I was lucky to get to see one Linsanity game -- the game with the Mavericks at the Garden. It was wonderful.

I hadn't been into basketball for almost 40 years, if you can believe that. The last team I was so enthralled with was the Knicks of Walt, Earl, Bill, Dave and Willis. This team had a different charm. It was youth, and brilliance, and so what if maybe they wouldn't make the playoffs. I really don't care. I just loved watching them play. It was pure love. It was the kind of sports event that seems can only happen in NY, and only happens every 40 years. Last time it happened I was in high school. And at the same time the Mets were winning the World Series, we went to Woodstock and men landed on the moon. That's how big these things can be.

But the Knicks are a corporation, and the players who had moved aside so the magic could happen came back, and when they did, the air went out of the balloon.

Apparently the coach saw clearly what was going on and wanted to do the only right thing -- trade the corporation for the youthful optimism. And the corporation did what corporations do -- stayed with the safe bet, and fired the coach.

I'll put my stake in the ground. Pretty soon Lin won't be the starting point guard, and soon after that they'll trade him to another corporate mess. Of course I could be wrong. I desperately hope I am. It would be great if they let Carmelo go. I don't care if they get anything for him. Sure he got up for one game, he had to. But this is going to wear out quick, and the mediocrity will win.

 3/14/2012; 10:32:20 PM.

I'm really getting good at organizing development projects with the outliner.

Here's the screen shot.

Thought it would be good to show to any MORE or ThinkTank users who might be lurking.

And this is what that same document looks like on my website.

Of course what you see when you click on the web link will be different from what you see in the image, which is just a snapshot in time. The outline is dynamic and develops with the project I'm doing.

BTW, to people who develop outliners, the interface is OPML and HTTP. It will definitely be possible for any outliner to hook into this content system. And that's the plan, to bootstrap the writing tools and the website in tandem.

Some projects only work if you are systematic about note-taking.

 3/14/2012; 10:18:45 AM.

I'm converting from Bootstrap 1 to Bootstrap 2 this week.

It's very revealing, when you see how a platform developer, and Bootstrap is definitely a platform, evolves the platform. The kinds of problems they fix that cause breakage in apps. In this case, they break a lot of stuff, for seemingly esthetic reasons.

For example, in Bootstrap 1 they define a "twipsy" -- which is a little popup that emanates from a link as you roll over it with your mouse. Someone must have noticed that this is very much like what a "tooltip" does, so they changed the name. Not a big deal, you say -- perhaps -- but it is breakage. In my world, I probably wouldn't change it. My philosophy is the worst name is the best name. This is to prevent discussions like this one. If someone said "tooltip is a better name" I would say "give me a worse name and I'll change it." It's a joke like "we make shitty software," but like all jokes it's an eloquent statement of the truth.

If I had to change it, I would continue to make the name "twipsy" work. Avoid breakage and people who develop on your platform will love you, if they actually notice. Okay, they won't curse you in their sleep at night.

I adopted this philosophy largely because I develop on my platforms too, and there never is a day when it's cool to have everything break. Especially because a programmer on the other side of the API decided "tooltip" was sexier than "twipsy." And btw, I think twipsy is a wonderful name! So clever and cute. Maybe it was a legal problem? I don't know, but it is disconcerting, esp since I haven't gotten tooltips to work and twipsies worked great. Oy.

The charm of Bootstrap is its simplicity. You can get a feature running in minutes sometimes, if you stare at the code the right way and get lucky. But it's getting less simple in version 2.0. They did a lot of factoring in some areas, combining types. Not sure what that gets us -- literally, I'm not saying it doesn't get us anything, just that I'm not sure what it is. But one thing is certain, factoring makes the theory harder to grok for the newbie.

By the time Bootstrap 3.0 comes out, we'll likely be deployed with users of our own. Since we pass through a lot of what Bootstrap does, there will be breakage, if 3 is as radical a departure from 2 as 2 is from 1. My goal will be to try to insulate people who develop on my platform from changes in Bootstrap, to the extent I can.

 3/14/2012; 8:28:17 AM.