FATSort + NatSort = LOVE

Felix Leidner told me he merged my natural sort ordering routine into his FATSort Utility. That's quite a neat hack: it rewrites the disk structures so that files appear in sorted order, even if the program displaying them doesn't explicitly sort them. (As is probably common in little embedded devices that use FAT.)

ubuntu bug fixes in bazaar branches

Bug #314406 in gnome-desktop (Ubuntu): “xrandr plugin of g-s-d crashes on startup”

It's nice to see more and more Ubuntu packaging being done in Bazaar branches, since that was one of the main reasons for Canonical working on Bazaar. It's a particularly good combination with PPAs in Launchpad, where people can publish both the source changes to fix the bug and also the built binaries for testing.

It should get even better when Jono & co finish the feature of having source branches directly attached to source packages.

journalling vs blogging

Alex Payne writes of keeping a private journal, separate from his blogs.

The primary and obvious difference between journaling and blogging is that a journal is private. A journal exists only for the author’s personal consumption, or possibly as a posthumous record of a life. Without the modest audience my blog has accrued, I have no incentive to filter what I write for content or style. I can be as dry or as flowery as I like and nobody need suffer.

I've been doing this too, and went through some kind of dry spell in blogging in the process of working it out.

It seems like by blogging in 2009 you speak to a much larger audience, or a different kind of audience, to that you might have reached in say 2001. I remember one friend then writing very personal content in a blog, hidden in html comments. Was it to filter it to more technical readers, or to people looking closely rather than just skimming? Or was it, I speculate, a kind of desire to work out the boundary between the public and personal.

Beyond keeping a private diary, sometimes online and sometimes on paper, I've found it useful to keep special journals, append-only and dated, just in text files, on particular topics or projects. If I come back to a project after a gap of a few weeks or even a few minutes it reminds me where I was, and seems to help in reestablishing flow. And if it's the kind of issue that takes long-term contemplation it's quite enlightening to see what I thought of it six months ago. One can easily believe one always thought what one thinks now.

trying out dopplr

I'm heading to South America later this month, which should be great. It's on my dopplr page, which looks like an interesting little service.