Google have acquired AppJet, which means they’ve acquired EtherPad and the EtherPad team are going to start working on Wave. This is great news for them, but not so good news for their users and customers. They announced that they would be shutting down EtherPad. This is very sad indeed. EtherPad is Wave for people who actually need to get shit done. We used it really successfully for drafting things like blog posts and e-mails for BarCampLondon 7. I’ve tested it as a way to draft Citizendium articles collaboratively. Simon Willison used it at BarCamp recently on a birds-of-a-feather session on non-relational databases and NoSQL so that people could collaboratively edit a list of all the different non-relational database servers that are coming out - really successful. I was very sad to see the announcement that it was disappearing, as were many others in the comments and on Twitter. The good news? They’ve listened to the users! They are keeping the site going until… they open source EtherPad. Woohoo! This is the best outcome of all: we will be able to run our own EtherPads locally, on our own servers - this will be great for things like RailsCamp where we are offline. I’m already on Google Wave - it’s a fancy toy to show how clever browser-based apps are. EtherPad is the real deal.
Nietzsche Source publishes scholarly content on Nietzsche - primarily the German original manuscripts.
On Twitter yesterday, I was searching around for a new paradigm in computer science which I could ruthlessly import into philosophy and turn into a cult. That way, the cult could make me enough money to pay off my student loans and would enable me to eventually destroy the cult and do some useful work - the cult would simply be a means to my own end. I thought this might be fun after seeing another discussion of “object-oriented philosophy”, a label frequently used by the speculative realists. Then, this morning, while doing completely unrelated research, I stumble across a Dooyeweerdian Extreme Philosophy that attempts to turn Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming methodology into a lesson in metaphilosophy. Needless to say, reading this has made me note that while I’m definitely a subscriber to many tenets of Extreme Programming and agile methodology, I certainly am not an Extreme Philosopher. I guess this means I’m a Waterfall philosopher, although I have no idea what this entails. I guess something like a Hegelian Big Design Up Front approach. Perhaps there is some strange synthesis one can make between just-in-time methodology in manufacturing, concurrency in software development and… Heidegger. That’s it. Potential thesis title: “A translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time With Reference to Erlang”.
