James Tauber's Blog 2005/04/27
Should I Continue Title-Only Feed?
Two (separate) questions:
Would anyone continue to subscribe to the title-only feed if there were a summary feed?
Would anyone object to me stopping the title-only feed all together?
Please email jtauber /at/ jtauber /dot/ com.
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : (permalink)
Designing from the Outside In
In his post Designing from the Outside In on the new O'Reilly Radar blog, Tim O'Reilly mentions a conversation he had with Jason Fried from 37signals (is it so-called because 37 is a psychologically random number?)
Jason...
believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed "from the outside in." That is, at 37signals, they try to design the usability and function of the application first, and that drives the implementation. And if they can then extract a re-usable framework, all the better. For example, basecamp wasn't built on top of Ruby on Rails. Rather, Ruby on Rails was extracted from basecamp.
That notion of extracting a re-usable framework after the fact struck me as interesting because that's really what's happened with Leonardo. Two years ago, I wrote a little wiki-like script in Python in order to enable editing of content on jtauber.com from a browser. I then decided to expand it just over a year ago to include a blog. Now, as more features are being requested, an underlying web framework is emerging that could very well be useful outside of running a wiki or blog.
It reminds me of a point Jon Bosak used to make that Backus-Naur Form (BNF) came out of work on the specification for Algol. Another example of extracting the general from the specific rather than attemping to build the general in isolation of a specific use.
Tim also mentions Jason's referring to Christopher Alexander's Paths and Goals pattern.
If you read Tim's full post you'll also see there's another whole aspect to what he's talking about with regard to UI-centric development and the role of designers. Jason's blog is a great read too.
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : (permalink)
Poincare Project: Topological Properties Revisited
Part of the Poincare Project.
Recall that a topological property is one based only on the open sets of a topology and not any other structure. For this reason a topological property is preserved under a homeomorphism. If one topological space has a topological property and another doesn't have that property then the two spaces can't be homeomorphic.
So far we've talked about the following topological properties:
Compactness is enough to topologically distinguish a circle from an open interval. A circle is compact whereas an open interval is not.
Connectedness is enough to topologically distinguish the real line R from the plane R^2 because if you take away a point from R and from R^2 then R is disconnected but R^2 is still connected.
We don't yet have a topological property that can distinguish a sphere from torus. We shortly will and it will be at the heart of the Poincare Conjecture.
UPDATE: next post
by James Tauber : Created on April 27, 2005 : Last modified April 27, 2005 : Categories poincare_project : 1 comment (permalink)