posts brought to you by the category “aaronland”
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.
Ceçi n'est pas du mileage.
refers to
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Me : Net::Delicious.pm 0.1
The version number (0.1) reflects the fact the del.icio.us API still has a great big
I am a moving targetdisclaimer around its neck. This package implements the API in its entirety as of 2004-01-30.
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It's Aaronland, not “Arronland”
— and you can bite me which hopefully won't
provide difficulties for readers to understand the information itself. Eh?
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Silly rabbit...
Ceçi n'est pas une poste.
Not much of interest has happened during the last week.
Unless you count the spat over XML error handling, which I don't. It was a controversial decision : I'm shocked! It's been borne out to be a good decision, HTML notwithstanding : Shocked, I tell you!
I briefly considered posting an open letter to television news executives imploring them to let, no force, their on-air personalities to wear toques when it's - 40° Celcius outside. If not for their sake then for the impressionable young children watching them.
A bunch of stuff got upgraded on the machine that serves as the
staging
server for this weblog and now the fancy-pants program that does all the heavy lifting, generating pages and indexes, is dumping core whenever the
XSLT
function
aa:permalink()
is called. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the Deep and Meaningfuls in that one.
I'm not overly concerned about this, right now. It will get fixed but I'm not going to turn my life upside down over it. And some pretty awful stuff has happened in the neighbourhood, recently, that helps keep things in perspective.
In the meantime, this is one of the best stories I've heard in a long time:
“You killed my girlfriend's fish. No, you made her kill her fish.”
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Hello world.
The Remembrance Day 2003 reading list has been updated
with suggestions from
David Tilley
.
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I love rolling my own.
The boys couldn't get enough of the porcetta.
All men are pigs, Tarano, August 2003
Cut off its nose!! Cut off its nose!!!they cried in unison, as though they had just stepped out of the chorus line for Lord of the Flies - The Musical! Over and over, as each piece was cut away from the torso. By the time the youngest one started screaming
Cut out its brain!! Cut out his br-AAAAA-iii-iinnnnnn!!!at the top of his five year old lungs, more than a few people had commented that it helps when the people serving the food have no idea what the guests are saying.
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see also : If I ever taught computer programming
Spinach risotto, Montréal, September 2003
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RDF::Laces.pm
Transforms RDF thingies in to Perl objects with corresponding methods accessing for the various bits.
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If I ever taught programming, I would set aside an entire class for making risotto.
It would be proof that there are just some things computers can't do. That all your fancy code-fu won't save you from standing in from of the stove stirring, for at least a half an hour. And that's okay.
Ed
mentioned that few, if any, labs would be equipped for this sort of thing what with them being full of computers and all. This led to some very silly images of people making virtual risotto and "stirring" their mice for twenty or thirty minutes.
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freebsd-update
FreeBSD Update is a system for automatically building, distributing, fetching, and applying binary security updates for FreeBSD. This makes it possible to easily track the FreeBSD security branches without the need for fetching the source tree and recompiling (except on the machine building the updates, of course). Updates are cryptographically signed.
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I also heard about this plan to move the planetarium
out to the Big O, while I sloshed sleepily around the morning. It seems to me that they might as well just move it *in* to the Big O. Both have a dangerous fondness for light shows with lots of prog-rock and it would probably bring each back to life. If the city chose to spend the money they've ear-marked for YA-roof on a decent sound system, you can be guaranteed that the place would fill up every weekend with acid-heads, phish-weenies and all manner of people who look like deers caught in the headlights. See also :
bigger is better...
and cue the rent-a-solos.
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Me : Net::Google.pm 0.60_01
If someone out there is connecting to Google through an HTTP proxy and can double check that the new
http_proxy
method works, I'd be grateful. see also :
changes
and
docs
.
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Now, I've never really been one for conceptual art
but unlike the esteemed Mr. Kimmelman I thought this was pretty interesting and daring piece of work. Of course, it was sort of deflated by the knowledge that the artist was too dense or too naive to have
never imagined what would happenby leaving the pieces in the subway. Well, duh. What the hell else was the point, you ninny? To take some clever Gap-ad photos to show your class-mates? Anyway, shouldn't the word "straphangers" [sic] be hyphenated?
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Apparently, the CBC now has a line item for canaries.
(real audio)
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10, 000
Matthew Wall-Smith : The Network Society: A Shift in Cognitive Ecologies?
asc says: "By examining the psychodynamic effects on human cognition of the adoption of the technology of writing we can logically assess and contextualize the potential effect of the massification of networked information systems on our day-to-day thought processes. The identification of congruent, parallel and differential affect between writing and network technologies demands that their development be considered above and beyond the dictates and imperatives of consumer capitalism, it demands that the Internet be thought of in terms of public infrastructure rather than saleable capital." asc says: Dude, where's my car? bendoh says: did a lawyer write that? bendoh says: He should have put a smiley face at the end of that. It would've made it all better. asc says: Academic. asc says: Lawyers would almost certainly argue in favour of saleable captial because then it would subject to all kinds of litigation. bendoh says: I would not want to read that paper. It would make my head fall off and subsequently explode. asc says: That would be a symptom of massification and the differential aspect of the network. bendoh says: If I could think of anything remotely witty to respond to that with, I would say it. asc says: Dude, where's my car? bendoh says: hehe
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : exegete
Exegetist \Ex`e*ge"tist\, n. One versed in the science of exegesis or interpretation; -- also called {exegete}. web1913
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Bill : "Come for the fries! Stay for the talk of CSS and porn!"
I can see the t-shirts and other swag, already.
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Me : XML::Filter::XML_Directory_2XHTML.pm 1.0
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : sillying
Joking around.
ex. When Franklin called the boy "squirt," he was'nt being mean--he was just sillying.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : ramping like a hose
Going crazy; over-processing; suffering from too much work and poor support. At least, that's what we think it means....
ex. "The (130-nanometer) process is ramping like a hose," said Frank Spindler, Vice President of Intel's Mobile Products Group.
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Did the Earth move?
I don't have any issues with how my comments were reported, but just for thoroughness' sake, this is the unedited version of what I said. If nothing else, it will give credit where it is due for the zippy quote at the end of the article...
When asked to elaborate on that last bit :I'm not sure that the API, per se, will do much. It's got a pretty high hack-value and gee-whiz factor...
- http://aaronland.net/weblog/archive/4210
- http://www.decafbad.com/news_archives/000087.shtml#000087
- http://interconnected.org/googlematic/
...but I doubt that it will make the Earth move.
Notwithstanding the fact that the search widget combined with the cache widget will return non-HTML documents, you sort of have to ask yourself : why wouldn't I search for web documents in a web browser?
On the other hand, it will probably give a big push towards making people more familiar and comfortable building sites/tools using distributed widgets.
See also : http://use.perl.org/~gnat/journal/4163
It's sort of the same idea as the one that the "internet operating system" gang like to trumpet. For example, pulling in remote content or manipulating your own content via a remote function as a page (let's just imagine we're talking about the web) is being published [1].
You can sort of see this happening with the many publish/subscribe widgets that are popping up [2]. That is, there is a growing interconnectedness among pages, sites, applications.
I'm not sure I buy it, though. It's plenty cool but there are lots of problems that need to be worked out. All the same problems that plague popular websites (bandwidth, scaling, etc.) are going to plague popular web services and not everyone has a thousand servers like Google does[3].
Not to mention issues of reliability and the nagging sense that I think a lot of people have that it's just the carrot (cool-ness!) before the stick (micro-payments!)
Mostly I was just trying to say that being able to "plug" Google-ness in to your website will, if nothing else, provide an example of "distributed computing" that is not as abstract as those that have come before it.
- RSS feeds are a good example
- http://radio.weblogs.com/0100059/stories/2002/02/25/whatIsPublishAndSubscribe.html
- http://fyuze.com/api
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : baggapple
Used when you stub your toe or hurt yourself. Scream this in place of a curse word.
ex. Baggapple, I just hurt my finger hammering.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : trustafarian
"someone who has adopted the style and demeanor of one who eschews financial success, but with generous help from parents' trust fund. Often seen sporting thriftstore clothing, dreadlocks and a brand new vehicle."
ex. ""You used to get real cheap beer here, but all the trustafarians infiltrated and prices have skyrocketed.""
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Radio Crankypants #21: The Unbearable Instantness of Outlines
So, I spent some time this morning writing a SAX filter to read an OPML file and slurp "instant outlines". The short version is : you should be able to do this with exactly one data file and one parsing/munging widget. As it stands, you need two data files : the outline and a storage unit -- a table in Frontier, a Storable file in Perl -- to maintain the list of subscriptions and (I guess it's a six-of-one thing) their file size. What is aggravating about this approach is that all the necessary information for doing instant outlines can be stored in the outline file itself. The (unwritten) DTD for an OPML file is:
<!ELEMENT outline (outline?|outline*)>
<!ATTLIST outline text CDATA #REQUIRED
created CDATA #REQUIRED
type (link|foo|bar) #IMPLIED
url CDATA #IMPLIED>
Rewritten to accomodate "inline" instant outlines it would look like:
<!ELEMENT outline (outline?|outline*)>
<!ATTLIST outline text CDATA #REQUIRED
created CDATA #REQUIRED
modified CDATA #REQUIRED
type (link|subscription|foo|bar) #IMPLIED
url CDATA #IMPLIED>
Which would let you do something neat like:
# @ISA = qw (XML::SAX::Base)
sub start_element {
my $self = shift;
my $data = shift;
if ($data->{Name} ne "outline") {
$self->SUPER::start_element($data);
return 1;
}
# This part of SAX2 really sucks...
if ($data->{Attributes}->{'{}type'}->{Value} ne "subscription") {
$self->SUPER::start_element($data);
return 1;
}
# mmmm...suckiness
my $uri = $data->{Attributes}->{'{}url'}->{Value};
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET=>$uri);
# I don't think Radio does this; it should.
$ua->max_size(MAX_SIZE);
# The Yeastie Girls wrote a great song called "You Suck"
$request->if_modified_since($data->{Attributes}->{'{}modified'}->{Value});
my $outline = $ua->request($request);
# Not modified. Move along, now.
# Needs to carp unless return code is OK
# or NOT_MODIFIED
if (! $outline->is_success()) {
$self->SUPER::start_element($data);
return 1;
}
# Suck it hard, baby
$data->{Attributes}->{'{}modified'}->{Value} = time;
$self->SUPER::start_element($data);
# Pass $outline->content() off to a secondary filter
# and keep munging. Note to self: hooks to prevent
# recursive instant-ness...
}
Oh well.
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From the "Because I Can" department : Searchable RSS
There are plans afoot to provide a SOAP/XML-RPC widget for the search interface but there are some problems that need to be sorted out first. see also :
forbidden searches
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Danny O'Brien : haiku.py
discovers "Found Haiku" ... in plain text files.
Which strikes me as being several orders of magintude more interesting than "google-it-ing" a text. Didn't someone write a bookmarklet to feed a piece of selected text to a search engine like two years ago? I think I will have to write a daily op-ed haiku widget... Mr. O'Brien has also written a
tool for synching
a PalmOS device with a
PaperPDA
device.
via
boing boing
refers to
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : bigity-bam
Used to describe something good that happens very quickly and out of the blue. From the movie "Mall Rats".
ex. "I put a dollar into the slot machine, and Bigity-Bam. I won $100."
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : prolix
Prolix \Pro*lix"\ (?; 277), a. [L. prolixus extended, long, prolix, probably fr. pro before, forward + liqui to flow, akin to liquidus liquid; cf. OL. lixa water: cf. F. prolixe. See {Liquid}.] 1. Extending to a great length; unnecessarily long; minute in narration or argument; excessively particular in detail; -- rarely used except with reference to discourse written or spoken; as, a prolix oration; a prolix poem; a prolix sermon. With wig prolix, down flowing to his waist. --Cowper. 2. Indulging in protracted discourse; tedious; wearisome; -- applied to a speaker or writer. Syn: Long; diffuse; prolonged; protracted; tedious; tiresome; wearisome. Usage: {Prolix}, {Diffuse}. A prolix writer delights in circumlocution, extended detail, and trifling particulars. A diffuse writer is fond of amplifying, and abounds in epithets, figures, and illustrations. Diffuseness often arises from an exuberance of imagination; prolixity is generally connected with a want of it. web1913
prolix adj : tediously prolonged or tending to speak or write at great length; "editing a prolix manuscript"; "a prolix lecturer telling you more than you want to know" [ant: {concise}] wn
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : ineluctable
Ineluctable \In`e*luc"ta*ble\, a. [L. ineluctabilis; pref. in- not + eluctabilis to be surmounted, fr. eluctari to struggle out of, to surmount: cf. F. in['e]luctable. See {Eluctate}.] Not to be overcome by struggling; irresistible; inevitable. --Bp. Pearson. The ineluctable conditions of matter. --Hamerton. web1913
ineluctable adj : impossible to avoid or evade:"inescapable conclusion"; "an ineluctable destiny"; "an unavoidable accident" [syn: {inescapable}, {unavoidable}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : talkintuitive
A descriptor of someone comfortable with or adept at conversation; someone "easy to talk to."
ex. After we got to know each other over a couple of drinks, she was talkintuitive, so I thought I'd ask her back to my place.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : spurp
When a person tries to speak, but burps instead.
ex. The crowd was amused by her spurp.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is tintinnabulation
| source : web1913 | Tintinnabulation \Tin`tin*nab`u*la"tion\, n. A tinkling sound, as of a bell or bells. --Poe. | source : wn | tintinnabulation n : the sound of a bell ringing; "the distinctive ring of the church bell"; "the ringing of the telephone"; "the tintinnabulation that so volumnously swells from the ringing and the dinging of the bells"--E. A. Poe [syn: {ring}, {ringing}]
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Cory Doctorow : Yours is a Very Bad Hotel
Eric Meyer : CSS2 Reference Sidebar [for Mozilla]
mmmmm...sidebars. Which, needless to say, got me thinking that the next logical step in the whole
categories as rss as html
thread is just a stylesheet and an
onclick
event away from categories as rss as html as
sidebar
widget.
Whiz! Bang! Crash! Splat!
via
scottandrew
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Matt Segeant's slides from his AxKit presentation at TPC5
I'm
not usually
one for slides, but these look to have enough code and meat as to make them useful.
(pdf)
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You can imagine my surprise
when I noticed that the magnets had been taped to the fridge.
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Mark-Jason Dominus : TRS80.pm
"At present, there is no port of Perl to the TRS-80 Model I computer. Until there is, this module is provided to simulate the TRS-80 environment."
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is raiment
| source : web1913 | Raiment \Rai"ment\, n. [Abbrev. fr. arraiment. See {Array}.] 1. Clothing in general; vesture; garments; -- usually singular in form, with a collective sense. Living, both food and raiment she supplies. --Dryden. 2. An article of dress. [R. or Obs.] --Sir P. Sidney. | source : wn | raiment n : especially fine or decorative clothing [syn: {array}, {finery}, {regalia}] v : provide with clothes or put clothes on [syn: {dress}, {clothe}, {enclothe}, {garb}, {tog}, {garment}, {habilitate}, {fit out}, {apparel}] [ant: {undress}]
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Marcel Bresink : Integrating Mac OS X in an NIS environment
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On buggy-rolling : "When your nose is less than 10 cm from the ground, at 60 or 70 km/h,
the speed sensation is boosted. pedestrian are giant! 17 time higher. Dogs are monster. Pavement are crevasses. if the floor is bumpy, you are shaked in every sens, you must be full concentrated on your trajectory, seem to touch the floor every five meters."
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Take me to your hot tub, Earthling.
Almost ten years ago I sent a letter,
and some drawings, to Kurt Vonnegut. He was gracious enough to reply, complimenting me on my drawing skills -- even going so far as to say I was almost as good as Durer -- and skillfully avoiding any mention of collaborating, an idea I had floated in my letter. "When I die," he wrote, "I will be found under a mountain of stuff from other people that I didn't have the balls to throw away." When I die, I can imagine being found underneath the mountain of bowls, vases and serving dishes my family owns. We are, if nothing else, a family of vessels.
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Florida Supreme Court : "But to allow the Secretary to summarily disenfranchise innocent electors
in an effort to punish dilatory Board members, as she proposes in the present case, misses the constitutional mark. The constitution eschews punishment by proxy." (pdf) Meanwhile, W. accuses the justices of cloaking
its ruling in legalistic language
and conveniently forgets -- or is flat out ignorant of the fact -- that the judiciary is a fundemental part of the American system of government and that it, in fact, *does* interpret the law under the U.S. Constitution. These people are truly as evil as they are stupid, or stupid as they are evil. I can't tell which anymore.
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Most of what I've had to say today
has been over here
. The rest has largely involved typeglobs but I'll spare you that.
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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....
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John McCrae : In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
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Administration and Cost of Elections Project : Ballot Design
"While there are common factors in "mark choice" ballot design, the manner in which they are implemented provides a wide array of different styles and possible permutations. While the following examples are by no means an exhaustive review, they do give an indication of the range of possibilities in current ballot designs."
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Talking to Americans : Do you, the American people,
actually care whether your political candidates are sitting at a desk or standing behind a podium? In the short day that I've been back, it seems to be the only thing the media circus talks about when they discuss this evening's presidential debate.
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CBC : Artist Trading Cards sweep Calgary
This is pretty cool, but don't beleive the hype. Artist trading cards have been around for a lot longer than 1998. Not to mention the bit about "breaking down the hierarchy of the art world" being your basic boilerpot crock of shit...
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Larry Wall : State of the Onion
"Post-Apocalyptic Survival with Perl" (mp3)
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SANS Flash Advisory
"You are vulnerable to total compromise simply by previewing or reading an email (without opening any attachments) if you have one of the affected operating systems and have the following installed: Microsoft Access 97 or 2000 [or] Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher." I guess that's the diplomatic way of saying "You risk getting fucked if you use Windows."
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The only thing worse than X?
X as a Java-based web application
. The end is truly nigh. Run for the hills. see also :
Joel Sutton : Accessing FreeBSD using VNC
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mp3sh
"A shell like interface to mpg123 and id3 tags" see also :
Connecting mpg123 to MySQL
refers to
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Weirdos
I wish I wish I wish
that
The Joy of Cooking
would be released as a Visor module.
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Ra : Undefined Animals
Possibly the only thing to put a smile on my face today.
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Perl Wisdom : FreeBSD! For Music Lovers!
"My next three columns will look at a set of programs I'm writing for the FreeBSD machine that lives in my basement. I'm using the machine to play mp3 audio files, and I want my wife to be able to control the playlist through the web. While there are already programs to do just this, I thought it'd be instructive to see how to write it."
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MP3PVM (read distributed MP3 encoding)
This one comes via the nice people at
Ars Technica
who have this to say on the subject : '[T]he idea is that you can use this program to encode mp3s using multiple computers in much the same way that Setiathome and RC5 do. Is this really worthwhile? Probably not, but it's definitely cool."
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LA Weekly on Napster
"Dr. Lincoln Stein, part of the project at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, is exploring how to use Napster-style automated resource discovery to enable scientists to publish their discoveries in the genome. The reason Stein and other experts are so excited is that Napster turns the prevailing computer technology of client-server on its side. ... 'We've been stuck in a client-server paradigm for many, many years. People who had stuff to share had to learn arcane knowledge, like FTP, static IP addresses - there were a lot of technical hurdles. The beauty of this system is, it does automatic resource discovery. Napster publishes the route to the user's information. Not just the IP address, which may change, but the port.' " If you didn't already think that Lincoln Stein was cool enough for having written
CGI.pm
, he's also written
MP3::Napster.pm
(requires threaded Perl).
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I always thought
the rationale for greed was that it would act as a catalyst for innovation,
not encourage morons
. via
rc3
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Libération : L'utopie communiste devient possible
"Après l'économiste Eric Brousseau, qui affichait hier dans nos colonnes une critique du discours sur la nouvelle économie, nous publions aujourd'hui le point de vue plus enthousiaste du philosophe et spécialiste des sciences cognitives, Dan Sperber sur les effets sociaux des nouvelles technologies. Il y développe une analyse marxiste, ou plutôt marxienne, des nouveaux réseaux et de la révolution informationnelle."
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I'd like to offer this as one of many possible replacements for the Microsoft
Freedom to Innovate Network
logo. Why does Microsoft *always* have such lame icons? via
camworld
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A picture from the wedding
I attended this weekend, of two boys scaring swans in the company of their babysitter. I thought it had a queer sort of Mary Cassatt quality in it's composition which made me think it would have been fun to replace all the guided tour cassettes from the recent
Cassatt retrospective
with recordings of the sounds of small children being the tyrants they truly are.
refers to
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Brad L. Graham : Day Without Weblogs
refers to
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The Anti-Rudy on the Sensation show
"I share the feeling that I know many New Yorkers have that there are parts of this exhibit that would be deeply offensive,'`I would not go to see this exhibit.' [But] it is not appropriate to penalize and punish an institution such as the Brooklyn Museum.'' Thanks Hillary, I think. Meanwhile, the NY Civil Liberties Union is holding a rally on Friday in support of the show, but there's nothing about it on their
website
.
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Simson Garfinkel weighs in on the Unix wars
"If I had to pick out the single difference between the BSD community as a whole and the proponents of Linux, I would say it is something called 'correctness.' The BSD developers are more concerned that the underlying technology in their operating systems be implemented in a manner consistent with the overall design of the systems. Linux developers, overall, are more interested in just putting together something that works."
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The Leisure Luge
"I smiled when I got the email from my BBC contact. He asked if I could do the second part of the live interview from my skateboard-propelled recliner via cell phone as I rolled through the streets of Richmond. The suggestion was as absurd and spontaneous as the Leisure Luge itself. I loved that. " Sweet!
refers to
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Eye on Toronto's Graffiti Transformation Project
Saturday Night on Kalle Lasn
"Like the car out back, it's not the glue that's important, it's the idea of the glue." Lasn is the founder of the Media Foundation and editor of
adbusters
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Le Devoir : Le frigo a 100 ans
"Or, ce dimanche, le frigo domestique fêtait ses 100 ans. Petit rappel de tous les changements sociaux, sanitaires et économiques qu'il a rendus possibles et survol de son évolution à lui."
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Jon Katz : The Net - Boon or Nightmare?
sigh.
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Michal J Wallace : The PHP Snurk
Nice!
The mighty mighty Aaron Broodman was kind enough to offer some very nice words about this site the day after the magic that renders it started, mysteriously, dumping core.
When I re-wrote this monster I tried to do in a way that (if I ever get around to publishing the source) it could be re-done in [your favourite language here] without too much pain. Since this week's problem seems to be somewhere deep in the bowels of Perl itself I'd like to tell you that I am feeling the subtle nudge needed to go out and master Lisp. But I am not hopeful.
In the meantime, here's a pretty picture to look at while the boat continues to take on water.