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February 27, 2004

Wiki spam.

EmacsWiki: AdultCheck

Who woulda thunk it, though it makes sense when you do - wiki spam. This is the first I've seen of it. I wonder if this is automated? Could you automate this?


February 26, 2004

More panda sightings.

stereogum: Pandas Are The New Trucker Hut

I saw him as well, in Grand Central:

Panda in GCT

Someone else walked up to him and took his picture, and then quite gravely said, "Thank you, Mr. Bear."

Full size image here.

That is some enlarger you've got there.

Today I got penis enlargement spam from one "Louisa Fleming" (note the name) with the subject line:

I gained 1 inch in 10 days.

Hmm.

I found this especially interesting:

This product gives me bursting confidence and electric sexual energy and makes me feel like I can lift up a Mac Truck with my pinky finger.

I used to be shy around girls and always
scared of what they would say when I pulled
down my pants. Now I'm the one in control.

Hmmmmmm.

Grey everyday.

I think I am going to leave the mono color scheme in place - I like the look of it.

Besides, clams is mostly grey.

Secrets of the Pyramid.

Via Scoble, the really fascinating story of the debacle that was Mac Word 6.0 and how it led to the creation of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft. Great article, read it. By Rick Schaut, one of the Word developers. I love stuff like this - it's always interesting to see the process behind the software you're running.

February 24, 2004

I guess there was no Orkut then.

Representation: James Madison, Federalist, no. 55, 372--74

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

Put that in your power law and smoke it.

Grey tuesday.

This site is grey today.

February 19, 2004

A career romance for young moderns.

Via the always terrific Library Juice, Library Career Romances.

February 16, 2004

The number one result for cheerblogger.

The shorter Doc Searls:
All my pals at the conference who run weblog companies think weblogs are a great idea. Revolutionary even.

February 15, 2004

And he should know.

Scripting News: 2/15/2004

How unfair that they won't comment publicly on it, leaving us guessing as to their motive, what they're doing and where they're going.

I know, that's so frustrating. It's really funky behavior.

Tiresome.

Not like high school at all.

At least with advertising the manipulation's out front. And this sort of thing does wonders for the credibility of blogs. Yeah, I'm going to put a whole lot of faith in the reliability of this list if I know that it's just another forum for the a-list to game. Like, it's what all my friends are talking about.

February 14, 2004

Oh, please.

Please don't feed the megalomaniac.

February 12, 2004

White Apple Kool-Aid, Take 2.

I have nothing but praise for the repair people at Apple: my Powerbook, which had developed the dreaded white spot syndrome, came back working perfectly and sporting a brandy-new LCD today, after having been picked up Tuesday. 2 days ago. That is some impressive turnaround. Kudos, kudos, kudos.

NB: for those 2 days, I had to use my Windows laptop at work, and all I can say is: Good Christ. I mean, Cygwin makes that shit just barely tolerable. Not usable, just tolerable. Uck. Thank God I had a Linux box at home.

A-List, Illuminati linked.

collision detection: Heathers

But the funny thing is, this sort of nuanced critique is quite hard to find amongst digital folks. The digerati who are most fascinated by social-network theory tend to be those who are -- whaddya know -- really hugely popular themselves. The pundits who continually obsess over the magic of social networks are the ones who have been enormously rewarded by them, which makes them, in a way, utterly unable to see the huge social problems that are created by network dynamics. Christ, it's like asking a bunch of popular cheerleaders to determine whether high school is pleasant, fun, and a socially egalitarian place. (It's also like asking the rich whether they think the marketplace is mostly fair and "rewards merit". What the hell else are they going to say?)

You know, if you weren't such a loser, you wouldn't be like so losing and all.

This is very smart. Go read the whole thing. Christ, I've been on Orkut like a week now and if anything, I know fewer people than I did when I started, if such a thing is possible. I do not join well, folks.

February 11, 2004

NotSync.

Brighthand - What Isn't in Palm OS Cobalt... Yet

Macintosh synchronization is something that the Palm OS used to offer, but won't any more.

Mr. Slotnick ...made it clear that PalmSource isn't developing a Mac version of the Palm Desktop. As the way the PIM apps work has changed significantly, this means Mac users won't be able to HotSync without third-party software.

I just don't get Palm sometimes. I've owned 3 Palm devices, and it always been a pain getting them to work with Macs - having to buy different extra cables, additional software downloads, limited mail syncing. Are they this confident about their market dominance that they can afford to alienate any part of the user base? Or maybe they've decided that since we're all just running iSync anyway, there's no point in continuing to support Palm Desktop for Mac. Now I'm dependent on Apple for syncing? Ye cats.

February 10, 2004

Shameless plug.

Yes, I've started one of those little snarky link farm things. Blosxom powered. Because I like writing things in emacs, damnit.

The feed.

SCO's throes.

Now They Own It, Now They Don't: SCO Sues Novell to Stay Afloat

If SCO's licensing campaign fails to generate the revenues SCO has been predicting for potential investors--because it turns out that SCO never owned what it claimed to be legally entitled to force others to license-- SCO and its principals will have plenty to answer for, and not just to its shareholders, but to the SEC as well. It is not good practice to attempt to force people to buy from you what you may not own. It is even worse practice to mislead investors into thinking that they will benefit from such sales without disclosing that you may not own what you are trying to sell.

They'd never have even gotten this far if anyone involved on the legal end were at all tech-savvy. SCO's actions are even more disgusting given this exploitation of the ignorance of the general public and their stockholders.

In a funny way, though, this whole sordid episode represents legitimization for the maturing free software movement. It wouldn't have been worth SCO's while at all to do this when "Linux" meant a set of floppies with Slackware 2.0 on them.

Give Paris Hilton a blog

Paris Hilton's Book Proposal

I read about 5 pages of this with a nagging feeling of "Where have I heard this before?," when it hit me:

It sounds just like Gawker.

UPDATE - Gawker, being, of course, where it first showed up. Are we sure it's legit?

White Apple Kool-aid.

xlab | mac os x | Apple Defends Safari 1.2 Panther Only Stance

Since I am using 10.3 myself, I find no fault with this. If you are still using 10, 10.1, or 10.2 (or even 9) I think the time has come to upgrade. You know you want Expose.

I did this upgrade myself. But sometime I think that people love their Macs so much that everything Apple does seems reasonable to them. Yeah, I wanted Expose. But this is abandoning people who have for whatever reason decided to not upgrade yet. I don't know if we should always be so quick to say, 'Jeez, upgrade already!' when maybe we ought to be wondering why Apple can't roll at least some of the non-Panther-related improvements back into Jaguar Safari.

My evil plot revealed.

While reading yet another encomium to O'Reilly ETech, this time on BoingBoing co-dependent BoingBoing, it suddenly occurred to me that all you would have to do is crash a Segway into the conference and you could utterly destroy the Power (Law) Rangers. Or at least the head of the distribution. Mwahhh -ha ha.

What attention span?

Mark Pilgrim via Ed: nerd attention deficit disorder

Cheap security

Wired News: Cheapskate's Guide to a Safe PC:

"If you're wondering what lunacy your computer might contain but aren't in the mood to fork over a few hundred bucks for software that can examine and secure your system, fret not. There are plenty of free tools available for download that do a good basic job of purging and protecting computer systems. And some of these tools, such as SpamBayes, Spybot and the Mozilla Web browser, work better than similar commercial products."

He forgot Linux or FreeBSD on that list.

February 7, 2004

Future tech support

OSXFAQ :: View topic - Palm/Adobe Palm Reader/OSX 10.3.2

Having been bitten by this already a couple times, I am blogging this so I can find it again in future. The installer for Adobe Reader for Palm OS on the Mac doesn't work right - this is how to fix it.

February 5, 2004

Coming detractions

There are two things I am interested in writing about, both related in a way, now that I think about it:

1. anonymous blogging. There seems to be quite the backlash against anonymous blogging and commenting, and I'm not sure why. People seem to see it as somehow shirking the responsibility of free speech, but there's actually a long and deep tradition in America of anonymous speech being a healthy and important thing;

and 2. Man, are people down on Orkut or what? Holy molyosky. Just as someone finally invites me in, it becomes about as unhip as you can get. Story of my life, kids...at least I got a good new blog to read out of it.

More later, but I am kinda frantic with some stuff at work at the moment.

February 1, 2004

A new and better clam

So far, I'm just tweaking stylesheets - but I'm going to put back some of the sidebar stuff from before. I'm also not quite done tweaking, so if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free.

ecto is out

The release version of ecto is out. Very competitively priced at 17.95. I've already paid for a copy. If you're on Mac OS X and need a blogging tool that isn't a web form, highly recommended.