Whoo-hoo! Electronic Periodic has released Element 14! I hereby declare this the coolest thing of the day. Silicon forever!

There often comes a time when dealing with a homegrown software project where its product or its needs begin to outstrip the system. Such is the case with Notanda at the moment, and I’m struggling with how I want to handle things.

When I decided to look into using the existing wikiesque Notanda system as a journal/blog system as well, I came up with the simple yet cunning plan to do nothing more than pretend the dates were wiki words. So, for example, in my local directory of plaintext files, you’ll find today’s entry as a file called 2005_09_30.txt. Notanda takes that text file and performs some magical steps that eventually produces a nicely formatted HTML file and directory (or updates it if it exists already) that are rsync’d to the webserver. So far so good.

What I’ve come to realize over this past month is that the number of folders in the main directory will continue to grow as time goes by, one per day, forever. :)

Notanda isn’t set up yet to handle subdirectories under its source folder, so my next idea of using folders (e.g. 2005/09/30/) isn’t immediately available — it’s also more complicated than it sounds, due to Notanda’s methods of handling related articles and tagging.

All three of my basic options are time-consuming. What I’m struggling with is whether to graft subdirectory-handling into Notanda (major surgery as I abstract a bunch of stuff that’s hardcoded currently), start from near-scratch and re-build Notanda more sanely (Christ, not again!), or move to another system altogether.

If that last option seems drastic, it is. When I get frustrated, I tend to want to wipe the slate clean and go a different direction. Thing is, the same concerns, unmet needs, etc. that wiki, blog, or wiki+blog systems had when I first planned this iteration of the 1414 site are still the same, and my desire to have my own trusted system is as well. So as tempting as it is to dump it all into MediaWiki or WordPress, it just isn’t going to happen. At least not as easily as that.

It’s a balance between wanting to just keep on writing and to keep on futzing with the tools I use to write.

So what would the ideal situation be?

I’ll probably wind up going with the major surgery option and program subdirectory-handling into the existing system. Mostly, though I want to keep writing. :) I’d thought to plan out this process for a vague October 1st date, but I can see it’s going to take more time than the next few hours to complete. I can work with a New Year’s timeline, though.

Wild gorillas seen using tools for first time (Reuters) and Wild gorillas seen to use tools (BBC).

Two female gorillas have been photographed using sticks as tools to get through swampy areas, the first time the apes have been seen doing so in the wild, researchers reported on Thursday.

‘This is a truly astounding discovery,’ said Thomas Breuer of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study….

One time I was visiting an ape exihibit at a primate center, in which you could get much closer to them then in a zoo setting. A female gorilla was sitting on the ground next to the outer bars, and as I stood nearby, watching, she took two sticks and began rubbing them together.

I expect she was trying to teach the poor hairless ape a thing or two. ;)

b.la: The Thurman Fire. Photos at my flickr page.

Sirens scream through town every so often, alternating with the heavy drones of fire-fighting planes overhead. There’s another fire out in the I.E. which isn’t on that CDF info page as yet — it’s near Angeles Oaks in the San Bernardino Mountains, and has forced the closure of Highway 38. And since 330 is also closed for road work at the moment, Highway 18 is the only way up or down from Big Bear on the San Bernardino side of the mountains….

Tom outs Michael Chiarello. The bastard. Chiarello, that is, not Tom.

Tom’s a bastard for picking the coolest place to propose. ;D

New:

• O’Reilly: Re-revisiting emacs In which our hero turns back toward the feared emacs and re-evaluates his previous utterance.
• b.la: Fire season is definitely here

New articles:

• b.la: From better to nurse
• b.la: Don’t worry, it’s only the invisible stuff that’ll kill ya
• b.la: Feed me, see more
• b.la: Fire danger updates
• b.la: Feed this
• b.la: Cable TV is bad for you…especially in Culver City

Not so nice headline of the day: Palm teams up with Microsoft. As a former Palm devotee, I’d like to offer some reasoned commentary here, but will instead limit it to a simple ‘ewwwwwwwwww’ and give my HPDA a few extra index cards before I leave the house this morning. ;)

How to turn off iChat iTunes status messages? Command line version. Post of the day. See, the CLI is better!

Discover: Biologists Crack Code of Chickadee Song

Who would have guessed that when a chickadee opens its tiny beak, it has a lot to say? Biologists studying the alarm calls of black-capped chickadees found the bird’s songs signal not only the presence but also the size of nearby predators. ‘This level of complexity is certainly new, in terms of alarm responses especially,’ says Chris Templeton of the University of Washington in Seattle. His study shows chickadees have one of the most sophisticated means of communication discovered in animals….

Congratulations! Tom and Tiffany!!!! That is just so cool! :)

Headline of the day: Two Vikings arrested after gas station scuffle. The little mental movie that produces is just precious. :)

New the past couple of days:

• b.la: Tempting fruit
• b.la: Ghost Ships of Los Angeles
• b.la: When worlds collide
• b.la: LA Peace March Photos
• b.la: AIDS Project LA to help out Gulf Coast AIDS organizations

NaNoWriMo signups are only five days away. :) Oddly enough, between the time I first posted about this and the next time I checked, their site went down. Check back in a few days.