Oy, applescript.
Seen this am in a sig on the bbedit-talk list:
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, but not thoroughly, thought through.
Those of you who've been there will join me in a hearty "Amen, brother."
« September 2002 | Main | November 2002 »
October 31, 2002
Oy, applescript.
Seen this am in a sig on the bbedit-talk list:
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, but not thoroughly, thought through.
Those of you who've been there will join me in a hearty "Amen, brother."
Oy, applescript.
Seen this am in a sig on the bbedit-talk list:
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, but not thoroughly, thought through.
Those of you who've been there will join me in a hearty "Amen, brother."
October 30, 2002
RTFM to me
Sometimes I get support questions about RSS 2.0. This can make me grumpy. Why? Because we have a mail list for that purpose.
Coming from someone who both couldn't be bothered to do this much about his iPod problem, and is well known for abusing his readership for support questions, this is too much.
October 26, 2002
Keep in mind
A good quote seen this am in the poets.org email newsletter:
"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived." --Abraham Lincoln
October 25, 2002
Accept no imitations
And since I am running my mouth this afternoon: I was walking past a hair salon near the train station last night and saw this sign in their window:
We have now added the original
Japanese Straightening
to our line of services.
What is that, and is it as scary as it sounds?
Japanese Straightening
to our line of services.
More on related stories
I also notice a trend with the 'Related Stories' box: When I first make a post, the box is often blank; but as the post gets rebuilt due to revisions and the addition of new posts, the box starts to fill up. Often the first link that appears is a link back to this site. It's sort of a form of incremental search compilation. Or think of it as a very small history of Google.
I've actually been thinking of dropping the whole Related Stories thing: it was interesting at first, but often the results are actually completely irrelevant to the post topic. and I still haven't been able to figure out a fix for the "no stories" formatting problem I mentioned recently. On the other hand, I've found a few good links in there that happened to get trawled into the box. Any opinions among the 4 of you out there reading this?
Blogger probs again
phil ringnalda dot com: Blogger cracked, redux:
Former Blogger users: it's time once again to think back, and try to remember whether you've already changed every FTP password you ever gave to Blogger.
Man, exactly what I was thinking. I think I had changed them all, but now I can't get in to find out iffen I was right. I'm just going to dump my account as soon as I can log in to Blogger again. I haven't touched Blogger since I started using MT.
Incidentally, the notice at status.blogger.com currently says:
Also, if you store your FTP login information in Blogger, it wouldn't hurt to change that on your server-though it is unlikely that information was accessed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Why is it unlikely, I wonder? Did they disguise the column names? Are they encrypted (now that would be smart)? And also, Sorry for the inconvenience in this context is a bit too casual, methinks.
UPDATE: Blogger is back up. I logged in, saw that my ftp username was there but not the password. Whether that was due to my not storing it there or it being blanked during the server restore I dunno. I do vaguely remember making the decision to not keep it there anymore after the last hacktrusion, so that's the likely answer. I'll delete the unused blog later today.
October 24, 2002
Vote with your vote
Print this out. Put it on your car. Make a t-shirt. It's so apropos.
BTW, why do you hate America so much? Eeek.
Vote with your vote
Print this out. Put it on your car. Make a t-shirt. It's so apropos.
BTW, why do you hate America so much? Eeek.
October 23, 2002
Some MT inclusion questions
I guess this is actually a question for the very fine MT support forums, but I have been trying to figure out how to do some conditional inclusions. For example, with the "Related Stories" boxes that adorn these posts. Sometimes there are no Related Stories (which makes me think I am either a very orignal thinker or am so trivially lame; you make the call) I found a terrific plugin from Brad Choate which basically lets you test whether an MT tag, such as MTGoogleSearchResult, is empty. But - and this is a big but - how the hell do I pull in the surrounding markup i.e. the box? Very frustrating and I guess I need to do some reading and thinking beforehand. The same thing would of course apply to the "Posted in" line when there are no categories. This may seem trivial but it's the sort of fit and finish detail that drives me crazy when it's not attended to.
October 22, 2002
Circular
You can subscribe to a whole lot of RSS feeds, mainly about what people are doing with their RSS feeds.
Weird.
We validate.
Check it out.
October 21, 2002
Force markets
Don Park's Blog, on Mitch Kapor's Open Source Application Foundation:
What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software. If OSAF succeeds, consumers will have access to a wide array of high quality software for free. Most likely, every PC will start to ship with them preloaded. Every time a new OSAF product ships, a market segment will dies. OSAF paints a picture of the future where consumers are expected to pay for contents and services, but software is free.
But how is this substantively different from the death of market segments via Microsoft integrating functionality into the OS? Anybody remember Central Point PC Tools? How many products got killed off because Microsoft shipped "just good enough" versions of commercial utilities with new OS releases? For some reason, if MS does this, it's "competition," but if OSS products enter the market, all of a sudden programming as a profession is in grave danger and something must be done. What happened to market forces in that argument? Compete on quality if you can't on price then.
Arguing against the consumer getting higher quality products more cheaply because the software industry will make less money seems to me to have the argument exactly backwards.
More fun with subversion
I am having the hardest damn time this afternoon getting Subversion to compile from tarball on my Linux box. I have been having the problem described in this message about libtool garbage, but despite editing the .la files I still cannopt get it to compile. I am half tempted to toss the spource and attempt installing from rpm, but I dunno...Any helpful advice would be appreciated. (I'm trying to get it installed for work.)
UPDATE: Managed to get it to compile. I am now using the client to get the latest version from the web. I only hope I won't have to spend half a day compiling that.October 18, 2002
MT 2.5
MT 2.5 is out, and what is IMHO the best weblogging package out there just keeps getting better and better. New version has lots of great new stuff like integrated search (notice the search box at the top of the right-hand nav now, yay) auto-pinging of blo.gs, auto-trackback pinging (very cool). I may just have to pony up another $20 to help keep Ben and Mena at it. Thanks for great great software. God, am I gushing or what?
October 17, 2002
Schwag 1, Ethics 0
Doc prevaricates on whether bloggers are actual journalists ("you see, it's literal, we keep journals") in the face of maybe having to get out of bed with the tech industry.
It's actually time as far as I can see that someone started blowing out the cozy firstname relationships these guys all have with each other. See Sheila Lennon (in my hometown paper, the ProJo) on standards for what journalism really means.
What's mine is mine and...you know the drill.
Good to see that Scripting News is helping itself to copyrighted content again without compensation or even any attribution. Remember, kids, software is different. You have to pay for every copy you have. Once you pay for anything else, hell, even if you don't, you can reproduce it as much as you want, because the BigCos just don't get it.
Let's all remember that this is the company that starts getting the lawyer letters ready if another site even includes a fucking cactus in their graphics.
What's mine is mine and...you know the drill.
Good to see that Scripting News is helping itself to copyrighted content again without compensation or even any attribution. Remember, kids, software is different. You have to pay for every copy you have. Once you pay for anything else, hell, even if you don't, you can reproduce it as much as you want, because the BigCos just don't get it.
Let's all remember that this is the company that starts getting the lawyer letters ready if another site even includes a fucking cactus in their graphics.
October 13, 2002
When bad things happen to good weblogs
This is what I saw over at What do I know this am.
October 11, 2002
Passing blogs in class
This has to be one of the stupidest, most immature and childish things I have seen in some time. I think I actually find this embarassing, esp in someone this age.
October 7, 2002
Things to do with a search engine when you're bored
October 3, 2002
Neither forgive nor forget
From William Safire's NYT column this morning, aghast at the Democrats in NJ:
"Nothing is more fatal than a dodge," young Winston Churchill told Commons in 1906. "Wrongs will be forgiven, sufferings and losses will be forgiven or forgotten . . . but anything like a trick will always rankle."
I know just what he means.
Would make Tufte proud
This morning, reading an essay by Jeffrey Hiles on bike lanes, I was struck by this infographic, whose caption is:
Figure 8
Daytime crashes (outer circle of numbers) compared to bicyclists' perceptions (inner circle of numbers) of risk of colliding with vehicles from various directions in percent of total collisions. Source: Hoque, 1990.
Interesting that: 1) the biggest discrepancy is for being t-boned on the right; and that 2) the smallest is for being hit directly from behind, the no. 1 fear of newer cyclists when riding in traffic.
Great joke
In a thread on Mefi about British researchers and the world's funniest joke, a really good one.
October 2, 2002
Mt-mode released
In other news, the software responsible for all those damn "testing, is this thing on?" posts has been released and I can highly recommend it. Hie thee over to marginalia.org and pick up a copy of MT mode for (X)Emacs. If you live in any of the emacsen, you'll appreciate it. Now I have some feature requests...
Crappy AND cheap URLs
You mean like this incredibly informative and intuitive URL?
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2002/09/30.html#a1553
Nice glass you got in that house.
Still high up there
Burningbird comments in her usual smart and interesting way on the Google demotion of webloggers in the rankings. God knows how they're doing it.
I will note, however, that the site you're reading now is still the #1 hit for the search "snappy clam." Ha.
On the other hand, I kinda doubt I'm even in the first 1000 pages for "John." Just browsing the first few pages of results would seem to bear that out.
If you don't read this blog, we'll kill this dog
Kids, remember when the worst thing you could say about a home page was that it was a collection of bullshit info about the author's pets?
Let's apply that to blogs too, ok? I do not care HOW CUTE (FLUFFY || CHUCKLES || DOS\ PESOS) IS. Thanks.