Recent Posts
Archives
- July 2011
- June 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- November 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- December 2009
- September 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- June 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
Categories
- Abstraction
- Admin
- Analytic/Continental
- Blogging
- Book
- Capital v.1
- City Planning
- Coffee
- Cognitive Science
- Contradiction
- Conversations
- Courses
- Critical Theory
- Critique
- Current Events
- Dialogue
- Drafts
- Ecology
- Empiricism
- Events
- Family
- Fetish
- Fieldwork
- Grundrisse
- Intellectual Property
- Interdisciplinary
- Linguistics
- Links
- Logic
- Logic of Science
- Marxes
- Materialism
- Math and Science
- Metatheory
- Methodology
- Miscellaneous
- Negations
- Overheard
- Phenomenology of Spirit
- Philosophy of History
- Political Economy
- Politics
- Procrastination
- Professional Life
- Psychology
- Reading
- Reading Group
- Reification
- Religion
- Self-Reflexivity
- Social Movements
- Social Science
- Sociology of Knowledge
- Supervision
- Teaching
- Technology
- Thesis
- Transformation
- Writing
Rough Theory 
This is very nice, thank you. It is nice to have attention drawn to software that is suffering an identity crisis as we speak, casting off its ambitious designation of beta, and reverting to type as pre-alpha. Nice to suggest to people that there is in fact something to look at, and that the something indeed has a purpose which is at all fathomable. Nice indeed, for there to be such acknowledgement of an inordinate ineptitude which advertises its poor showing prematurely. Especially nice, since many a late night has been spent swearing at the screen, trying desperately to remedy the effects of a premature ‘launch’ – a process often commented on, bitterly, in the company of this blog’s author (who can therefore claim no excuse of ignorance). Thank you too, for your publicity blitzkrieg initiative having “roughtheoried” my server with traffic. I now owe the four visitors the most sincere of apologies for any disruption of service…
On a completely separate note: how is the research question coming along? Happy, as always, to help…
Crap – an outstandingly witty comment of mine seems to be lost in the mire of Rough Theory’s more than capable spam filter. No doubt with good reason.
Suffice to say, I am of course immensely grateful for NP’s most effective publicity and advocacy on my behalf. Now if only my software had some kind of clear point to it, this would be most advantageous. In the meantime I am working overtime to recover from the effects of the recent “roughtheorising” my site has received. Apologies to all 4 registrants for any drop in service levels this sudden influx may have caused…
LOL! I love it: perhaps I should use this in my signature when I post elsewhere – “You have been roughtheorised”… ;-P
I can’t see your post in Akismet – did you get a specific error message? (I hate losing posts – even your posts… ;-P)
Hah! Found your post! (And on the research question: You bastard!)
“It is nice to have attention drawn to software that is suffering an identity crisis as we speak, casting off its ambitious designation of beta, and reverting to type as pre-alpha.”
Pre-alpha is a good description for what I looked at when I logged in the first time as there was no content. Almost none. One that without content on any of the help pages associated rather with Finnegan’s Wake than with Rough Theory, actually.
But talking of spreading the word.. hadn’t you yourself linked to your project on your blog first?
“Thank you too, for your publicity blitzkrieg initiative having “roughtheoried” my server with traffic. I now owe the four visitors the most sincere of apologies for any disruption of service…”
No problem. I haven’t noticed any offtime. 🙂
I logged in tonight the second time and am fascinated to watch it grow. Of course I knew there would be introductory content on more pages soon, but really couldn’t figure what it was going to be about. Now there is more text and I’m still curious.
thx for sharing.
ps apologies I haven’t yet filled in any profile neither at Somet nor at Rough Theory or at my own blog. I’m working on it.
Now see, LM – look what you do to this site, what with your work:
orange. – remind me (seriously) to ask your feedback before I submit work for review – you method slam with the best… 🙂 No worries about the profile – I still need to get around to figuring out how to let you edit your comments.
(LM: would you know how to do this in WordPress? It seems like it ought to be a basic issue: I just want to enable someone with a standard “Contributor” account to edit their own comments. To make this possible, I need to change the privileges associated with the user category, and I’m sure I’ve done this kind of thing in the past, but can’t figure out how – or if – I did this… I’m asking you since, you know, I’ve been so nice to you lately and figure you must just be burning to do me a favour…)
Always happy to help…
There is some bug with contributors being able to edit their own comments.
There are two ways around this:
Upgrade the user to an ‘Author’
Hack the source of WordPress, and fix the problem with the current_user_can function (requires some PHP knowledge).
Not having done the latter, I suggest the former.
Pirandello perhaps said it best in his famous play “Six Contributors in search of an Author”.
Yeah, I tried that when I was first setting up the account, but couldn’t edit comments as “author”, either. Are you able to edit yours here? (Since I’m too lazy to create another “author” account to check… ;-P)
There is an “editor” user category, which I haven’t tried – but I was assuming that would give someone the ability to edit everything, whereas the intention was just to allow people to edit their own material.
I was sure, though, that at some point I had changed the privileges associated with one of the user categories – from memory, it was to make something visible that ordinarily wouldn’t have been. But I can’t remember how I did this, and it may not have involved the user categories at all…
Yes, it does relate to making the edit and delete links visible in the edit-comments.php template. You can of course remove the “if… then” checks from the template, but this will make all comments editable to all users (please let me know if you do this, as I’m would enjoy re-writing history…).
Just noticed I can edit *some* comments, just not all. And of course I cannot edit all of my own, and I can edit some others – meaning I can realise my re-writing desires after all.
So maybe when I’ve perfected my own software, very shortly, I’ll look to fix up the vagueries of WordPress too…
So you’re telling me that you can currently see an edit option for some other folks’ posts – but not for all of your posts? Does it have to do, perhaps, with whether you’re the author of the main post? Can you edit your commenters? But not your comments under someone else’s main post?
The template itself shouldn’t make things editable – regardless of whether the links are visible? But the template could be causing my problem: maybe the privileges are working fine, but I just need to make some changes to get the links to show properly? It hadn’t occurred to me…
No, you shouldn’t really have to change the template – this was me trying to hack around the limitations of the permissions system (by removing them…)
But, yes, something seems buggy in the WordPress permissions. It probably is only for ‘Author’ roles. On this post, when I go to ‘Mass Edit Mode’, I get all the comments, some of which I can edit, some of which I can’t. The ones I can edit include *some* of mine, as well as *some* others – I’ll send you a screen shot via email.
OK, I see what you’re saying – I can edit *all* comments related to a post *I* authored. But *no* comments, including my own, related to any other posts. Somewhat counter-intuitive. Given what you want to do, I think you’d need to hack the permissions system of WordPress after all (either via the template directly, or possibly by tweaking the database to make it look like there are many more “authors” of articles than is in fact the case). Either of these hacky options will compromise your security however. Leave it with me…
And this might help figure out your woes – http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
I registered and trialled, but hit two problems: (1) I have no idea what it is about, nor what I’m s’posed to do with it; and (2) my browser (Camino v1.0.2) is very, very picky about javascript, and it turned up its nose at what was on offer. Sorry.
…
Wait! Just tried again, and the Help is showing, so I guess my browser got over its superiority complex…
LM: I think a theme might be arising in relation to your work:
Just as it has been said “Existence precedes Essence”, so in this instance “Functionality precedes Documentation”.
In any case, thanks for the pointers. Some further documentation will be forthcoming. Unfortunately JavaScript is an essential requirement, it is used quite extensively. Would be interesting to see what it looks like without it, in fact.
To use NP’s blog for further self-promotion (some – not I – might even suggest damage control after promiscuous publicity), the software is about developing and matching semantic web databases (otherwise known, helpfully for this audience, as “ontologies”). The idea at the heart of it is to test for the commensurability of formal knowledge representations (taxonomies, database schemas and the like). How this is to be done, even now, remains somewhat mysterious…
Anyway I appreciate the feedback.
For rob – I found a copy of “Debating Derrida”, which looks as interesting as you suggested. Some more prompting might even have NP taking a look…
LMagee–you have launched your project, right? Its not NP’s or any other person’s responsibility when people log in to have a look around and remain, say, confused about it.
Linking to a publication in blogsphere is more than a standard procedure–its the blogsphere’s very essence.
So, what I was thinking first is that its past pre-alpha status is part of the experiment. I at least perceived it to possibly be programmatic.
True, I did… My outrage at NP is entirely projected, and not of course intended seriously. And it is a generous interpretation, which I will gladly accept, that its pre-alpha status has proved to be part of the experiment…
At least part of the difficulty related to the fact that *both* the software *and* the purported method are somewhat “experimental”. Nor is there any assured probability that the kind of confusion you describe will vanish upon successive iterations, unfortunately…
From first to second log-in I found exactly the information being added I had missed before to clear my total helplessness a little up regarding the field of expertise you are working on. Theres concepts which I can look up now to get an idea at least about in what academic space(s) the project is located in.
To me my first log-in alone has been worth to participate because I could so well observe myself looking for points of orientation in that strange surrounding.
My browser btw first showed strange artefacts of code I did not understand on many pages, too.
Out of interest what browser are you using? I must admit, I don’t test for this. I am assuming Firefox 2 or IE 6, which may not be good assumptions…
I was using IE6 that time. It didn’t look like being caused by the browser. Pages’s left and right ends were expanded and there was one single line displayes additionally to the menue on top of each page. Can’t really remember though what it said. There were some letters, words maybe and then 0s and 1s, as far as I can revisualize.
Hey L Magee. Glad to hear that I didn’t send you off on a fruitless hunt, and I hope you do get something from it. It’s a nice short book, so perhaps NP (if I may) can be convinced to skim a few pages each night before bed?
As for the site/software, I’m still both intrigued and in the dark. That’s probably because I’m not sure I know what an ontology, as distinct from ontology generally, is (although I think there’s irony somewhere in that statement). It’s also probably because “avoid ontologising” functions, kind of, as a guiding “principle” of my work. To the extent, moreover, that ontologies amount to taxonomies, I’m definitely the wrong person to turn to, since I’m never very happy using them, either.
Having said all that, my ignorance on the matter is enough to keep me interested — and I look forward to the chance to learn something. So if there’s anything the ignorant can do to help, please let me know.