Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I have been doing a lot of writing lately and was interested in automatic versioning so I could see the results of writing over time and how things change. I think that it would be really interesting to see a visualization of a book being written from scratch. Normally you only see the end product; tracking changes over time would allow others to see the sausage being made. This could be useful for teachers to help their students improve their process, for writers to analyze their craft, or for aspiring writers to see how books really get written.

Here's a demo of what I envisioned using a recent blog post that I wrote using the following method.

The system uses git for version history. I also used a Vim hook that checks in the current file on buffer writes:

cabbr autocommit call Autocommit()
fun! Autocommit()
  au BufWritePost * silent !git add <afile>
  au BufWritePost * silent !git commit <afile> -m 'Generated commit'
endfu

This is about the finest grain of editing that I can imagine being useful and that was practical to do. Anything lower-level and you're probably looking at the document as the cursor is moving around. Commits are nearly instantaneous, and you can amend commits to explain complicated changes. Git branching seems to work well with this system. Hence, you can have multiple streams of writing. If you're working with other people, you could be writing a new chapter when you get some feedback on the last chapter which you would like to add. Simply create a branch from the time that you sent the document out, and you should be able to see exactly what the reviewer saw. In addition, authors of collaborative works can use the push/pull functionality to manage copies, which is probably better than emailing documents around. See this page on collaborative writing for more ideas.

Well, it's been a year since I started this blog, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the personal changes that I have seen, as well as other people's responses to my writing.

I appreciated feedback that people gave me over the course of the year, whether through comments or discussions. This helped me realize that I can provide value through writing and that people are actually interested in reading what I am thinking about.

In most languages, regular expressions have symbols to indicate when the first part or last part must match the first or last part of the string or line. These are called anchors. Anchors are usually the caret (^) for matching the beginning of a string, and the dollar sign ($) for the end of the string. Hence:

'abc' =~ /c$/     => true
'abc' =~ /a$/     => false
'abc' =~ /^a/     => true 
'abc' =~ /^c/     => false

I can remember what the anchors are. When I have trouble remembering which is which, I use the following mnemonic:

Found a site that is trying to improve free software documentation. I found this interesting because the idea is related to a previous post that I had about open source tech writers.

It seems that their goal is to improve the documentation of free software products to increase their adoption. You can check this out on the about tab. The discussion on their FLOSS manuals overview reminded me of thoughts that I was having about having some sort of open source documentation or tech writing business. They basically outline the major models for producing content and being compensated for it. There were several sections that focused on the prevailing mindset, technologies, and economics of doing open source (in this case, for free software) documentation. I agree with them that adequate and consistent documentation is something that keeps most open source and free software from being widely adopted on the desktop.

I've had vivid dreams for a long time, and at some point in high school I got interested in remembering them. Here are my experiences.

Why I'm interested in this

Dreams are a great way to get to know yourself better. Plus, they are a good way to solve problems. Your subconscious mind works in an environment with different constraints than reality, often providing valuable insights. You may know something that you cannot apprehend consciously. I think that it makes you more creative because you get better at listening to different parts of your brain. Plus, you're sleeping anyway, so you might as well make the best of it. :)