an eddy in the bitstream

Month: June 2010

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.

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.

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