posts brought to you by the category “culture”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
see also : practice consumer sovereignty
Mélanie Baillairgé : Calvin
Simon Cozens : HouseShare.pm
Ken Wiwa appears to have found the connection between weblogs and 1984
Andrew Shapiro : "I am the ambassador of cheesesteak love."
I went to the Commerce and Design expo on Friday afternoon
which was cheaper, lamer and just plain plus
quétaine
than last year's show. A few notable exceptions were :
- fridgeland , less because I really liked the furniture (I don't think it will age very well) but more because their website made me laugh.
- xera , whose kitchen designs don't actually look like they were tested with honest cooks. Still the zero_2 is pretty clever, modulo the electric burners and faucet that will probably need repairing every four and a half months.
- messier designers , who would do well to flesh out their website if they're seriously looking for companies to mass produce their very nice "Flo" faucet; it's a free-standing, shiny chrome dealie where the arm juts out at a ninety degree angle from the shaft. Its unclear what the potential for dowsing yourself is (why do they never install plumbing at these shows?) but it will probably be a big hit with the less-is-more crowd.
- Namber-pamber-umlaut-gobble, or something like that. I wrote the name down somewhere...oh, here it is: nienkämper . I note, however, that they don't bother to include the nice chair I sat in on their website and that they are responsible for producing tables with those silly spinal cord thingies . Oh well, it may have just been that the sum of the chair and my spiffy Italian shoes was greater than either of its parts.
refers to
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Robert Fisk : Baghdad, the day after
One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted?
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Me : ASCOPE::Search::Boolean.pm 1.1
Matt Sergeant : AxKit OpenOffice Provider
The product includes an AxKit plugin, an AxKit provider and DTDs and Stylesheets to make delivering SXW files to the web a trivial matter, and the results are pretty too.
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The Connection : An Ode to Clutter
Meanwhile, most people are shopping their way into a stupor,
the Democrats continue to entertain
embracing a tool of the accounting lobby as a viable alternative to the
tools that put Harvey Pitt in charge of the S.E.C. and others are once
again ascribing way, way, too much importance to the Idea of Weblog. I
have been making paper boxes which have neither namespace, nor
permalinks and whose relation to one another depends largely on which
way the wind is blowing. I guess we all have our own ways of dealing
with the notion that there's a war on the horizon.
meta
And in the "Small ingredients, loosely arranged" department :
www.cookmuse.com
You might want to visit this site in a
text-based browser; I nearly went blind when the index page
loaded.
via
research
buzz
refers to
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Some guy named Marcel : Spoken News
"Hear your favourite RSS newsfeeds: Take some
LWP, a little XML::RSS and season with command-line driven AppleScript."
refers to
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : cupidity
Cupidity \Cu*pid"i*ty\ (k?-p?d"?-t?), n. [F. cupidite, L. cupiditas, fr. cupidus longing, desiring, fr. cupere to long for, desire. See {Covet}.] 1. A passionate desire; love. [Obs.] 2. Eager or inordinate desire, especially for wealth; greed of gain; avarice; covetousness. With the feelings of political distrust were mingled those of cupidity and envy, as the Spaniard saw the fairest provinces of the south still in the hands of the accursed race of Ishmael. --Prescott. web1913
cupidity n : extreme greed for material wealth [syn: {avarice}, {avariciousness}, {covetousness}] wn
meta
If I were a conceptual artist
I would have set up a video camera to the right
of the door at
open da
night
and filmed people as they came in walked to the corner of the bar. I
would capture the moment of realization and the slow turning of the head
as each realized that the line actually started three feet back, so as
not to block the game on television, and actually stretched all the back
to the
pool
table
. But I am not a conceptual artist. So much so that one of my tiny
moments of joy was meeting
Kelly Mark
in the cafeteria at NSCAD and ripping on Damian Hirst.
meta
I am probably going to shut things down for , realistically, a week or two
in the next few days. Every time I turn
around, it seems like something else in aaronland is broken. Rather
than try to hold one part in place with duct tape while I fix another,
I think I will just turn it all off and do it right. It might be nice
to say that I will pull a Jedi mind-fuck and write code for four days
uninterrupted emerging at the other end like some kind of bad-ass
super-dweeb but it's not going to happen. It just doesn't interest me;
I would rather spend some of that time baking to be honest. In the
meantime, I might keep the weblog going via the command-line and RSS
feeds which will suck for people not using an aggregation tool. I don't
know. You've been warned.
meta
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : singleton
Non gender specific term somewhat akin to "spinster," with less negative connotations (as popularized by Helen Fielding in "Bridget Jones's Diary").
ex. "Just because you're a Singleton doesn't mean you can't lead a normal fulfilling life..."see also : singleton dict-ified
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Dachb0den Labs : bsd-airtools
"is a package that provides a complete toolset
for wireless 802.11b auditing. Namely, it currently contains a bsd-based
wep cracking application, called dweputils (as well as kernel patches for
NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD). It also contains a curses based ap
detection application similar to netstumbler (dstumbler) that can be used
to detect wireless access points and connected nodes, view signal to
noise graphs, and interactively scroll through scanned ap's and view
statistics for each. It also includes a couple other tools to provide a
complete toolset for making use of all 14 of the prism2 debug modes as
well as do basic analysis of the hardware-based link-layer protocols
provided by prism2's monitor debug mode."
meta
Doug Harvey : "Why is communication impossible at the supposed highest levels
of our culture when a few proles on the Internet
can punch a hole in the fabric of consensus reality with a few
keystrokes?"
Stick that in your
post-modern knowledge pipe
and smoke it, buddy. Don't worry, I have plenty to say about that one. I
just need to
build [the] world
first...
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BBC : "The US Government has bought all rights to all the pictures of Afghanistan
and surrounding areas taken by the privately
operated Ikonos high-resolution imaging satellite. ...Under the terms of
the contract, Space Imaging, the company that operates Ikonos, will not
"sell, distribute, share or provide the imagery to any other entity"."
meta
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is disquisition
| source : web1913 | Disquisition
\Dis`qui*si"tion\, n. [L. disquisitio, fr. disquirere to inquire
diligently, investigate; dis- + quaerere to seek. See {Quest}.] A formal
or systematic inquiry into, or discussion of, any subject; a full
examination or investigation of a matter, with the arguments and facts
bearing upon it; elaborate essay; dissertation. For accurate research or
grave disquisition he was not well qualified. --Macaulay. | source : wn |
disquisition n : an elaborate analytical or explanatory essay or
discussion
meta
Computer World : "If you are willing to donate IT goods or services
to help in the wake of the tragedy in New York,
please enter the information below. If your donation will be needed, you
will be contacted in the coming days."
meta
Jish : "God dammit, I'm Canadian."
David Bollier : Can the Information Commons Be Saved?
"How Intellectual Property Policies Are Eroding
Democratic Culture and Some Strategies for Asserting the Public Interest"
via
libjuice
. (pdf)
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First, there was the laundromat-cafe.
Then, there was the bookstore-cafe.
Recently, some brave --highly deluded-- soul pioneered the
disco-bowling-alley. Yesterday, I saw the hair-salon-computer-store.
Who knew?
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Sean M. Burke : perlpodspec, draft 1
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is intrepid
| source : web1913 | Intrepid \In*trep"id\, a.
[L. intrepidus: cf. F. intr['e]pide. See {In-} not, and {Trepidation}.]
Not trembling or shaking with fear; fearless; bold; brave; undaunted;
courageous; as, an intrepid soldier; intrepid spirit. Syn: Fearless;
dauntless; resolute; brave; courageous; daring; valiant; heroic; doughty.
| source : wn | intrepid adj : invulnerable to fear or intimidation;
"audacious explorers"; "fearless reporters and photographers"; "intrepid
pioneers" [syn: {audacious}, {brave}, {dauntless}, {fearless},
{unfearing}]
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Me : Apache::SOAP::NYTimesParser.pm
<quote>you know, what I would
really like in a bot, though I'm sure there are reasons this doesn't
exist. is a bot that you can send a NYTimes URL to and it will spit
back [or email you? does this break some rule?] the text of the
article, no banners, no headlines, no cloying logins etc. I have been
dealing with a particularly zealous fan who has been trying to tell me
that linking to NYT articles is Bad Form since not everyone has a
login, even though I do offer my own login to them ... So, I'm thinking
I should learn perl in order to be able to do this.</quote>
And that was all it took.
meta
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is parse
| source : web1913 | Parse \Parse\, v. t. [imp.
& p. p. {Parsed}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Parsing}.] [L. pars a part;
pars orationis a part of speech. See {Part}, n.] (Gram.) To resolve into
its elements, as a sentence, pointing out the several parts of speech,
and their relation to each other by government or agreement; to analyze
and describe grammatically. Let him construe the letter into English, and
parse it over perfectly. --Ascham. | source : wn | parse v : analyze
syntactically by assigning a constituent structure to (a sentence) |
source : jargon | parse [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine
the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the
standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse
that." 2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple;
you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that."
3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing
fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is
okay". A `parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some controversy over
whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean `deboned'.
meta
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is nettlesome
| source : wn | nettlesome adj 1: causing
irritation or annoyance; "tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with
his fork"; "aircraft noise is particularly bothersome near the airport";
"found it galling to have to ask permission"; "an irritating delay";
"nettlesome paperwork"; "a pesky mosquito"; "swarms of pestering gnats";
"a plaguey newfangled safety catch"; "a teasing and persistent thought
annoyed him"; "a vexatious child"; "it is vexing to have to admit you are
wrong" [syn: {annoying}, {bothersome}, {galling}, {irritating}, {pesky},
{pestering}, {pestiferous}, {plaguy}, {plaguey}, {teasing}, {vexatious},
{vexing}] 2: easily irritated or annoyed; "an incorrigibly fractious
young man"; "not the least nettlesome of his countrymen" [syn: {cranky},
{fractious}, {irritable}, {peevish}, {peckish}, {pettish}, {petulant},
{testy}, {tetchy}, {techy}]
meta
Rocco Lucia : Darwin ports
"As every FreeBSD enthusiast I wanted to see the
Ports Collection working on Darwin as soon as I installed Mac OS X on my
Powerbook. Here there is a quick and dirty way that will give a start to
the magic."
meta
Helena Echlin : Letter from Yale
"Where there is noparaphrasable meaning, dissent
is impossible, because there is no threshold for attack." thanks
traffic sounds like the
ocean girl
refers to
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Feed : "Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's
is made up of a series of comments written over
the course of a year on Wendy's customer-feedback cards. Wendy's asks its
customers to "TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT," and Wenderoth spares no detail,
from fantasy couplings with its nubile mascot to the challenges of
ordering after ingesting marijuana brownies. ... The mechanistic rituals
and the bland, uniform settings of the fast-food transaction have become
so naturalized that we're not even aware of them until something disturbs
the artificial tranquility -- like Wenderoth replying "Daddy fucked me!"
when another man in line grouses that "You'd think they had to grow the
potatoes!" "
I worked at the Wendy's across the street
from the Forum for four days when I was sixteen. Notable memories include
: 1) Desperately wanting to cry out "reality check" when the stupid
buzzer over the oven went off and the first plebe to reset it had to yell
"quality check!". 2) The weirdo manager-guy from the franchise on Peel
excitedly telling me that they could prepare a burger in 9 seconds flat
after it was ordered. He was also the guy who, after I left, told me
earnestly that I
wasn't cut out fot fast food
. 3) The other weirdo manager-guy who
showed me
how to use the french fryer
. 4) The day I cooked 500 strips of bacon before 8AM.
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Andrew Odlyzko : Content is Not King
"Content can be profitable. Numerous media
companies are doing very well. Content can also be of value to a network,
even aside from providing traffic for the network to carry. However, it
is probably best to think of content as either catnip or icing on the
cake; something to attract new users, or enhance user experience. That is
what broadcast TV programs do for the advertisers who pay for them. That
may also have been the main role of the Web and browsers in bringing more
people to the Internet."
meta
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to meet Bonne Fete Barbie.
Kyle Smith : XML2SQL
"is a collection of Perl scripts used to convert
XML files into SQL scripts for creating tables."
refers to
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Sarah Musgrave : How the New Economy Turned Me Into an Old Capitalist
"I can only imagine some ending like that of the
first Star Trek movie, where the computers of the space-wrecked Voyager
ship spend years searching for their creators and that’s why they
keep hassling the Enterprise when it passes through their solar system.
This harassment comes in the form of a bald chick in a short skirt, not a
bad result of a computer geek’s wet dream."
meta
Evan Williams estimates that there are currently
20, 000
active weblogs
. What does this mean for the Idea of Weblog? Doubtless, it can only mean
naked weblogging
.
meta
Dave Winer
"You can relax, no matter what other people say,
every point of view is just as valid as any other. (Even if others don't
recognize it.)" I'm going to go out on a limb here and say : that's just
plain wrong. see also :
Russell McNeil : Soft Relativism and the Malaise of Modernity
meta
In Rome, last Wednesday
I ate pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner and
was nearly killed when a six foot chunch of building on via del
trastevere fell off and crashed 10 feet in front of me. This weekend I
went to the beach, got sunburned and ate cowboy dry meat.
meta
A. Sundararajan : A proposal for Dynamic XML with DOM and Scripts
Interesting, but all the dynamism appears to be
time-based. If that's the only trick it can do then I'm afraid that DXML
is basically still-born.
meta
Apparently, the burning question
on the minds of Americans is
why does Canada have so many female pop singers
?
meta
Complain and you shall receive*
The
eyebeam
application converts eyemodule files to firepad (nee image viewer) files.
The
imgvtopgm
tool converts firepad files to pgm files at which point there is the
trusty
convert
program for making web images. Now I just need to figure out how to mail
firepad images as attachments... *When I was a small boy I used to get
mad some fierce when I was playing with my Lego and building a
complicated model. I would need to find that one tiny connector without
which the whole effort was moot. It didn't take long before I was
smashing the few unfortunate pieces I could see and screaming blue murder
for the guily party to stop hiding and show itself right now! Eventually
I found it because, well, it was right there. Still, I never really let
go of the idea that it was my screaming that had made it appear.
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Rachel Greene : Web Work, A History of Internet Art
I tend to distrust anything with paragraphs that
begin "Not unlike the Surrealists and Situationists...", but I will slog
my way through this anyway. Read it while you can; the URL suggests that
the article will get blasted next month. I guess Artforum is still
learning to walk the walk... Meanwhile. Morning Edition does
a short piece on eToy NYC
. (real audio)
refers to
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An HTML to XHTML converter
from the nice people at O'Reilly. Pass the
source, please.
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Rex Murphy : Dot-com looniness, phantoms of avarice and appetite
"The most self- regarding generation of all
history is going to live forever; jog till it's 90; chemically extend its
furious sexual capacity; replace and enhance all body parts and get
continuously rich forever. It is this happy exceptionalism that has made
the practice of building hopes and dreams on the stock market, and in
particular that portion of it known as the NASDAQ, such a delightful
habit for so many North Americans." Is it just me, or does it frighten
anyone else how much Rex Murphy looks like
Prime Minister Poutine
?
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Michael Schwern : Sex.pm
"Given two (or more, I'm a liberal guy) packages,
Sex.pm will recombine their symbols at random recombining them into the
new module thus providing a cross-section of its functions and global
variables."
meta
You'd think I'd won an award or something
I'd like to thank
Grim Skunk
for making music that helps on days when your hands hurt and your
eyeballs are all tingley and you keep clutching your face like it's
melting. I'd also like thank
symbolic
links
for many of the same reasons. Finally, I'd like to thank spring for
making an impromptu appearance today so that I could take a walk and cool
off. Most people thought I was nuts to move back to Montreal in February,
but it's worth it to be here when the warm weather finally comes. (It's
only March, I will be surprised if it doesn't snow atleast once more.)
The leaves are on the trees and people are outside and happy and giddy
and psyched and it's great to be around. When I lived in Halifax, I used
to wonder
how many times I could say
"I hate this place." Now, it's pretty much the opposite. Hee hee hee
hee...
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Alan Paller : Notes from the White House
"Witt Diffie stole the show with his analogy of
DDoS attacks to the "breakdown of democracy." He said, "It's as if, Mr.
President, you lost an election, not because people voted against you,
but because someone stole votes and cast them in favor of your opponent.
... Throughout, the President asked many follow up questions and told us
how he looked at the problem (like an arms race where some people develop
weapons and other people develop defenses and the goal is to make the
time between new weapons of your enemies and the applicable defenses as
close to zero as possible)." Mr. Paller is the Director of Research at
the
SANS Institute
refers to
meta
Jesse Helms on the United Nations
and why it should support
The
Monroe Doctrine
.
meta
Morning Edition talks to Mark Crispin Miller,
professor of Media Ecology (whatever that is) at
NYU about the AOL Time Warner We Control Your Children deal. see also
Media Ecology: A Journal of Intersections
and
Media Ecology : Taking Account of the Knower
. Unless you're looking for an Apache manual, don't bother with
mediaecology.com
just yet.
meta
Yeah yeah yeah
whatever. I want an OS that is stable,
networked, can play with all the cool Unix toys and *builds* on
everything that is good about the Mac. Throbbing dialogue buttons and
goofy email attachments were not exactly what I had in mind.
refers to
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I saw Being John Malkovitch this evening
and thought it curious that, despite the multiple
levels of head-tripping already going on, the film makers still relied on
an eye-shaped mask as a device to let you know one character was "inside"
the head of another. I'd also like to know how many film theory mid-terms
have been written about The Lazy Boom.
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CyberNotes
"CyberNotes is published every two weeks by the
National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC). Its mission is to
support security and information system professionals with timely
information on cyber vulnerabilities, hacker exploit scripts, hacker
trends, virus information, and other critical infrastructure-related best
practices." Courtesy the nice people at the
DOJ and
FBI
.
refers to
meta
GiveQuick!
"GiveQuick's directory allows website owners to
earmark their [e-commerce affiliate program] commissions to the nonprofit
of their choice ... We take no money out of any referral fees generated.
We are doing this because it needs to be done."
refers to
meta
There are three golf courses
on the Vineyard, but the guy who puts up Mr. Bill
while he's on vacation here wants to build another one (complete with six
figure membership fees.)
Things are starting to
get ugly.
meta
PC Week : Compaq to Halt NT on Alpha development
About a year ago, I got to test-drive an Alpha/NT
box for a couple months. This was when DEC was trying to woo the Mac
crowd with a faster, cheaper graphics machine. Stuff that been ported to
Alpha (Painter & Quark) screamed. Everything else ran under an NT
emulator. The really impresive thing was that the machine "learned" NT as
you used it, re-compiling into native Alpha code. Unfortunately, we could
never get QuickTime installed which basically meant it was D.O.A. via
slashdot
.
meta
Peter Gzosky talks with Samuel Hollander
"Samuel Hollander is an internationally respected
intellectual economic historian. He says that a close reading of the
works of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill reveal them to be closet
socialists. And further, that they would be alarmed by our modern day
love affair with unfettered capitalism and depleted social safety nets."
real audio.
meta
If I dig a hole through the Earth from Montreal
Michael Kimmelman : How Photography Makes Celebrity So Irresistible
"The show's unspoken question is whether
something that has become so commonplace is still meaningful, beyond its
value as a commodity." Tangentially, consider also the conflicts that
arise when trying to assign value or excellence to a thing or person in a
world that genuinely strives to include everyone and give equal merit to
their contributions.
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Montreal Index
"Number of complaints made against city snow
removers in 1998: 913. "
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Daniel Jacques : Des «conditions gagnantes» aux «conditions signifiantes»
"Compte tenu de l'état d'esprit qui prédomine
dans notre société, j'estime préférable de suivre les enseignements de
Rousseau. Il ne s'agit pas tant de parvenir à réunir «les conditions
gagnantes» qui nous permettraient de nous assurer collectivement de la
maîtrise de l'avenir, mais plutôt d'examiner sous quelles conditions
cette prise de contrôle - en admettant qu'elle puisse être acquise -
pourrait avoir sens et légitimité de manière à favoriser la concorde
entre tous les citoyens du futur État."
meta
wtf?
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dude, where's my car
This document uses CSS kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a browser with incomplete CSS and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some later date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right unreadable please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
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yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through the cracks.
See also : W3C::LogValidator.pm
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it's the software, stupid