloat in cyberspace, so you can tune them in from any
network-connected machine: at home or work, in a hotel room or
a phone booth. Filenames and directories are gone: You're
relieved of filing and organizing duties, except when you
actually want them.
Mirror Worlds | Horizons
no more filenames, time as the major organizational tool... the way I
expect the machine to know what I'm expected/obliged to do is to record
all communications in which I agree to do something or set expectations
that I'll do something with enough structure that the machine can show
me an index into the future of my past records.
So I start looking for techincal details... JavaSpaces: Linda revived.
Anybody read the book?
But then I see "patent-pending Lifestreams=99" and I think about the year=
s
Ted Nelson wasted with his ideas tied up in NDAs and trademarks.
Sigh...
If you love something, set it free.
p.s. My latest conviction is that email the tool that people use to
commit their knowledge to electronic form for the purpose of sharing. If
we want people to be able to write hypertext easily, their mailers are
the place to start. And I want to use my email archive as a back-link
service ("show me all the mail messages that link to this page") and I
don't want to use heuristics to find those addresses. So I'm using this
second-rate hypertext editor to see if I can life with it, and to see
what it would take to hack Mozilla into a first-rate hypertext editor.
-- Dan Connolly, W3C
--------------8A3A253B8A8E07083051FCA5 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> I'm planning my next business trip... trying to maintain the invariant that my PalmIIIx knows about all the things I'm expected/obliged to do so that it can beep at me when I need to context switch from one task to another... trying to synchronize:
The Microsoft Windows view of computing (formerly known as the Apple Macintosh view) is obsolete. It dates from a long-dead era when= most people owned only a relative handful of computer files, since they hadn't been computer users for very long; when e-mail and the Internet were largely unknown; when memory and computing power were expensive. In the New View, your files will be stored not on some particular computer but afloat in cyberspace, so you can tune them in from any network-connec= ted machine: at home or work, in a hotel room or a phone booth. Filenames and= directories are gone: You're relieved of filing and organizing duties, except when you actually want them.no more filenames, time as the major organizational tool... the way I exp= ect the machine to know what I'm expected/obliged to do is to record all comm= unications in which I agree to do something or set expectations that I'll do somethi= ng with enough structure that the machine can show me an index into the futu= re of my past records.
Mirror Worlds | Horizons
So I start looking for techincal details... JavaSpaces: Linda revived.= Anybody read the book?
But then I see "patent-pending Lifestreams=99" and I think about the y= ears Ted Nelson wasted with his ideas tied up in NDAs and trademarks.
Sigh...
If you love something, set it free.
p.s. My latest conviction is that email the tool that people use to
commit their knowledge to electronic form for the purpose of sharing. If
we want people to be able to write hypertext easily, their mailers are
the place to start. And I want to use my email archive as a back-link ser=
vice
("show me all the mail messages that link to this page") and I don't want=
to use heuristics to find those addresses. So I'm using this second-rate
hypertext editor
to see if I can life with it, and to see what it would take to hack Mozil=
la
into a first-rate hypertext editor.
--
Dan Connolly, W3C
--------------8A3A253B8A8E07083051FCA5--