Lambda the Ultimate

Who would think to build a wiki out of a single web page, make it support plug-ins, etc.? It's the original hack carried through to perfection.

I currently use this to manage a bunch of things.

Fun fact: Ward was actually embarassed by how simple his wiki was at first, until everyone really said they loved it.

Hard-to-follow discussion

I think the thing that makes Ward's Wiki hard to follow is lack of a good delta system, as well as the ability to show who said what. I often can't tell where one person's views ends and another person's views begin.

I don't think you need overly structured "conversations" metaphor as a solution. That's just injecting process as a way to institute bureaucracy.

At work, we were actually using Etherpad instead of Google Wave, despite the fact all developers got early versions of the Wave Beta. Wave is just waaaay too structured for our needs. Etherpad gives us freeform editing and allows us to collaborate in real-time. I really think Google Wave is overkill for most people. But Etherpad uses text highlighting to show you who said what. Sure, somebody can always erase and re-state what somebody else said, but it is almost always obvious that it is merely an editorial pen. Likewise, StackOverflow allows editorial pen features and things are still fairly rigorous.

Etherpad doesn't have a linear progression. Instead, it has a more literate progression! Why you would want linear progression or threaded progression is beyond me. The Spirit of Google Wave, and by reduction LtU, is that people own chunks of texts. For an encyclopedia or even a codebase, this is a bad model.

I often can't tell where one person's views ends and another person's views begin.

One man's feature is another man's bug, eh?

When two sides are clearly having a discussion, and then a third party appears to jump in, it gets confusing, especially with anonymous comments.

All I'm saying is I want very light conversation traces. Nothing heavy like Google Wave is necessary.

When two sides are clearly having a discussion, and then a third party appears to jump in, it gets confusing, especially with anonymous comments.

Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind. These random interjections are the anti-thesis of the articulate, cogent arguments found here on LtU. Whether or not this is due to threading, as I implied, or something else, as you suggested earlier, is up for debate.

Diving into thread trees depth-first, or skimming threads breadth-first is up to you. Seems well suited to my learning style at least.

Backtracking is also fairly easy; not so on Ward's wiki, where you have to mentally track to whom you assigned which randomly interjected comments.

I see you probably misinterpreted what I said.

Not being able to delineate who is talking can often result in subtle reading difficulties. I often ask myself, "Did this guy just contradict his earlier position? Is he coherent?" That's why knowing who is talking is important.

Perhaps it's all because the layout of LtU is statically typed, but wikis are latently typed.

Is that irony or prophecy?

nagios & ubuntu cdrom drive failure debugging

Etherpad was acquired by Google about a week and a half ago. When first acquired, Google blocked all creation of new etherpads and told users they had until March to save their etherpads. It now seems they've reversed that decision.

Sometimes what we'll do at work when somebody is remoting, we'll set-up gotomeeting, a phone call, and etherpad. This is how we do code reviews remotely. Etherpad is honestly the ultimate groupware "glue tool".