posts brought to you by the category “free beer”
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.
Easy Hotspot
Easy Hotspot is a bootable linux distribution that boots and runs completely from cd. It comes preconfigured to act as a wireless hotspot using the excellent nocat wireless gateway software. Configuration of a hotspot is done though a web interface.
After receiving configuration data for a hotspot our server will create a custom iso file with the specified configuration data. Creating a Hotspot is then as simple as burning the iso to cd and slapping the cd in a box with the proper hardware. If you choose to use the authorization services of your local public wireless internet group you can contribute a hotspot that can be used by anyone, thereby helping to provide Free Public Wireless Internet for all.
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You say “Atom”, I say “bookmark”
Karl commits the ultimate sacrilege
and says something nice about that thing, downtown, that used to be the Forum.
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One the funny things about Montréal is that listings for the city's only remaining porn theater
are always included with those for the repertory houses. At least one person I know has tried to convince me that Cinema L'Amour is a repertory cinema but I remain unconvinced. The other funny thing is that, for at least a year and a half, running the place was considered the pinnacle of cool among many of the Main's scenesters.
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More from the "This is My Cross to Bear" department : this bit about permalinks is also a crock of shit.
My god, people, get a grip and repeat after me : It's the software, stupid. What, you think twenty years of relational database weirdos were just sticking their fingers in their ears waiting for the two ends to meet and form the word
permalink? No one remembers the creation of the permalink because it's so shockingly obvious. Not in a "change the world" kind of way but rather in a "why are we having this conversation?" kind of way. The only thing that distinguishes a permalink from our old friend the HTML anchor (aside from the fact that the latter has been deprecated) is that often the software powering the former allows a single item to be rendered independent of it's surrounding posts. What with support for bells and whistles like XInclude, XPath and XSLT being included in client-side browsers even the rule that it's a (blog) tool-thing no longer holds. Meanwhile, this is the part where the Semantic Web freaks start getting excited so I will, posthaste, take my leave...
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I have a friend who joked once about turning a church into a pizza joint and calling it Cheesus Crust.
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XPointerLib
XPointerLib is a project providing XPointer support for Mozilla 1.0+, Netscape 7, and Phoenix 0.4. This code was motivated by the Annotea Project's use of XPointers to specify annotation locations.
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What the hell is a "bunny-hugger" ?
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : torpid
Torpid \Tor"pid\, a. [L. torpidus, fr. torpere to be stiff, numb, or torpid; of uncertain origin.] 1. Having lost motion, or the power of exertion and feeling; numb; benumbed; as, a torpid limb. Without heat all things would be torpid. --Ray. 2. Dull; stupid; sluggish; inactive. --Sir M. Hale. web1913
torpid adj 1: slow and apathetic; "she was fat and inert"; "a sluggish worker"; "a mind grown torpid in old age" [syn: {inert}, {sluggish}] 2: (biology) in a condition of biological rest or suspended animation; "dormant buds"; "a hibernating bear"; "torpid frogs" [syn: {dormant}, {hibernating(a)}] wn
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : bumptious
Bumptious \Bump"tious\, a. Self-conceited; forward; pushing. [Colloq.] --Halliwell. web1913
bumptious adj : offensively self-assertive [syn: {self-assertive}] wn
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : appurtenance
Appurtenance \Ap*pur"te*nance\, n. [OF. apurtenaunce, apartenance, F. appartenance, LL. appartenentia, from L. appertinere. See {Appertain}.] That which belongs to something else; an adjunct; an appendage; an accessory; something annexed to another thing more worthy; in common parlance and legal acceptation, something belonging to another thing as principal, and which passes as incident to it, as a right of way, or other easement to land; a right of common to pasture, an outhouse, barn, garden, or orchard, to a house or messuage. In a strict legal sense, land can never pass as an appurtenance to land. --Tomlins. --Bouvier. --Burrill. Globes . . . provided as appurtenances to astronomy. --Bacon. The structure of the eye, and of its appurtenances. --Reid. web1913
appurtenance n : a supplementary component [syn: {accessory}, {supplement}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : schmca
used when asking why
ex. person one: lets go eat a garden hose person two: schmca would we do that?
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : dilatory
Dilatory \Dil"a*to*ry\, a. [L. dilatorius, fr. dilator a delayer, fr. dilatus, used as p. p. of differe to defer, delay: cf. F. dilatoire. See {Dilate}, {Differ}, {Defer}.] 1. Inclined to defer or put off what ought to be done at once; given the procrastination; delaying; procrastinating; loitering; as, a dilatory servant. 2. Marked by procrastination or delay; tardy; slow; sluggish; -- said of actions or measures. Alva, as usual, brought his dilatory policy to bear upon hi? adversary. --Motley. {Dilatory plea} (Law), a plea designed to create delay in the trial of a cause, generally founded upon some matter not connected with the merits of the case. Syn: Slow; delaying; sluggish; inactive; loitering; behindhand; backward; procrastinating. See {Slow}. web1913
dilatory adj 1: inclined to waste time and lag behind [syn: {laggard}] 2: wasting time [syn: {dawdling}, {laggard}, {poky}, {pokey}] 3: using cautious slow strategy to wear down opposition; avoiding direct confrontation; "a fabian policy" [syn: {fabian}] wn
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DynDNS.org Announces $20, 000 Donation to Perl Foundation
"Thanks primarily to Perl and other Open Source technologies, we are able to provide DNS services to over 180,000 members of the Internet community. This is our way of giving back to some of the people whose tireless devotion to writing quality software has enabled us to provide our services to the Internet community over the past three years. ... Not only is Perl the core technology behind our services, but the Perl community has welcomed us both as an organization and as individuals. It seems natural for us to share our success with them." see also :
How to Donate to Perl in Corporate Fashion in 24 Hours
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Movable Thoughts #12
There is no way for the superuser to change the password for a subuser. All you can do is delete the user and then re-add them afterwards. I was pleased to see that a post is not also get deleted when it's author is removed from the system. But, since there is some sort of relational juju going on between the posts and authors databases, the remaining posts suddenly become orphans. At the very least, this makes for the tiresome task of going through a bunch of posts and reassigning an author for them. At worst there isn't presently much you can do about identifying an author whose posts you want to keep but who is no longer an active MT user. Probably the right thing to do is assign a "deleted" date property to each author and then modify the permissions check accordingly.
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IETF : iCalendar DTD Document (xCal)
"This [draft] memo defines how XML can be used to represent iCalendar objects. This memo includes the definition of the XML DTD for a XML document representation of an iCalendar object."
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is hardscrabble
| source : wn | hardscrabble adj 1: yielding little by great labor; "a hardscrabble farm"; "poor soil" [syn: {poor}] 2: of a bare living gained by great labor; "the sharecropper's hardscrabble life"; "a marginal existence" [syn: {marginal}]
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N.Y. Times : Art on City Streets Till the Cows Come Home
"We're the largest producer of public art in the world. There are a lot of copycats and a lot of different forms out there, but the cow has the absolute perfect size and dimensions. It's also probably the only animal in the world that is universally known and liked. If you're talking about fish, we don't have any connection with them except that we eat them."
Or, in the immortal words of the Kurt,
It's okay to eat fish / Because they don't have any feelings.
It is interesting that no mention was made of a similar project in Toronto, a couple of years ago, involving moose. This is probably because there is hardly a single statue anywhere in the city whose antlers haven't been removed. It reminds me of the story of Alcibiades who is said to have, on the night before the Athenians were to set off for battle, roamed the streets of the city knocking all the penises off the statues of Hermes that graced many a front lawn. Speaking of Kurt, I went to visit the Museum School in Boston -- that's a
rhinocerous
outside not a cow or defaced moose -- shortly after [his] suicide. I was sitting in the lobby area having some lunch when I noticed the hand-painted paper banners hanging from the exposed staircases. They were almost poetic in their simplicity.
Kurt
, they called out.
Kurt
. I haven't been back since. In the end, though, the most telling thing about the Times article is that the author negledted any mention of Joe Fafard's
bronze cows
, resting next to the obligatory big-city Mies van der Rohe towers in the heart of Toronto's financial district. I'm going to assume that this was because they did not fit in to the blueberry bagel flavoured world-view of subsequent animal projects. see also
Moose Truth - Toronto's Moose Conspiracy
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is deracinate
| source : web1913 | Deracinate \De*rac"i*nate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Deracinated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Deracinating}.] [F. d['e]raciner; pref. d['e]- (L. dis) + racine root, fr. an assumed LL. radicina, fr. L. radix, radicis, root.] To pluck up by the roots; to extirpate. [R.] While that the colter rusts That should deracinate such savagery. --Shak. | source : wn | deracinate v 1: move (people) forcibly from their homeland into a new and foreign environment; "The war uprooted many people" [syn: {displace}, {uproot}] 2: pull up by or as if by the roots; "uproot the vine that has spread all over the garden" [syn: {uproot}, {extirpate}, {root out}, {pull up}]
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is genuflect
| source : web1913 | Genuflect \Gen`u*flect"\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Genuflected}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Genuflecting}.] [See {Genuflection}.] To bend the knee, as in worship. | source : wn | genuflect v 1: bow in church or before a religious superior or image 2: bow in a servile manner [syn: {scrape}, {kowtow}]
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Paul Tchistopolskii : "Let's map the Windows 3.0 entities into Zope entities
and see what is missing. Perl CGIs are like simple DOS apps, Apache mod_perl things are like tricky DOS apps. Java apps are like Macintosh apps. Native Zope Applications are of course Zope Products."
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Sightings : Happy happy. Joy joy.
"I can't wait"
for the New York Times
to stop asking questions of such boring stiffs
in such a thinly veiled attempt at learning their readership.
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David Sweet : A Perl of a Site Map
"I hope I have inspired you to sneak into your boss's office and throw away all the photocopies of your site."
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Voir : I Shot the Sheriff
"Pour [ Joe Arpaio - shérif de Mariscopa County ], les webcams permettent au public de savoir ce qui se passe dans ses prisons; et ça, c'est leur droit. Guy Lemire est d'accord sur un point: les institutions carcérales doivent être redevables aux citoyens. «C'est pourquoi, au Canada, il existe des comités de citoyens pouvant faire l'inspection des prisons fédérales et dresser ensuite des rapports. C'est une façon plus approfondie et plus sérieuse de maintenir un droit de regard du public sur le fonctionnement des établissements de détention, explique-t-il. Les citoyens doivent avoir un droit de regard, mais de façon sérieuse, pas d'une façon médiatique davantage liée à des cotes d'écoute et à de la publicité, comme c'est le cas des webcams.» "
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Montreal Mirror : How to build a $240-million convention centre around a turn-of-the-century brick wall
This reminds me of the contruction site in downtown Montreal when Les Promenades De La Cathedrale was built in 1987. The giant pink skyscraper went up directly behind
Christ Church Cathedral
whose entire foundation was removed to make room for a
shopping mall and parking lot
.
"Resembling a giant ship in dry-dock, passers-by were arrested by the church's "floating" appearance; some were even heard to say "You wouldn't catch me going in there!". Sidewalk superintendents were numerous and eloquent - explaining their accurate (and not-so-accurate) engineering ideas to anyone who would listen." I once sang at Christ Church, with the
FACE Senior Treble Choir
, during the short year that I was still a soprano in high school. The tower's developers were granted a 99 year lease on the property, and when that expires the whole shebang falls under the ownership of the Anglican Church. If you've ever seen
Jesus de Montreal
and wondered about the building with the pyramids that gets all those lingering panoramic shots, it's Les Promenades De La Cathedrale. via
YULblog
"Resembling a giant ship in dry-dock, passers-by were arrested by the church's "floating" appearance; some were even heard to say "You wouldn't catch me going in there!". Sidewalk superintendents were numerous and eloquent - explaining their accurate (and not-so-accurate) engineering ideas to anyone who would listen." I once sang at Christ Church, with the
FACE Senior Treble Choir
, during the short year that I was still a soprano in high school. The tower's developers were granted a 99 year lease on the property, and when that expires the whole shebang falls under the ownership of the Anglican Church. If you've ever seen
Jesus de Montreal
and wondered about the building with the pyramids that gets all those lingering panoramic shots, it's Les Promenades De La Cathedrale. via
YULblog
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I realize that Mozilla is supposed to be the future;
an application development environment that will replace the operating systems of yore and all that. But it's a bad sign sign when the
latest Netscape 6 release
takes longer to install than, well, my operating system. Even if it didn't, the fact that I feel like I am working on an old teletype machine as I write this is almost enough to make me want to type : rm -rf /netscape. Later that day, our hero took note of
Cameron's
comment that "Mozilla is not Netscape" and downloaded
Mozilla M17
only to come to the conclusion that this was not unlike saying : "Margarine is not I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." True, but it does not change the fact that neither is butter.
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Damian Conway : Switch.pm
In case you were really tired of typing elsif all the time.
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National Post : The skeletal spatulas moved in spastic disunison
"like the legs of some waking beast preparing to lurch toward the unsuspecting spectators. Children cried. Old women squinted. It was almost meal time. ... 'Sometimes,' she continued conspiratorily, 'we use maple syrup.' But before she could go on, several other chefs rushed up and hushed her. Just as well. If she had said any more, they probably would have had to kill me."
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Congratulations go to Macromedia
for making Shockwave 8 the most annoying plug-in install/upgrade to date. That's quite an accomplishment after years of Real * installs. What is especially annoying is that this comes from the same company that pulled off the elegant and invisible Flash plug-in upgrade. What gives? Later that same day, our hero was heard to mutter "I think I hate Lingo almost as much as I hate JavaScript..."
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If anything is going to drive me away from computers
it's the fact that my handwriting just sucks these days.
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I've been known to mistake one object for another.
Often I look out the window and see the moon where there is only a streetlight. Lately, I keep turning around in the kitchen and thinking that the bottle of olive oil on the floor is one of my cats.
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Paul Maliszewski : Instructions for Reaching the Bridge to the 21st Century
"You used to have to climb the mountains of the new millennium, now you can just ride the escalator to tomorrow right up to the first summit. From there what you're looking for is the ladder of opportunity. There are lots of ladders around, but the one you want is beside the fire hydrant of gut feelings and the newspaper-vending machine of all that is sad and lonely." thanks to
oldstyle no.1 girl
.
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Simson Garfinkel : Excuse me, are you human?
WGBH : George Antheil's Ballet mécanique
"Composed in 1924 while Antheil lived in Paris, "Ballet mécanique" calls for three xylophones, four bass drums, a tamtam (gong), two pianos, a siren, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, and 16 synchronized player pianos." Live webcast, beginnning 21h15 EST.
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Big Brother isn't on your TV
Lawrence Barichello needs to get a life
"When you read that people are winning damages for forced sterilization, for botched surgeries and unwanted treatments, and see how the courts treat these things, you realize there is a good avenue here for a lawsuit. You are getting a part of your body cut off that is very sexually important and it is done for no reason. It is malpractice, quite frankly."
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Andy Oram : The Lexus, the Olive Tree, and the Internet
This is not the sort of thing I would have ever expected to see in
web review
. Good for them.
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WaSP : An Open Letter to Microsoft
"We've written a letter (right) outlining our position. The more of you who send it to Microsoft, the bigger the dent we can make in their reticence to commit to full standards compliance, and the likelier we are to have fully standards-compliant browsers in this lifetime."
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iMP Magazine on Y2K
"What does the problem and our fascination with [it] tell us about our dependence on complex technological systems? What have we learned that may help us understand and manage these systems? And what have we learned about ourselves?" via
librarian.net
.
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Dimanche magazine
"Le fumeur et la cigarette sont-ils en train de devenir les boucs émissaires de toutes les intolérances? C'est la question que soulève le film Cigarette, une récente production de l'Office national du film du Canada réalisée par Monique LeBlanc. Ginette Lamarche, animatrice de Dimanche magazine, discute du propos du film avec le comédien et co-scénariste Yvan Vanhecke." Cigarette was awarded the prize for Best Documentary at the 1998
Atlantic Film Festival
. real audio
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Updates may be a bit spartan this weekend
while my mother is on-Island. ( She brought
real bagels
too! Yay! )
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Daniel Pinkwater on Mensa.
"I don't think I have to make an argument in support of how cool I am." real audio.
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Road Tripping
Josey Vogels reviews the Bad Girl's Guide. "The BGG tells you how to come up with a road name by combining what you had for breakfast with the name of the last place you peed by the road. If Waffles Minnesota doesn?t suit, try your homemade porn name. Combine the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name (Uh, that?d make me Mandy Koks, not bad). " Meanwhile, This American Life
debunks the myth of being On The Road
.