posts brought to you by the category “the fear”
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.
William Steig, 1907 - 2003
There was a picture of Mussolini greeting veterans from the First World War.
Yehuda Berlinger : Podindex
Podindex is an attempt to provide an interface to the Perl documentation which is easier to navigate than the currently available perldoc or the html pages. ... We have created a module called Pod::Index which is the indexer and the core interface to the index. We are using it as the backend to all kinds of user interfaces.
Meanwhile, in the "Whatever you do, play it loud!" department:
Bill : You gotta have it
It appears that Simon Cozens has rolled his own weblogging software.
In the "Letters from the Past to the Future" Department : Today was the day that 'make' made suck.
Scott Wiersdorf : Term::Twiddle.pm
Always fascinated by the spinner during FreeBSD's loader bootstrap, I wanted to capture it so I could view it any time I wanted to--and I wanted to make other people find that same joy I did. Now, anytime you or your users have to wait for something to finish, instead of twiddling their thumbs, they can watch the computer twiddle its thumbs.
Transactions with Class::DBI
Me : eatdrinkfeelgood-1.1-to-indexcard-fo.xsl 0.9
Me : Log::Dispatch::Jabber.pm 0.1
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : roseate
Roseate \Ro"se*ate\, a. [Cf. L. roseus, rosatus, prepared from roses. See {Roseal}, {Rose}.] 1. Full of roses; rosy; as, roseate bowers. 2. resembling a rose in color or fragrance; esp., tinged with rose color; blooming; as, roseate beauty; her roseate lips. {Roseate tern} (Zo["o]l.), an American and European tern ({Sterna Dougalli}) whose breast is roseate in the breeding season.
web1913
roseate adj : having a dusty purplish pink color; "the roseate glow of dawn" [syn: {rose}, {rosaceous}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : tacky 'r us
Where you go to buy very nasty, skanky, or ugly outfits.
ex. Christina musta got that at Tacky 'R Us. She needs to find out where Britney shops.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : veg
"to relax, to chill out"
ex. i'm going to veg out for the afternoon...
see also :
veg dict-ified
I have a somewhat irrational dislike of the other teams in the Original Six,
Me : www.otlml.org
Aaron Schwartz : The Semantic Web for Web Developers
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : jake
Completely and utterly boring or lame.
ex. This movie's jake. Let's get out of here.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : extempore
Extempore \Ex*tem"po*re\, adv. [L. ex out + tempus, temporis, time. See {Temporal}.] Without previous study or meditation; without preparation; on the spur of the moment; suddenly; extemporaneously; as, to write or speak extempore. --Shak. -- a. Done or performed extempore. ``Extempore dissertation.'' --Addison. ``Extempore poetry.'' --Dryden. -- n. Speaking or writing done extempore. [Obs.] --Bp. Fell.
web1913
extempore adj : with little or no preparation or forethought; "his ad-lib comments showed poor judgment"; "an extemporaneous piano recital"; "an extemporary lecture"; "an extempore skit"; "offhand excuses"; "trying to sound offhanded and reassuring"; "an off-the-cuff toast"; "a few unrehearsed comments" [syn: {ad-lib}, {extemporaneous}, {extemporary}, {offhand}, {offhanded}, {off-the-cuff}, {unrehearsed}] adv : without prior preparation; "he spoke extemporaneously" [syn: {extemporaneously}, {extemporarily}]
wn
Dick Snyder : "Years ago I had brunch with a fabulous, very stylin' woman.
Afterward, my suggestion was that we go check out a few design-y stores and art galleries. Maybe she just didn't like me, but her preference was to go jogging. I mean, this woman had a jogging date set up after brunch. . My feeling was that pretty much sums a person up. On a Sunday afternoon, you can go shopping with a guy as cool as me, or you can go jogging."
Props to the Movable Type gang for a new release
B. K. Oxley : Arguments.pm
"I had an epiphany to use subroutine attributes for argument type checking, and to try and make it clean and simple to use. It is not there yet, but I hope to get it there. If nothing else, it is a new, fun area of Perl for me to explore."
Dirk-Willem van Gulik : mod_auth_jabber
Gary Younge : "The relationship between these facts and last week's atrocities is contextual, not causal.
Those who believe that America got what it deserved as a payback for its former ills lack the very humanism which they argue has been missing in America's foreign policy. But, similarly, those eager to stifle any critical understanding as to why these attacks happened lack the faculties to begin to imagine how to make the world a safer place."
Cafe con Leche : "Bottom line: any doubt that the IE team at Microsoft actually cares about standards has been erased.
More than three years since XML 1.0 was released and almost two years after XSLT 1.0 was released, IE still does not correctly implement these specifications. Even though the XML parser group at Microsoft provided the IE group with a relatively standards conformant XML parser/XSLT processor, the IE programmers deliberately chose to cripple it rather than support standard XML!"
Java xsl-FO to Rtf
"converts XML documents conforming to the XSL-FO specification to RTF format, the goal being to use the same XSL-FO documents (as often generated using XSLT transforms) to generate PDF (using FOP or similar) and RTF (using jfor) documents. Through an intermediate transformation to XSL-FO, jfor can be used to convert any raw or XML data to RTF format."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is corpulent
| source : web1913 | Corpulent \Cor"pu*lent\ (-p?-lent), a. [L. corpulentus, fr. corpus: cf. F. corpulent. See {Corpse}.] 1. Very fat; obese. 2. Solid; gross; opaque. [Obs.] --Holland. Syn: Stout; fleshy; bulky; obese. See {Stout}. | source : wn | corpulent adj : excessively fat; "a weighty man" [syn: {obese}, {weighty}, {rotund}]
IBM : Web Services Flow Language 1.0
Sean M. Burke : The RTF Cookbook
"RTF is a nearly ubiquitous text formatting language devised by Microsoft. Microsoft's Rich Text Format Specification is widely available, but it's usable mainly just as a reference for the language's entire command set. This short document, however, is meant as a quick reference and overview. It is meant for people interested in writing programs that generate a minimal subset of RTF."
NY Times : We have outsourced our brains.
Marjory S. Blumenthal and David D. Clark : Rethinking the design of the Internet
The end to end arguments vs. the brave new world. "This paper looks at the Internet and the changing set of requirements for the Internet that are emerging as it becomes more commercial, more oriented towards the consumer, and used for a wider set of purposes. We discuss a set of principles that have guided the design of the Internet, called the end to end arguments, and we conclude that there is a risk that the range of new requirements now emerging could have the consequence of compromising the Internet’s original design principles. Were this to happen, the Internet might lose some of its key features, in particular its ability to support new and unanticipated applications." (pdf)
Harlan Hile and Drew Perttula : Toilet Paper
"When a motion sensor detects a visitor in the hallway outside, toilet picks from a list of sounds to play to encourage a visitor to enter. If toilet has a visitor, it plays appropriate sounds based on state from the seat positions, the laser beam across the seat being broken, the light switch being off, etc. It scrolls news headlines across the LCD panel. When the toilet is flushed, the lights flash and the music fades. If the seat is left up when the door is opened, a reminder sound plays. Toilet also serves web pages to the outside that allow us to view history from the database, request specific CD tracks, control the volume, and send messages to the LCD screen."
Would you buy food from this guy?
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is plaudit
| source : web1913 | Plaudit \Plau"dit\, n. [From L. plaudite do ye praise (which was said by players at the end of a performance), 2d pers. pl. imperative of plaudere. Cf. {Plausible}.] A mark or expression of applause; praise bestowed. Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng. --Longfellow. Syn: Acclamation; applause; encomium; commendation; approbation; approval. | source : wn | plaudit n : enthusiastic approval; "the book met with modest acclaim"; "he acknowledged the plaudits of the crowd"; "they gave him more eclat than he really deserved" [syn: {acclaim}, {acclamation}, {plaudits}, {eclat}]
www.handsoffmy.org
Sightings : Dany Laferriere
Oliver Travers : Recently I backed up my online bookmarks...
Wherein the author cautions ASPs that they really ought to offer one-click backups for their customers. I got here via a link to
Favorites::Convert
in my referer logs. The combination of navel-gazing and the topic at hand made me think that bookmark-ish files would make an interesting distribution format for weblogs. If I were
the prototypical neurosurgeon
that Cameron wrote about a thousand years ago, I think it would be pretty cool to download a neurosurgery archive and simply add it to my bookmarks collection and get on with the day. It is, I think, the only time I've ever seen the merit in Microsoft's decision to use filesystem based bookmarks, rather than a single text file, because I can add and remove items in discreet actions without doing anything programatically and/or offering up my bookmarks for third-party viewing. On the other hand, since there is an
XML-RPC client for Mozilla
you could conceivably offer a similar service, using XUL(?), a la
Meerkat
. Eeen-teresting....
Me : Favorites::Convert.pm
The other day I came across a Perl script on Freshmeat that
converts your IE (Win) favorites into a Netscape bookmarks file
. I tried it out and thought wouldn't it be cool if I could make other bookmarkish files from my IE favorites. [I am no big fan of Microsoft but the fact remains that they have the best browser on the market right now.] So I chunked out the code and put it in a module and told it load other modules depending on what kind of output file you're after. As of this writing Favorites::Convert will generate plain old HTML, XBEL and OPML files. Still to do : proper documentation ( don't worry there's a test script that calls the single public method ), indentation / pretty-printing and moving the bookmark definition information into XML files so they can be read by other languages.
Mark Kingwell
"Focusing on income levels while ignoring other factors can only lead to a skewed assessment of citizen well-being. But perhaps the time has come for those of us on the left to acknowledge that plunging average income is no longer something we can simply shrug off. Sure money isn't everything, but declines in income, set against a cultural background of relentless wealth-celebration, can't help but generate relative poverty. Poverty creates envy. And envy, felt consistently and acutely enough, leads to many other social ills we cannot so easily ignore, like crime and riots and beggars on the street."
Vodka espresso?
Does History Matter?
"in an increasingly technologically oriented present?" A discussion between Jack Granatstein and Michael Ignatieff
David Adams : Speller RPC Interface
"This interface will allow any Internet- connected application to connect to a Speller server and check the spelling of any arbitrary text."
Mother of Perl : Simplified DocBk XML on the Web
"I wrote a Perl script that takes a Simplified DocBk XML article and: splits it into multiple pages, converts it to HTML, and adds all headers and footers I use for Webreference. You can download it at..."
Georges Raby
"Je crois que le gouvernement du Québec devrait inscrire au plus tôt à l'intérieur de la loi 101 un nouveau règlement qui inciterait les jeunes Anglaises à pratiquer le french kiss le plus souvent possible, dès le secondaire, pour qu'elles s'habituent à tourner leur langue du côté de la majorité. Ainsi, grâce à cette forme d'exercice fort plaisant, elles pourraient développer dès leur plus jeune âge un goût marqué pour notre langue, en accord avec l'idéal de la loi 101."
They say that packaging is everything
Joseph Heller 1923-1999
Craig Holdrege : What Does It Mean To Be a Sloth?
"We are losing animals. I do not mean only numerically through the extinction of species. I also mean we are losing them in our understanding. ... This essay is an attempt to show how we can begin to grasp something of the organic lawfulness inherent in an animal. And the sloth, with all its unique and unusual features, almost seems to be prodding us to understand it precisely in this way."
Web Informant : Don't let shoppers name their price
"I found another way to get online bargains, though. It involves a simple hack to web shopping cart pages. All it takes is a text editor, a browser, and about five minutes of spare time."
I will enjoy watching
Possible Artworks
This is from an otherwise annoying piece of contemporary web/art, but I like the idea of using this link as a homepage or a daily ritual like the
word of the day
.
I had no idea
This is Not CNN
(unusually large) flash animations
The moped
is a popular method of transportation among tourists on the Vineyard, much to the consternation of people who actually live here. Over the winter, some industrious soul had bumper stickers printed that read "Mopeds are dangerous". They've been a big hit and you can see them on the tail of many a car. The other day, I spotted this
variation on the theme
.
NY Times : Tough Rules Stand Guard Over Canadian Culture
" 'This isn't just cars or refrigerators for sale; this is ideas,' [Norman] Jewison said. "And when you start exporting ideas, philosophies, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.' "
Kelly Hagerton, Product Manager Elron Software
"It's only Orwellian when organizations spy and don't tell employees." And 2 + 2 = 5.
Children's Books You Will Never See
Daddy Drinks Because You Cry
When it, hanging by the inside of the door to the shop owner's private , was mentioned afterwards the shapes I had noticed in my peripheral vision on my way out started to make sense.
It was the first and last shop we went to in Deruta. All the others that we saw, save for one that was selling garish Picasso -esque splatter comedies, continue to produce the same ornate and intricate decorative pieces that the town is famous for.