A lot of people call weblogging software "Content Management Systems." I think this fits only in the loosest sense, as most weblogging packages are really 'Content Delivery Systems' with a little CMS thrown in.

Real content management is the domain of tools which, contrary to their mandate, are so difficult to insert into the regular process flow of data creation, modification, and deployment, that it's not used anywhere near as often as it should be, and is usually used only where it has to be, say where programmers are all working concurrently on a codebase. That's where concurrent versioning comes in.

To handle simultaneous access, file locking, merging, source branching, and all that, your options are few. You can buy, deploy, learn and mandate the use of an expensive package like Interwoven or Perforce, use something slightly less expensive but with a host of other workflow problems like Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, or you can do what millions of geeks do and learn to use CVS, or Concurrent Versioning system, an open-source implementation atop RCS, another open-source tool.

The beauty of personal content management is really seen when you use it for more than just code. It will save every version of a file, so when you want to go back and get that paragraph you edited out of your great american novel five weeks ago, it's there for you. If you think your site redesign was a mistake, a year after you launched it, you can rol back the templates to the way they all were at any specific date.

CVS isn't trivial to learn, especially if you're setting up and running your own CVS server, but kudos to Apple for publishing a how-to article Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS.

I encourage the mac and the (far more common) PC user to check out the article. You can get CVS for virtually any platform, and its benefits aren't tied to the OS.

It's early, I'm running a bit late, and I just woke up 20 minutes ago, so I'm not running at full-proselytizing speed, but CVS is really cool, is something that by all rights should be built-in to the fabric of any modern OS (especially when hard drives cost $250 for 120 gigs), and can totally save your ass. Now that I've turned aside from proprietary data formats like Microsoft Word (my last year in college I wrote everything in HTML with a simple stylesheet. It's really nice to be able to read, edit, and publish anywhere, especially when you don't need Word's featurebloat for a simple paper), CVS becomes even more useful, as the diff and merge functionality is easily comprehended, and only actual changes are saved, instead of resaving a whole file because you changed 'teh' to 'the.'

Okay, shower time, then takin' the train to work. Happy Friday!

Of course it's so obvious that it hadn't even entered my mind these last (almost) nine months, but September 11 is this generation's Kennedy Moment, that time where for the rest of your life you'll remember where you were and what you were doing when it happened or you found out.

I remember when my high school AP History teacher was talking about Kennedy and said we probably didn't have a moment like that in our generation, and several of us piped up with the Challenger explosion. A few others were when Reagan was shot (I don't remember), when the Iran hostage rescue attempt failed, or the Loma Prieta Earthquake (well, for us Californians). Still, most of us felt that Challenger was a good example, if not the Paragon Exemplar of the phenomenon that JFK's assassination was. Several months later, the air attack on Baghdad would be another such moment, staying up and watching the green night-vision

I'm surprised that I didn't actually think about it until today, the last day of the clearing and recovery effort at Manhattan's ground zero, just how big a cognitive reference point this will be in peoples lives. September 11th may be the day we lost our innocence (if it wasn't lost already in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It will certainly outstrip Challenger as my primary Kennedy Moment.

I'm wondering how this compares in the mind of someone old enough to have had the Kennedy assassination affect them? We may still be too close to this one to be able to get a clear perspective, but I'd love to hear your own impressions, along with any Kennedy Moments I may have overlooked.

So I wrote a longtime friend of mine, Evan (aka Mr. Bad), asking if he was planning on going to the Mozilla 1.0 Release Party. I guess I don't talk to Evan often enough. He writes:

When was the last time I talked to you? I got laid offfrom my job in August 01, and took my severanceand savings and high-tailed it out of town. I've beendriving my Citroen across the US for the last 8 months,and I just arrived in Montreal a few weeks ago. I've gotan apartment here, and I'm gonna spend 6 monthswriting a novel.

You go, man! (And his Citroen is probably the coolest car I've ever seen. It's got factory-installed hydraulics.)

Props to Robert for coming through with today's Buffy Tidbit: Apparently, for those too impatient to wait three years for Season Six to come out on DVD, you can plug that burning hole in your pocket and bid for a few rare DVD copies of "OnceMore,WithFeeling" on eBay.

It seems that (quite rightly) Joss has chosen this episode as one of the two each series is permitted to send out to TV notables, hoping for Emmy nominations. As a result, hundreds of copies are out there, and naturally some of them have made their way to the common market.

On a parallel tangent, I've been TiVo-ing the late night and early morning reruns of Mad About You. I've got a jonesing to catch "Met Someone," the flashback episode where Paul and Jamie meet for the first time. Checking out the schedule of shows for the next two weeks, I came across another M.A.Y. episode entitled "Once More, With Feeling." Is this a trend, or an homage?

PS: for those non-Buffy fans out there, give it a try. You've probably noticed that your friends who rave about Buffy aren't those who you'd think would go for cheezy stupid TV like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and you're right, they don't. The show's a wonder, and I really truly hope OMWF gets an Emmy because honestly, it so richly deserves it.

Riding the train. I overslept this morning, for the first time I can remember. Oh, sure, I'm a snooze-slut, resetting the alarm to give myself another 5 to 20 minutes for good behavior, but this morning I turned off the alarm, and closed my eyes for those last five minutes to sweep up my subconscious after the revelries of yesternight's dreams.

But the dreams weren't done with me, and I had two more before I woke up 30 minutes after the train left. Still, if I rushed I could still catch the late train, so rush I did. Even so I missed the train (or I presume that I did) in Jack London Square, instead rushing on to Hayward where I'd have a better shot.

So now I'm on the train, starting over an hour late at what already promised to be a hellishly busy day. Still, I get both of the big plusses of riding the train to work (surprisingly, 'saved time' isn't usually one of them): A little time to write (and I can hear some of you calling out right now, asking why I'm spending that time writing about this morning when I could be writing a dotcom story...), and a 'hard-out' at 5:30.

What else is in the news? Today is my one year anniversary at Yahoo!, three of my closest friends are out of town, Spanish class was cancelled yesterday, I got new contact lenses (I just put them in for the first time, and had to switch because I got left and right messed up), I got a funky new pair of headphones that stick all the way inside the ear canal. They have a dynamic range from 6Hz to 24Khz. That's some pumping bass.

I've got tons on my mind in every direction. I'm going apartment-hunting in Pittsburgh the week after leaving Yahoo!, and going to Brown Island with family the week after that. I've just found out that Richard Powers is teaching a Waltz Week in the last week of July, and I'd love to go, which suddenly means my huge downtime is reduced to just three weeks idle. Time flies, flies away. and now I'm at Santa Clara, and have to pack up my things here too. Bye!

Do you know who's playing Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter II? Kenneth Branagh! That's... odd. Also, he's on the short list of directors for Harry Potter III.

Just so long as he doesn't make it 4 hours long, with an intermission preceeded by Ronald Weasley delivering a dramatic (yet still laughable) St. Crispins Day speech on a glen.

Also, it seems that HP III: Azkaban is set for 2004, which means there would be a one-year gap in the storytelling...

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" said Thomas Edison. Then again, Edison created a lab in Menlo Park that employed hundreds of scientists to flesh out his ideas.

So perhaps Edison's famous quote wasn't so much a statement that genius isn't a shortcut past hard work, but rather that the true genius busies himself with the inspiration, and gets others to do the perspiration for him.

Hmmm....

The train just whizzed by a used car lot, where there are usually four cars parked out front, with huge letters stenciled on the windshield, one with an S, the next with an A, followed by an L and an E. Apparetnly there's always a big SALE! going on, a SALE! so big they have to write on the cars to make their point.

Today the S was gone, and there's a huge vehicular sign crying out ALE! and I think, Huzzah!

A few moments later, I wonder where the S car is. Is someone taking it on a teSt drive? Are they Squinting through the windShield? Does someone else, watching them drive by, nudge their partner and say, "Hey, look at that S-car go!"? Is there the obligatory snail behind the wheel?

I had a good weekend, bracketed by trips to the airport, first to pick up a best friend, later to drop off two others. There's a lot to be posted this week, so check back often. Part II of Focus Group Voyeurism really will go up on Wednesday, and more stories are on the way. :-)

I've also been thinking a lot about enhancements to the site, that I'd like to discuss with y'all.

My weekend's moment of epiphany came while talking to some net friends at an MJ dinner party on Sunday evening.

I was talking about the parallels between blogging and my recently purchased and viewed DVD of Pump Up the Volume (I'll have more to say on that later) and Paris (was it Paris? If not, I hope someone corrects me) said that weblogging (and journaling) is fulfilling the promise of the internet.

Big words, I thought.

But really, when the Net was just real enough to be a promise, everyone wisted about how it would bring everyone closer, crossing borders and cultures, leaping over oceans and preconceptions, and we'd meet people we'd never have met, and share our inner thoughts about the local worlds that surround each of us.

Pah. That's what they said about the phone, but who's going to call random people in Thailand? And of course, when the Net promise was realized first in email, it didn't do much for global unity. Who are you going to email? People you already know. Who will you want to hear from? People you already know.

Why? Because strangers are stranger.

That's the thing about the blogs. Anyone with net access can start one (and more importantly, they do without feeling a technological barrier to entry, thanks to Blogger, Livejournal, and the others), and they're inviting the world to read.

And more importantly, the world does.

When I decided to open Fury to comments, I was ready to shut it off just as quick if things got ugly. Now I hear from at least 8 people a day, sometimes a bunch more. I know you, Contessa, and Lou (err, both of you). I know you Phreaky, Alec, Liz, and David (all three of you).

I have no idea who most of you are, what you do, where you're from, but it doesn't matter as much as the views you share. I probably know in real life about 1/3 of the people who comment, and maybe 1/10 of the people who read Fury, yet I talk to you, and you talk to me.

That's the power of the internet. It's here, it's growing, and it's warm and fuzzy. err, in the good way...