What’s this site all about?

This blog follows my pursuit of issues in online collaboration, knowledge development and publication, also software analysis, and perhaps a little neuroscience, diagramming and visualization, with other topics thrown in once in a while.

My foray into software analysis tools

My interest in online collaboration and collaborative knowledge development has rubbed my nose in the problem that tools for automatically analyzing and summarizing systems are substantially short of what ought to be possible.  This is not a new revelation for sure, but this time around, I’ve embarked on a foray into the analysis tools arena to understand it a bit better, and see if some key obstacles can be surmounted.

Eclipse notes

A page on which to save some notes about the Eclipse developer platform.

Java Miscellaneous Notes

Just a page on which to capture miscellaneous notes relating to Java.

Programmer’s editor exploration

I’m starting to itch for an upgrade/update in my text-editor department, so in this post I’m accumulating some notes on features I care about, and listing some editors to look at.

PHP grammar notes

I’m refining an ANTLR grammar to parse PHP, which runs into the issue that (so far as I can determine) there’s no formal definition of the PHP language, other than just what the Zend PHP engine accepts. There is documentation at php.net, which is a great help, but is often not complete, and sometimes muddles together discussions about PHP 4 and 5, whose syntax can be substantially different.

So in this post I’m recording some notes on a number of finer points of PHP syntax which seem to be undocumented. In particular:

• Rules for composing a valid variable or function (or object…member variable/function) identifier “path”.
• Variable names — not limited to simple strings
• Variable names can be reserved words
• The supposed “reference operator”
• Can some statement keywords (like print) use function syntax?

Marks and Meaning notes

Notes relating to Dave Gray’s Marks and Meaning “unbook” project.  Visual thinking, knowledge management, structure-of-the-universe, how to draw, neuroscience, cognitive science, all in one place!

Neuroscience ontologies — notes and links

A place to stash notes and links relating to efforts to muster an ontology for neurosciences or parts thereof.

Infographics linkage

A place to remember links to infographics-related sources.

Useful MRI Explanations

A place to accumulate notes and links to explanations of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and related topics.