posts brought to you by the category “web apps”
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.
Bob DuCharme : Datatype Checking with XSLT 2.0
There's actually some good, even if ironic, news about data typing support in XSLT 2.0: if you're still using DTDs, and you're putting off a move to any schema format, you can use XSLT 2.0 stylesheets to add datatype checking to your system, further postponing a move to schemas.
meta
This is the network of our disconnect.
What happened to all those English majors
who were running the Internet during the bubble?
meta
This one's for Pete.
Ponie is a version of Perl 5 that will run on Parrot.
To the naked eye that sentence is almost as
incomprehensible as an RDF statement...
meta
aaron:2 + boris:2 = boris:5
From: Aaron Straup Cope
To: boris
Subject: Re: Hrm.. Echo?
Date: 27 Jun 2003 08:08:02 -0400
Yeah, I've heard of echo. I wish them luck, but I honestly don't think
it will fly. For a few reasons:
In among all the talk of a common syndication format is talk of a common
API and that's *never* going to happen. I spent a little bit of time
thrashing around with this on the weblog-devel list and it became clear
that given the difficulties in identifying just the parts of a post
(body; title, body; title,link,body; excerpt,body; etc.) we weren't ever
going to get very far.
Two points here: 1) that we were even able to agree on the idea of
"post" speaks volumes about the influence that RSS has had on things 2)
that we didn't succeed in creating a Grand Unifying Theory of Weblog is
okay and probably a Good Thing.
I've said this a few times in the last couple days, spewing almost
nothing but pure bile yesterday [1], these are technical problems.
Everybody wants some magic seamless import/export functionality (or at
least the idea of it; I have yet to understand what people are going to
*do* with it when they get it,) The impression I get is that they think
some kind of dorky, the network is my pal, group hug is the way to deal
with it. It is not.
It is not, because anything that gets developed will, in short order, be
RSS-ed. That is, no one is going to wait around to achieve consensus on
whether or not their patches to the spec are approved. Not users and
certainly not developers. Let me pause for a moment and say, lest you
think I have turned in to some kind of irate laissez faire crank that I
am all for consensus where applicable. XML is a good place for
standardization; weblogs and the various bits associated with them are
not. A weblog has always been, whatever anyone wanted to be (just do a
Google search on "Ben Brown 3000 words") and, by extension so, is its
static representation and its I/O "methods" (API, if any.)
Any standardization there is today is simply the result of convention
which is fine, but don't confuse it for the "stoneness of the stone" so
to speak.
People are trying to pin it down (again) because they think there's big
money somewhere in here, atleast in the short term. What they are really
trying to do is pin down RSS (which was pinned down a long time ago) and
formalize the weblog as its vehicle. They can probably do the first, but
people will continue to do whatever they want on their weblogs. That is
the Idea of Weblog.
RSS is not a weblog archive format, despite what other people may say.
It never was; it has always just been an XML representation of the
intersection of many different weblogs (what is the role of the
<link>
element, anyone?) and it sure looks like people got blinded by the
light. Weblog authors and tool-maker have too many divergent needs and
interests to ever follow one another's lead. Never mind the social
engineering.
It's not rocket science. All people need is for tool-makers to provide a
static XML dump of their content. The semantics don't really matter;
docs would help but it's not the end of the world. Any kind of
interchange of content is going to require human intervention. I sense
that people want to believe this isn't true but, well, they're wrong.
We're not crunching numbers here. It's human thought, with all its
subtleties and contradictions, and computers suck when it comes to
grokking stuff like that.
We're going to have to keep have holding their little binary hands for a
long time to come. We're going to have to keep on actively maintaining
lists, mental or otherwise, that say
aaron:2 + boris:2 = boris:5
.
Which sucks, perhaps, but people had better get used to it. That's life.
That's the bad news. The good news is that these days we have tools and
frameworks (repeat after me: weblogs are not a framework) that make the
actual drudgery easier.
---
[1] http://aaronland.info/weblog/archive/5100
meta
John E. Simpson, the XML Q&A guy, has some nice things to say about the XML Résumé extensions I wrote.
Me : xml résumé (XSL) formatting extensions 0.4
Doron Rosenberg : The XSLT/JavaScript Interface In Gecko
Simon Wistow on Meals Ready to Eat
You could tip the non dairy whitener over flames to make pretty green fireballs - this was obviously not great if you were trying to conceal your position but then you wouldn't be lighting a fire anyway.
meta
John Carleton : "I was almost done with my ramen"
Maybe it's just because I once knew some
one who became a
Hairy
Fishnut
and was promptly nicknamed Snack Ramen, but for the life of me I can't
understand why people still eat the stuff.
meta
You don't need to tell me who "to raise a glass to."
You don't need to tell me who "to raise a glass to", you fucking idiot -- I raise six glasses every night, just to get drunk enough to love this country like I did as a kid: without feeling like it's using me .
meta
Well, that just says it all doesn't it?
Me : Net::Blogger.pm 0.8.4
Added support for the
metaWeblog.newMediaObject
method. As always, this will take a while to make its way on to the
CPAN so you can grab a copy
over here
if you're feeling eager.
meta
Paul Martin : Why Am I Keeping a Blog?
Dork. For those of you not keeping score Paul Martin is, for all intents and purposes, the next Prime Minister of Canada in waiting. (It remains to be seen whether Ti Jean (that's Prime Minister Poutine for all you Americans out there) manages to shit-can his nemesis' run for the leadership of the Liberal Party (read:Ontario) between now and his supposed departure from politics.) Mr. Martin is perhaps best known for butchering federal spending on health care transfers to the provinces. He is less well-known for also slashing proposed federal funding for bringing high speed Internet access to rural Canada; a program that would have said so much more than a spattering of pithy comments from the campaign trail. So you've got a weblog, Paul. Big fucking deal: talk minus action equals zero. via montreal cityAfter all, it's not like I can pretend to be the kind of guy that spends a lot of time surfing the web. To be honest, until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know what the hell a blog was - I joked that I thought it was something that might climb out of a swamp.
meta
http://mah.everybody.org/weblog/archive/80614074
xSiteable
Apparently, this is a Windows-only thing which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense but I haven't had a chance to look at the source yet. via a frog in the valleyis a complete small-to-medium-size site development kit created in XSLT ... utilizing XTM for structure, binding and other cleverness.
meta
I recently built a fresh FreeBSD install.
I run Windowmaker because I hate X-Windows
with a passion and it's the only windowing system I've found that just
works. Periodically, I think about translucent shell windows but they
are never worth the trouble. This is the list of my dock-thingies, from
top to bottom:
- the dock thingy thingy
- a clock
- the wm prefs thingy (arguably unnecessary)
- xterm
- emacs
- phoenix (mostly just because mozilla takes so damn long to build)
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Dan Brickley : XMP Metadata Extraction Demo
I guess it's time to start working on version 0.3 of Image::Shoehorn::Gallery ... via more like thisThis experimental metadata extractor will retrieve a document ... and look for embedded metadata stored using the Adobe XMP embedding conventions.
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mod_pubsub
is an attempt to write an Open Source Apache module which implements asynchronous publish and subscribe messaging.
refers to
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Me : Net::Google.pm 0.52
Fixes to let the package work properly with
5.005_02. As always, until the CPAN listings update you can grab a copy
over here
. see also :
docs
.
meta
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : numinous
numinous adj 1: evincing the presence of a deity; "a numinous wood"; "the most numinous moment in the Mass 2: of or relating to or characteristic of a numen wn
meta
Things I learned on my summer vacation :
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : indignate
Similar to "indeed" but used in a posh accent. Pronounced in-dig-narta.
ex. "Have you had enough caviar, Giles?" "Indignate, I have, Samuel."
meta
Ed Hawco : Bullet holes, Tokyo Restaurant, Montreal
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : mellifluous
Mellifluous \Mel*lif"lu*ous\, a. [L. mellifluus; mel, mellis, honey (akin to Gr. ?, Goth. milip) + fluere to flow. See {Mildew}, {Fluent}, and cf. {Marmalade}.] Flowing as with honey; smooth; flowing sweetly or smoothly; as, a mellifluous voice. -- {Mel*lif"lu*ous*ly}, adv. web1913
mellifluous adj : pleasing to the ear; "the dulcet tones of the cello" [syn: {dulcet}, {honeyed}, {mellisonant}, {sweet}] wn
meta
Android #5 : MailCal
"When you get an email you want to save in the
calendar, save it to a folder such as cal/2002/03/15. Then you can use
MailCal to view and search through the calendar. The subject of the email
becomes the title for the calendar entry. MailCal has many options to
view the calendar based on different criteria and can also output the
calendar in html format for inclusion in your website."
This weblog made with Pine?
refers to
meta
We were driving down Crescent Street watching the funny little hotel,
across the street from the Concordia Fine
Arts building, down on
René
Levesque
, being demolished by a wrecking ball. Even on good days Crescent
Street is the haunt of the aggressively normal but today, with an
infestation of Maple Leafs [sic] fans in town for the hockey game, it
was almost unbearable. Today was also the first day of Not Winter and
the bars that line the street were full of Leaf fans, in their shiny
dry-cleaned hockey jerseys, spilling out on to the terrasses. "Go
home," my friend called out. "When was the last you won the Cup,
anyway?" I was more interested in the wrecking ball but I did hear one
of them answer back, "It's not important." Which sums it up pretty
well, I think.
meta
mp3PhoneList
There a bunch of these things starting to
pop up for the iPod. Unfortunately, all anyone is doing is writing ID3
tags. No one's taken the leap to actually
write
the phone list data as an MP3 track. All in all, it's starting to look
like the iPod is going to bastardize the MP3 format much like weblogs
did to RSS... see also :
Sable
and
glossary of adaptive technologies : text to speech
meta
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : staboogie
When you walk up to a cute nose and squeeze it, you say staboogie.
ex. Hey, come here and let me staboogie your nose!
meta
The mod_perl Developer's Cookbook : Apache::TaintRequest.pm
"overrides the print mechanism in the mod_perl
Apache module. The new print method tests each chunk of text for
taintedness. If it is tainted we assume the worst and html-escape it
before printing." see also :
I hate squirrels
meta
Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System
"The purpose of this document is to define the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Reference Model for
an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). An OAIS is an archive,
consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted
the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a
Designated Community... The reference model addresses a full range of
archival information preservation functions including ingest, archival
storage, data management, access, and dissemination. It also addresses
the migration of digital information to new media and forms, the data
models used to represent the information, the role of software in
information preservation, and the exchange of digital information among
archives. It identifies both internal and external interfaces to the
archive functions, and it identifies a number of high-level services at
these interfaces..." (pdf)
Sound familiar?
meta
Apparently, O'Reilly is prepping a book on Slashcode...
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is recherche
| source : web1913 | Recherch'e
\Re*cher`ch['e]"\, a. [F.] Sought out with care; choice. Hence: of rare
quality, elegance, or attractiveness; peculiar and refined in kind. |
source : wn | recherche adj : lavishly elegant and refined [syn:
{exquisite}]
meta
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is caterwaul
| source : web1913 | Caterwaul \Cat"er*waul\, v.
i. [imp. & p. p. {Caterwauled}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Caterwauling}.]
[Cat + waul, wawl, to cry as a cat.] To cry as cats in rutting time; to
make a harsh, offensive noise. --Coleridge. | source : web1913 |
Caterwaul \Cat"er*waul\, n. A caterwauling. | source : wn | caterwaul n :
the yowling sound made by a cat in heat v : utter shrieks, as of cats
[syn: {yowl}]
meta
From the pullquotes department : the Jazz Fest and two-year olds
Car flowers. Funny hats. GNU's not giraffe.
Bye bye music! Bye bye MUSIC!! BYE BYE MUSIC!!!!
meta
Zero Devil Development : phpDOM
"is a class library for creating, extending and
manipulating XML documents. It is based on the DOM/XML library of PHP
4.x. ... phpDOM includes two packages: phpDOM for pure XML, and
phpDOM.XHTML for well-formed XHTML documents. These two packages can be
used as examples of how to extend the base classes."
meta
Eric Howeler : Paranoid Chic, The Aethestics of Surveillance
"Our visible and invisible world is continually
scanned by electronic technologies. The paranoid state is not the
exception, but the norm. Its claims of conspiracy and persecution seem
ever more justified in the Postmodern, post-contemporary, post-millennial
world. There is a reemergence of a new kind of paranoia in fashion
photography, design and advertising: Paranoid Chic, or the aesthetics of
surveillance. ... A billboard in Times Square epitomizes Paranoid Chic. A
couple in an elevator is oblivious to the camera. They are caught up in a
slouchy embrace. Above the image is an image of a surveillance camera -
presumably the camera that recorded the image below it - creating a kind
of surveillance diptych. Surveillance is a given, it is everywhere.
Surveillance is sexy. Big Brother is watching, so you have to look good."
A kind of surveillance diptych.
It sounds so kinky.
meta
The Society of Robotic Combat
refers to
meta
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to meet Bonne Fete Barbie.
Regular expressions reformulated as XML applications.
In case you needed another reason to start
painting again.
meta
Alan Lightman : "The way that cell phones are used is emblematic.
When you're on the cell phone, you're not where
your body is. You're somewhere out there in hyperspace. By always being
somewhere else, rather than where you are, you're nowhere. It represents
the lost state of society. We're nowhere."
meta
Rasterweb : "One of the Apple employees said
'I'd uh, prefer, if you didn't mess around with
the command line.' I really should have typed rm -rf and then said 'What
did you say?'" Let the games begin! Do you hear that sound in the wind?
It's the sound of high school sysadmins the world over muttering : fuck
fuck fuck....
meta
It's not quite an iBrator
but probably as close as I want to get to one.
meta
Seven 2 Eleven
paintings by Daniel McCleary
meta
I never found the source, but apparently 80% of the budget that the
federal government allocates for Canada Day celebrations goes to
Quebec. This on a weekend where upwards of 80,000 families in Montreal
alone are moving apartments. This from a Minister of Heritage who blew
50 million bucks to give every Canadian a flag and who went to the
States and held up
The Rant
as a shining example of Canadian culture. So, if your country is in
need of a Minister of Patriotism, we'd be happy to sell you Sheila
Copps.meta
I swore I would never learn C.
I bought an
eyemodule
. Every once in a while I get niche-marketed so well that I set aside all
my bile and hatred and general misgivings of humanity to become the model
consumer; I bought one of these as soon as I heard about them. I don't
know much about the guts of the PalmOS but I do know that everything is
stored magic Palm databases. Deep down, I knew this when I bought the
camera but it was still a huge let down when I realized that I could use
network apps to talk to the Network and I could use the camera to take
pictures but there is still no easy way to make the two play together. I
want to be able to take pictures on the road and email them to others
*while* I'm on the road. It's a PDA for crying out load! Okay, so the
Palm doesn't grok JPEGs (bad) but there is no way for me to "talk" to the
cameras image database from another Palm app without
rolling my own
. If I could then I would be able to send MIME-encoded gibberish to a
mailbot and only have to munge stuff once. I'm not sure who I'm pointing
fingers at, but I want to point them at someone because I really don't
want to learn C....
meta
NY Times : The Electronic Fishbowl
"She is frequently approached by people who want
to touch her hair."
meta
L0pht : BeamCrack
"is a simple application that will set or reset
the bit in each application's database header which tells the launcher
that it should or shouldn't be beamable, thus bypassing the PalmPilot's
infantile copy-protection. Useful for PalmOS >= 3.0 which support
beaming via the PalmPilot infrared port. "
refers to
meta
Inspired by Rasterweb's
Not Powered by Blogger
post and by
the
silly flame-fanning of an imaginary blog-war
, I've decided to do my part to try and piss everyone off.
My small
contribution
can be seen at the bottom of this page, or as William Golding once wrote,
"Ralph smiled at the success of his tiny joke." Meanwhile, if you've
gotten this far and are thinking
what a jerk
, that may well be true. Nevertheless, you should still read
this
essay
and, to come full circle,
write yer own damn code...
meta
CERT : Results of the Distributed-Systems Intruder Tools Workshop
"In November 1999, experts addressed issues
surrounding distributed-systems intruder tools. This paper is one outcome
of the DSIT Workshop. In it, workshop participants examine the use of
distributed-system intruder tools and provide information about
protecting systems from attack by the tools, detecting the use of the
tools, and responding to attacks." (pdf)
meta
I had no idea that
It was a dark and stormy evening
when
Ted Rall
wrote an editorial piece about
The King of
Comix
and boiled the blood of the faithful. The readers rose up and answered
en-Maus
[sic] until finally
Danny
Hellman
decided the time had come
to take
matters into his own hands
.
meta
I saw Three Kings tonight
When the Gulf War started, I had the luxury of
spending my days and nights painting and drawing. The day after the
bombing began I went down to the U.S. consulate, in Montreal, to sketch
the protesters chant things like "Peace, not war" (duh) until someone
spray-painted a peace symbol on the building and the riot squad moved in.
I went home, and banged out
a
series of drawings
which I photocopied and papered the city with. I don't know if they made
a difference, but atleast I felt like I had done something in a situation
where most people I knew felt stripped of their voice and their ability
to do anything.
meta
Do Androids Dream of Jon Katz?
"As he was thousands of years ago, man will again
become a fairly rare animal, probably a nomadic one. Towns may still
exist in places of unusual beauty or historic importance, but most homes
will be self-contained and completely mobile, relocatable to any spot
within hours. The continents will have reverted to wilderness; a rich
variety of life forms will return." Huh? Who programmed these uber-gaia
machines? How does [he] know that all artificial life will come with the
soul of a Greenpeace activist built in? I enjoy reading Jon Katz' work,
but it would be so much better if he would just focus focus focus on the
topic at hand rather than running everything through a
better-living-with-technology / politicians-are-stupid filter.
meta
Le Monde : Les ambitions numériques de Corbis inquiètent les photojournalistes
Corbis is Bill Gates and a rose is still a rose
by any other name. I am troubled, and angered, by his naked pursuit of
acquiring as much of the imagery we define and position our lives by as
possible.
meta
Scope on the Air Guitar World Championships
"The competition wound down with an
all-contestant jam of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." The
audience, and all the participants in the webcast, were encouraged to
join along in the arm-jerking frenzy for world peace. As the
Championship's website states: 'If everyone played the air guitar, there
would be no wars because the soldiers would have to lay down their
weapons.'"
meta
The MacPerl Mailings Lists
online, archived and <a href =
"http://bumppo.net/lists/sherlock/macperl.src.hqx">Sherlock-ed</a>.
Courtesy the nice people at bumppo.net.
refers to
meta
Le Monde on transporters
"Il y a deux ans, l'Autrichien Anton Zeilinger et
son équipe ont réussi à faire ce que Charles Bennett avait imaginé. A
quelques mètres de distance, le jumeau d'un photon a été recréé à
l'identique. Mais, et tant pis pour les inconditionnels de Star Trek, le
photon original a, comme le prévoyait la théorie, disparu dans
l'opération, comme si à chaque téléportation à bord de l'Enterprise, le
capitaine Kirk disparaissait à jamais et laissait la place à un double."
meta
wtf?
-
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.
-
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