Searching For Mark Pilgrim 89
First time accepted submitter microphage writes "Mark Pilgrim, author of many 'Dive into ...' books and guides, has — as the saying now goes — 'committed infosuicide,' which happily isn't like the real sort. Except it affects the info that you've created. Let's hope Dive Into HTML5 has some sort of permanence."
committed "infosuicide"... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody can blame him for wanting to escape the incipient idiocracy of facebook/twitter/etc.
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So what. It's his life, and he can live it as he chooses.
Nobody can blame him for wanting to escape the incipient idiocracy of facebook/twitter/etc.
So instead we drag his cyber-carcass to /.
Re:committed "infosuicide"... (Score:4, Informative)
Deleting your Facebook and Twitter accounts is one thing, setting every website you've ever worked on to return HTTP 410 errors is something different entirely. Mark decided to take all his balls and go home and made damn sure you knew he was going.
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Also I appreciate how his own website is the 2nd hit on google for "http 410".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe he just decided to take the free resource online and publish it as an income-generating book?
Then he probably should have chosen a different copyright license for his works.
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It might still generate income. Especially in the tech industry, a surprising number of free online books have paid dead-tree versions.
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Commentary on Archive Team? (Score:2)
Maybe this is commentary on Archive Team?
I Certainly Hope He's Not Gone (Score:4, Informative)
I do recall he was great at mixing in humor and entertainment into an otherwise dry and toilsome subject matter so may I say that I sincerely hope he hasn't given up on technical aspirations. At the time that book was one of the best general resources out there for HTML5. I'm sad that his github repo for the book may only exist at mirrors now.
From a comment on the article:
His GitHub projects have been mirrored:
https://github.com/diveintomark [github.com]
Dive Into Python 3
Online: http://diveintopython3.ep.io/ [diveintopython3.ep.io]
GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintopython3 [github.com]
Dive Into HTML5
Online: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/ [diveintohtml5.ep.io]
GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintohtml5 [github.com]
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About 8 years ago, I bought "Diving Into Python" (after reading a review here on Slashdot, I believe), and agree about his ability to make things interesting and amusing at the same time. Ah, well. Good luck to him.
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His "feedparser" site is down, but the software is still at Google Code [google.com], and there are other maintainers.
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"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"
Trust me. You don't really want to repeat the 1970s ... or the 1980s ... and especially not the 2000s.
I was just looking for "Dive Into Python 3" (Score:2)
I had just started on "Dive Into Python 3" about a week ago, and yesterday I was going to re-download the zip file with the PDF of the book and the example programs on a virtual machine, when I discovered his site was down. Fortunately, I had the file elsewhere. I figured the site was down because of a temporary glitch.
Incidentally, I had planned to order a physical copy of the book, but from the reviews on Amazon, the printing of "Dive Into Python 3" is of extraordinarily poor quality, with incorrect rende
My theory: (Score:5, Funny)
I blame a bad encounter with one of his cousin Scott's evil exes.
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I understand your move, Mark. You don't know me from Adam, but that's ok to - I completely understand. I've been at that edge, but haven't had the courage to step off and see if I will leap to the next building, or merely hit the ground.
What a bunch of wank.
Ha... (Score:2, Funny)
This is all a marketing ploy for his forthcoming book "dive into HTTP 410", a self-help guide for anyone with a social networking account or those who host email with Google.
Inspiration. The suicide of one's online self. (Score:1)
This baffling story is raw inspiration. The suicide of one's online self is a serious event. Do you suppose, if Mark began again, he would create another space of vision and beauty? Of course. A new vision.
He was (?) singularly poised at a wrinkle-in-time to become Our Voice. Yet, our wins are our losses. We lose the ability to hear the muse. Sometimes one cannot even see the new task, when there is clamor (hands vibrate and wave) loud eddies that distract from the quiet voice of curiosity.
Mark will
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What the fuck are you talking about?
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Mark Shaney strikes again! (Score:1)
Ignore these posts. Someone has been deploying what appears to be a Markov chain [wikipedia.org] text generator all over Slashdot, which has previously been used on usenet (see Mark V Shaney [wikipedia.org]) and I suspect The Daily Show with John Stewart, and with greater range, the Colbert Report.
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Doesn't look Markov to me.
It looks like a longstanding Slashdot user who may be (going) schizophrenic.
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He's living life (Score:3)
I was a personal acquaintance of his and coworker for about a year and kept in touch for years. I miss our monthly Chinese buffet lunches. Last I heard he was working at IBM as a consultant but that was years ago. I also know that he has two kids in the mid to high single digits. He's working, making plenty of money for his family, and taking care of his responsibilities. It's sad not to see more on his blog lately. However his primary money maker was not his blog or his books.
I too have a blog but it was neither as popular or as entertaining, but the same thing happened to me. I've gotten married, assumed more family responsibilities, and I just don't have time to update it. Right now I'm sure his priorities are elsewhere. It's not infosuicide so much as we all want more and he's simply not giving it to us. I'm sorry to say you'll just have to move on. That's the beauty of the internet.
Mark if you are out there, drop me a line sometime.
Re:He's living life (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't even relate to taking your hobby blog offline. He didn't just close his social networking accounts, he took every site he ever worked on off the internet.
"infosuicide" may be a dumb word, but I'd certainly say it's not just "we want more and he's not giving it to us". He wanted to take back everything he had previously given us. That's a bit unusual.
And the beauty of the internet isn't to move on, it's nearly the opposite of that. Hundreds of people around the world had his stuff saved and are putting it back online even after he tried to destroy it. THAT is the beauty (and ugliness) of the internet.
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You cannot remove pee from the pool.
Of course you can. Do you think that all the pee (and other stuff) that has ever been deposited in your local swimming pool is still there?
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It's not about us, it's about himself.
I relate to what he did because I did it myself a while back. Let go of my personal domains, email accounts, self-hosted blogs and online image archives etc. I'm still on the net, obviously, just under a completely reorganized identity. I'm now much more careful about separating personally identifiable information from general romping across the net.
Why? Because I had reached a point when
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If someone was a stupid, arrogant asshole twenty years ago, they will still be a stupid, arrogant asshole now, just better at hiding it.
People's characters don't fundamentally change much past the age of ten.
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To play devils advocate, one would hope that in 10 or 20 years time you may look back on that comment and realise how limited and naive it is.
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I know the feeling. Sometimes I think back to stuff I wrote online as a teenager, or, half my lifetime ago, and think "shit, thats still out there"?
Luckily, someone with my name joined the Bostones, and so,.... I went from being 90% of the first 2 pages of google search on my name to...pretty much being banished from the first page of results (not sure where I am now) by his fame. At first I was shocked, and a bit annoyed, but, as time went on, I have come to appreciate it...that and that my old content is
Lucky Stiff (Score:2)
First, Why the Lucky Stiff. Then this. Coincidence?
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Have you ever seen them together?
Strange, indeed (Score:1)
Perhaps he had a long talk with Francisco d'Anconia or something.
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And here I was just arguing on /. about whether anyone would actually "go Galt" (I know folks who have, sort of) Interesting thought!
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Wikipedia too (Score:5, Interesting)
He's trying to remove himself from Wikipedia too and has been since 2008 [wikipedia.org]ish.
For someone who appears to be savvy about computers and online culture it's funny he's unaware of the Streisand effect which is emphasized by the number of mirrors popping up across the internet despite his best efforts for infocide.
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Archives? (Score:2)
Dive into HTML5 has this at the beginning: "The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License." Anyone know a way to get complete archives of his books that's easier/better than scraping http://web.archive.org/web/20110726000452/http://www.diveintohtml5.org/ [archive.org] ?
He was a fun guy. I'll miss his writings. I've been reading his stuff for about six years, starting with http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/ [diveintomark.org] , which got me into using Handbrake shortly after I got a video iPod. No more google c
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Sorry, I had a few windows open and didn't get through them all before posting. Mirrors listed in the comments here. [meyerweb.com]
Still, it's sad to think that there will be no fun, new, snarky writings forthcoming. :-(
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No more useless than any other fiction. When I first tried to read it, I was put off by the poinlessly extreme cartoon villians. I read it recently and it was eerily predictive. Things seem to really be getting ugly these days as governments try anything at all except cutting spending to stave off financial collapse. (But families seem to be getting the "live within your means" message since 2008 or so, so maybe there's just a lag and in a few years the book will seem silly again.)
A Serious Question (Score:1)
Jobs the Mark, or the other way round. (Score:1)
Thank God he's alive. Hope he ressurects Dive into Python soon. You can only make so much impact on people this once, like Jobs did.
It's a pity. (Score:2)
The man wrote a lot of great stuff. I learned Python using his guide to that language, and I used his HTML5 guide to keep current on that. I don't think I'll be alone in missing him.
That said, he obviously intends for this to be permanent. He was a stickler for proper HTTP status codes, and wouldn't have his sites throw a 410 if he ever intended on bringing them back. Given the open nature of the things he wrote, it would have been nice of him to transfer maintenance of the guides before doing this. Archive
hmm (Score:2)
Well, way to help a brother out.
why? (Score:1)
everyone seems to be focused on the "he should be able to" and "we dont want to lose you" but nobody is asking, "why? why are you doing this?"
if someone knows, just say it.
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Rather than merely Stop Posting (or paying for a domain), and instead actually putting the effort to remove one's creations is something which is both strange and uncommon on the internet. I never used anything he wrote (that I know of?), but am immensely curious as to what would cause a person to do this. It's VERY different from retiring an old machine or deciding that you don't care about a domain anymore enough to actually update its DNS (or pay for it, perhaps).
as to why... (Score:3)
Here's hoping the reason isn't "Diving into the timezone database"...
Researching a new book? (Score:2)
Watch out for vitamin D deficiency from being... (Score:2)
... indoors posting too much: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/ [vitamindcouncil.org]
tz (Score:1)
Mirrors (Score:1)
Also mirrored here: (Score:3)
http://diveintopython3.ep.io/
This is the Python 3 version, last updated 2011. It is more current than the mirror in the main article.