rodcorp

How Lighthouse ticket-tracking currently uses Markdown for lists

We are gradually switching from Mantis to Lighthouse for ticket tracking at work because it's a great ticketing system, and more customer-friendly than Mantis because it's simpler. Lighthouse uses Markdown as its text-formatting "language". But we've had some problems getting text formatting to work well, partly because we're habituated to writing content in Textile-format in Basecamp, partly because we do lots of structured lists in our tickets, and partly because Lighthouse's implementation of Markdown lists is currently a bit idiosyncratic.

So here are some rules of thumb for making lists work in Lighthouse. As the developers improve it, I'll come back and edit this post. (I hope this also helps the developers updating the documentation and, preferably, the code: Lighthouse is a great product but we'd love to see a less brittle and more consistent implementation of Markdown lists.)

1. Every list must have a blank line above it and one beneath it. Else, your list will break horribly. (Also don't do a numbered list, then have a blank line, then do another list: it'll continue your first list.)
2. Nested/hierarchic lists work slightly differently for numbers and bullets:
   • To do a second-level bullet (a "child") you do space-space-*
   • To do a second-level number (a "child") you do space-space-space-1. That it's different from the way bullets are handled is probably a bug.
   • To do a third-level bullet (a "grand-child") you do tab-*
   • To do a third-level number (a "grand-child") you do tab-tab-1.
   • To do a fourth-level bullet (a "great grand-child") you do tab-tab-*
   • To do a fourth-level number (a "great grand-child") you do tab-tab-tab-1.
3. Mix numbers and bullets very carefully in nested lists: numbers should not contain bullets as children because the bullets tend to kill the number order of the parents...

Some examples. A list of bullets that works:

* parent
  * child (space-space-bullet)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
        * great-grandchild (tab-tab-bullet)
* parent
  * child (space-space-bullet)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
        * great-grandchild (tab-tab-bullet)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
  * child (space-space-bullet)
* parent

A list of numbers that works:

1. parent
   1. child (space-space-space-number) - nb, here it's a triple-space, not the double-space you'd do for a child bullet
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number) - again, not the same as it is with bullets. And nb now you can't do a fourth, great-grandchild, level of numbers.
1. parent
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number)
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
1. parent

And a list with both bullets and numbers that doesn't work in Lighthouse:

1. parent
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
        * great-grandchild (tab-tab-bullet)
   1. child (space-space-space-number) - here the number order has been broken by the preceding bullet
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number)
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number)
   1. child (space-space-space-number)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
    * grandchild (tab-bullet)
   1. child (space-space-space-number) - again number order broken by preceding bullet
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number)
        1. grandchild (tab-tab-number)
1. parent
   1. child (space-space-space-number)

There may be a better/more robust way to do nested lists, but I haven't found it yet. (Nested lists seem to work quite differently in Markdown, but to be fair to Lighthouse here, it does all seem a bit arbitrary in Markdown. Markdown seems more powerful than Textile, but also more complex, so maybe I don't understand it well enough yet.)

See also: Lighthouse commits to Markdown over Textile; Markdown syntax and testing doobry; a Lighthouse ticket discussing this very matter.

A chimney on one floor, Duchamp's final work

Duchamp's final artwork, an internal chimney in an apartment in Cadaques, has been found:

The artist is believed to be responsible for a corner fireplace built within the residence in the resort of Cadaques in Catalonia where he spent the final months before his death in October 1968. [...]

"We knew about the chimney from references but it couldn't be found in the home Duchamp owned for the final seven years of his life," Mr Malla told The Daily Telegraph. "So I naturally thought it didn't exist until I met Richard Hamilton."

The British pop artist [...] directed him to a house that Duchamp had rented when he became too frail to climb the stairs of his own residence.

And at the top there we see Hamilton casually propping up the chimney.

A few precursors to the chimney are known: the assemblage Preliminary Studies and Tools for "Anaglyphic Chimney" (Cheminée anaglyphe), 1968 (video here, via Tout Fait), and the altogether sketchier Anaglyphic chimney, 1968 (ignore the menacing bee watermark hovering over it). Until now, there had merely been rumours of the physical existence of the chimney.

(There's much to write on chimneys, on smoke (married with the smell of a mouth or otherwise), on beautiful breath (Belle Haleine) and on the un-definable Duchampian un-concept of inframince. But let's leave these parenthetic breaths aside for now.)

The chimney stands at one end of a significant list of work that addressed, amongst other interests, spatial concerns:

• The Nude Descending a Staircase paintings of 1912: movement frozen and arrayed spatially
• A now-lost chimney ventilator, Pulled at Four Pins, 1915 - "Duchamp gave Pulled at Four Pins to his friend Louise Varese, who unfortunately misplaced it years later."
• a wall object placed on the floor (a coat-rack), or on a plinth (Fountain, 1917, the readymade versioned so many times it became a post-prefab)
• the Large Glass, 1915-23, the bachelors half particularly: think of the Glider sliding back and forth, and Steefel's description of it (erection tombe) popping out of the picture plan.
• the vertiginous spiralling space of Anemic Cinema, 1926
• Door Rue Larrey, 1927, a door (a joke, ajar) that's both open and closed simultaneously.
• the museums miniaturised into briefcases of 1935-41
• the space of a mile of string, 1942
• Etant Donnes (Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2.The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66, the erotic landscape placed inside a structure, secretly made after his avowed retirement from art in favour of chess, and hidden until after his death
• Eau et gaz a tous les etages...

And that list could no doubt grow - it makes me wonder whether a solid architectural view of Duchamp could be developed. There are clear secondary themes of optics and loss/vanished spaces to explore too.

See also:
Why Duchamp?: The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Contemporary Architectural Theory and Practice; Duchamp & Architecture!!!???; Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery; and bistre: "A colour made of chimney soot boiled, and then diluted with water, used by painters in washing their designs."

Cy Twombly at Tate Modern, 19 Jun - 14 Sep 2008

Cy Twombly is an American gone to the bad - a decadent exile who [...] is dirty-minded, and history-minded. Somehow, the two go together for this genius of rot.

Twombly looks like a man in a hurry: he violently pencils the canvas, claws through paint with his fingers, then wipes them on the canvases. There's a sense of hysteria: bodies, body parts, bodies in action, desire...

You'd go further than hurry and hysteria and think him barking mad, scrawling words as a babble. (He was conscripted into the Army in the 50s and trained as a cryptographer, and while on duty in the night would perform the automatic drawing of the Surrealists blindly. So imagine a Twombly who, during a top-secret cryptographic experiment, had inadvertently encrypted himself - his vision, brain, language - on a one-time pad, the drawings and paintings becoming desperate essays at auto-decryption or communication.) However, there's clear evidence against madness of the careful corrections in the underpainting.

He works in waves, cooler then hotter. The 70s drawings to a dead friend are beautiful and depthless, the Apollo drawings similarly cool and distanced. There's a preoccupation with repetition and the hand performing: many of the canvases have a clear right-handed italic bias - arcs of writing and drawing. The hotter ones are urgent, with frenzies barely repressed. The Hero and Leandro quartet combine the two: a wave of thick impasto and rich colour on the left makes way to a smoother, lighter treatment in the second canvas, minimal paleness by the third, and the smaller, supplementary coda of text.

"White paint is my marble", he said, but against the paintings the white sculptures unfortunately seem like weak filler. The later works, though - the pair of Four Seasons cycles and the muscular, exuberant Bacchus paintings - have meaty impact.

Great show.

.

See also:
Gordon Burns's excellent profile, which has this gem:

Twombly's practice in those years was to cover the whole of a large room with canvas and then start working close to the floor or up under the ceiling, wherever his eye took him. When many days had passed and all the walls were smeared with smudges of paint and fecal-looking stains and spidery unravellings of graffiti, he would hack off a section that looked as if it might have the makings of a painting and nail it to the wall without a stretcher.

Rindy Sam kisses Twombly's Phaedrus. Tate Etc: Lingering at the Threshold; Independent: 'Cycles and Seasons' spotlights an artist who hasn't put a foot wrong in a 60-year career; Observer: Top marks for handwriting; Guardian's sceptic: His scattered dreams and its cheerleader: The last American hurrah.

Command and Control at Standpoint, 11 July – 9 August 2008

Ross Hansen, Roger Kelly, Adam Latham, Mariele Neudecker and Rosie Snell in a group show at Standpoint on humanity and natural world, "eulogising and destruction, aestheticising and control".

Ross Hansen's drawings and paintings have undeniable quality in their painstaking detail (see also Glenn Brown), but have variable impact: Memento Mori 2008, a large colour pencil image of a tufted owl, and Potter's Lamb 2007, a rich oil rendering of a chimera - a two-faced lamb, are strong.

Adam Latham's posters are fun. In the mixture of history, science and bawdiness there are obvious hints of Keith Tyson and Archimboldo, but visually they're indebted to Robert Crumb.

Mariele Neudecker's simulated tree trunks aren't quite as evocative of non-place as her work usually manages. What look like real twigs and pines cones are added to fibreglass trunks, the whole then sprayed with paint slightly clumsily. More a question of the convincing fiction than an evocation of the sublime; I prefer the cloudy vitrines from some years ago.

Rosie Snell's paintings of military objects, tanks and buildings camouflaged into their surroundings are great: silent monoliths cached in the landscape like lost - or certainly long-misinterpreted -archaeological cities. They're a bit like Peter Doig with flatter, simpler painting handling and colour. The one at the top - Stalker, 2005 - isn't in the show unfortunately.

The side room has the best work: Neudecker has a matt black cast of an airline black box that vibrates visually, a mute sigil (silence seems to be everywhere in this show) and crypt. Roger Kelly's drawings are extraordinary. Bomb-damaged houses, each with a title ("treasure house of stained glass") are rendered as flat scenes that only gradually reveal their source material. The linework is delicate, a consistent width and pressure (as if inked), giving them a quality of "alloverness" that collapses form and ground (something I'm obsessed with). Buildings with histories transformed, flattened down, teased out, re-storied into mostly abstract patterns. Fantastic.

This painting isn't in the show, but gives a sense of what he's doing. There's little on the internet about Kelly: a pair of blurry but representative drawings here, a 2007 drawing here, a 2001 painting that perhaps hints at his future directions. Kelly has compatriots in the excellent Peter Peri and Ernesto Caivano, who currently has a great show at White Cube.

Neudecker has always been one to watch, Rosie Snell and Roger Kelly get added to the list.

links for 2008-08-05 [delicious.com]

• Haruki Murakami: Nobody pounded the table anymore, nobody threw their cups | Sport | The Observer
  (tags: sport running harukimurakami books)
• Folkestone Triennial ~ Tales of Time and Space
  Rather good - recommended for you Down From Londoners.
  (tags: art folkestone folkestonetriennial)
• Whitstable Biennale 2008 - Welcome
  Missed it.
  (tags: art whitstable whitstablebiennale)
• Why artists love to be beside the sea :: Cathy Lomax
  (tags: art cathylomax folkestone folkestonetriennial whitstable)
• First Thursdays
  (tags: art london listings)
• Home >> comment
  (tags: art london listings)
• Art Rabbit - contemporary art - exhibitions listing and opinion
  (tags: art london listings)
• The Post-Materialist | Zines Run Amok - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
  Lo-fi photocopy-style mag and artist books.
  (tags: print magazines art scotland)
• State of art in London's East End :: Cathy Lomax
  (tags: art london cathylomax)
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Edward Burtynsky, “The 10,000-year Gallery”
  Interesting: "The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as ...", but don't we have this already, everywhere: "curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past"
  (tags: art time history longnow edwardburtynsky print camera)
• A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties by Teller
  (tags: story books memory time)
• An Economist Goes by the Numbers to Assess Artwork - NYTimes.com
  There is undoubted merit in quant approaches, but the top 10 simply doesn't feel quite right, nor the question ("greatest"?). Maybe needs to include books wider than 1990-2005 to avoid publishing trends? Cf Komar & Melamid.
  (tags: art duchamp picasso economics toread)
• Review: Trauma by Patrick McGrath | Books | The Observer
  A Hundred Years' War between literature and psychiatry: "the trump card that literature has always had in its dealings with psychiatry, the knowledge that explanations never satisfy", though analysis's defence is that it is never over and assimilates all.
  (tags: psychoanalysis books patrickmcgrath)
• The Urbanite Magazine - THE DRAWING BOARD
  Nice urban plan with shipping containers providing the measuring unit. "How can the structure of this place accommodate multiple systems that change over time—not just from shipping to housing, but also the fallow period in between?"
  (tags: architecture drawing infrastructure baltimore)
• npower renewables: Little Cheyne Court
  Wind farm east of Rye, near Camber. 26 turbines planned; they were installing the 12th last weekend.
  (tags: camber rye wind eco)
• Crookes radiometer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Demonstrates light energy converted to mechanical energy, but the mechanism remains uncertain 130 years later...
  (tags: light physics)
• IBM Research - PeopleVision
  Will be used at 2008 Olympics.
  (tags: surveillance cctv security china olympics)

Kafka Everyman

Zadie Smith on Kafka in the NYRB:

"It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time." [Begley, The Tremendous World I have in My Head]

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer's equivalent of the dater's revelation: He's just not that into you. "Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents' apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn't write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of his self-esteem." [...]

Obviously, Kafka put it more dramatically:

The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.... Thus what has resulted was a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn't a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.) [Kafka, letter]