Seduction and Betrayal

This is a really good op-ed. Mayhill Fowler gets just the right amount of "philosophical and epistemological" in her reflections on the recent McChrystal blow-up.

The storyteller changes reality, because the story changes our memory, personal and collective. It's always that way. It's the great lesson of the Deconstructionist school. All narrators are untrustworthy -- or rather, trust is not the same as fact. And faith is an act of trust, not fact.

File under ideas/ Fri Jun 25 09:12:59 CT 2010

CPAN test failures

SWISH::3 0.08_04 is passing all tests all over the CPAN testers universe, so that is encouraging.

However, some reports (notably on FreeBSD) report false failures because of a Wstat issue.

I've posted about it at PerlMonks and hope someone out there has an easy fix.

File under projects/swish Wed Jun 16 20:33:08 CT 2010

Open Source Business

opensource.com has an interesting thread on the open source business model(s).

File under general/ Wed Jun 9 08:35:33 CT 2010

Swish3 progress report

There's been a ton of work on Swish3 in the last year. I've actually started planning a 1.0 release, after 5 years of work.

Lately I've been focusing on three things: (1) making the Perl bindings easier to install; (2) indexing of compressed documents; and (3) supporting XInclude of document fragments. The first is accomplished: you can install the entire library via CPAN. The last two are aimed at large doc sets where I want to keep the XML compressed on disk for space reasons, and where I want to re-use subsets of the document collections in building multiple indexes.

File under projects/swish Tue Jun 8 23:33:18 CT 2010