Gnodal Journal

An item on support.opml.org spun off this set of items:

* Purple Wiki, from the folks at blueoxen.com … also a message from collab.blueoxen.net
* Starting Conversations”
* “An Introduction to Purple” by Eugene Eric Kim, the founder and Executive Director of Blue Oxen Associates (see “Church of Purple: The IDs the Thing” in ”EEK Speaks”, his blog
* resources from Chris Dent
* Simon Willison‘s plinks – a purple numbers variant … Javascript and implementation
* Meatball’s Transclusion page … see also their CollaborativeCriticism and PurpleWiki

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A late night find: google’s AJAXXLT – “AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T.”

So many options! I remember consulting on hardware purchases back in the early 90s … the sort of task that has informed my thinking on “Participatory Deliberation”: in an imperfect world every option closes some doors.

RubyOnRails? Dang … I had kinda ruled that out … but kiko.com has me thinking again. (Kiko’s homepage makes a nice pitch for Web2.0 … and the description of Javascript ActiveRecord states the case for JS very neatly.) And the ActiveRecord project is, well, a pretty good pitch for Ruby itself!

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Also of interest: Douglas Crockford on Javascript.

From Sforce AJAX Toolkit for Smarties … credit to SForce and CRMSuccess [33minutes Flash]

And for good measure: SplineTech JavaScript HTML Debugger
*thanks for this to Reuven Cohen*

see also:
* AJAX Office; ” to Microsoft Office what GMail (Google Mail) is to Microsoft OutLook” … and its wiki [!? down ?!]
* Open AJAX listing from agRSSive
* Protégé; a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework.
* Enomaly: Open Source Enterprise Consulting
* TYPO3.org; the main developer resource of the TYPO3 project, a free CMS framework released under the GPL.

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Javascript is soooo neat … see this MetaTag Generator

http://www.quirksmode.org/ … Peter-Paul Koch. I was just looking for examples of XML parsing in Javascript!

Mmmm, a nice buglist in http://www.quirksmode.org/js/findpos.html

Shiet, kewl … I rummaged around his bio stuff and found “DOM Scripting Task Force » Manifesto“

“Since its introduction in 1998 as the open, participative process
to develop and revise the Javaâ„¢ technology specifications, reference
implementations, and test suites, the Java Community Process (JCP)
program has fostered the evolution of the Java platform in cooperation
with the international Java developer community.”

If people with widely divergent opinions agree on something, is that to be taken as more than mere concensus on one specific? Probably not … but what gives rise to such a constellation?

Anyhow, this breakdown of opinions on the issue of universal heath insurance brings this to a painful point: peek this typological breakdown … now, ponder this: if we could explicate the views of each of the groups who agree, wouldn’t that serve to clarify just what the “Enterprisers” are choking on?

(Supplemantary: how come fewer “Disadvantaged Democrats” support this than “Liberals”?)

PoV … right. Now, moving along:

I suspect that a rigorous dialectical analysis (dialogics?) would evidence that a number of perspectives are valid, credible, and plausible. To revert to the vernacular: there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

And so decisions are then derived, quite properly, according to the human values at play: here we would see the play of various principles.

The point to the exercise is always that a) most people cannot put forward arguments in support of their opinions and b) most of those few supporting arguements are simply wrong.

What comes to mind is that rationality needs to get its foot in the door of public argumentation and that it does so. But it does so again and again and again with only slight progress: each victory gains little and every defeat is costly. What the “Participatory Deliberation” system produces using the POV method is a set of substantial foundation blocks.

Is this of value? Is anything except material wealth?
Does this matter? Does anything except brute power?