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February 28, 2002

The Abyss Looks Back

Interestingly creepy headshot at waferbaby. Nice site if you haven't seen it.

February 27, 2002

cool

hey, I'm posting this from my Palm

February 26, 2002

I Thought You Had It

There goes the Fortress of Solitude.

MT & Mozilla Problem Solved

I had been wondering why this site looked pretty bland in Mozilla, which is what I'm using as my fulltime browser. Well, thanks to this tip: Mith-ology: Movable Type problem with Mozilla, I am seeing it fine again. Turns out that it's due to the Lizard being strict as to what it'll accept as the MIME type for a style-sheet. A simple .htaccess file change solves the problem.

We want MT Props!

meryl's notes:

Typically, these articles only mention two weblogging applications and often overlook MT. I have yet to see Joel Spolsky's CityDesk mentioned in an article.

C'mon, journalists! Do your research and list more than two apps!

Damn straight. We really need more diversity in weblog software coverage than Blogger and Radio Userland. Hell, what about greymatter, for that matter?

Too busy to write

Not saying very much at the moment; way down in code. We have a push on - code complete for the first version of the project is Friday and I'm in the thick of XML generation and deployment. If it works it'll be a pretty nice system, though it seems impossible to model a document system without some glaring hole in the object model somewhere. I haven't been able to articulate this one's yet, but I can feel it lurking around in there somewhere, waiting to pounce. Maybe I'll be wrong this time; would be nice.

"This is NOT a nice magazine"

Via MeFi (where else?): The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick. This is fascinating stuff. Dick had a religious or psychotic episode, take your pick, and had all sorts of visions, including one in which he saw with complete accuracy that his son had a birth defect which needed immediate surgery. I beleive this sort of thing can happen; my wife "saw" a popcorn kernel that my son had stuck in his ear. After having read this I'm not sure I want to see Beautiful Mind anymore. Well worth a look.

February 22, 2002

Is Open Source Professional?

Scripting News:

Saying someone is an amateur doesn't mean they're inexperienced or the work is low quality. It simply means they don't do it for pay. A long time ago Olympic atheletes had to be amateurs. It was considered a higher calling, people who do something just to be excellent, not to make money.

Interesting argument in light of Dave's past comments about open source and how money is a reliable indicator of professionalism re:software.

February 20, 2002

It's recursive, dude

Has anyone else noticed that most Radio weblogs seem to be about...Radio weblogs?

February 19, 2002

You Gotta Pay to Play

evhead on Dave Winer's being refused access to Google's XML output. I don't think this is Google not getting the web. Google provides the XML output to their partners that have Google host their search. It's a paid service, and Dave has no right to expect that they should just open it up to him for him to experiment with, unless, well, he pays for it. You want to prototype the tool, make a deal with them and see what happens. The Google folks are pretty open - the site I worked for that did a partnership with them wasn't getting very many hits, was a pretty small site, and we still got great and responsive service from them. And we didn't even try oldBoyNet stuff like sending over our business cards when our net.celeb pics were being taken.

Where's the damn cupholder?

Via MeFi, an Amazon auction for the first consumer model Segways. There's a few days left in the auctions, and they're currently running at about 17k. Something about this reminds me of making an NPR pledge of $500 for a channel 13 umbrella. I guess this is a way of getting the Segway, which dropped way, way out of sight after its initial burst of publicity ("it's a SCOOTER?") back into the public eye. Maybe they should auction off a few Megways as well. I bet you'd get much higher prices.

Where's the damn cupholder?

Via MeFi, an Amazon auction for the first consumer model Segways. There's a few days left in the auctions, and they're currently running at about 17k. Something about this reminds me of making an NPR pledge of $500 for a channel 13 umbrella. I guess this is a way of getting the Segway, which dropped way, way out of sight after its initial burst of publicity ("it's a SCOOTER?") back into the public eye. Maybe they should auction off a few Megways as well. I bet you'd get much higher prices.

Where's the damn cupholder?

Via MeFi, an Amazon auction for the first consumer model Segways. There's a few days left in the auctions, and they're currently running at about 17k. Something about this reminds me of making an NPR pledge of $500 for a channel 13 umbrella. I guess this is a way of getting the Segway, which dropped way, way out of sight after its initial burst of publicity ("it's a SCOOTER?") back into the public eye. Maybe they should auction off a few Megways as well. I bet you'd get much higher prices.

Yes, but 99% of everything is stupid, and that includes you

Doc Searls: If it's a fact that most blogs suck, it is neither a useful nor an interesting one. Unless, of course, you're writing a story about why blogs suck.

What's interesting about this is replace "weblog" with "BigPub," and replace "story" with "self-aggrandizing/referential/congratulatory weblog entry" (OK, maybe just "weblog entry"), and it still works. Does blogging deserve more respect? Sure. Is it going to replace all forms of media as we know it? Sure. Just like TV replaced the movies.

February 15, 2002

Back in the saddle

After a week of Perl coding at my new job, all I have to say is: when all you have is an object, every problem looks like UML.

Well, THAT didn't take long

Wire story on Salon: Microsoft .Net security flaw reported. Is this thing even outta beta yet? and already they're finding security flaws? and you can even think for a second of letting these people anywhere near your credit card number? Forget it. The ridiculous thing is that Microsoft could actually use this sort of situation to their advantage, by publicizing their rapid reponse to fixing security holes. Instead, they trot out the tired old "security through obscurity" mode: notice that Microsoft chastises the company for publicizing the exploit instead of "working with them first," i.e. reporting it to MS and then keeping their mouths shut.

Note mostly to myself

But you can see it too: this XPath Tutorial at zvon.org is pretty damn nice, and so far, everything I've seen on this site leads me to believe that it's a great reference site for all sorts of XML-related technologies. But then again, you probably knew that already, right? Sure you did. I'm particularly interested in what exactly XLab is (see the examples in the tutorial), but the whole site just smells like smart innovative competence.

February 8, 2002

Was that guy supposed to be a flame?

I'm also watching the opening ceremonies of the you-know-what while I'm writing this, and I think the production numbers might actually be worse than the Oscars. It's almost embarrassingly bad. No, actually it is embarrassingly bad. Is it cause they're Mormons?

Back to work

I have good news to report. After a long 4 months of being that cultural cliche the laid-off dot-commer, I have landed a contract gig doing Perl programming at MLB.com. I have somewhat mixed feelings about going back to work. I have really enjoyed being able to spend more time with my wife and son. But, like the punchline goes, we need the eggs. and it'll be good to get off unemployment. So it's back to work and a longish commute for me, and hopefully this'll be the start of something really good.

February 5, 2002

Chris Ware Lunchbox

This is so cool. Though I wonder how many kids are actually going to carry one of these to school rather than obsessed fanboy collectors cryogenically preserving them for future value.

But the fire is so delightful

Then again, we've been pretty lucky, though. If it's taken till early February for the first really cold day, it's a pretty mild winter.

The weather outside is frightful

Cold, cold, cold. It is cold this morning. It's really the first morning where I've felt like the down parka was actually necessary, instead of overkill. I felt like "OK, it's winter." Might have to make a fire tonight.

February 4, 2002

My Aim Is Not So True

I've been using Trillian for a while as my IM client on Windows, and it's pretty slick. Great-looking interface, great IM interoperability (even does IRC! Cool!), just really a terrific program all around. On Linux, though I'm flirting with Gaim again, I'd been using TNT, an emacs-based client. But on Windows, I couldn't see any reason to use AOL's client, especially given the crappy flashing ad-gewgaws the program is overloaded with, so I was happy with Trillian.

So it was a big disappointment to try logging on with it this am and find that it can no longer connect to AIM. I've read about this problem on a few sites (ok, Metafilter) and in the past I've thought that it's not such a big deal. But it is. I don't see why AOL continues to block access to IM; beating MS in this arena means really blowing it wide open so that everybody wants to write to your spec, or at least to something like Jabber that plays nice with everybody. As it is, everybody I know, for better or for worse, uses some form of IM provided by AOL, whether via the ubiquitous AIM client or the lumbering beast that is the AOL client software. Before PC Magazine gets hold of this and declares MSN messenger to be the best choice for the business user (the "business user" is easily the most boring, tedious, joyless computer user in teh whole world, and you should avoid anything that gets recommended for them like the plague) AOL should make AIM the Windows of IM, except that they should copy the numbers and not the quality.