Tiddly-FamilyTree

These days, people are still having babies by old-school sexual reproduction, so you want to know who your progenitors are and where you stand in the family tree. This post is about genealogy software.
I only use a family tree for my Albert Lortzing-project, the German composer of “,Spieloper“, and for this the great program GenoPro gives me all I need. Because I’m not a family-man, I don’t feel the need to know everything about my family – I know who my parents, my siblings and my children are and where I can find them. But, since this website is about collecting, organizing and transforming information, “data-mining”, about TiddlyWikis and the Social Web, I think there is reason to write a small post about Genealogy programs in these two domains.
In the web 2.0, there is the application Zooof. It is Dutch and I don’t think it is very well known. I’m a long-time member of this community – of course – and I entered the data of myself and my ten nearest family members in the tree. Now, the purpose of a web 2.0 application should be that some of these members also put their data in the Zooof-network, so the tree can grow – expand if you want. But this hasn’t happened yet; I’m not sure I planted my seed in very fertile soil. Anyway, who cares?
Now there is also a TiddlyWiki with a FamilyTreed plugin. Developed by Jon Robson. TiddlyWiki is a very useful note-book application and in fact my first post on this weblog was about my discovery of the TiddlyWiki. However, I’m not sure if the format and the lay-out of the TiddlyWiki is appropriate for a genealogy tree. OTOH, one of the great advantages of a TiddlyWiki is that it is portable, so you can carry your TW along with you, and use it on any Windows computer without leaving any personal data behind.
The best of these worlds would be a portable GenoPro, or even better: a cloud-version of GenoPro.

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  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.