{"id":656,"date":"2014-01-07T19:26:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T19:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=656"},"modified":"2014-01-07T19:26:21","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T19:26:21","slug":"questions-for-2014-1-mind-traffic-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=656","title":{"rendered":"Questions for 2014 : #1 Mind Traffic Control"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not going to be making predictions for 2014. Or promises that I may or may not keep. Or even resolutions. At least, not public ones : who knows what crazy trajectories my life will take this year?<br \/>\nBut I do have a couple of questions. These are the things occupying my mind at the beginning of 2014. And which may plausibly inform what I do.<br \/>\n<strong>1) What&#8217;s the relation between OWL and Mind Traffic Control?<\/strong><br \/>\nThere&#8217;s little doubt in my mind now. <a href=\"http:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=653\">OWL is great.<\/a> It&#8217;s the future. At least, as far as my private notebook is concerned. And that means it&#8217;s now my <em>de facto<\/em> to-do list manager as well.<br \/>\nWhich is kind of embarrassing for <a href=\"http:\/\/mindtrafficcontrol.com\/\">Mind Traffic Control<\/a>.<br \/>\nMTC <em>does have<\/em> some virtues :<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>firstly, a kick-ass name that I love. <strong>&#8220;Mind Traffic Control&#8221;<\/strong> is the best name ever! For personal organizer stuff. <\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s solid. It has remembered everything I put into it from the moment it was written. It&#8217;s all still hanging around to haunt me. (Even if I kind of wish some of it wouldn&#8217;t)<\/li>\n<li>the task delegation is pretty sweet. I don&#8217;t know anything else as simple as MTC for delegating tasks to other people and tracking what you delegated. To be honest, I don&#8217;t do a lot of delegating tasks to people. But if I did, I&#8217;d want to use MTC.\n<\/li>\n<li>the deferral part works as advertised and it&#8217;s a nice feature for a task-tracking app.<\/li>\n<li>MTC is slicker than you remember, if you haven&#8217;t looked at it for a while. In 2013 I did a bunch of Ajaxing it up so it&#8217;s now sending more little json fragments around and doing a lot less recreating the page.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But it also has big problems.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s not OWL. (See above. Doh!)<\/li>\n<li>There is a <em>major<\/em> impedance mismatch between queues and the ORM-style storage system that Google App Engine uses. Moving items around on the queues seems to be really inefficient. To such an extent that whenever I do a burst of development \/ testing on the live server, Google kick me off for going over my quota of data queries. Querying also seems to take longer than it needs.\n<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s on the GAE cloud, at a time when I and, I think, many others are becoming wary of storing their personal \/ private data on servers belonging to large corporations under the jurisdiction of the NSA. And at a time when I, myself, am seeking to become less entwined with Google and its technologies. <\/li>\n<li>While the UI has improved, it&#8217;s still not as slick as it <em>ought<\/em> to be. It still needs a lot of work to look as good or work as well as modern web-apps.<\/li>\n<li>It never really caught on. People try it, some have used it off and on over a couple of years, but I don&#8217;t think I have any long-term users except me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So if I look deep into the abyss and am honest, MTC is a failed experiment. Whatever its theoretical virtues.<br \/>\nAnd in 2014 I think there&#8217;s a straight choice :<br \/>\nEither admit to myself that MTC is no longer a going concern. Perhaps kill it entirely. (Like I <a href=\"http:\/\/platformwars.blogspot.com.br\/2013\/05\/ceasefire.html\">did<\/a> with Platform Wars last year.)<br \/>\nOr, to use a fashionable term, <em>pivot<\/em> the site to become something else. Probably something with OWL at its core. I don&#8217;t quite know what that would mean. Maybe doing the hard work of remodelling the queue data-model (use localStorage? synchronized to large BLOBs on the server?) and then trying to put OWL \/ Concord on the front-end of that? Maybe just a one-time export of MTC data? (Remember, MTC has exported to OPML since its inception.) Maybe becoming a GAE hosted farm of OWL wikis? If so, what, if anything, of the original queue and delegation model could \/ should be preserved \/ recreated?<br \/>\nToday, I only have these questions rather than answers. But this year, I&#8217;ll be trying to resolve them one way or another.<br \/>\n(I&#8217;ll post the next of my 2014 questions tomorrow. Maybe.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not going to be making predictions for 2014. Or promises that I may or may not keep. Or even resolutions. At least, not public ones : who knows what crazy trajectories my life will take this year? But I do have a couple of questions. These are the things occupying my mind at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[282,297,324],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mind-traffic-control","tag-my-stuff","tag-owl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}