#458 - Fresh New Look

Posts about the current state of the Column 1) are not interesting, and 2) do not age well… but here’s one anyway!

Multiple Emails

In transitioning to a new code base it may take me a bit to figure out how to prevent emails from going out… or having formatting issues. Who knows! Please bare with as I settle in.

New Column

Hey! Things look different!

Things actually probably look worse, if I had to guess what my average reader would think. But my previous codebase was essentially just a template I used verbatim. The new blog is also a template, sort of, but it’s one that I can (and have) change to suit my fancy.

Why

The move to the new code base allows me a less tedious writing & posting process.

Old Posting Process

New Posting Process

Why Really

I wanted even more ownership over my content & how it is presented. This new approach allows me to use Obsidian, which has really started to replace Notion as my go-to app for where I want to spend a lot of my time. The new setup is essentially just a rehosting of my Obsidian Vault to the web + some customizations… but they are my customizations. I can actually get under the hood on this one.

Also the old method made images particularly tedious to include in my posts. This disincentivized me to using many images. The new method makes images no big deal and therefore more likely to be included, which I want.

Analysis Analysis

To quote the first five words of my green notebook¹:

I love flowcharts and lists

That pretty well sums up my particular flavor of nerdom. But it’s not that I love those particular tools & techniques, it’s what they are used for that I love - climbing up the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom pyramid.

You take raw data, analyze it, and learn information. You encode that information into a digestible form and in the process it becomes knowledge. You do this often enough in a particular realm, and you grow wisdom².

The tools of this trade are anything that helps you analyze, synthesize, represent, and generally play with data/information. Lists and flowcharts, though, awesome as they are, are not the totality of things in this arena.

Techniques & Tooling

When it comes to analyzing data, synthesizing information, and encoding knowledge, there are a wide variety of tools & techniques that I use. Here’s a cross section of my current go-tos³.

Technique	Main Tool	Prospective
Tabular data	Excel	SQL
Charts & plots	Excel PivotCharts	Tableau
Textual data	Obsidian	Python
Freeform drawing	So many.
Flowcharts & diagrams	DrawIO
Systems modeling	No “Main”
Ontology editing		Protégé
Graph data creation		Python

A Tool’s Errand

I’d love something that could do a nominal job at each of these things. Or figure out a process that goes between them fairly seamlessly. I think I might just be re-inventing Jupyter notebooks in my thought experiment.

An Omni-tool

A pipe dream.

Basically Notion’s “Block with Properties” approach, but not strictly hierarchical. With a very robust visualization engine that supports two-way binding of properties to graphical elements in the rendered diagrams. My “Semantic Canvas” Obsidian Plug-in is probably approaching the very beginnings of this sort of thing, but Obsidian is wholly inept at tabular data - which is a huge aspect of my imagined system.

A key feature that I think would tank this whole idea is⁴ my desire to mimic Obsidian’s “everything is just plaintext file in a folder on your computer” approach. Making a system that enables that while also adding in all sorts of features on top of it is trying to shove “fancy but rigid” into a “simple and flexible” framework. Doesn’t work. Also blocks would be individual files, and that would cause an absolute explosion of tiny files on your computer. Databases are a thing for a reason.

Top 5: Current Coding Projects

5. Omni-tool

See the section right above the Top 5. I’m not seriously looking at building this, but I needed a 5th thing to round out a “top 5”.

4. Obsidian + PDW Connector

My PDW migrated from a particular thing, to be more of a modular framework of things. Obsidian could very easily be the data storage & presentation layers. I’ve not started actually writing this code, but I’ve figured out how I think it would work.

3. This Blog Move

This one is sort of done as of this posting. I did lots of massaging of data and built a couple of custom components for this blog move.

2. Semantic Canvas 1.2

My Obsidian Plugin “Semantic Canvas” has been downloaded > 2000 times as of this writing. Some folks reached out and suggested new features, which spurred me to start developing them.

1. Brief Mystery

My 2024 Holiday Puzzle box is titled “Brief Mystery”. It is coming along! The most fun to work on of the list, but also the one I’ve been touching the least.

Quote:

I don’t mean to brag, but I’m awesome

• Jesse

Footnotes

1. The green notebook is the 2nd oldest thing I own. It was shown in [[20|Column #20]], which gives you an idea how old it is. ↩

2. That’s the theory I’m operating under, anyway. ↩

3. Which I expect will change during my pursuit of a Master’s Degree ↩

4. Aside from my lack of technical skill and the years it would take to build this thing that would ultimately end up being a worse version of all apps it is stealing pieces from. ↩